These days I call him a Pleasantville dad, after William H. I had an earring and often brought home weird loud music, trying to get band after band off the ground. Dads didn’t have to bond with their kids, and besides my younger brother was much more dad’s speed anyway, by taking apart car engines on newspapers in front of the kitchen fireplace.
It was just different times in the seventies and eighties. “Here’s us hanging out at the mall… and now playing a round of golf…” Heck, even going walking in Memphis would have suited me over barely being able to stroll with mine. “Here’s me and dad at the ball game…” or “enjoying a couple of beers…”, came post after post. Today being Father’s Day I recall how I used to avoid this day when I was a Facebook subscriber. With some maneuvering I can just about place my own life with my father into it. I watched the Silver Thunderbird video on You Tube – the view-count paling in the shadow of his ten-million-plus other song – and although its story is something of a literal translation I can still take it. So as a result of my disdain I shan’t ever be able to fully invest into the album-length work of Marc Cohn, but just content myself with my perfectly formed compact seven-inch single version as pictured here. Trust me on this one, this imagined sketch has kept me entertained in different versions for every time I have to suffer that infernal song. Placard: “Memphis’ average annual precipitation is 53.67 inches…” Singer: … in the middle of the pouring rain… Placard: “The delta blues is one of the earliest styles of blues music…” Touched down in the land of the delta blues… Placard: “Blue Suede Shoes is a rock n’ roll standard made famous by Carl Perkins…” WIKIPEDIA MEMPHIS: A short two-minute sketch for three players.Ī piano player, a singer, and a placard bearer a la Subterranean Homesick Blues.
My version is called Wikipedia Memphis, and it goes like this. Walking in Memphis is just a cheesy list to me, a grab-bag of Memphis cliche, and in my mind I have often performed my own cover version of the song as part of a comedy routine. Cohn must have made enough moolah from that dang song alone to happily live on a small island with his piano for the rest of his life. What’s worse is that I seem to hear that more famous song everywhere I go whether it’s in line at the bank, in the grocery store, or at least once a day in my workplace. It’s the follow-up to the Grammy winning Walking in Memphis, which is permanently placed in my all-time top-five most loathed songs on planet Earth. Silver Thunderbird is the second single from Marc Cohn’s self titled album in 1991. It doesn’t describe any further the relationship between father and son, but leaves it hanging with just enough for the listener to fill in the cracks.Īt least that’s what it does for me, because it speaks to me about my own fantasy life with my father too. He lies in bed in the morning and listens to his dad getting ready for work, but he’s gone by the time he gets out of bed. The second verse implies a distance between the son and his ideal. You can feel it in the life around that car for the boy, and in the detail of his father’s daily grind in the geography of the journey. His dad drives a big American car that he is so proud of, and almost every word of the song echoes his passion for it. A pure fantasy.Ī young boy waits patiently by the window for his father to come home. This song to me is just a dream, and an ideal. Me, I wanna go down in a Silver Thunderbird… You can keep your Eldorados and the foreign car’s absurd. If there’s a god in heaven, he’s got a Silver Thunderbird. Silver Thunderbird // Angelsong (Atlantic Records 7″ single, 1991)ĭon’t you give me no Buick.
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