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Songs with numbers in the title.

Tune in today, February 22nd, to Volume 106, 7 PM East, 4 PM West.

Phone #: 844-6-VOLUME, 844-686-5863

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I saw this guy. He was one of Ringo Starr’s All Stars. He’s not why I went to the show, but he was the highlight.

Am I the only person who didn’t love “A Whiter Shade of Pale”?

And Procol Harum was a strange band, the lyricist, Keith Reid, wasn’t even a performer. And why is it everybody always spelled it “Procul” instead of “Procol”? I always saw this as a sign of disrespect.

But I did love the title track of “Shine on Brightly.” I recorded it on the same kind of portable Norelco cassette deck that Keith Richards sang the riff of “Satisfaction” into in the middle of the night. It was a slim box. Cassettes were seen as lo-fi, but you could record on them. And I did, via a series of cables I purchased at Radio Shack. Not that I believed in that outlet, especially after it turned into the Sprint Store, but you could always find the cables and connectors you needed. Like a twenty five foot extension cord for your headphones.

And I’d be listening to WDRC FM in Hartford. Which I could get on my new Columbia all-in-one stereo (well, you could detach the speakers), and if I heard something I liked, I hit record. And always missed the very beginning of the track and got the deejay talking over the end, but I’d have it, and I’d listen to it, and one of those songs, as I said above, was “Shine on Brightly.”

Why did I like it?

Well, what can anybody say about  music? It hit me a certain way. It was Matthew Fisher’s majestic keyboard (I bought his initial solo LP, were there more?) and the catchy chorus and Gary Brooker’s vocal on top of the entire concoction, his voice had character, without sacrificing any power.

And then came “A Salty Dog.” Which got great reviews. And I would have purchased it if I had had more money, or had heard it at a friend’s house, but at the time it was just too much of a risk.

And then came “Home.” The reviews said it was a different sound, harder rock, that Matthew Fisher had left and this allowed the guitarist Robin Trower to shine. Robin Trower? I hadn’t even known his name prior to this, and once members start leaving the band it’s a bad sign.

And it’s not like “Home” got any radio play, at least not on New York City radio. You didn’t even hear “A Salty Dog.” All those bands bitching they can’t get exposure today. Yesterday you didn’t even need a hit single, your fans could carry you, word was spread person to person, via mouth. And believe me, most of the fans of the initial hit, “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” were not keeping the band alive, but others, who saw something in the act, and needed to own the albums.

So in July 1970, I sat stoned in the fraternity house bedroom of a Cornell student whose father ran the summer camp I was working at. This guy had more albums than anybody I knew. To the point where he bought them wholesale from Sam Goody, he even gave me the connection. But most of the albums were at camp, I remember he had “Cucumber Castle,” I didn’t know anybody who had that Bee Gees album, and he also had “Moondance,” that’s how I got into Van Morrison, it was the opening track, “And It Stoned Me.”

But in this bedroom, the only two albums that appealed to me were “McCartney” and “Home.” And at this point, I didn’t own “McCartney,” of course I knew “Maybe I’m Amazed,” but at the time, reviews were kind of middling, and like I said, I only had so much money, and to listen to that album stoned… “Teddy Boy” and “Every Night” revealed themselves to me.

As did “Whisky Train” from “Home.” You only had to hear it once, you were woken up immediately, the riff became emblazoned in your brain, hear it once and you never forgot it. (But for some reason, “Shine on Brightly” and “Home” are not on streaming services.)

But even better was the opening cut on the follow-up, “Simple Sister.” (“Broken Barricades” is also absent from streaming services, which is a crime, because if youngsters today could just hear “Simple Sister.”) And the opening track on the second side, “Power Failure.” The two were magic. I remember buying that album used, along with “John Wesley Harding,” from an upperclassman at college, those were the last two used albums I ever purchased, no one treated, nor respected, their vinyl like me.

And then the band split apart. Robin Trower had his own crew. I immediately had to buy “Twice Removed From Yesterday.” He didn’t really break through until his second LP, “Bridge of Sighs,” but I purchased them all, and I know it’s strange, but the one I played most, was the one that moved in a disco direction, “In City Dreams.” Listen to the opening cut, “Somebody Calling,” infectious. And while I’m on the Trower tip, I also want to recommend 1990’s “In the Line of Fire,” with Davey Pattison instead of James Dewar on vocals. It’s an Eddie Kramer production, and sounds like it, hits you right in the gut with power, but music was changing and it got little traction.

Meanwhile, Procol Harum soldiered on, did an album with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, and had a hit! “Conquistador” was everywhere, in an age where everybody did not have an FM radio in the car, I certainly didn’t in my ’63 Chevy. But the intelligentsia always wondered, why did Brooker sing the word as “quiz” as opposed to “keys”?

Although primed for further success, now with the best company extant, Warner Brothers, Procol Harum could not deliver. I purchased 1973’s “Grand Hotel” and 1974’s “Exotic Birds and Fruit,” and I preferred the latter over the former, but neither got any traction in the marketplace.

And then after the band faded away, they reformed in the nineties, and made an album for Lou Maglia’s Zoo, back when startup labels was a thing, and many people considered “The  Prodigal Stranger” one of their best ever, but seemingly only fans ever heard it.

And then I heard Gary Brooker at the Universal Amphitheatre, which itself no longer exists. Believe me, he wasn’t the guy I wanted to see, I was not eager to hear “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” and speaking of white, that was the color of his hair, long before Peter Frampton went bald and the rest of the classic acts’ hair either fell out or turned gray.

But the power of his voice! Man, he looked old, but when Gary Brooker sang he was the youngest star on stage, and certainly stole the show. And ever since, whenever his or his band’s name has come up I’ve testified about this appearance.

And now Gary Brooker’s dead. 76. Cancer.

Now our rock stars, we expect them to die young from misadventure, bad behavior. But when they don’t, we think they’ll be here forever, but this has turned out not to be true. They’re now dropping like flies. David Bowie and Glenn Frey were shockers, now when a star of the sixties and seventies goes…we realize they made it to their seventies, shorter than what we’d like, but they led a full life. But now they’re gone, and you know what that means, we’re next. Even worse, their music will probably die with us. It meant so much to us, it was not background, but foreground, the essence. We knew who the stars were, them, not us. We waited with bated breath for their new albums. Which we played over and over, trying to get deeper, to excavate all the meaning. And sure, we wanted to hear the greatest hits, but we loved that they played the new material in concert, that’s why we went to the show, we were diehards, not casual fans.

But now it seems only we know. Oh, Gary Brooker’s death is all over the news today, but it’ll be gone by next week, if not tomorrow. There won’t be follow-up stories, like there were with P.J. O’Rourke. And no disrespect to Mr. O’Rourke, but I’m sure if he were still here even he would testify that the written word paled in comparison to the music of the rock stars. Hell, rock music killed the Great American Novel. No, after “Sgt. Pepper” you wanted to make the Great American Album”!

That’s a passé concept today. Oh, people still make albums, but not only is physical a drop in the bucket, there aren’t two sides, with opening and closing tracks. And the albums of yore were long if they were forty minutes, now they’re an hour, or longer. And with money and distribution precious, you did your best to lay it all on the line, because you might not get another chance to record for a year, if ever!

So if you pull the lens back, Gary Brooker is the vocalist of one stone cold classic, that continues to live, a la the Moody Blues’s “Nights in White Satin,” but is “A Whiter Shade of Pale” forever? Well, it certainly doesn’t fit anywhere in today’s hit parade, but maybe synchs will keep it alive, a la “Don’t Stop Believin'” in “The Sopranos.”

And yes, all boomers know “Conquistador.” But youngsters do not.

And Procol Harum is not the Doors, with a cult of dark personality sustaining the act through the generations.

In truth, Procol Harum is just another rock band from when rock ruled the world. When your music spoke for you. We really have no idea who Gary Brooker was, he didn’t even write the lyrics, but that powerful voice, we thought we knew him. Did we? Lord only knows. But right there is the mystery and magic of classic rock.

I know who Gary Brooker was. I will continue to think about and play his music. But I am one of only a few who were shocked by his death. Well, not exactly shocked…I winced, another one is gone? I will remember. Because with one tune you can embed yourself in another person’s life, and Gary Brooker did this, more than once. Shine on brightly, you made us quite insane, AND WE LOVED IT!

“Downfall: The Case Against Boeing”: https://bit.ly/3gZx6hC

You want to watch this. On Netflix.

I’ve had a fascination with aircraft ever since my first jet flight on a Boeing 720B. We all knew the 707, it substituted for “jet” the same way “Kleenex” substitutes for “tissue.” Hell, ultimately Steve Miller sang a song about it. So what was a 720B?

I started to pay attention to the jets at the airport. The 727 was the one with the three engines at the back, with the high tailfeather. The DC-9 was similar, but smaller, with only two engines. The DC-10 was like a giant 727, and it had a spotty safety record. You started to worry about flying on a DC-10 towards the end of its service.

And then came Airbus. AirBUS? It’s not a bus, but a plane! And there’s no way the Europeans could compete with Boeing, NO WAY!

Only that proved to be untrue. Just like our ability to win in Vietnam. Boomers were brought up in an age where the United States was the undisputed king, we thought there was nothing our country couldn’t achieve, in truth all the boomers were active patriots, waving the flag, until the mid-sixties and Vietnam, when they might be sent to Southeast Asia and get their ass shot off in an unwinnable war.

That was the human element.

And that’s what “Downfall” adds to the picture. I knew almost everything in the flick, having followed the story closely, but to see the relatives of the dead? You never recover from that. And I can’t think of a worse way to die than in an airplane. Come on, to this day when something odd happens on the jet you start to contemplate it, especially when the captain comes on and says there’s a problem. I’ve been there, I don’t think my anxiety has ever been higher than the return flight to the airport we’d taken off from.

But in truth, your odds of dying in the crash of a major airline jet are infinitesimal, your odds of dying in a car are higher. But when it happens, essentially no one survives. I mean dying in an avalanche is bad, but in a matter of minutes you pass out. The plane heading straight down to the land or sea…I don’t even want to contemplate it.

So there are two stories involved here. The one of the two crashes, the Lion and Ethiopian 737 Maxes, and the corporate greed that ultimately caused the problem.

You see Boeing was beaten to the punch by Airbus. Boeing was disrupted. By technology. Airbus provided a much more fuel efficient airplane and Boeing had nothing to compete with it, to create a brand new competitor would take nearly a decade. So Boeing gussied up the decades old 737 and sold it as a solution.

But you can’t continually fix the past, oftentimes you have to start with a blank sheet of paper. Techies are normally good with this. Write off the past for a better future. Which is why I’m against the EU standardizing USB-C as the world’s connector. You want to impede technological innovation? Hell, the Lightning connector in today’s iPhones is far superior to the 30 pin one offered on the original devices, and smaller too.

But it’s the emphasis on corporate greed that ultimately resonates here.

Boeing moved its headquarters to Chicago. That would be like Universal Music doing the same, it made no sense, the planes were built in Seattle and the South Carolina.

But what this documentary does so well is delineate the schism that ultimately led to the crashes. Boeing merged with the fading McDonnell Douglas, which itself was the result of a merger, and ultimately the McDonnell Douglas brass ended up in control. And they had no understanding of the Boeing corporate culture, and only cared about profits. They wanted to make their bonuses!

And that’s America in a nutshell. Why is it that a corporation’s only duty is to deliver shareholder wealth? I don’t see that in the Bible.

And forget the 737 Max, if you follow the sphere, you know there are problems with the 787 Dreamliner. I’ll make it simple, they’re built shoddily, and therefore they keep on getting recalled and grounded. Build it once, right, the foundation is key. But the foundation went out the window when CEOs could suddenly end up billionaires solely from their compensation at the company.

I mean how do you remove metal filings from the wiring?

In truth all new planes need modifications. Which is why savvy customers never bought a car in the year of its introduction, nor a new tech product. But then Toyota always got it right and so did the tech companies, the products worked, right out of the box, and you expected that. So you expected the 737 Max to not be rotten at its core. But it was.

And it all came down to efficiency. If they told the airlines and the FAA the plane was significantly different from the original 737, pilots would need simulator training, and that’s very costly.

But it turned out the pilots ended up needing to be trained anyway. Never mind the planes sitting on the tarmac for all those months, waiting for a software update.

Yes, welcome to the modern world, where software is king. For those of us conscious before the twenty first century this is hard to fathom. The hardware was king. And if you were savvy, you might be able to fix it yourself. Now you can’t fix your own car. Then again, they break down a lot less. And when there’s a problem, Tesla just sends an update over the air, via the internet, and it’s solved. Meanwhile, Detroit is trying to meld the old with the new and so far it hasn’t worked well. It’s kind of like Apple, building the computer is the easiest part, it can be done in factories by low-paid employees in China. But there’s no way in hell those workers can write the software that makes them work.

So this story is continuing, not only at Boeing, but Airbus too, Qatar Airways is complaining that its A350s are defective, with the paint peeling. Then again, Airbus admits the flaws, no one other than the Qatar government believes there’s a safety problem, and in truth it’s just about money.

So, you see the thousands of people building Boeing planes. And you can’t help but see the discrepancy in pay between them and those in the C-Suite. Now we see income inequality everywhere we go. And like in the Amazon warehouses, Boeing workers had goals they had to hit no matter what, and what was sacrificed was safety.

But you’ll learn all that in “Downfall.” Which is not a big commitment, only an hour and a half. And it holds your interest throughout.

And in truth the buzz is building, this one film is going to dent Boeing in a way years of news stories has not. But the reason I watched the film was the personal recommendations from my readers. The rest of the hype just flew right by me.

It shouldn’t fly right by you.

Watch this.