BOOMERS ANONYMOUS -- Care or Quit?

This song is the final track on the 1974 Souvenirs album. It was also featured in the movie "FM." (No static at all.) and was produced by Joe Walsh of the group known as Eagles.  I really enjoyed making this one.  The melody is infectuous and easy to follow.  The lyrics are simple but powerful.  Dan Fogelberg was a genius.  Also, I've re-named the channel from "ClarenceQ" to "Roy Plays For You." There's nowhere to hide.   © 2025 by Roy B. Santonil

Keep doing what you were meant to do. In the studio recording on The Yes Album , this song opens with Jon Roy Anderson, Christopher Russell Edward Squire and Stephen James Howe singing the sentence: "I'VE SEEN ALL GOOD PEOPLE TURN THEIR HEADS EACH DAY SO SATISFIED I'M ON MY WAY" twice,  a cappella , in three-part harmony. This is followed by a solo intro by Howe on the laúd, a Spanish lute. He also sometimes plays the solo on a standard acoustic guitar. I played it on my Martin 00015-M and my white Mexican custom Strat. Anyway, as the laúd begins a repeated four-bar phrase, it is joined by bass drum and bass guitar as Anderson resumes singing the lyrics, solo and in three-part harmony with Squire and Howe. Dual recorders enter on the third verse. Finally, a Hammond organ joins them, playing the same chords as the laúd until the first part of the song ends on a loudly sustained and unresolved organ chord. This epic piece has led me through my life jou...

It's Memorial Day 2025 . Back in 1988, my future wife agreed to take a trip with me to San Diego to visit the parents. We were living in Los Angeles at the time. That Memorial Day weekend trip started it all, for us. The rest is history. I had to really grind to learn something new here. The the second solo and outro to this song were not part of the original sheet music, so I had to watch YT videos to learn it.   It's not perfect, but it's the real deal. Bruce Hornsby was emphatic about the fact that he wanted to convey "a sense of place" in this song. He grew up in the Williamsburg, VA area.  Who would have thought that a jazz infused, piano-based, rock song about civil rights in the Reagan era would become such a classic? Anyway, I worked pretty hard to get this one. And here's the good news . . . I didn't sing.  © 2025 by Roy B. Santonil

Next up on the Boomer Hit Parade comes from the land down under. "Cargo" was the 1983 release from the Australian band "Men at Work." There are some nice cover versions on You Tube. I think the best is this one by Lazlo Bean , in which the song's writer, Colin Hay, makes a cameo appearance.  The song gained a new generation of fans when Colin appeared on the hit TV comedy "Scrubs," playing this song over several scenes. This was a second upload because I had to fix the lyrics as follows:  I worry "over" situations I know will be alright, not "about" those situations. Ghosts appear "and" fade away, not "then" fade away. Insomnia sucks, but sometimes, it just makes you work harder. This one is dedicated to all my jamming buddies through the years: Ann and Andy, Max, Mark, Mike, Chris, Pam, Blake, Rocco, Ross, and Virgil. I will never forget you guys. I did what I could with what I had.   © 2025 Roy B. Santonil

This one was harder to produce than the previous three music videos, and in my opinion, it sucks. The video editor kept crashing, and just like the previous video, "Old Man," I had to restart after losing hours of work. It's also cringey. But I'm trying. Funny thing is, I'm nowhere near the boss battle in my music journey. Anyway, this song is dedicated to all the girls I've loved and will love ... Can't you kids see us boomers also want to stop hate ... except for evil.  It's OK to hate what is evil. In the end, True Love conquers all. © 2025 Roy B. Santonil

If you know, you know.  © 2025 Roy B. Santonil

So I did it. Here's the full cover version of the song, with both parts. [ These Days ] includes me trying to sing, as well as the lyrics Also, the YouTube channel will be under a pseudonym >>> Clarence Quemuel -- long story. Don't be cruel.   YouTube is hassling me about copyrights and whatnot. We'll see how long this lasts.  © 2025 Roy B. Santonill

The subject is angels. This is one you can approach from different --- angles. I do not want to be obtuse, so let me say: "It's Time." My musical journey has arrived at 2025 with a 50-year backlog of lyrical stress relief, and finally, I'm happy to share it with you, reader, in this stream of consciousness social medium.  I picked this as a first foray into YouTubery because, well, it's fairly simple to play, and more importantly there are no words! It may get worse if I start to sing, but it also might get better. It took a couple dozen takes, and there's still a minor flaw at the end of the piece, but that's not important. Basically, I needed to learn how to properly edit videos. I used OpenShot software, and recorded on my Samsung Note 23 Phone. It's only a first effort and we'll see how this journey evolves. Thanks in advance for (ahem) Liking, Sharing, and Subscribing.  Oh, and also, NEVER GIVE UP . Happy Birthday and Happy Valentines Day to ...

I like words. But words don't like me. The more I try and use them, the more they stick around, and the more they haunt me for using them. Using the wrong words can get you in trouble. Sometimes, words make ME laugh. Sometimes, words make OTHER PEOPLE laugh. And sometimes, words make other people BIG MAD. The internet is a big place. It is bigger than I imagined when I first connected to it with an IBM clone , running MS-DOS on a x286 CPU through a 14.4K baud dail-up modem in 1994. Back then, we lived out of a two-bedroom apartment, and I worked graveyard shifts to help raise our newborn baby girl. My my, hey hey. It is the best of times. It is the wierdest of times. It is time to communicate on another level because words to not do justice to explain reality. Justice seeks  --- its own resolution. Justice pays  --- no heed to the foibles of human desire.  What is the point?  I haven't posted since before what's-his-name was inaugurated to preside over the disso...

"The internet never forgets."   But, it could die.     Herein below (stupid lawyers) is what I could scrape from the interwebs, the remains of my written, posted work from blog posts over the last, oh, say, 15 years.  I will always contend that much deep thought went into these rants. Luckily, some of my thoughts have been captured, successfully. These thoughts, framed by bits of time, are fueled by one American citizen's concern -- I tried to serve as a voice, an advocate, for ourselves and our posterity.   With my mother-in-law's funeral service coming next week, what I can honestly say is that I have done and what I have done here to express, despite the degrees of separation the internet creates, what I know to be true, good, consistent, and above all, based in Scripture.   In the words of Nathaniel Benchley, "Only Earth and Sky Last Forever."   I'm not trying to out-perform "mean Tweets." The Divine Comedy keeps me laughing. With all our y...

Start here . Welcome back, and thanks for tuning in.  To review Part 1 ( link ), you may recall it ended with a bit of time travel. You were led to an obscure Commentary written 38 years ago in a law school newspaper. The writer spoke from the past about how Roe v. Wade had weak, and more likely non-existent, constitutional underpinnings. He asserted that Conscience is the true final arbiter of moral questions that society attempts to answer through legal sophistry. That writer has been doing honest homework on those issues, sustained by a steady diet of locusts and honey, so plentiful in the wilderness of legal unemployment.  Such is the price for honest legal opinion.  Such is the price for sticking to your guns. But today, it is, finally, water under the bridge.  The river has run its course. As Thomas Paine put it, "Time Make More Converts Than Reason." Fortunately, you have not been triggered by my past comments enough to have me assassinated, just because I t...

Start here . Hello again, Boomers, Jonesers, and Non-Boomers alike. Nothing to talk about lately? What do we Americans do when the temperature starts climbing above 80, and the lawn needs mowing?  Well, for the last couple of centuries, there was this thing called Our National Pastime. Notice the word  "pastime" suggests an activity unabashedly and unequivocally meant to be an acceptable and civil  way to pass time . I would even go so far to say, pre-Internet distraction, there was a tapestry. a weaving of the fabric of your cultural character in sport, a mythos, conjured and nurtured for the benefit of inter-generational respect and  civility. Heck, even affection. Love you, dad. Alas, locusts and honey will have to suffice anymore "Oh, there you go again Roy, being literal, and trying to find out what words mean." I suppose so. Unfortunately, in my blogging experience, if you are a fan of scholarly etymology and  reasonable contextual usage, with a dash of tr...

Start here .  I'm visiting the Golden State right now. So this message is pre-programmed. Singing starts at 2:10.  "Mexican Reggae" was a tentative description of the song before the Eagles settled on "Hotel California." Just so you know, there is no Hotel California. The building on the album cover is in fact the Beverly Hills Hotel on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.  I lived in Los Angeles from 1988 to 1991. All this to say growing old ain't for sissies. "Some of the wilder interpretations of that song have been amazing. It was really about the excesses of American culture and certain girls we knew. But it was also about the uneasy balance between art and commerce." -- Don Henley, 9/11/07 On a dark desert highway ,  Cool wind in my hair, warm smell of colitas rising up through the air. Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light. My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim. I had to stop for the night . There she stood in the d...

That'll do, pig. IN THE BEGINNING . . .  there was " WIT , GUN , and STEIN ." That was the title of my first blog.  Some of you already knew that. WGS existed from January 2009 to March 2011.  In it, I mixed blood, sweat, and tears, with golf course and music reviews. Sometimes, I tried to be funny . Not much is left of WGS, other than the internet way-back machine archives , which means some but not all of the internet, lasts forever.  Some of the internet just dies. Notwithstanding the grandiose experiment in literary expression and political polemic, I feel successful in having conducted my verbal excercise, working through variously apt sub-titles, patching together broken phrases, just to say: "Hey. Words mean things." For example:  WGS -- "3 Things You Will Need For The End Times" As it turns out, the reference to  "End Times" was a bit melodramatic. Too early, perhaps? Wittgenstein, get it? Another sub-title was:   WGS - "A Gol...