12. Music Meanderings: SoCal Cruisin’

PCH (that’s Pacific Coast Highway, to those of you not familiar with SoCal/California lingo) on the way down to Laguna Beach, with Crystal Cove State Park on the right. It’s even better when the day gets closer to sunset/dusk hours.

“I’m In Love With My Car…”-Queen

As mentioned in last week’s playlist entry, Southern California (as well as the entire state in general) is one of the hubs of car culture. I focused primarily on the Classic Car Culture in “Gunnin’ It”, but that is just one of at least half a dozen manifestations of how Californians are in love with their cars.

11. Future Destinations: Avalon, Santa Catalina Island, California

Avalon Bay, with the well-known casino built by the King of Chewing Gum himself, William Wrigley, Jr.

From the mountains in Canada to a… semi-popular local island! Today’s post is about Catalina, dubbed by The Four Preps in 1958 as “The Island of Romance” (see song below). But is it really all that romantic? Let’s find out.

10. Music Meanderings: Gunnin’ It

Generation 1 Mustang, year and trim to be determined. Caught this guy at an intersection on a daytrip with my dad a few days ago. Snapped the shot just before we went to green! Definitely worth it.

Clarifications

Before we get to today’s post, a few more explanations for these playlists are in order:

• There is currently no way that I know of to convert a youtube playlist into something that you can listen to while in your car. Unless you’re OK with your smartphone being hooked up to the internet for 6-8 hours straight for video play, and if your route has good cell coverage all the way to your destination, it just won’t really work that way. Would that I could, though…
• These playlists are intended to be examples of how music fits into various motifs so that you, dear reader, can understand the concept, as well as build your own similar playlists in itunes or your respective music players, or in some cases, buy these songs so that you can build your own.
• It is encouraged that you listen to these playlists at home or in static, motif-appropriate settings, despite not being able to take them easily on the road.

Get your motor runnin’…

This week’s playlist is all about CLASSIC CAR CULTURE. Being born and raised in Southern California, one of the hearts of this phenomenon, it’s a natural occurrence for me to see many wonderfully-done garage projects, hot rods, and restorations on the streets and freeways every day. Sometimes, if I have my camera and the timing is right, I can catch one in action to share with others, like the beauty above. It’s a culture that practically roars individualism (and sometimes a little teamwork, depending on who all is involved) out of its exhaust pipes, in the quickly-empty gas tanks, through the superchargers, and in every off-the-line series of gear shifts any lucky driver may take.

9. Future Destinations: Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada

Valley of the Ten Peaks and Moraine Lake. Yes, Harry: the Rocky Mountains really are that rocky.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about wanting to see the Southern Andes in Chile. Last week, we took a mental and spiritual retreat to Castel Gandolfo in Italy, because it was relevant to the news of the Pope’s resignation. However, I had meant to continue talking of trips to mountainous places, so this week we’re back on the trail!

8. Music Meanderings: Just Truckin’ On

The last available gas station for 110 miles, heading west on I-70 in Green River, Utah.

Since the advent of the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System in the 1950s, American freight trucking has almost always had a unique flavor to it. Envisaged by many in pop culture as the modern version of frontier cowboys for their lone driving and long hauls, a lot of music has been written for this lifestyle that turns it into an easy motif for playlist-making.

“Just Truckin’ On” is my version of this playlist. It’s 120 songs long (a cap I have placed on my playlist sizes, in order to make them more mangageable), and incorporates a lot of songs from the genres of Country, Classic Rock (including the Southern Rock and Country Rock subgenres), oldies, folk, pop, and even some tunes from anime and movie soundtracks.

What’s interesting for this motif is the tempo of these songs. They’re meant to fit right into the 0-55 mph speeds that most tractor trailers operate at. Some of the songs are great for truckin’ at speed, while others are great for starting out to or for cooling down in some roadside dive of a bar or diner. But there’s also a good portion of the list devoted to the lighter tunes during the sunny days on a long run, as well as bar songs with some darker humor that I can imagine I’d enjoy if I were a trucker.

An earlier version of this playlist was tested out on one of the longest roadtrips I ever took in the Midwest (which I will cover in a later blog entry or series), and it worked quite well.

Click below for the youtube playlist and the texted list!

7. Future Destinations: Castel Gandolfo, Italy

It’s intriguing when you consider (from an American, suburban perspective) how many older European cities are still standing after all these many years, despite the proximity of most of their buildings to each other.

(NOTE: For those following the Monday series “Past Journeys”, it is currently on hiatus until the proper resources (photography and supporting facts) can be found and uploaded to the post. I would prefer to post a completed story and then move on with the rest of the timeline, than to jump over it and leave it withering on the vine, so to speak. Meanwhile, Wednesday’s and Friday’s series will continue, as none of the three series are directly related to each other. Thanks in advance for your patience and understanding!)

When considering locations for this week’s Future Destinations post, I was faced with two different options: an entry on the Canadian Rockies (which was my original intent) or, as the major news story developed all day on Monday, this small town just outside of Rome, which is tied in directly to the Vatican, the Olympics, and of course, the Mediterranean Sea and climate zone. The very name, while gentle on the whole, can easily be made to sound edgy and quick, depending on which syllables you emphasize (which I find amusing).

Time to beat a retreat, then! Fall back to the CAS-tel Gan-DOL-fo!

6. Music Meanderings: Desert Wanderings

A dusty road at the Indian Cove campground in Joshua Tree National Park.

Deserts have been an almost inescapable part of my journeys outside of Southern California since 1993, primarily due to geography. If you want to get anywhere east of here by car, bus, or train, you must travel through the Mojave or Colorado Deserts, and if you must go farther north or east than that, there are still more to wander through. Sonoran, Painted, Great Basin… they all make up a good chunk of the American Southwest’s alluring mystique, with long, straight roads untouched by rain for 90 percent of the year. Untamed by civilization, these hot and dusty places will always hold a sense of adventure, but you must go well-prepared. For the most part, that’s pretty easy to do these days on a physical level; you just need enough water, food, gas, and a functional car (it doesn’t have to be fancy). Mentally, you must be patient and focused.

5. Future Destinations: Torres del Paine National Park, Chile

The Cuernos del Paine formation, as viewed from Lake Pehoe. Glaciers truly have different ways of carving rock, everywhere you go.

On Monday, we were talking about mountains for a little bit, right? Bear Mountain, just north of Santa Cruz, at elevation 528 feet, right?

It’s time to think bigger. No, no, A LOT bigger.

Everest? K2? McKinley? Okay, too big.

But at least let’s take a look at some mountains that measure in at over one mile in height, shall we?

4. Past Journeys: Santa Cruz 1991

Manresa State Beach, looking north into Monterey Bay.

Last week, the first full week of blogging for me, made for some very nice segues between posts. There was a connection between Yosemite and Northern England via the subject of walls, as well as a more obscure link between Northern England and surf music… via the Mel Brooks classic, “Robin Hood: Men in Tights”:

(Darn Warner Brothers and their near-airtight copyright enforcement on Youtube… I was looking for the slightly longer version of this clip where he lands just seconds before this quote and yells, “ENGLAND! ENGLAND! I’M HOME!” Well… maybe I just know that movie too well and said clip isn’t as popular as I thought.)

See? That’s got a beach in the scene. It’s in England. Boom, there you go. Connection.

Continuing on with the segues, today’s Past Journey takes us to the beach cities of California yet again, this time farther north, in Santa Cruz.

3. Music Meanderings: Bummin’ on the Beach

Lifeguard House at Gladstone’s Beach, near the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway, Pacific Palisades, CA

(Welcome to the Music Meanderings series! For the first part of this series, I’ll be posting playlists of various motifs or themes. Every playlist has a minimum of 60 songs in it, so that you can play it long enough wherever you are, or are traveling to. These are playlists that I have made from my own personal iTunes library, so they are nowhere near complete. If you see a song or multiple songs or artists that have been left out that you think would fit the theme, feel free to politely suggest them in the comments. If I don’t have it on the list, I simply do not have the song or artist yet, is all. Also, the only mixing order for most of these lists is alphabetically by album, unless otherwise stated.)

When I first started building playlists in iTunes, I found it to be a frustrating task, because I had 4,000+ tunes about 2 years ago, and I had attached rather specific emotional connections to a lot of them. Sorting through the personal details about whether each song would fit into a certain motif left me with half-done playlists that I barely listened to at all.

And then it struck my mind that I was not playing to any given framework or detached mental coding to really handle this kind of task. Discovering the problem, I set about laying out some ground rules:

• All of my playlists had to be 60 songs minimum to be considered working playlists,
• They needed to cover a certain motif, usually via some subgenre I hadn’t specified in my library which could draw from the main genres I did have,
• One or two songs with powerful emotional connections could be allowed to START the playlist, but they didn’t have to be the limit to it,
• And each motif had to have certain tempos and sound mixing elements that were distinct from others, making for as little overlap as possible between playlists.