Pirate: Emerson, Lake & Palmer

 

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At the time (early 70s), ELP was big. Their 1977 US tour was notable for its size as they went on the road with an orchestra. Said Emerson, "what you hear on the record is what you expect to hear when you buy the ticket to the show." The size of Emerson's bank of keyboards was noted to "resemble a fortress".

I honestly do not recall the last time I listened to Emerson., Lake & Palmer - or even thought of them. But there was a time (way back when) that they were on my "play-list". That would have been mid 70s - their "heyday". with songs like Lucky Man. Since they tended (like Pirates) to lengthy songs not suitable to pop radio, their charting would have been limited. This one times in at around 12 minutes.

The song lyrics are a story in themselves. not short story or novella, but considerably longer than "normal" radio play accommodates.

How fortuitous in some way, that Seuras Ogg beat me to the modern day pirating issue. Back in the late 60s early 70s,  I, too, as an American living outside America looking to listen to the latest US songs, tuned in to Radio Caroline on short-wave frequencies .Not FM or AM. Short-wave, where the sound goes and comes, but the airwave connection did allow you get the gist of things. Equally fortuitous that Seuras also previously mentioned Papa John, who for some reason also conjured up images of pirates in my mind.

For anyone who has been online as long as I have (mid '90s) the concept of pirating music has greatly evolved. I am of the generation where we read horrifying stories about grandmothers who were subjected to court cases for "inadvertently sharing" music files: taken to court for violating "laws" and subjected to fines amounting to thousands of dollars. Grandma music pirates.

Navigating and explaining the changing legal positions as a teacher of Digital Citizenship during those years was a difficult ."What's legal and what isn't?". Students wanted to know if sharing a YouTube video was legal. If posting a cover of a song was legal. More often than not, the legalities of sharing were a bit hazy, and it changed over time as record companies figured out the market. Today, I can 'pirate' most any song I want via YouTube.

20 years ago, there was also the Pirate Bay file sharing site out of Sweden, which the web tells us "... still works in 2022.." I confess I made not infrequent piratical use of the rather complex, devious method to get access to music that is now "free" via Spotify, YouTube... Wasn't it Stevie Wonder who sang about the  power of music to find a way to get its message across?

Pirate: National Talk Like A Pirate Day

Lambchop: National Talk Like A Pirate Day
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I’ve probably mentioned here that since 2017, I’ve been the secretary for my college class. Typically, that job consisted of writing the Class Notes column in the alumni magazine, and communicating occasionally with classmates, as well as keeping minutes of class officers’ meetings. In this era of social media, however, the job—or at least my take on the job—expanded to include taking a lead role on our class social media, starting a monthly class bulletin, and coordinating a vibrant series of Zoom sessions for classmates (and others), that have continued even after the COVID lockdown that spawned the idea.

At some point, I started putting up holiday posts on the class Facebook page—mostly trying to find pictures featuring tigers or an orange/black color scheme that relate to the holiday. And over the years, I’ve expanded the list of holidays to include celebrations that aren’t Christian or Jewish holidays or obvious national observances. There are no rules about what I can or can’t post about, so I’ve occasionally included things like Holocaust Remembrance Day, or International Day of the Tiger, or Darwin Day. No one has ever complained either about the inclusion or exclusion of a day, and I’d have no problem if anyone else wanted to celebrate something on the page. OK, maybe not Confederate Memorial Day (celebrated on different dates in different racist states). But no one else has done so. 

So, at the end of each month, I schedule the holiday posts for the next month, and to do so, I usually go online and find a calendar of holidays and observations. And I’m always annoyed to have to wade through all of the ridiculous “Days” listed on them to get to the good stuff. Like Belly Laugh Day (January 24), National Tartan Day (April 6), or Rural Transit Day (July 16). 

And then, there’s International Talk Like a Pirate Day, celebrated on September 19. It was not commemorated on the class Facebook page, but it has at times gotten traction elsewhere. “Founded” in 1995 by two friends in Oregon, one of whom said “Aarr” when he got hurt playing racquetball, their inside joke went viral when they wrote humor columnist Dave Barry, who promoted the idea. A video and a song followed, and in 2008, Facebook, which at that point was still mostly kids, and not mostly cranky adults and Russian bots like now, had a pirate translated version of the website on the day. And of course, there’s an official website. 

Lambchop is one of the many bands who I have heard a little bit of over the years, and have liked most of what I’ve heard, but never spent the time to really dig into their substantial body of work. An often shifting lineup of musicians based in Nashville led by Kurt Wagner, they’ve moved from a country-based sound in their early days in the mid-1980s through a number of genres. The stuff I like is probably best described as Americana. One of these songs is their “National Talk Like a Pirate Day,” presumably from before the celebration spread beyond our borders, like, you know, a pirate. From the band’s 2008 album OH(Ohio), it’s a rambling song that actually mentions the “Day,” although it isn’t about it. (By the way, it’s not even the best title on the album—that distinction goes to “Sharing a Gibson With Martin Luther King, Jr.”) 

The song’s genesis was described by Wagner in Rolling Stone: 

I'm writing a line about something else and my wife calls on the phone telling me it's National Talk Like A Pirate Day, I go, 'Oh, okay.' And suddenly that leads to me thinking about my wife. Then next thing I know I'm looking at a picture of her, and she's in her pajamas, she's got a record player. You know, there's a hockey game in the little picture and I start describing the picture. So the song started out as some sort of folk song, you know, and then next thing you know it becomes something else, but it was all because of what happened in the process of writing it: the phone rang. 

So, I guess the lesson is that inspiration can come from anywhere. Sadly, although I wanted to try to work a “buried treasure” reference into this post, but my inspiration never came.