Tuesday Tuneage
Creedence Clearwater Revival - “Lodi”
1969

Been at this same writing desk in my apartment for almost a year now, putting down words. But it’s not the same without being at the coffee shop, grabbing a table and setting up my office there with notebook, iPad, magazines, and folders. The words I type these days mostly go into unfinished pieces that feel inspired or at least solid upon first spark, but after typing up the notes and rewriting, revising, and editing, they lose their shine. There’s no variety while I sit here, no random sighting of folks across the shop, no snippets of conversation drifting across my table. No sense that as I’m away from home, I’m getting away with something. I like to use that feeling of mischief in creating, that sense of pulling a fast one, of getting away with the perfect score. But here I am sitting at home again, like the narrator in Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Lodi”, on a treadmill with seemingly no way of getting off. “If I only had a dollar ...”

Tuesday Tuneage
Brenton Wood - “Psychotic Reaction”
1967

How I made it until 2021 without hearing this one is baffling. Sampling Count Five’s garage rock masterpiece of the same name while adding ? and the Mysterians-like keyboard results in a soul nugget that anticipates Funkadelic, Prince (especially), and a long list of funk weirdos. Both Woods and the Five were on the same Double Shot label, must of made clearing the rights to the song easier. Interesting that the original “Psychotic Reaction” was a clumsy/genius rehash of the Yardbirds “I’m a Man”, which in turn was a cover of the Bo Diddley classic. Though when things get weirdly fun we tend to end up at Bo, don’t we?

(And again, the singer is Brenton Wood, not Bretton Woods.)