Welcome to Tuesday! You have arrived at Tuesday's Musical Notes! Is that where you intended to be? We sure hope so as we celebrate the best day of the week by highlighting some of the best music ever!
We take melody combined with lyric and then analyze, scrutinize, and sometimes criticize that very combination to make a sometimes awe-inspiring, thought-provoking, and an expectantly life-changing point. It is Tuesday's Musical Notes' ambition to provide a context to our life based on truth wrapped up in a tortilla of entertaining ambiance.
All of this bloggy goodness started the last Tuesday of May in 2012. Today, Tuesday's Musical Notes has 426 blog posts about music and life. (Check out the complete list by month on the left side of your screen or use the search box for your fave song or group.) Even better than how many posts is the fact that The Notes has been seen more than 51,000 times in countries all over the world. Given these numbers, it is safe to say that we here at Tuesday's Musical Notes are grateful and strongly believe in...miracles. And that's how we get by...
In 1965, 20-year-old Marty Balin gutted a pizza joint and converted it to a music club, naming it The Matrix. This allowed him to always have a place to perform his music with a band that he would put together. Balin would team up with folk musician Paul Kantner, as they started the propellers of Jefferson Airplane. After seeing musicians come and go, Jefferson Airplane hit on a lineup that would take them down the runway and keep them soaring, albeit with a fluctuating lineup and almost as often a fluctuating band name, for the next 50 years.
The 1966-1970 lineup was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 (as the Jefferson Airplane) and included Balin (vocals/guitar), Kantner (guitar/vocals), Jorma Kaukonen (lead guitar/vocals), Grace Slick (vocals/keyboards), Jack Cassady (bass), and Spence Dryden (drums). Amazingly, this lineup only saw two top ten hits both of which came in 1967 ("Somebody to Love" (#5) and "White Rabbit" (#8)). Their impact on music however spans the generations as they were pioneers in psychedelic rock during the Summer of Love (1967).
With the aforementioned personnel changes and making the attempt to reflect the beginning space race, Airplanes became Starships. The group's new name is reflective of Paul Katner's 1970 solo effort, Blows Against the Empire which credited backing musicians, Grace Slick, Jerry Garcia and Mickey Hart, (Tuesday's Musical Notes - "Touch of Grey" (The Grateful Dead)), David Crosby (Tuesday's Musical Notes - "Turn, Turn, Turn" (The Byrds)), Peter Kaukonen, Jack Casady, Graham Nash (Tuesday's Musical Notes - "Teach Your Children Well" (Crosby, Stills, and Nash), Tuesday's Musical Notes - Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" (Crosby, Stills, and Nash), Tuesday's Musical Notes - "Wasted on the Way" (Crosby, Stills, and Nash),) as the Jefferson Starship.
For the next ten years, the original group with a new band name taken from Katner would see the hits come as fast as rocket fuel burns. 8 Gold or Platinum albums and 9 top 40 singles would erupt from this new incarnation of the band.
"Miracles" was one of those 9 top 40 singles. It peaked at #3 for three weeks on the Billboard Hot 100. It was written by Marty Balin who had left the group early in its Jefferson Starship incarnation but returned full time to the band with the Red Octopus album. Inspiration for the song came from a duality of places. Balin wrote it as a love song for the woman he was dating at the time and as a tribute to an Indian guru thought to be a miracle worker.
Balin would remain with the group until it changed its name again as well as its musical direction. He would not be in the band that would emerge from the litigated name change...Starship (Tuesday's Musical Notes - We Built This City (Starship)). The Jefferson Airplane would however reform with Balin as lead singer for the 1989 self-titled and final album to mixed reviews, but an incredibly successful album tour.
The group that started as a house band for a remodeled pizza joint, continues to see its music played on classic radio and its legacy promulgated by music historians and fans alike. If only they believed in miracles...
Do you believe in miracles? Have you ever been a recipient of one?
If you were to read the history of the book we call the Bible, you would certainly have to admit to miraculous occurrences happening for us to have it available to us today. The book itself is the recounting of astonishing events that science, even by today's standards, find it difficult to explain. However, if you were to speak to an Orthodox Jew, they would quickly narrate the miraculous as it applies to their nation, especially in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible.
For today, The Notes would like to focus on a passage that has been and continues to be the making of Sunday School lessons all over the world. Let's take a look:
Imagine seeing over 2 million people walk across a dry sea bed with walls of water on either side. Once every one of them is safely on the other shore their enemy is swallowed up by the water walls returning to their place of origin. This is what should have been on the minds of the Israelites as they were beginning their journey to the land that was promised to their ancestor Abraham.
What were they thinking of instead?
"I'm hungry, I'm thirsty. We would have been better off if we had stayed put!" (obviously paraphrased with a little whiny in the mix). This generation of Israelites had just witnessed God destroying the economy and health of the world's first superpower, Egypt. Then they watched as God defeated the arrogance and pride of Egypt's military in the parting of the Red Sea. Why would they doubt that this same God would provide nourishment in abundance for them now that they began their journey to the land of promise? Why would they declare their allegiance to a lifestyle of slavery as being better than their current circumstance?
It is very easy to be critical of the Israelites at this point. It is unfathomable that they would have been witness to the greatest miracles of their time and then complain when their stomachs began to growl.
But, let's be very careful in our critique. Are we not witness to the miraculous every day when a baby is born, that someone is in remission from cancer or recovers from covid-19? Are we not spectators to some of the most incredible advances in communications and technology ever in the history of mankind? Do we not breathe the only sustainable air in the universe? "If only you believed in miracles..."
God did provide food. More food than the Israelites could eat in fact. But it wasn't due to their complaints or their faithlessness, it was due to His faithfulness.
God shouldn't have to move heaven and earth for you to believe in miracles. Perhaps we should look all around us more and listen to our stomachs growling less...
'Til Tuesday,
Serving HIM by serving You,
randy
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