Tuesday, January 12, 2021

Tuesday's Musical Notes - "Feel Like a Number" (Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band)


This is a test.  This blog is conducting a test of the Emergency Musicinfo System.  This is only a test... (annoying noise for 23 seconds, yup we checked the timing...) The bloggers of your area in voluntary cooperation with the artists, engineers, and record labels of the music industry have developed this system to keep you informed in the event of a musical emergency.

If this had been an actual musical emergency, the annoying 23 second sound would have been followed by an official drum intro, segueing into guitars riffs, keyboard gliss', and possibly a funky horn section as the situation demanded. Had this been an actual musical emergency you would have also been instructed to cautiously find your way to the nearest concert venue. (Yes, we know this is a dated EMS test...stupid Covid!!!) This blog serves the internetosphere area of all the known world.  This concludes this test of the Emergency Musicinfo System. You are now returned to your regularly scheduled blog already in progress... 

...blog on the planet!  It's Tuesday's Musical Notes!!!  Welcome!

Do you ever get the feeling that your efforts at your place of employment are underappreciated?  You work and work to get things just right only to have that work go unnoticed?  Ever feel like you are #19690 at #9697 instead of Randy, the Store Manager at Hastings Entertainment, Inc.?  I think this is more of a common occurrence than we might realize.  

From the moment we are born we are assigned a Social Security Number.  We use this number as an identifier in many scenarios.  In the United States, this number is used for everything that involves government interaction.  Many organizations assign a numerical identifier to their employees for payroll and benefits purposes, as well as login information to access company systems.  These impersonal means of identification have existed for years as it streamlines corporate databases and makes information seemingly more accessible. But does this replacing of one's name with a number also make recognition an impersonal if not neglected act?  Is it the first step in putting into place systems that enable the end of the world as we know it?  (Tuesday's Musical Notes - "It's the End of the World as We Know It" (R.E.M.))

It's easy to see how one could come to "feel like just another, spoke in a great big wheel, like a tiny blade of grass in a great big field..."



It did not chart however until it was released as the A-side of a single from the 1981 live album Nine Tonight, where it went as far as #48 on Billboard's Hot 100 singles list.  "Feel Like a Number" the A-side was bolstered by having a B-side of "Hollywood Nights", the #12 second single from Stranger in Town.  

Bob Seger has also been heard at the cinema.  He has provided the music for 22 different movies.  Some good...some, well...  "Feel Like a Number" is one of those songs and is featured in 2 films.  The song can be heard in the 1981 William Hurt/Kathleen Turner film Body Heat and the 1993 Bruce Willis/Sarah Jessica Parker movie Striking Distance. (Neither of which Tuesday's Musical Notes recommends). The Seger File: Soundtracks

In a September 14, 1978 article, "Bob Seger is Still the Same", interviewer Steve Morse with The Boston Globe recounts Bob Seger's story behind "Feels Like a Number" 

"I got the idea for the song after watching a show about computer banks and how many names were in them. We're all in computer banks. Lord knows how many data collections there are. Everybody is a number and in the record industry you're also thought of a lot of times as a number — the amount you sell or whatever. Some of the humanity gets lost and the hype takes over. You have to watch out. That's the whole idea of Stranger in Town as an album, actually. It's about identity and trying to survive and keep your identity."  https://www.newspapers.com/clip/25306726/globe-14sep78-p82/

Bob Seger's ode to identity certainly supports the struggle for individualism that we've recently seen become headlines.  While we all exist in the human race (everything else deemed "racial" is actually culture or melanin), that existence is dependent on our individuality.  The name we are given when we are born becomes the humanity part of this equation.  That name signifies our identity to everyone, and for some reason, throughout history, names seem to be a much better way of designating the distinctiveness of who we are as opposed to numbers.     

One stage name that many musicologists, well the ones that read liner notes anyway, know is Alto Reed.  He was the principal saxophonist for the Silver Bullet Band. Sadly, Alto Reed (Thomas Neal Cartmell) succumbed to colon cancer on December 30, 2020, at the age of 72.  A consummate studio musician (dude played with everyone!!!  Alto Reed - wikipedia.org) Reed was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of fame with his Silver Bullet Band family in 2004. 


2020 was the year in which the news cycle was dominated by a contentious election and the world-wide pandemic.  Had these stories not been the focal point for the year, we would have probably seen news reports regarding the demographic gathering efforts made across the United States that occurs every decade.  Once again, citizens of the United States are relegated to numerical status by discriminating factors.  The census serves as a means by which the government has the information it needs to apportion state aid and draw legislative districts, et. al. It can also provide business and industry with information that can be beneficial for planning and marketing purposes.  While these things can be helpful, they have the unintentional (hmmm...) means of stripping away a person's identity and lumping them into a category in which their assigned number might fit the demo.

This practice of counting folks has been a part of mankind's fabric since the early days of Israel's history.  In fact, the book of Numbers in the Bible is the accounting of the peoples who exited the slavery of Egypt to go to a land promised to them by God.  As we continue our journey through the Bible and its great stories, we will see a number (pardon the pun!!!) of times when a census was taken.  As we will see, when the instructions for a census were from God, there were results that were beneficial for all those involved.  When mankind decided to see how many folks there were, the results were less than favorable.  Keep checking back with us to see which ones are which!!


Any time God commands a leader in the Bible to take a census, it is for a reason.  The census information gathered in the first two chapters of Numbers serves a couple of purposes.

First, the children of Israel were strangers in town.  This meant they were vulnerable to attack at any time and they needed to amass fighting men for defense.  The census provided them with a count by their ancestral tribe of those who were 20 years of age or older.  These men would make up the military might that Israel would need to defend itself as it journeyed to the Promised Land and to conquer the nations who were currently inhabiting that land. Seeing these numbers also provided the nation with a sense of confidence in the fact that they had the numerical might to do those things.  That number? 603,550, about 50% of their total population.  For comparison, as of 2018, the United States had 1.3 million active military personnel of the 327.876 million residents, or 004% of the population.  

Secondly, the census provided a means of organizing each tribe in the camp.  With approximately 1.2 million folks quickly fleeing Egypt and now roaming around the desert, one would imagine a time of organization was needed to get families back into their individual tribes.  

There was one tribal exception to the census taking. The Levitical tribe was set apart for the administration of the tabernacle and the items that would be used in that tabernacle to worship God.  They were directly responsible for the transportation and protection of the first church structure.  Their position of encampment would be surrounding the tabernacle as a means of protecting the other tribes if someone inadvertently disobeyed the very strict instructions regarding the holiness of the tent of meeting.  There would be no need to count the sons of Levi as God would be the provider for all things involving worship, including the number of folks needed to carry the structure and carry out the services.  The Israelites were to be confident in God's strength and might, not their own to provide this service to the nation.

While there were a numbering of people, the people were listed by their individual names in their tribe.  They were never number 658 of Dan's tribe or 1245 of the sons of Naphtali.  God commanded that they be listed by their name.  That's important for us today as we are reminded that God knows us by name.








  

Based on these Scriptures, you can rest confident that the God of all creation knows you by your name, inside and out, knows what His plans are for you, AND He wants a personal, by your name relationship with you!!!  You are not known to him by a set of digits, you are known by Him at the sub-atomic level.  To God, You are not another drone.  To God, you are not a statistic on a sheet.  To God, you are not a file or a consensus on the street.  You are not a stranger in this land to Him, You are not a number, you're a man...or a woman...

'Til Tuesday,

Serving HIM by serving You,  
randy

 

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