This weekend they’ve been having the annual Air And Water Show along the lakefront here in Chicago. It’s not really my cup of tea but it’s quite popular. Between my friends posting pictures from it on Facebook and my iPod coughing up songs about people on boats it seems I have little choice but to pay tribute to the spectacle.

While the name of the event is the Air And Water Show, there’s not a lot of water involved these days. It’s mostly airplanes flying around, many of them military jets. So I’m going to do my best to put the Water back into the show with this post.

Dan Zanes “Drunken Sailor” (Traditional)
Dan Zanes is a pretty popular children’s musician. He’s all over the Disney Channel. Amazingly enough his music stands up well on its own and is way better than most children’s music. Hell, he does a duet with Lou Reed on one of Freakette’s CDs. The only other kids music that doesn’t make me cringe is the stuff that They Might Be Giants does.

The Winechuggers “Six Months In A Leaky Boat” (Split Enz)
This is the song that started me thinking about this week’s theme. I still find it weird that it was banned in England because the BBC thought it was written to protest the Falklands War. There really isn’t a lot of metaphor here, it’s clearly about sailing to New Zealand. I guess you could get confused if you don’t know what Aotearoa is. Or if you think that “shipwreck love” is some sort of slam on the Royal Navy.

The Virginia Gentlemen “Ship Of Fools” (Robert Plant)
I suppose there are many reasons that there aren’t many ships at the Air And Water Show these days. I’m sure the airplanes are big crowd pleasers and are more visible to more people. With ships you’d have to look over the people in front of you to see if you’re on the lakefront, with airplanes you just look up. And people have always been interested in watching things fly. But I bet a real live ship of fools would go over big. And we seem to have no shortage of fools these days to put on such a ship.

Michael Manning “Somebody To Love” (Jefferson Airplane)
There are civilian planes flying around the show but it’s largely military jets. And some of those pilots can be obnoxious. I was at a Cubs game a few years ago during the Air And Water Show. I was sitting in the back of the upper deck and some jerk in a jet decided to buzz Wrigley Field. It scared the hell out of me because he came from behind me and I couldn’t see or hear him until he was pretty much literally on top of me. Others in the crowd cheered the plane. I did not.

Parthenon Huxley “Mister Blue Sky” (Electric Light Orchestra)
The weather this weekend has been absolutely perfect for the event. Cool temperatures and cloudless blue skies. This is the best version of this song I’ve ever heard, way better than the original.

It was great to see the Curiosity rover land successfully on Mars. I’m so happy that there’s something besides Neil deGrasse Tyson making science cool these days. Maybe it will encourage some young American children to learn more about the planets around us.

Jon Langford and the One Day Band “Rocket Man” (Elton John)
Of course there was no rocket man in the spaceship that took Curiosity to Mars, just the remote controlled dune buggy. But the rover is indeed burning out its fuse out there alone. This cover comes from an episode of This American Life about classified ads. Jon Langford used the classified ads in The Reader, Chicago’s free “alternative” weekly newspaper, to put together a band for one day. And this is what they came up with.

The Gourds “Ziggy Stardust” (David Bowie)
When I first heard about Curiosity I was very excited because I thought they would finally find the Spiders From Mars. But the guys at NASA decided to have it look for rocks instead of doing the really important stuff like looking for spiders. I could have just taken five covers from the Ziggy Stardust album and called it a day, but that would have been too easy. But I did have to include at least one.

The Space Lady “Major Tom” (Peter Schilling)
Kind of a two-fer on this one. It’s the inimitable Space Lady performing a song that’s a response to Mr. Bowie’s Space Oddity.

Camper Van Beethoven “Interstellar Overdrive” (Pink Floyd)
Mars is of course part of our solar system so there was nothing interstellar about Curiosity’s journey. But the more we learn about our solar system the more prepared we will be to one day travel to other stars.

Mates Of State “Son et Lumiere” (The Mars Volta)
This song comes from a Mates Of State album called Crushes where they covered a wide variety of material. I had heard of these folks before I found this song but I wasn’t aware of how polarizing they are. People seem to either love them or hate them. Personally, I kinda dig what they’re putting down.

The second and final week of my big project at work is over. While the second week went better than the first, one of my summer interns seemed to have a problem with reading comprehension. There were written instructions to follow and a checklist to be filled out as each step in the process was completed. In some cases there were notes that indicated special treatment that was required. But this one guy consistently had problems with reading and understanding all this stuff and it put us in a bit of a bind. It makes me fear for the future of our country if our college students have this much trouble with simple instructions.

The Waybacks “I Wanna Be Like You” (Louis Prima)
This song comes from the movie The Jungle Book, which was of course a real book before it became an animated Disney flick. The instructions I provided were far from being a book, it was just a few pages to read over. But I get the impression that this guy doesn’t read a whole lot of books.

Peter Gabriel “The Book Of Love” (The Magnetic Fields)
Love is a complex thing that I sometimes have problems comprehending, so I wouldn’t get upset if my intern had problems comprehending the Book Of Love. But that wasn’t what I was asking him to read.

Taxiride “Word Up” (Cameo)
When you’re reading something it all comes down to the words. Understanding what each word means and how the words fit together to build sentences which then fit together to communicate information. That’s the very soul of reading comprehension. But I think that when it came to reviewing the information my intern decided to throw his hands in the air like he just didn’t care.

New Buffalo “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” (Nina Simone)
I thought my instructions were clear. I asked other people to review them and they agreed. I told the summer interns to ask questions if anything was unclear. But alas the written and verbal instructions were misunderstood, largely due to the lack of reading comprehension that I’ve been harping on all through this post.

Skee-Lo “The Tale Of Mister Morton” (From Schoolhouse Rock)
I suppose it would be too much to expect Schoolhouse Rock or some contemporary version of it to be broadcast between the Saturday morning cartoons of today. It’s an artifact of a simpler time. But I did learn a lot about grammar and reading from those cool little cartoons. In my intern’s scenario he played the role of Mister Morton and he was supposed to do what the instructions told him to do. Mister Intern reads. Mister Intern does. Mister Intern follows instructions.

Last week was a very tough one at work, long stressful hours. By the end of the week I was tired and strung out. In a word, I was toast.

The Toasters “Secret Agent Man” (Johnny Rivers)
If you’re gonna have toast the first thing you need is a toaster. Back in the day a toaster was an inexpensive lump of chrome that would last the better part of your lifetime. These days it seems that there are two types of toasters available. You’ve got your incredibly cheap toasters that self-destruct in a matter of months and you’ve got your expensive toasters that approach the Platonic ideal of toasters past. After churning through a series of cheap toasters I finally broke down and bought a good one. But it still bothers me to pay $35 for a damn toaster.

13 Nightmares “Everything I Own” (Bread)
Once your toaster is accounted for you’ll need bread. I sometimes have a problem with buying bread that’s too wide to fit into my overpriced toaster, you’d think that there would be some sort of standard for the size of a loaf of bread that the bakers could share with the small appliance manufacturers.

Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass “Popcorn” (Hot Butter)
Unless you’re Elwood Blues there are few things in life more awful than dry toast. One can make the argument that toast is really just a butter delivery system, but I would argue that the butter is a necessary part of the whole toast experience.

Tom Jones “Black Betty” (Ram Jam)
Jelly, jam, preserves. Which you prefer on your toast says volumes about what kind of person you are. Without going into the psychological implications of my choice I will admit to a preference for jam. I find that jam has a more pleasing consistency than jelly, which I find unsatisfyingly thin, and is easier to spread than preserves.

The Hassles “A Taste Of Honey” (Bobby Scott)
Some people will not be drawn into the preserved fruit debate and will instead put honey on their toast. That doesn’t make you a bad person, in fact I do it myself when we run out of jam.

“Meta” is a word that is becoming more popular these days to describe things that refer to themselves. In the world of computers meta data is data about other data. A popular culture example would be 30 Rock, which is a TV show about a TV show. I’ve never heard a song about a song being called meta, but it definitely fits.

David Bromberg “Tennessee Waltz” (Cowboy Copas)
After a bit of a break I’m back taking mandolin lessons. This is one of the songs I’m learning and I was struck with just how meta it is. It’s a song about how how I lost my woman while they were playing a song about about how I lost my woman while they were playing a song about how I lost my woman. It’s an endless hall of mirrors.

There’s something that’s always bugged me about the lyrics on this song. If they were playing a song while my friend stole my woman I wouldn’t consider that song to be “beautiful” even if I thought it was before my woman left me. That’s why I like this version. Mr. Bromberg sings it with a little bit of an edge. He sounds like the whole experience still sticks in his craw.

Billy Paul “Your Song” (Elton John)
This is probably the most soulful cover I’ve ever heard of an Elton John song. This is also one of the lamest love songs ever written. He admits that he can’t even remember what color his lover’s eyes are and then says, hey I wrote a song about how much I like you. I can’t think of too many people who would be proud to tell people that it’s their song.

The DeRellas “You’re So Vain”  (Carly Simon)
I wrote this song about what an asshole you are and you’re such an asshole that you think I wrote it about you, you asshole. It’s a shame that Carly Simon finally copped to who she wrote the song about. I liked the idea of millions of baby boomers going to their graves tortured by the question.

Al Pierson’s Big Band U.S.A. “Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song” (B.J. Thomas)
It seems that the most meta songs fall somewhere on the scale from melancholy to self-pitying and this one’s no different. It’s a sad song about wanting to hear a sad song because your woman done you wrong. But this version is surprisingly chipper. It’s also delightfully cheesy, all the more so because it’s played completely straight and sincere by Mr. Pierson and his big band.

Big Daddy “I Write the Songs” (Captain And Tennille)
I’ve loved Big Daddy and their “lost 50s band” schtick for quite some time. And they don’t disappoint on this song about writing songs.