SOUND SYSTEM SUNDAY: Deep Purple - Black Night

My first conception of the mythical black knight was not from reading stories of King Arthur (varies, but generally a murderous sort) or Robin Hood (King Richard in disguise), not even from watching Monty Python (relentless!), but from listening to Deep Purple’s “Black Night” and conceiving of it as a Black Knight, particularly in the chorus “Maybe I'll find on the way down the line / That I'm free, free to be me / Black [k]night is a long way from home,” with its combination of hope (the possibility of freedom, as yet unrealized) and forlornness (driven home in the perfectly sung line “Black night is a long way from home” but also born in the tone of the lyrics throughout).

Sound System Sunday: Samhain - Let the Day Begin

From 1986, a song that succinctly, or really not-so-succinctly, captures the feeling of demonic forces unleashing themselves upon the world—especially true for me since I always thought the line “Nomadic waltz into light” was “Demonic waltz into light” (a happy mondegreen). Really, Glenn Danzig is right up there with Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin as one of the top all-time OD&D mood setters. I have a feeling this won’t be the only Samhain song I post, nor the last from their great November-Coming-Fire.

Let the day begin
Let the horror start
Let the fury swell
Let the skies all cry
Let the day begin

Let the fun begin
Let the worlds collide
Let the day begin
Let humanity spin
Let the day begin . . .

Sound System Sunday: Fleetwood Mac - The Green Manalishi (with the Two Prong Crown)

In the 80’s I thought this was truly a Judas Priest song. My cassette (for the record we called these things tapes!) of Hell Bent for Leather was recorded from a friend with no mention of the track as a cover, and this was not one of the many Fleetwood Mac songs you would hear on the radio. In retrospect, the green manalishi is clearly a metaphor, arguably with misogynist undertones. But it was fun, in those days before the Web and instant Google satisfaction, to try to imagine just what in the world a green manalishi literally was—the assumption being it had to actually be something, right?!? If I was a more imaginative, or maybe just more active, gamer I would have statted up a Green Manalishi. Oh well. Thinking about this this morning I’m liking it as a possibility for my slightly customized version of the clumsily-named ogre mage first presented in Greyhawk. I like that the name creates greater separation between what are really two separate species (or, at least, subspecies). So the manalishi (maybe there is a purple manalishi as well as a green?) might be distantly related to the ogre, but the difference in abilities, intelligence, geography, etc., is more apparent by its having a different name. Or something.

Anyway, here is my song of the week . . .

SOUND SYSTEM SUNDAY: Operation Ivy - Sound System

So I figure maybe every Sunday I’ll look back and post a song from my D&D playing era (or, probably in many cases, earlier). I know very well what my first D&D experience was—a relatively short-lived Keep on the Borderlands expedition run by my cousin in which my thief character nearly died fighting an NPC elf that was somehow a member of our party—but I don’t know if that was 1982 or 1983. I have two different memories that contradict each other: first, being tired but having trouble falling to sleep as my mind raced with thoughts of goblins and hobgoblins in the apartment my family lived in while I was in third-to-fourth grade; second, my mom on the phone in the kitchen and me answering her from the dining room saying I want to play a thief character in the apartment my family lived in while I was in fourth-to-fifth grade. My other early memory is talking about D&D with a classmate out in front of school early one morning, listening in half disbelief as he spoke of rangers and monks(!); that may have been in fourth grade, so that doesn’t really help. Anyway, my era goes up to 1988, possibly early 1989, at which point my friends and I began making fun of how D&D seemed to have denigrated into “check to see if your next breath is successfully taken” (yeah, probably more our fault). My first Sunday Sound System post is more SLC Punk than D&D, but I heard it on the local college radio station the other day and it took me right back to that era and some of the same people I played my last a couple of D&D games with, and, well, it inspired the whole idea behind this post.