Curiousity Made Me Research It

I like all kinds of music and songs. You name the genre, I've probably sampled it in the past 39 1/2 years of my life (I started paying attention to music when I was about 10, which is 1975) in some particular way, shape or form. 99% of the time, the songs I listen to pretty much takes me on a journey to the farthest recesses of my memory, both past and present.

It's that remaining 1% that we're gonna have fun writing about today, and maybe, get you to search your memory banks as well.

I've always found exceptionally intriguing, to the point of the blog title, songs that touch upon an actual event. The weird thing about those songs, is that almost all of them touch upon a true crime event. I haven't heard many that don't, but the ones that I like apparently are somewhat dark/macabre in nature.

So gather 'round the BBQ and grab yourself a heaping plate of food and a tall cold one, while I regale with four tales of strange songs that touch upon true crime events. Please be warned that if some of this bothers you or makes you squeamish, by all means, feel free to check out the archives for this blog or for Cedar's Mountain. And away we go.

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For those of you who aren't up on your historical pop culture, back in the mid 80's, Dan Rather was a well known and respected news anchor on CBS Evening News. One day, he was mugged, and his attacker keep repeating the phrase "What's the frequency Kenneth?". REM decided to write a song about the attack for their 1994 album "Monster", which in turn became a big radio smash for them.

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This became one of my favorite songs from the mid 90's from the band Filter. Contrary to popular and persistent opinion, it was not about the alleged suicide of Kurt Cobain, but more of the live on your boob tube suicide of R. Budd Dwyer (the link is to the Wikipedia entry, but I found a website that has the actual recorded suicide. Couldn't bring myself to watch it, which means I'm probably getting mellower in my old age).

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This was one of my typical purchases where I would buy the entire album for just one song. I first read about this song in some book about provocative/banned songs, so of course I had to search it out. Basically, the song title stems from a schoolyard shooting in California, in which the shooter gave as the reason for doing the dastardly deed that left two classmates dead.

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And finally, the last example on the infamous hit parade. I first heard this remake of the Bobby Fuller Four classic (irony there somewhere. Bobby Fuller ran afoul of the Mob back in the day and supposedly committed suicide...by tying his hands behind his back and gagging his mouth with the engine running in the car) on college radio, so naturally I was intrigued about it to search it out. I didn't get hold of the song until some 15 years later on a compilation, but suffice to say, the remake was based the assassination of Harvey Milk and George Moscone by Dan White.

(c) 2015 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved.