172. Peas! Peas! Peas! Peas! Eatin' goober peas!

172. "Legend of The One-Eyed Sailor" by Chuck Mangione

You might think that "Feels So Good" or "Give It All You Got" would be the Chuck Mangione songs that made me want to take the money I earned from my first summer of lifeguarding and buy a flugelhorn. But you'd be wrong. It was "Legend of the One-Eyed Sailor."




The decision to purchase a flugelhorn came one evening while I was waiting in the car for someone (probably Mom or Dad) to come out of the church and drive me home. In those days, listening to the radio in the car was about the only option to stay entertained while waiting for parents to stop their drawn-out church chats. If we were at the church during a weekday and Mom or Dad said, "Wait for me in the car," the next words out of my mouth were, "Can I have the keys so I can listen to the radio?" On this particular evening I was moving up and down the dial looking for something good to listen to, and I landed on a jazz station. I thought, "What the heck, I'm in band, I'll listen to some jazz for a while." After a couple of songs, Chuck Mangione's "Legend of The One-Eyed Sailor" came on. I really enjoyed hearing the minute-long flugelhorn solo during the first part of the song, and I thought the song was going to end with it at about the 4-minute mark, since DJs usually don't play songs that go longer than that. Once in a while, you might hear a few songs that extend beyond 5 minutes, but as Billy says, "If your gonna have a hit, you gotta make it fit, so they cut it down to 3:05." Well, this song didn't stop after the flugelhorn solo. It went on for another 4 minutes. At the time, I think it was the longest song I had ever heard on the radio, and I probably could have listened to another 8 minutes of it. I loved the sound of the flugelhorn on this song so much that I decided at the end of it that I was going to buy me one. I also went to Grand Central and bought me a copy of Chuck's album "Tarentella," which featured this song, and listened to it over and over.

I'm so happy I'm blurred!

Have you hugged your flugelhorn today?

The album also had a few songs with Dizzy Gillespie, one of the greatest trumpet players ever. Simply put, Chuck loves Dizzy. So much that he wears a gold medallion around his neck of Dizzy's trumpet with the bell bent up at a 45-degree angle. But Chuck doesn't puff out his cheeks like Dizzy when he plays. Only Dizzy can do that.

They're gonna blow!

While Dizzy didn't make my top 200 list with any songs, I must admit that I especially enjoy "Salt Peanuts." There's something about the sound of lightning-fast be-bop mixed with the image of salty goobers that I find irresistible!



By the way, I remember in elementary school that we had to learn to sing part of the Civil War song "Goober Peas." Now, our elementary school teachers didn't have time to teach us everything, so they would have to select only those things that they thought were most important for us to succeed in life. And for some reason, they thought learning this song was more important than learning the metric system. Burl and Johnny would agree.