---

Sometimes there’s quite a potpourri of ingredients to choose from when it comes to the music themes!

The warm-ups before game 1 were certainly that with a couple of really personal tracks amongst them:

• Cat Stevens (later changed his name to Yusuf Islam after converting) was born on 21 Jul 1948 and is celebrating his 78th birthday today.
  
  His “Greatest Hits” was a frequent inhabitant of the 8-track tape player in Mom’s dark green Plymouth Duster that would regularly make the round trip between Fayetteville (where she lived) and Pinehurst (which was the hospital where she and my stepfather worked for many years before they both eventually made it to Cape Fear Valley in Fayetteville).
  
  I can still see that tan-coloured cartridge sticking out of the deck that was mounted near the driver’s side door toward the floor and “Morning Has Broken” was one track that would get instant repeats and all of us singing it at the top of our lungs! 🙂
• Jim Croce would go to #1 on the charts in 1973 with “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” which would turn out to be his only chart-topping hit during his lifetime.
  
  What we didn’t know at the time was like so many folk artists of the 1970s and 1980s, he’d leave us in a plane crash three months after he hit #1 at the very young age of 30.
• Jerry Goldsmith is one of those names that you don’t have to know composers by heart to know of his work with so many iconic movie soundtracks to his credit.
  
  The “Wrath of Khan” soundtrack is easily one of my favourites and not just because there is a very bittersweet personal connection to “Genesis Countdown”.
  
  I was flying down I-40 on my way to Fayetteville on my mother’s birthday in 2006 after having been tipped off by my brother that my stepfather’s time was at hand and that I needed to get there from Garner as quick as I could. And I can assure you that I was holding absolutely nothing back from what that little Ford Escape could produce from under the bonnet and was determined to burn every ounce of horsepower to try to make it back home in time.
  
  I had this soundtrack on the radio and “Genesis Countdown” was playing when I got to Exit 312 and felt his spirit slip away right at the point of the iconic cello solo in this particular track when Captain Kirk has been called down to Engineering after narrowly escaping the explosion of the USS Reliant and he looks over at Spock’s empty chair and the penny drops as to what must have happened and why they’re still alive.
  
  My brother rings me up not too long after and tells me that I need not continue rushing to Highsmith-Rainey and to just take my time.
  
  I’ll never forget that poignant cello solo as long as I live!
  
  Now, I don’t want to leave that story as a total downer as we did later have some laughs after spending time in the room as the staff were doing the usual things to patients that have passed on and made the arrangements to transfer his body to the funeral home just up Ramsey Street from Highsmith-Rainey.
  
  We figured we were in the area so we’d just pop over there and let the funeral director know that his services were going to be needed in the near future and to expect my stepfather’s body presently. When we told him what my stepfather’s name was, you could see the cogs of confusion grinding and grinding before his brain finally came to a halt and he asked us “didn’t I already bury him a few months ago?”
  
  Ah! That was the “Senior”, the one coming to you in a few hours is the “Junior”!
  
  We all started laughing that hysterical laugh you have when you’ve come through an exceptionally stressful situation and the thought of some poor funeral director trying to figure out if we were tricking him and trying to test his memory still brings a smile as does my mother’s exasperated response to recruiters that called years after he’d passed and asked if they could meet him for an interview (“yep, he’s in the lake at Camp Durant!”).

The Information Society track was an added bonus (which has a Star Trek tie-in) as the Zamboni driver was being trained and was a wee bit slower than usual which was absolutely no problem to me when I get to play some additional tracks… 🙂

Game 1 Warm-Ups

Zamboni and Game 2 Warm-Ups

I could have just stuck with this album for the entire evening had I not had some real personal tracks to choose from.

“Appetite For Destruction” has the distinction of being the best selling debut album of all time when it was released in 1987 racking up an impressive 18M units sold. It’s since added to it’s record with over 30M units sold.

It turns out that this is a timely milestone as Guns N’ Roses are due to play Carter-Finley Stadium near Lenovo Centre on Thursday evening in what is likely to be dreadfully foul weather! I think I’ll enjoy these tunes in a nice dry ice skating rink… 🙂

Post-Game