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Finding My Long Lost Song

Copyright © 2005, W. David Tarver

When I was a student at University of Michigan back in the 70s, I heard this very strange song on the radio. It began, "Well I’m a stranger here, in this place called Earth, and I was sent down here to discover the worth, of your little blue planet, third from the sun, come on and show me what you’ve done." The song had a catchy melody and a novel message – a creature from outer space was telling us earthlings how we were destroying the planet. The earthlings would brag, "We got the aero-plane, we got the automobile, we got skyscraping buildings made of glass and steel". The space alien would reply, "Oh, you crazy fools, don’t you know you had it made? You were living in paradise!"

For years after I left Ann Arbor, I sang that song to myself. It reminded me of my days at Michigan, and it recalled the environmental idealism of the seventies. After I moved to New Jersey, I never heard the song again – none of the radio stations out here played it. Eventually, I forgot about the song, but after several years it popped into my head again. I asked several friends if they had ever heard the song – no luck. I visited several record stores to see if I could locate the song. I would sing a few bars of the song to a store clerk, only to be greeted by a blank stare. No luck! Nobody in New Jersey seemed to know about that song. After awhile, I got the bright idea to call the radio station in Ann Arbor where I first heard the song. I called the station and asked to speak to one of the deejays. When the deejay came on the line, I told him about my dilemma and sang a few bars of the song. The deejay seemed to ponder the song for several minutes, and finally he said, "Sounds like it might be the Kinks. I never heard that particular song, though." Off I went to the record store. I searched through all of the Kinks records I could find, but again no luck.

I was beginning to think that the song was a figment of my imagination. Maybe I created it during a sleep-deprived, engineering-school-stress-induced stupor. Those were pretty common during my student days. Or maybe real space aliens had tapped into my radio back in Ann Arbor and played the song only for me. The whole thing was beginning to take on a mystical quality, and it was driving me nuts.

Then I forgot about the song again. For years, I didn’t sing it, and I never heard it played on the radio. One day last year I was sitting in front of my computer daydreaming. For some strange reason, the song popped into my head again, and I had another idea. I went to the Google site, and I typed in "I’m a stranger here in this place called earth and I was sent down here to discover the worth." Then I clicked on SEARCH. I really didn’t expect anything – I was just playing around. To my amazement, after a few seconds all of the information about my little mystery song popped onto my computer screen. My space alien song really existed after all!

Turns out that my song was called "I’m a Stranger Here", and it was performed by a Canadian group called Five Man Electrical Band. Their biggest hit in the U.S. was a song called "Signs" ("Do this, don’t do that, can you read the signs?"). Google took me to sites that provided a history of the group and information about every one of the group’s records. I found the CD with "I’m a Stranger Here", and went to Amazon.com to order it. A few days later, the CD came and I was finally listening to my mystery song. The Internet and Google let me do in just a few minutes what I had been unable to accomplish in the past 30 years. All I had to do was type in a few of the lyrics and hit SEARCH.

When it comes to technology, I can be pretty jaded. I’ve designed computer systems, I’ve written lots of software, and I have been a heavy Internet user for years. In spite of all that, nothing made me appreciate the Internet more than the simple act of finding my long lost song. The sheer joy of that discovery really brought home the power of Internet technology. It’s a technology those mystical space aliens from "I’m a Stranger Here" would probably appreciate.

 

Red Bank, NJ

April 12, 2005