“How could you leave me alone again” Lyric by Box, Byron, and Hensley and Blog Entry Title by James Pate Williams, Jr., BA, MSwE, PhD

The title lyric is from the song “Salisbury” off Uriah Heep’s second album released in the United States in the year I graduated from high school 1971. I probably was unaware of the album until late 1971 or early 1972. The album “Salisbury” along with its title track was my sexual encounter anthem back in the day. The album has other very meaningful tracks, but I will review the album later in this blog entry.

The blog title lyric is applicable to at least four significant females that entered my life then left me high and dry. I do not understand why I was abandoned and sentenced to live in misery and regret. The decades of their meaningfulness to me were the 1970s, 2000, 2010s, and now. I will not blurt out their names and where they worked. Being sentenced to solitary confinement and a singleton life is the very theme and bane of my existence. So much for my depressing facts of life.

Now back to the United States version of Salisbury. It has the following tracks in the order as written:

  1. “High Priestess” by Ken Hensley
  2. “The Park” by  Ken Hensley
  3. “Time to Live” by Mick Box, David Byron, and Ken Hensley (lead guitar, lead vocals, and keyboards, respectively)
  4. “Lady in Black” by Ken Hensley
  5. “Simon the Bullet Freak” by Ken Hensley
  6. “Salisbury” by Mick Box, David Byron, and Ken Hensley

Tracks 1 – 4 comprise side 1 and 5 – 6 are on side 2. Tracks 1, 3,  and 6 are perhaps best considered love songs with track 3 being especially poignant about love lost and never regained. Tracks 2 and 4 are anti-war anthems. It is interesting that there was a lot of protesting about our Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United Kingdom. Track 5 is an anti-opiate use song.

The lead guitarist Mick Box uses the wah-wah pedal a lot on track 1, 3, and 6. His use of that audio effect is as good as Jimi Hendrix with same effect or perhaps even superior to Jimi on tracks 3 and 6.

“High Priestess” is about eternal love. In track 2 the “speaker” of the song is lamenting the lost of his brother at “hand of needless war”. The setting of “The Park” is a children’s entertainment park. Track 3 is about a prisoner who is doing 20 years for killing a man who was abusing a woman. The prisoner is about to be released and wants the female heroine of the song to smile at him upon his freedom from prison. “Lady in Black” is a Goddess of War and Peace and the singer is asking for implements to kill his enemies and the Lady does not comply with warlike wishes. Track 5 is about a heroin addict who rips people off with a weapon and sometimes kills for money to get high. The album title track is a beautiful full classical orchestral and rock work of high artistry. It is about love gained then utterly lost thus the title of this blog line. Mick Box has at least three guitar solo passages utilizing his wah-wah pedal.

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Author: jamespatewilliamsjr

My whole legal name is James Pate Williams, Jr. I was born in LaGrange, Georgia approximately 70 years ago. I barely graduated from LaGrange High School with low marks in June 1971. Later in June 1979, I graduated from LaGrange College with a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry with a little over a 3 out 4 Grade Point Average (GPA). In the Spring Quarter of 1978, I taught myself how to program a Texas Instruments desktop programmable calculator and in the Summer Quarter of 1978 I taught myself Dayton BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) on LaGrange College's Data General Eclipse minicomputer. I took courses in BASIC in the Fall Quarter of 1978 and FORTRAN IV (Formula Translator IV) in the Winter Quarter of 1979. Professor Kenneth Cooper, a genius poly-scientist taught me a course in the Intel 8085 microprocessor architecture and assembly and machine language. We would hand assemble our programs and insert the resulting machine code into our crude wooden box computer which was designed and built by Professor Cooper. From 1990 to 1994 I earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from LaGrange College. I had a 4 out of 4 GPA in the period 1990 to 1994. I took courses in C, COBOL, and Pascal during my BS work. After graduating from LaGrange College a second time in May 1994, I taught myself C++. In December 1995, I started using the Internet and taught myself client-server programming. I created a website in 1997 which had C and C# implementations of algorithms from the "Handbook of Applied Cryptography" by Alfred J. Menezes, et. al., and some other cryptography and number theory textbooks and treatises.

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