Furlough week, Day 1: Hi-yoooo!

“If we couldn’t laugh, we would all go insane.”

The wisdom of Jimmy Buffett, from “Changes In Latitudes, Changes In Attitudes.” That line from that 1977 song is our mantra for this week.

I work for a mainstream media company that for each of the past four years has had everyone take a week off without pay. It helps control costs, they say. (Such savings also help pay for the lovely $37.5 million parting gift given to the CEO who left the company last year.) After four years, it seems to be part of the business plan, like crack for the bean counters.

This is my furlough week. We’re going to take that lemon and make lemonade. Each day, let’s laugh so we don’t go insane. Just something a little different.

When I was a kid, I bought 45s until I could afford albums. In 1970, I was 13, a teenager, just barely. Yet old enough, I thought, that I should be buying albums. So I bought my first, probably with birthday money.

I remember going through the records at the J.C. Penney store in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. I couldn’t decide on what kind of music I wanted (or what would be acceptable to my parents’ ears, a consideration I thought wise at the time). So I made the safe choice, settling on this one.

“The Best of Bill Cosby” was released in 1969. Here’s a cut on which Cos almost gets edgy. Listen to this, and you can tell just how Cosby influenced Richard Pryor. All it needs is one “motherfucker,” and it’s Pryor, not Cos.

“The Lone Ranger,” Bill Cosby, 1964, from “The Best of Bill Cosby,” 1969. Recorded live at Mr. Kelly’s in Chicago and originally released on “I Started Out As A Child,” 1964.

What I never knew until this week is that this version of “The Lone Ranger” — the one I’ve known for 40 years — is just an excerpt of the original bit. There’s more of it in the video below, but still not the entire thing. My version runs 57 seconds. The video runs 2:26. The original cut from 1964 runs 3:07.