Crystal Blue Persuede Shoes

Pete the Cat's blue shoes (see "Fools and wise men on hills, planetary shoon, and a literal Blueberry Hill") made me think of the song "Blue Suede Shoes," most famously sung by Elvis Presley, which begins thus:

Well, it's one for the money, two for the show
Three to get ready, now go, cat, go
But don't you step on my blue suede shoes

Besides the cat and the blue shoes, the emphasis on "stepping" also syncs with Pete the Cat, where we read four times (the number corresponding to "go, cat, go"), "Oh no! Pete stepped in . . ." to explain why his shoes have changed color.

I had been primed to think of "Blue Suede Shoes" by a book I recently read, Tuned In by Grant Cameron, which relates this anecdote about what inspired the lyrics:

The song came to [Carl] Perkins in a dream. In an interview with Gadfly Online, Perkins stated, "I was playing at a place called the Roadside Inn. I heard this boy tell the girl he was dancing with 'Watch out, don't step on mah suedes' and I looked down at his feet, and he had on this pair of blue suede shoes. It kinda stuck to me." The incident stayed on his mind all night and when he woke up in the morning he immediately began writing down the lyrics on an old brown paper potato sack, the only piece of paper he had around the house.

Suede is a homophone of suade, an archaic synonym of persuade, so that got me thinking of another song: "Crystal Blue Persuasion" by Tommy James and the Shondells. I had been primed to think of that band in an advance, too, by a comment in which Debbie copied and pasted this from Wikipedia:

The Ides of March is an American jazz rock band that had a major North American and minor UK hit with the song "Vehicle" in 1970. The Ides of March began in Berwyn, Illinois (a near western suburb of Chicago), on October 16, 1964, as a four-piece band called "The Shon-Dels".

That's right, the Ides of March -- whose guitarist's footwear was what brought blue shoes into the sync stream in the first place -- were originally called the Shon-Dels. It was in the summer of 1964, just months earlier, that Tommy James renamed his own band to the Shondells.

Back in early 2023, probably February or March, I had a dream of my own about blue shoes. I dreamt that I had bought a pair of blue leather wingtips and was very pleased with them. The dream left me with a desire to buy such a pair of shoes in real life, but they unsurprisingly proved impossible to find. I ended up buying a pair of brown wingtips instead. Up until then, I had never worn wingtips in my life -- had actively disliked the style, in fact -- and had a very strong preference for black shoes. This "brand new pair o' brogues" inspired the post "Are the Irish better at math?", which is what my approximate dating of the dream is based on.

Note added: When I went to YouTube to get the link for "Crystal Blue Persuasion," it recommended an unfamiliar song, "Substitution" by Silversun Pickups, and I clicked out of curiosity. Almost the first thing we see in the video is this:

Second note added: Elvis Presley, who made "Blue Suede Shoes" famous, is never referred to by his name in Chinese but is always called 貓王, "the Cat King" -- apparently a fusion of his titles "the Hillbilly Cat" and "the King of  Rock and Roll." Several other singers have special Chinese monikers as well; for example, Katy Perry is known as 水果姐, "Fruit Sister," apparently in reference to some of her costumes.