Elvis Presley, "My Boy"

Didn't intend for an absence last week. But I was in a sour mood, and when I would try to write, poison spilled out; and you deserve better than that.

I've been doing a lot of listening lately, most recently to decidedly adult efforts of the turn of the '70s. As my friend Mike and a Casey Kasem countdown reminded me, early 1971 offered an odd inclusion of music geared toward the older set - including, during the Top 40 of this week in '71, three separate takes on the theme from Love Story.

But it was a song from a previous week's countdown that really stuck in my mind this weekend. "My Boy" was initially a near-hit for Richard Harris, who took it to #41 as the follow-up to the much-maligned "MacArthur Park." But Harris, while a gifted actor, was simply not an especially gifted singer, and so it fell to Elvis Presley to draw the last drop of emotional melodrama out of the collaborative song a few years later. In the King's hands, "My Boy" carries the prideful resignation signified in the lyric. A deep thing, it is: Dad's not happy in his relationship, but he considers his importance in his son's life, and, as the saying goes, "dies to the self" or perhaps "takes one for the team," and knows the most important role in his life then and there is to be a father and a presence and an influence for his child. It sounds so simple - yet it somehow seems so uncommon. I don't have a fatherly impulse myself - but if I develop one, I hope it's with the selflessness expressed in "My Boy."

As long as one doesn't trouble oneself too much with the other unfortunate dynamic going on in the song: "I really don't like your mother."