The Mamas & the Papas, "I Saw Her Again Last Night"

That lyric really takes on an ugly sheen now, dunnit?

But ignoring John and Mackenzie Phillips' family affair, I've long wanted to repurpose "I Saw Her Again Last Night" to be about a closeted guy with a beard-girlfriend. And watching Mad Men a few weeks ago, when Sal daintily and diligently performed the entire "Bye Bye Birdie" choreograph for his silently horrified wife, I thought to myself: "To string her along's just not right ..."

The Miracles, "(Come 'Round Here) I'm the One You Need"

One of my favorite, and one of the most peculiar, entries in the Miracles' large and often miraculous catalog. Why peculiar? Because it was one of very few Miracles hits that Smokey Robinson didn't write himself, and it sounds so tailor-made for Levi Stubbs's declamatory voice that I can't fathom why the Four Tops didn't do it instead. Maybe it was too similar to their concurrent triumvirate of four-to-the-floor hits "Reach Out, I'll Be There," "Standing in the Shadows of Love," and "Bernadette"?

At any rate, Smokey comes off more victim than victor here on "(Come 'Round Here) I'm the One You Need," a tune ostensibly about waiting your turn while your beloved wastes her time with a guy who's clearly wrong for her. Problem is, he's so meek when he implores, "I may not be the one you want, but I know I'm the one you need," that the girl's natural reaction is to say, "Yeah, right, whatevs" and go back to the bad guy.

Still, you've gotta root for someone in Smokey's situation. At least he's a gentleman in his impotent longing.

The Dreamlovers, "You Gave Me Somebody to Love"

The esteemed music critic Robert Christgau suffers neither fools nor copy editors gladly. So I didn't get to know him as well as I might have liked during the brief period we both worked for the Village Voice. But he did at least one nice thing for me: knowing my love of '60s pop, he gave me a just-received CD titled Phil's Spectre II: Another Wall of Soundalikes. As the title suggests, the songs were all produced in the densely orchestrated style of Phil Spector's Wall of Sound (the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling" being the iconic example, for those unfamiliar). A few of them even warrant such bombastic treatment.

And so we have "You Gave Me Somebody to Love," a 1966 non-hit by a Philly vocal outfit, the Dreamlovers, who'd scored a couple of hits a few years prior. The writers are Peter Andreoli, Vincent Poncia, and Jerry Ross - Poncia, I know from other writing credits; the other two, unfamiliar to me. They've given this your basic Righteous backdrop, but it's the message that matters here, not the music. (The depth of the message is probably why the song failed to chart.) Guy's losing his girl - but instead of being angry with her or begging her to change her plans, he lets her go, sad to lose her but fulfilled with the knowledge that he knows how to love. That he has known love. It's the most mature response to not being able to be with the one you love.

"The greatest thing you'll ever learn / Is to love and be loved in return," went the old chestnut "Nature Boy." I'd argue the truth is slightly to the left: the greatest thing you'll ever learn is to love and never wonder whether you're loved in return.

The Byrds, "Eight Miles High"

Here's a metaphor being thrown down the middle of the plate: No matter how talented or gifted you are, there are some moments where you must be in harmony with others to reach your potential.

L&Gs, I present a 1973(? - commenters suggest it may be '74-'75) performance of "Eight Miles High," a 1966 Byrds hit that genuinely spooked me when I first heard it as a kid - the vocals, as heard on oldies radio, seemed oddly layered and futuristic (it preceded the Airplane in my grasp of psychedelia). Here, in this performance with Roger McGuinn singing it all by his lonesome, it is brittle, hollow like decaying bone - in the words of Rolling Stone's McGuinn bio, that "pinched, adenoidal quality" ruins it for me. Whoever he was paying to be his Byrds at this point obviously weren't being paid enough - they couln't be less interested to be onstage, much less engaged enough to be singing along.

I offer the original for contrast.

Lee Mallory, "That's the Way It's Gonna Be"

Thank the gods for sunshine pop, particularly on a day when world events have me in a resolutely sour mood. (Can November get here any more quickly?) My friend Mike, who sometimes posts in the comments here, turned me on to this phenomenal obscurity last week. Lee Mallory's "That's the Way It's Gonna Be" only made it to #86 on the national charts, but Wikipedia helpfully informs me that it made it to #1 in Amsterdam and #2 in Seattle. (Now that's street-teaming!) The Phil Ochs tune gets an Associations-esque production from their main man Curt Boettcher, who knew his way around a vocal arrangement and went off the jazzy deep end on this one; keeps the backing minimal, as if inspired by Love's grungy garage take on Burt Bacharach's "My Little Red Book"; and gets more insanely wonderful as it goes.

It won't make bankrupted funds reappear, nor will it end a war or make politicians tell truths instead of lies, but it's all I've got today, so it'd better do.

The Mad Lads, "Patch My Heart"

Now I know where Color Me Badd got everything in "All 4 Love" from: the 1966 Isaac Hayes-produced "Patch My Heart" from an obscure R&B outfit called the Mad Lads. Thanks, Mike, for continuing to advance my musical education.

The Mamas and the Papas, "Dancing Bear"

Filed under "Be careful what you wish for": Denny Doherty and his fellow Mamas and Papas sing in "Dancing Bear" (I like that abbreviated live clip, but go here for the full song) that rather than being a humble chimney sweep, "I'd rather be the gypsy / Who's camped at the edge of town." Sounds nice, a slice of '60s idealism of freedom, until you get to the verse not included in that live perf: "And when I am a grown man / I'll taste just what I please / The honey from the bee / The shellfish from the sea / The earth, the wind, a girl / Someone to share these things with me."

None of those are promised to any of us as grown adults ... especially the latter. Especially for us gypsies of the cosmos.

Or, put another way:

Lost in Space (a/k/a Poem for a Gypsy)

Some of us have muses,
Some inquisitors, interrogators;
But what of the man who has no inspiration,
No collaborators?

Some of us get married,
Have our children, have our houses;
But what of the man who has no close relations,
No spouses?

Some of us have legacies,
Carry names for offspring to come;
But what of the man who has no generation,
No home?

We're a mobile and free culture, for the most part and increasingly. But increasing disconnection is a consequence, and disconnection is a drag sometimes.