Ides of March, "L.A. Goodbye"

Well, who else would you play on March 15? Ides of March are best remembered for the horn-heavy lecherous hit "Vehicle," but I've come to prefer their mellower follow-up, "L.A. Goodbye." It's a refrain I've sung many a time.

Jamestown Massacre, "Summer Sun"

It's officially summer now, though you wouldn't know it to look at a New York City that's resembling London more and more each week. Last year I posted a "Summer" theme set (though I wasn't yet in the practice of including YouTube links all over the place); there hardly seems reason to repeat the idea. Especially since, as he always does, Barry Scott gave a far superior treatment to the "summer" theme on this weekend's episode of "The Lost 45s."

Scott, a longtime fixture on Boston radio, deals primarly in chart-pop obscurities, the sorts of songs that made the Top 40 in their day but never came back into circulation in any of the oldies/classic rock/Jack radio formats. He can always be counted on to play something I've never heard before, and this weekend he came through again. Played "Summer Sun," a tune I'd never heard of from a band I'd never heard of (Jamestown Massacre, and the name is a reference to events of 1622, not a foreshadowing of events of 1978) that made it to #90 in 1972. A bit of research tells me they're from Chicago, and I shouldn't be surprised: there's a unified sound that links "Summer Sun" both to the Buckinghams, Chicagoans who'd had a burst of success five years prior, and to roughly contemporary local efforts "L.A. Goodbye" by the Ides of March and "Lake Shore Drive" by Aliotta, Haynes & Jeremiah. I've been thinking that if there really was such a thing as a "Chicago sound" circa 1972, I'd like to hear more of it.

Cat Stevens, "Morning Has Broken"

Pop Argot turns the show over to his friend Dave* today: after his terrific piece last fall on Todd Rundgren's "Hello, It's Me," he's back with another contemplative early '70s entry.

The Saturday before Palm Sunday, there were articles in the New York Times talking about something I had never heard of before: Birkat Hachama, a Jewish blessing recited once every 28 years, at dawn, to celebrate the sun's return to its original position on the morning of creation.

This sounded too cool to pass up, so on April 28th, I went down to the parking lot behind our triple-decker at precisely 6:17, one minute before dawn. The sky was half-blue, half-filled with a very dark, advancing cloud bank, but for the moment one could clearly see the sun beginning to peek out from behind the hills of Worcester. I waited for it to get high enough to discern the top of the solar disc, and then chanted:

"Blessed are you, LORD our God, King of the Universe, who makes the works of creation."

That only took a moment. As you can see in the above Wikipedia article, the blessing is usually said as part of a small liturgy. The occasion certainly seemed to demand more. I thought for a second, then added the Gloria Patri: "As it was in the beginning/ Is now and ever shall be." And then, as the dawning sun rose at the precise angle it did over Eden, I sang:

Morning has broken, like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning
Praise for the springing fresh from the Word

I think most people think of "Morning Has Broken" as a Cat Stevens song, but fact is, it was written in 1931 as a hymn. Stevens, who even before his conversion to Islam had a religious streak a mile thick, heard it and loved it enough to record and release as a single (which subsequently went to #6 this month in 1972).

I know it as a child from church, from singing in pews on warm spring Sundays, when the windows would be open and the sounds of the world would join our singing. During my childhood, nature seemed to me to be a grace-ful thing. Though my family were never biblical literalists, there was nonetheless a very strong sense in our house that God had created the trees, the water and the animals and that He loved them. I found comfort in nature. Compared to a human world that seemed cruel to me, forests and rivers were always welcoming and peaceful. I loved the bleakness of snow, the soft fall of rain, the smells of a spring thaw, the crunch of autumn leaves. The only interruption to this was the work of man, destroying and polluting, sinning.

But as I got older and learned more about biology, certain facts kept sticking themselves uncomfortably into this picture. I found the unspoiled natural landscape I thought was so tranquil was actually a constant battlefield. Everything is trying to eat or avoid being eaten. The trees and grasses grow as tall as they can to secure their source of sunlight and avoid being shut out by those larger than them. Predators kill mercilessly - indeed, there is no room for mercy, since forgoing prey would just ensure the predator's own death. Whatever is left of the dead is eaten by a thousand hangers-on. All that snow and rain looks much prettier from behind the walls of the warm house, a vantage point no wild animal has. Wasps place spiders into comas so their young can eat the spiders alive. Dolphins and ducks rape. The penis of the bedbug is like a syringe, and its insertion like stabbing. Parasites insert themselves wherever they can find an opening, and will fill up a weak creature with as many of their own as can fit. And when humans blast their way into nature, it is not due to any moral evil but simply from the same evolved urges that every organism unwittingly obeys.

God is nowhere to be found in any of this. There is neither need nor want of Him. The world is powered by eating, fighting and fucking, a massive ball of pain rolling from nothing to nothing.

Is this true? I asked as a sun rose. I stood over a small lake filled with fish and insects, home to ducks, gulls, swans and a great blue heron, bottomed and bordered by trees, bamboo and weeds, lit by the new sun. I love it. Is there any room for Creation here? I have staked my soul on the idea that among all the struggle, God is guiding, and that the turbulent nature and turbulent man will someday be renewed, put again as they were intended, magnificent and peaceful. On that day the lion shall lie down with the lamb, the lion shall eat grass (or not even grass, for the grass will be a friend as well). I long for that day. Until then, under the sun of the first day, I sang:

Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning
Born of the one light, Eden saw play
Praise with elation, praise every morning
God's recreation of the new day.

The Addrisi Brothers, "We've Got to Get It On Again"

The Addrisi Brothers, to the extent they're remembered at all, are remembered for being the writers of the Association's imperial chestnut "Never My Love" (later also a hit for the Fifth Dimension and Blue Swede). And perhaps for laughably bad fashion decisions. But they had a recording career as well: its high point was, for me, the 1970 theme song for Nanny and the Professor; the brothers also went Top 20 in '77 with a vaguely misogynist middle-age swinger's lament, "Slow Dancin' Don't Turn Me On." (Sample lyric: "But when they dance slow, I just can't tell / If all the moving parts are put together so well.")

Five years earlier, though, they'd done something a bit more interesting, though it fared worse on the charts. "We've Got to Get It On Again" is, as its title suggests, a plea for reconciliation. One with nice enough harmonies, and undoubtedly the only use of "penetrating" in a Top 40 charter. What I'd never noticed, though, until hearing it this weekend on a rebroadcast of a Casey Kasem American Top 40 countdown from this week in 1972, was that the song's chart presence came roughly nine months before Pop Argot's arrival on the scene. In other words, this was part of the soundtrack when I was but a twinkle in my daddy's pants. Interesting, and discomforting, circumstances for conception. I'll stick with "Nanny" and "Never My Love."

Richard Harris, "My Boy"

OK, this song deserves a twin-spin. When my friend Mike claimed in yesterday's comments that Richard Harris's original was the superior version, I decided it was worth revisiting. (It also gives me a chance to correct a failed fact check: Harris released several singles between "MacArthur Park" and "My Boy," which did not come until 1972.)

I'm still standing by Elvis Presley's subsequent bigger hit with it. One thing Elvis had going for him was that, after years of recording hundreds of tracks, he by this point had developed an uncanny ability to correct himself within milliseconds on the fly melodically, ensuring he'd never thoroughly flub a note as Harris reliably did every time he sang. Unfortunately, this didn't carry over to correcting himself lyrically - pills make for sloppy copy - and so in his "My Boy," "because" became "becod" - three times. But damn he was still a true salesman of that magnificent melody.

So back to Richard Harris - who I actually did not know until yesterday played Dumbledore, such is the blind spot in my pop-culture radar. I know him as Camelot and a Man Called Horse and a man who in an odd and frankly uncomfortable way resembles my biological father in this clip of him singing "My Boy."

Harris acquits himself a bit better in the studio version, though something just doesn't feel quite right. Maybe it's the way he ends his line with flourish, at moments where I wouldn't think flourish was called for.

Or maybe I'm just really uncomfortable with the scenario as rendered by someone more intrinsically believable than caricature-ready '70s Elvis. Harris forces the boy to be aware of and think about every argument he's had with his wife, the boy's mother. How much it hurts him to stay. And frankly, I'm dubious as to the effectiveness of "staying together for the sake of the children" in the first place. Oh, and: "If I stay"? Is this ongoing negotiation? Elvis, being Elvis, inherently has enough ironic distance from his material to get away with this. Richard Harris, being such a good actor, is all too believable as a father who's threatening to inflict some serious psychic pain and weight on his beloved son. Good thing he was still asleep.

I'm still thinking about this one.

Marvin Gaye, "You're the Man"

President Obama.

Er, President-elect Obama.

Ah, hell. President Obama. It's got a nice ring to it, hasn't it?

Congratulations, Senator Obama, on the campaign you've run, on your ability to persuade a majority of the nation's voters that you are the right man to be running this country. I am one of the millions who believed you. Please lead with wisdom and prove us right.

But first, if I may, a word to the people running the Republican party: Please don't pretend McCain's was the best campaign that could have been run. Yes, it's a difficult economic climate, never a good thing for the incumbent party, but if you had persuaded the nation that you had a finance plan superior to Obama's, a whole lot of suffering Americans would have gotten in line behind you. Instead you focused an entire campaign on distractive elements, let your worst side show. Please take this opportunity to work with the Democrats over the next four years; we will need not only your support but your active assistance.

Now, to be honest, I have a hard time believing we can get our debt under control, reassert the stability of our banks, maintain our infrastructure, make universal health care a reality, and develop a green-tech economy, all by gingerly upticking the tax rates of the $250K-plus class. That number's gonna have to come down, far down, to include much more of the middle class, I suspect - but I'm behind Obama anyway. If that's what it takes, then that's what it takes. Best we can hope for is that getting corruption and fraud in government spending under control will give us a lot more to work with.

But let us have one night of celebration before we start setting down to business. I watched Obama's victory speech with a great sense of pride; he validated everything I've valued about him. "I will listen to you - especially when we disagree," he promised America. And to those who did not vote for him: "I hear your voices; I need your help - and I will be your President too."

Barack Obama, that's why You're the Man.

The Spinners, "How Could I Let You Get Away"

Everyone's got the one that got away. Here's mine.

It was late October 1997. I was celebrating Halloween in the Castro district of San Francisco with a gaggle of friends from work. As we flowed through the merriment, a guy caught my eye. I was in a wizard's outfit; he was uncostumed as best as I can remember. We made instant deeply connecting eye contact - which to that point had never happened to me before. "What's your name?" I stammered, trying to be heard above the din. "Christopher," he replied. "I'm --" ... but before I could continue, the swollen crowd pushed me along. And since I got no phone number or other information from him, I forgot about that moment not long after.

Flash forward to early May 2001. I'm back in SF after having spent the prior year in Southern California - but not for long, as I've just made the decision to move back east, to Boston, a move that will take place in only a week or so. It's a Friday night, and I'm looking forward to meeting up with my visiting friend the Princess of Cairo for karaoke and then to hosting a visit from another out-of-town friend the next morning.

So I'm waiting for PoC at a bar called the Pilsner, getting tipsier than I intended, and then. It happens. I'm in the way of a stool at the bar, and this guy comes to reclaim his seat; we look at each other and immediately melt into each other's eyes, smitten immaculate. His name? "Christopher." We've already moved on to our first kiss by the time my late-arriving Princess makes it in, and so we become a party of three as we proceed to the Mint for song and drink.

PoC and I, at my insistent urging, perform Steely Dan's "Do It Again," trading lines in a Mamas-and-Papas fashion (it sounded better in my head than it ultimately did on the stage). I'm not paying her the attention she deserves, but she sees how well Christopher and I are connecting and magnanimously suggests that I go take advantage of the situation.

Which I do. And we do. We spend a marvelous night together at his nearby place, and I awaken the next morning to find him out on the deck in his underwear, smoking a cigarette. It's all perfect, except for my situation: in the words of Grand Funk, I'd picked a bad time to be in love. I remind him that I'm moving in a week. "Don't go," he swiftly and softly replies.

Now, I've moved a lot over the years, to many cities. No one before or since has ever said to me, "Don't go."

But go I did. And I didn't have the good sense to stay in touch with him. I'll probably never know if it was the same Christopher I met on both occasions. I'll probably never know if we were as tight a connection as we seemed for one night. All I know is that I think about him every once in a while - and I did so this morning, humming a Spinners chorus: "How Could I Let You Get Away?"

Curtis Mayfield, "Freddie's Dead"

So the federal government has taken over two private, for-profit institutions because they were failing and threatened to have domino-toppling effects on other financial structures. OK, if that's what has to be done to prevent the economy from tanking further, fine, let's do it. But let me take this opportunity to point out to any Republicans who might be reading this that this is - shock, horror - unquestionably and incontrovertibly a Big Government activity. Isn't that something only those evil Democrats advocate for?

Here's a teachable moment, folks: There are some things - many things, I would argue - that command and deserve a big government involvement. Katrina of course comes to mind. Our response this week to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac suggests this is another of them. So any Republicans who continue to demonize Barack Obama and the Democrats for not minimizing government's function can take this Bush-administration-enabled debacle and go eat it with a big bowl of fuck.

I'd further like to take this opportunity to remind Sarah Palin what I typed above: that Fannie and Freddie are private, for-profit institutions. She was apparently under the impression that the programs were taxpayer-funded, as the Huffington Post reported with relish. So I'd like to humbly suggest that while she's safely secluded from the evil media as she bones up on GOP talking points, perhaps Governor Mooseolini might want to bone up on a few factual points as well? (How sad, the lack of an intersection in that Venn diagram.)

Meantime, Freddie's not quite dead, but here's Curtis Mayfield anyway. He was a truth-teller for his generation, and man, do we need a lot more of those today in America's current anti-intellectual climate.

Temptations, "Papa Was a Rollin' Stone"

"It was the third of September
That day I'll always remember
(Yes I will.) 'Cause that was the day
That my daddy died."

OK, the selection today's due to the conceit of the date, but DAMN do the Tempts truck on this one. Orchestrated soul is one of my very favorite of musical styles, and this is one of the very best examples. The song's been covered numerous times over the years, including an audacious treatment from George Michael as part of a medley with Seal's "Killer," but no one could approach the Temptations' ability to trade off lines like a seasoned relay team handing off a baton.

Lobo, "I'd Love You to Want Me"

Oh, for the days when looks weren't necessary for songcraft to take an artist into the Top 10. Lobo, who scored a half-dozen or so hits as a minor embodiment of the '70s singer-songwriter movement, was perhaps the least star-looking of them all, particularly in this clip of his No. 2 hit "I'd Love You to Want Me". Frankly, he looks less like a guy calling himself Lobo in 1972 than like Amy Sedaris dressing up as a guy calling himself Lobo in 1972. And not quite mastering the art of lip-synching.

ILYTWM nevertheless nails the Southwest Aztec living-in-a-van vibe and stands as Lobo's biggest hit (even if "Me and You and a Dog Named Boo" is the one people remember more). And if we may indulge the song's vaguely creepy conceit, haven't we all felt that way at some point, even if discretion and good manners dictate that we brush the thought aside unspoken?

ETA: And damn, are those some mismatched fonts on the album cover, or what?

The Fifth Dimension, "If I Could Reach You"

Perhaps this blog should be a politics-free zone, but I've been thinking about the John Edwards caper over the past few days. I'm of several minds: His behavior is inexcusable, but infidelity isn't a crime and it doesn't say much about a person's ability to lead or govern. I'm pissed at him for wantonly imperiling the Democratic party (had he been the presidential candidate, this would have been nightmarish), and I agree that it's an actionable offense if he used his PAC monies or other fundraising dollars for hush money and other payoff costs. But I can't pretend I have a high horse to sit on where matters of fidelity are concerned. What can I say - I value honesty, but I find monogamy overrated; like veganism, it's a good idea, but it's not for everyone.

Which leads me, indirectly, to "If I Could Reach You", one of the last big hits for the Fifth Dimension and certainly one of their most unfairly overlooked. Marilyn McCoo sings from the perspective of The Other Woman: perhaps a prostitute, as my friend Mike has speculated, or maybe just someone who's being strung along by a man already in a relationship. "It's hours before dawn, and there's no one who'd rather be with you," she sings the effective and stark lyric, defeat resonating with every word. "I let you take my love, knowing you don't love me." Yet she continues in the sad situation, hoping against hope that something will change; that if he can't love her, he might at least recognize her deep and abiding love for him, and that might be enough for him to stay. Marilyn pays no mind at all to her lover's significant other, if indeed he has one, demonstrating how when love becomes all-consuming it can turn a world solipsistic, consequences be damned, other hearts be ignored.

The song has no direct resonance to John Edwards or Rielle Hunter, and I'm not justifying or condoning anything they've done. But I do have sympathy for the situation; more important, I hope it won't distract us any further from the subjects that actually need to be discussed in this presidential run-up. Let's focus on negotiating our own relationships with honesty and compassion rather than fussing over others'. Relationships, they're complicated things.

Friday Funtime: What August Means to Me

Ewww. Some onanism with your Porcupine Pie? Sorry to subject you to Neil's, um, longfellow serenade.