We Can Still Come True

Today I received an email forward (is that what you call those things? Forwarded email? Chain email?) for the second time. It was the one with the pages from the 1977 JC Penney's catalogue that someone posted on their blog (and someone tell me how one gets one's blog to be read so much that excerpts are circumnavigating the cyber-globe).

Anyway, this time I read it more closely and noticed a reference to Seventies hottie (if you like blond and Lutheran--he was born David Solberg to a Lutheran minister, so I can say that) David Soul. He played Hutch on Starsky and Hutch and was a pop singer, scoring a number-one hit with "Don't Give Up On Us." So, not really the Justin Timberlake of the day but more like the, I don't know, Mandy Moore? Or that Hannah Montana girl?

Anyway, of course I had to go look me up some David Soul on the interweb. Before he was chasing bad guys by leaping from the roof of one building to another in a Sansabelt, David was a folk singer in the late 60s and early 70s, one who learned the form in Mexico while attending university there after he turned down an offer to play for the Chicago White Sox. I am not shitting you. I mean, duh, draft-dodge much, David?

His first big break came when he reinvented himself as a singer known only as the Covered Man. Yes, he'd sing and play guitar in a mask, like on the Merv Griffin Show. Things dried up some when he removed it, not surprising given his eventual popularity in the UK, where a cell phone ring can top the charts.

If that bio isn't crushed-velvet 60s enough, the title of his eventual hit album, Playing to an Audience of One, is so 70s-sensitive-guy-pouring-you-wine-by-the-fire, I couldn't believe the track listing from his greatest hits album, Best of David Soul:

Tracks
1.
Don't Give Up on Us
2.
Tattler
3.
Silver Lady
4.
I Wish I Was
5.
It Sure Brings Out the Love in Your Eyes
6.
Seem to Miss So Much (Coalminer's Song)
7.
Let's Have a Quiet Night In
8.
Going in With My Eyes Open
9.
One More Mountain to Climb
10.
Topanga
11.
1927 Kansas City
12.
Landlord
13.
Nobody But a Fool or a Preacher
14.
Bird on a Wire

I'm ready to pledge myself to you, baby, right here on your Naugahyde sofa wearing my belted fair-isle cardigan sweater but after I corner some bad guys in my striped Torino, hug my buddy, and give some skin to Huggy Bear.