Oh, when the cool night brings back memories of a good life

I need to write something so I can feel something. I need to pick something to write to feel about. Climbing up the wagon wheels is daunting. Oh, wait. I am mixing metaphors. I'm climbing back onto a horse, I have not fallen off of a wagon. Or, I'm climbing onto the horse that was once pulling the wagon that I was upon? Did I want to be on this wagon? 

No. No. This should, at least, be easier than clambering to sit astride a horse, but it's not when you feel like your mind is a jumble and the chutes that take you away from the jumble are ultimately unbeneficial and lead to things like watching The Match Game-Hollywood Squares Hour into the night, laboring over work emails, and, in fact, writing everything in the style of a work email (I hope you are well!).

Heart: Well, write something already. Pick a song!

Head: But I want to google Paul Davis AND Andrew Gold, compile a comparative synthesis of their lives/styles/origins. And paint my nails. Toes and fingers. 

Heart: *headdesk*

Head: Fine. Fine! All the best, Head.

Well, this one has been around a lot lately. You'd think SiriusXM's programming well would be infinite, but--at least in the soft/yacht/mellow rock areas--there's a lot repeated. That's okay, since hashtag-Soft-Rock-Saved-Me. Paul's gentle plea is cumulatively effective this way. Plus, my flowers are outside literally dying right now because it's the coolest Cool Night we've had since April (or May).

You don't have to take a stand, he says. Lay out any plans. Just come on over. Just be. Just do.

Hear that, Head?

So don't you have no doubt, I'm gonna spell it out

I listened to this today because, of course, Questlove posted all the shiz about the Street Songs album. But, okay, it's this 7-minute live version of a song I never liked that's not even Rick's stuff, but god, is it a jam. 

Slick Levi and Lady T are exactly what I need when I get too into the work biz. Sheets? Who gives one? I don't. 

Well now you see what you wanna be

Even at 10, could I tell this was something from the underground? There was nothing else like it before, or after, really. 

Mostly, I was enraptured (how could I not?) by the sillier lyrics, the interlude about ending up in the Man from Mars, and eating all manner of domestic and imported autos.

The future, past, and present musical tenses all linked, now I see, in this part:

Don't strain your brain, paint a train

You'll be singin' in the rain

Said don't stop to punk rock

This explains it all better than I can right now. It's hard to hear something new you heard with young ears with old(er) ears to make it new again, when you know it by heart, and now, know what it all meant.

How lucky we were then to even have an underground to surface in oh-so-delicious ways above-ground, here and here and here (again). 

I missed the peak sensation

 Over. And over. And over with this one. 

Is it the cadence, the creepy guitar? More likely, the video, this huge, angular man haunting a comfortable house, the comic tableaux of the band playing on the couch, in the dining room, the kitchen, the anthropomorphic appliances and shoes--oh, yeah, the shoes! I would have dug those white booties with the ruffle and big buttons, and the hint-of-the-70s dressy platform sandals. 

I probably did. This one's pretty burned into the back of my eyeballs, so far back there that all I can do is just play over. And over. And over.

Time, beckoning me

This is what you listen to when you have writer's block. Or don't know what to write, or both.

It could kind of be a hymn, like Dust in the Wind. It was in the hymnal (or, rather, binder with mimeographed pages of songs), but we never, ever got to sing it. I don't know if it was somehow officially sanctioned, or if it was sneaked in there by a fan of Kansas.

Time followed up the first single, "Games People Play," which was decidedly more prog and prone to be played in a bar while you're playing pool in the early 2000s, but never to be played during Mass (maybe confession, though).

This, though, is sweet and sad, and not so slick that it doesn't take you someplace, whether it's up in the clouds or a daydream you had in the backseat of the car in the summer of '81.

Pointless Radio Reviews: Abacab

I decided to review what’s playing on retro pop radio. Because somebody had to. 

 “Abacab,” Genesis. 1981.

My cousin and I flipped our wigs when we dug this album out of her dad’s stack by the (very, very nice, why did he let two 11 year olds play it?) stereo. Uncle had...a song on the radio?! What if we’d found a copy of Freeze-Frame next? 

You've got something about you that I want around me

I'm a sucker for the soaring and otherworldly sounds of Gary Wright. This track is the logical advancement of what he established in "Dream Weaver" and "My Love Is Alive"-- you can hear that the equipment is more state-of-the-art than the tracks of 1975's The Dream Weaver.

Buddy of and collaborator with George Harrison, playing keys on Harrison's solo albums and pursuing a deep interest in India and spirituality with him. No surprise that relationship evolved into logging miles in Ringo's All-Starr Band.

Once in training to be a doctor, Gary assembles songs with the same kind of delicate precision that you find in a surgeon. He found his way around the early Korgs and Rolands, and even pioneered use of the keytar (see below).

And he could still get down.

Gary Wright is resoundingly under-praised, in my book.

As usual, I prefer the deep-cut, non-hit, that first reintroduction of which prompts the delightful realization, "I probably haven't heard this since it was on the radio in 198x!"

Your eyes won't believe what your mind can't conceive

I like B-music. What's B-music? You know what B-movies are. B-music's the also-ran, the didn't-quite-make-it, the one-hit-wonder or, in its most piquant form, never-was-gonna-make-it-but-they-followed-the-dream-anyway (aka Anvil).

I fell down a Spotify k-hole and found some sweet late-disco/early Quiet Storm B-music.

The Jones Girls had been plying their trade for most of the 70s. They were Detroit-born sisters, forged in gospel singing, discovered first by Curtis Mayfield and later, after backing Diana Ross on tour, re-discovered by Gamble and Huff. Stars aligned then, and though they didn't become stars, dancefloors pulsed in '81 with this track.



I'm aching to find a good 12- or 7-inch copy of it, and in this week's obsession with it I've figured out its A-list sonic cousin.



Chaka's track is clearly more sophisticated, and there's a good reason why there's a gulf way wider than the Mediterranean Sea that separates "Tunisia" from "Egypt." Chaka's single "Night" in Tunisia is a cover that came from the mind of an actual genius who's genetically incapable of creating something as rustic as the unnecessary Middle Eastern-sounding keyboard riff in "Nights Over Egypt."

The Jones Girls can sing. But what they didn't have is access. The saying in the creative world is that you have to work with artists who are at least a little better than you so that your craft is raised. Access is based on timing, and the Girls' timing was not good, seeing as it was situated on the back-end of the (post-payola) Gamble and Huff juggernaut and given writers from the Philadelphia International stable that were maybe on the downslope of creating hit soul music.

After 1984, while Chaka found the third act of her career, The Jones Girls never got back on track.

Unequal songs, unequal careers, unequal access. But I (and probably only I) respond both songs with equal enjoyment, despite the unfair outcomes for the singers. But maybe they didn't want any more than that -- someone's ears being pleased at the sound of their song.

I best return my ears to simply listening before I embark on a master's-thesis rumination about the post-80s diminishing returns of Patrice Rushen.