Midweek Music Break: The Three Degrees, “When Will I See You Again?”

[Video: “official” video, I suppose, from the Three Degrees’ own YouTube channel. I also found a video on the ’Tube of their singing the song “live,” maybe, in what appears to be a theater-in-the-round setting. The backup singers have very little to do in this video, except — in time with the lead singer — swivel on their stools.]

Every morning, I receive an automated email message (set it up using this tool) which consists entirely of a link to a random Wikipedia article. I’m never surprised, nor upset, when the target article turns out to describe some minutely tiny corner of the known world. (“Paraguayan field hockey players, 1983 season” or “a small village in northwestern China” — that sort of thing.) But I’m often delighted when the links in such an article lead me down one unexpectedly fascinating rabbit hole or another.

I don’t remember what specific article I got sent to this past Saturday morning. But after following one link, then another, and so on, suddenly I found myself thrown back in time almost 50 years…

The song isn’t much, really — it’s one of those songs made in the arranging and performing, rather than in the songwriting. Embedded in a swirl of strings, horns, and vocals, the lyrics simply ask questions:

When will I see you again?
When will we share precious moments?
Will I have to wait forever?
Or will I have to suffer and cry the whole night through?

When will I see you again?
When will our hearts beat together?
Are we in love or just friends?
Is this my beginning or is this the end?
When will I see you again?

And so on. It’s actually difficult — for me — to read the lyrics on their own and imagine how they could be sung, never mind that they were sung, and were sung successfully at that.

As for what those lyrics say: if you imagine them as questions asked of the loved one, they’re, well, annoying. Clearly, the object of affection here has a problem on their hands: an obsessive, indeed possessive follower, determined to lay sole claim to their time… again, if you imagine them as questions to someone else.

Yet now reconsider: suppose the song is an interior monologue?

Ah, then, then the narrator becomes instantly more sympathetic: they’re not necessarily clingy; they’re heartbroken — singing not to, but about someone beloved. I am sure such a narrator would find a lot of company among the rest of us!

While researching the song’s background, I found an interesting passage to this effect in Bono, a 2006 book about the U2 frontman. The book is basically a compilation of interviews with Bono by a journalist (and friend of his), Michka Assayas. At one point, they’re talking about the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, on March 11 — bombings which killed almost 200 people and injured ten times that many:

What song would you have sung had you been onstage that day?

“When Will I See You Again?”—the Three Degrees.

How does it go?

[sings] When will I see you again? De-de-de-de-de…/When will we share precious moments? It’s a song about loss. That song can bring you to tears. It’s a very strange course of events. We played in Nuremberg on the PopMart Tour in August 1997. They had marked out an area. There’s a stadium, the Zeppelinfeld, which is associated with the Third Reich. It’s an Albert Speer building. There was some controversy about us playing there. And I remember thinking: No, we should never be afraid of a building. And if people are so scared of it, paint it pink or something like that. Howie B, my great friend, was deejaying there. He said to me: “I’m not sure I want to do this.” I said: “Well, you don’t have to if you don’t want.” But he went on and started his set by playing the Three Degrees’ “When Will I See You Again?” It was just the most remarkable thing to see this joyous jazzman with tears down his face, decades later, mourning people of his own ethnic group that he’d never met, but feeling it. I really felt this song just chase the devil away. [sighs] Because you should never think about these things on a grand scale: these are families, and sisters and brothers and uncles.

[source]

Again, not to say that the songwriters had anything necessarily sweepingly profound to say with “When Will I See You Again?” The songwriters-cum-producers, in particular, were all about the commerce — indeed, this song proved to be one of the first boulders pushed downhill to start the disco avalanche. But, well, maybe in “When Will I See You Again?” they accomplished something worth having accomplished in the long run, after all.

I don’t want to over-dramatize the personal significance of the song to me. I’m not sure it had any significance at all for me back then, in September 1974, and I have no specific memories of hearing it: no memory of an occasion when I heard the song playing; no association with a woman who might’ve favored it, then or later… And unlike much of the music of my adolescence and afterward, I’ve never acquired an MP3 or physical recording of it. I never “missed hearing” it, had not even thought of it — as I said — in decades.

And yet it has loomed large in my mind since unearthing it over the weekend.

Why I would have known it at all isn’t hard to figure out. After all, except for a brief year of college, I’d lived my entire life in South Jersey. There, throughout the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s — until I moved closer to New York — I’d soaked thoroughly in a bath of Philadelphia radio music, AM and FM. Besides the music popular across the nation, and world, I’d thus been exposed, repeatedly and subconsciously, to the music of Philadelphia. The Three Degrees, the group who first recorded “When Will I See You Again?,” had not only themselves grown up in the Philly area; their music in general was considered the quintessential representative of — yes — the “Philly Sound.” Their first big hit, six months earlier, had in fact been called, literally, “The Sound of Philadelphia.” (“TSOP,” as it was called, became the theme for the TV show Soul Train.)

So yeah: on any given day, from September 1974 at least through the end of the year, I’d probably heard “When Will I See You Again?” three, four, five times a day. Of course it burned itself into my subconscious.

The larger question is why it hit me so powerfully now.

No answers to that one, I’m afraid: just speculation. This centers around the vague idea that Fall, 1974, represented the tail end of adolescent innocence for me: almost no one in my family had died, or even shown signs of infirmity; relationships were intact; and I myself had not yet set off down a path nearly 30 years long of disastrous personal mistakes.

Well, whatever it was: “When Will I See You Again?” just completely saturated my mind this weekend, and it’s still pulsing in the background. Maybe posting about it here will set it — and me — free again.

Aside: apparently, the Three Degrees are — or once were — the favorite musical group of Britain’s Prince Charles. Not only did they perform at Buckingham Palace; they were also among the very few American invitees to the prince’s wedding to Diana Spencer. The media supposedly referred to them as “Charlie’s Angels”… or perhaps that was just a fabrication of the group’s publicists!