Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

My 1970s AM-Radio Playlist: 1972

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[I seem to be settling in at the “two dozen songs, plus or minus” length for the playlists (but see the “About the playlist” section below for info about a couple of songs I started to include here, but didn’t)… The list for 1971 is here, and you can see the introduction to the whole series here.]

Oh, 1972… or, as I have often thought of it, the year I started to grow up — or pretended to, anyhow! (Well, let’s be kinder: maybe it’s not so much that I was pretending to adulthood; let’s say I started to imagine adulthood realities then.)

January ’72 found me halfway through my junior year as a Communications major at a state college in South Jersey. With three other guys, I was sharing the second floor of a two-story house in a nearby town. (I think but could not swear that it was one of these houses; I almost never saw the house from the street, since the only way to get to the second floor was via an exterior stairway at the back of the house, approached via a gravel driveway and parking area.)

As mentioned in the previous post in this series, I’d joined the staff of the campus opinion magazine a couple months before. (I’d debuted there with a faux-“investigative” piece about the tensions between the college’s established English department and the newer, flashier Communications one — the gods forbid that I pick a topic I might actually have an opinion on *cough*. The headline read something like, “He Useta Wanna Be an English Major.”) One of my favorite courses — it has profoundly affected why and how I read fiction, and how and why I thought about it, right up to this second — was called “Fantasy & Science Fiction,” taught by a brilliant eccentric named Richard Mitchell. (Add his name to the list of people I’ve known to whom I really need to devote future posts.)

Not at all incidentally, early in 1972 I met — and quickly proposed to — the young woman who would in 1973 become my first wife…

While the preceding paragraphs are written in orderly fashion — the material has outlines and edges, shapes — please note that the events chosen carefully trace only the outward course of my life. Inwardly, jeebus, I was a mess. Take that sentence ending with “my first wife,” for example. What the hell did I, of all people, know about dating, about sex, about proposing and actual marriage? Zero, or damned close to it. And yet I went blithely on. By the time the second half of ’72 rolled around, I was already in full-blown Spackle-Over-the-Cracks mode. It could all be figured out later, right? If I got something wrong, I had plenty of time to correct course!

And then I ran into 1973…

About the playlist…

By 1972, my musical tastes (and memories) had begun to shift firmly out of the familiar “If it ain’t on my car’s AM radio, does a song really exist?” groove. For starters, I’d begun to dip into FM radio — edgier, less (overtly) commercial, willing to serve artists and audiences eager to write, perform, and listen to longer, ever more elaborate (and sometimes more profound) songs. On the other hand, I’d started to really pay attention to the musical tastes — the curations — of people I knew (but wasn’t related to).

But this series of playlists specifically focuses on what I heard via AM. So be it. About this particular post’s selections:

  • The release dates, as before, precede the start of the calendar year — “Brand New Key” from October ’71 — and end well before December 31, 1972 (“The Game of Black and White,” from August). The reasons for this are the same as before, too: music just took longer to attain “hit” — i.e., AM-radio-worthy — status, and therefore took a while to dislodge from the stations’ programmed rotations.
  • I think 1972 was the first year in which the rhythm, the beat of music started to impress itself on me. Probably the best examples on this list: “Hold Your Head Up” and “Long Cool Woman (In a Black Dress)” — they made (okay, still make) me want to finger-drum along with them, y’know?
  • The 1971 playlist included Chicago’s “Colour My World,” which would eventually serve as “our song” — the song we first danced to at our wedding — when I married Missus Number 1. Here in 1972, though, “Nights in White Satin” — already something like four years old — had suddenly become a hit again. And what forever earned a place in my mind about that song is that it served as the wedding processional song for “that girl” — the one back in New Jersey for whom I’d pined during my year at Wake Forest. She got married in mid-72; she had the innocent audacity to ask me to take their wedding photos, and I had the surprising nerve to say No, I don’t think so… but I never forgot that processional. That the two songs shifted back and forth in my emotional timeline is emblematic, I think, of my scrambled emotional landscape in general.
  • I wanted to include a couple other songs I specifically recall hearing, repeatedly, but did not include them for different reasons. First, Bobby Vinton’s “Sealed with a Kiss”: I dropped it once I realized it simply covered an even bigger hit from years before… and that was the repeated play I remembered. Second, Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold”: it definitely deserves a spot on my personal playlist… but Mr. Young has pulled from Spotify (which hosts these playlists) all the music to which he holds copyright. So, not an option.
  • Still funny to me: the way that songs of no particular long-term staying power in terms of cultural influence, cultural history, “the poetry of rock,” or any other grand scheme of things — such songs, even so, still managed to stamp themselves in my mind. “Motorcycle Mama”? “Popcorn”?!? Er… what the hell? Mission accomplished, AM-radio program managers!
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My 1970s AM-Radio Playlist: 1971

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[This may be a sign of things to come: a playlist of twenty-five songs, vs. the previous post‘s fifteen. In general, I bet I spent more time in cars in 1971 than I did in 1970 — maybe that’s why I’ve got more music from the former? For an introduction to this series, see this post from a few days ago.]

1971 wasn’t an especially monumental year for me, in terms of good or bad “incidents” as such. On the other hand, it probably ranks highly as a formative, becoming-John twelvemonth. In large part, I credit this to the mentors I mentioned in passing in the 1970 entry in this series…

I’d known Mr. H as an English teacher back in my high school — never actually took a class with him then, but he was the advisor to both the school newspaper and the yearbook. I’d taken photos for both publications, and during my senior year was on the editorial board of the yearbook, so got to attend many meetings with him in attendance. My staff title: “literary editor,” meaning more or less that I had ultimate responsibility for all the words. If you encountered a particularly lyrical passage in a photo caption, or for that matter a typo or a clanging metaphor, then I probably had a hand in it — an attentive or a distracted hand, as the case might be.

Anyhow, I don’t think I’d had contact at all with Mr. H during my freshman year at Wake Forest U. But somehow, he got wind of my “at loose ends” status during the summer of 1970, when I found out — belatedly — that I wouldn’t be returning to WF. As it happened, he himself had left high school teaching, and in September 1970 would be joining the faculty of a community college about a 45-minute drive from my hometown; also, he’d be advising the college’s yearbook — and would really appreciate having a “known quantity” on staff…

You can probably see where this is going: Mr. H went 100% to bat for me to make it not only possible, but easy for me to transfer to that college, despite the very late date of application. I was very, very lucky to have known him.

And yes, I came aboard as “literary editor” for that year’s junior-college yearbook. I took a creative-writing course taught by Mr H. (Somewhere around here, most likely in a cardboard box I haven’t unpacked, I’ve got a folder of my collected works from that course, and if you’re lucky — hell, forget lucky, maybe if you’re just present here at the wrong moment — I’ll share some highlights, such as they were.)

Very exceptionally, Mr. H helped me in one other respect: simply getting to and from school. My family had two cars, neither really reliable, and no public transportation would get me to that campus in rural South Jersey; Mr H lived a few miles away from my parents’ house, and offered to pick me up in the morning and drop me off at the end of the day when I had no other way to get back and forth. To this day, I remain amazed that he did — that any teacher would do — such a thing.

Actually, he went even further. Our daily schedules did not overlap, of course, and he was also working — mostly in the evenings — for a state college near the county one. So he actually gave me the keys to his car so I wouldn’t be confined to one campus or the other, until we were both ready to head back. To boot, the car was one of the coolest I’ve ever driven — a 1971 Mercury Capri (shown at the right, in a slightly different color than the gold/bronze I remember), with a “four on the floor” transmission. I simultaneously lived in terror of wrecking it and thrilled to the core with every gear change. I’m pretty sure I never again had so much fun at the wheel of a car.

That year, I also took a couple of journalism and American-lit courses with a teacher who advised the college newspaper and would become my other mentor: Mrs. R. She and Mr. H shared an office, so I ended up spending a good amount of time simply around her even before I knew her that well. It took me many years to appreciate not only that she’d taught me quite a bit about that course material, but also that I’d developed a genuinely profound crush on her — specifically, for the tempo and tenor of her conversation: rapid-fire, hilarious, at once kind, generous, and no-fooling. A couple years later, I lost touch with her (thanks to a stupid, stupid, stupid betrayal of a confidence, after which she understandably wanted almost nothing to do with me — certainly, nothing like confidences). I know she moved away a few years later, and remarried, and finished her career as a librarian. And I know that I have probably not gone more than a week since without suddenly hearing her voice or her laugh in my head. Ou sont les neiges…

The second half of 1971 brought more changes: I began classes at the college I’d eventually graduate from — the same state college which Mr. H had been attending/working at outside of his “day job.” I declared my major course of study to be not English, but something called “Communications.” (Journalism, PR, creative writing, filmmaking — the creation of texts and narratives, as opposed to their consumption, so to speak.) Not 100% coincidentally, the head of the Communications Department was Mr. R — yes, Mrs. R’s husband — a fact which introduced me to ever more subtle levels of the awkward human heart.

I wasn’t taking photos much, but I was writing — a little for the campus newspaper, but mostly for Venue, what they then called the “opinion magazine.” (Eventually, as I understand it, it became known as a “humor magazine” — but that came after the mid-’70s, when political and social tensions. i.e., hangover from the 1960s, had started to recede.) By the first half of 1972, I was Venue‘s managing editor, and would be editor-in-chief throughout my senior year. But that, like the music of 1972, still lay ahead…

About the playlist…

As with the previous one, this playlist’s songs are arranged roughly in chronological order by release date. And again, some came out months before January 1971 — they just took that long to gather steam, or simply hung around as (Philadelphia) AM-radio favorites. (“One Less Bell to Answer” dated back to April of 1970.) A few specific notes:

  • I’m pretty sure I didn’t even know of Gordon Lightfoot until I heard “If You Could Read My Mind” (released December ’70). Ultimately, though, I doubt that I listened more to any other artist throughout the 1970s.
  • The Beatles, again — as soloists (Harrison and McCartney), and as songwriters (those guys performing, and Richie Havens on the Harrison-written “Here Comes the Sun”).
  • “Colour My World”: this song came out in June of 1971, but clung to the popular imagination for years after. Who knows? Maybe it’s still played all over at weddings and school dances. It was in fact “our song” when I married my first wife, in 1973, so it continues to hold a certain inescapable personal… well, resonance for me.
  • I know what you may be thinking: Perry Como??? The singing barber of Pittsburgh??? He was still putting in a Billboard-list appearance in 1971??? I was surprised when I looked at the numbers, too, but oh yeah, now that I’ve been thinking about it: I do remember hearing “It’s Impossible” probably hundreds of times over the next year. Not so surprising, either: the WW2 generation was still actively listening to and buying pop music then, and Como himself was only 59 years old.
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My 1970s AM-Radio Playlist: 1970

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[Fifteen songs? That sounds about right — what I expected. But note that I wasn’t really paying attention to pop music yet; it was just part of the “background sound” of life at this point. Songs in chronological order, from earliest to latest release dates. For an introduction to this series, see this post from a few days ago.]

If you wanted to characterize my 1970s with a single adjective, and polled for their opinions not just the me of 2023 but anyone else who knew me then, the consensus might cluster around the word “confused.” Hindsight, of course, is everything; but at the outset, in January 1970, here’s kinda where things stood:

I’d gotten midway through my freshman year at Wake Forest University, in North Carolina, with every expectation of continuing there through graduation. That was really my only expectation of the future, though. While I enjoyed my course schedule (except — ugh — the physics class which met at 8:00 AM on Thursday and SATURDAY mornings), I saw nothing in their syllabi which tempted me to anything like long-term commitment. I was on friendly terms with, if not exactly close to, the seven other guys who shared my dormitory suite, and anticipated no trouble on the horizon in that respect. (I was right about that much, whew.)

My family were all healthy; the nearest blood relative who was no longer living was my paternal grandfather, who’d died when I was a year old.

Romance? Or rather “romance,” in quotation marks? Nearly nonexistent for me. I took note of a few girls (we were all still boys and girls then) around campus, but I was also separated from them by the thick shroud of social clumsiness I’d draped myself in. I couldn’t even start to imagine a setting in which I might actually talk to any of them. Almost certainly approachable, they were, but that didn’t mean I had, y’know, approaching on my mind.

On the other hand, there was this one girl, back in New Jersey… One of these days, I may write about her — I could probably do an entire post or three or four about her — and she certainly remained a fixture of my life (inwardly and emotionally, at least) until her death from cancer over 30 years later. For purposes of this playlist, though, just know that like all the rest of the above, she certainly played a part in the ways that some of these songs stuck in my head from the outset.

As 1970 rolled on, though, “things happened”: fate started to bump up against the scaffolding beneath my comfortable life:

Let’s start with Dad. He had been a maintenance mechanic for most of his working life; in mid-1970, the workers at his plant, including Dad himself, went out on a strike which lasted for most of the summer. (It was also a tough summer for Dad because his mother — Nan, to me — died that July. Not that Dad himself ever complained about any of it, at least to me; for him, I think, it was all just Stuff to Be Gotten Through.) Mom wasn’t working yet; when I asked her about it recently, she explained that she couldn’t work because my younger brother was still in elementary school. (The times, they change…) Between one thing and another, then, I wound up transferring for my sophomore year from Wake Forest to a small — and new — community college in South Jersey.

I did return to WF for a visit in the fall, and was astonished how much the guys had changed over the summer — beards! they had facial hair!

Among other things, my time at the community college gave me a real sense of how I might spend the rest of my days once I became an adult (whenever that’d be). I was writing, for one thing; taking pictures, for another. I had mentors, not just teachers, and got a sense of genuinely moving forward (vs. just scrambling to keep my feet)…

But 1971 and beyond, of course, still lay ahead. What did I know???

About the playlist…

Not all of these songs were actually released in ’70; but they were all hits that year, which is why I heard them so much on the radio — and which also says much about how the music industry functioned then: singles were “released” to radio program managers, who then offered them (via the DJs and the airwaves) to anyone tuned in. [*] The stations’ listeners would (a) call the stations to ask for repeats and (b) go out and buy the singles on vinyl, or — even better — buy the entire albums on which the singles appeared. It took time to get the momentum chugging along on individual songs.

(As an aside, it also means that some songs released in 1970 wouldn’t appear on the Billboard list until 1971, but that blog post still lies ahead…)

As far as specific songs on the list, I have no specific memories. In general, though, I remember:

  • A couple of them were favorites of that girl back in NJ, and maybe that’s why they imprinted on me, too.
  • At Wake Forest, I was a contributor to the campus literary magazine. The editor that year was a brilliant guy named Al — the next year, he went on to a Rhodes Scholarship — who possessed an incisive wit and shrewd editorial instincts. But he also had a bit of a mushy side to him: the managing editor on one occasion put the “Bridge Over Troubled Water” LP on the office phonograph, and Al yelled something, completely seriously, to the effect of Goddammit, Jonas, you KNOW that song makes me cry!
  • Ten years ago, one of my annual “Potpourri” posts included a brief discussion of “American Woman.” The song had actually come out during my senior year in high school, but it had staying power into 1970!

Stray observations:

  • Some monster hits of the time aren’t in this list, or in future ones of the series… because they were too long to be played by AM radio stations. The version of “American Woman” in this playlist, at five minutes’ duration, is the longest one here — but it wasn’t the version being played on AM then; they chopped off the intro passage and probably shortened (or accelerated) it otherwise, too.
  • The Beatles’ influential shadow remained long in rock/pop music of 1970 and beyond. Their own songs — like “Let It Be,” here — continued to be released, of course, both as a group and solo. But their Apple Records production company introduced a respectable number of other artists to the public… including Badfinger, above, which was sometimes referred to in the music press as especially Beatles-like. (The group changed their name from The Iveys to Badfinger as a subtle nod to the Fab Four: the original title of “With a Little Help from My Friends” was “Bad Finger Boogie.”)

______

[*] “Tuned in” then meant, among other things, within a few dozen miles’ radius of the broadcast antenna. No coast-to-coast monolithic AM networks existed — none which compelled local stations to follow the playlists established by corporate headquarters. Philadelphia radio stations, which I listened to, of course played quite a bit of the same music as their New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles counterparts. But they wouldn’t be marching in lockstep, and generally skewed toward the tastes of their nearby audiences. The Jacksonville Florida-raised Missus’s memories of music back then only partially overlap my own: I don’t think I heard a single Allman Brothers song — not often enough to remember — until I was in my 30s or older.

[back]

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Trying Out a New Series: 1970s AM-Radio Music

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AM-band-only dashboard radio
[It’s surprisingly difficult to find a decent image of an old car dashboard radio which is *not* damaged or for sale. (This one is courtesy of user “cottonbro studio,” at pexels.com.) I thought the world was supposed to be set up for the convenience of nostalgic Boomers?!?]

Over the last few weeks I’ve been feeling evermore creatively restless. I’m still posting daily new photos to Instagram (the five most recent always display here, down at the bottom of the right-hand side); and I contribute what I hope are thoughtful comments to various Substack and similar sites — mid-21st-century blogs, really. But here at Running After My Hat, what should be a fruitful tool for writing creatively (and not incidentally, for stimulating actual creative writing), I’ve been twiddling my thumbs for a few years now….

Back in what I think of as Ye Olde Blogging Days of the early 2000s, one reliable source of inspiration for posts came from music. It turns out that I’ve written roughly 500 posts about music, counting the annual — and recently stalled — Christmas playlist. And so I’ve been thinking maybe I should get back into that…

Yesterday I accompanied The Missus for a dental appointment (hers). I’d brought along reading material, of course, but — also of course — had my phone handy, too. And here’s what happened:

Suddenly, I found myself thinking about a song popular when I was in my 20s, that is, in the 1970s. I couldn’t remember the name of the guy who sang it, and I couldn’t remember the song’s title. I had a vague sense of the song’s “mood,” which was a love song in the plain-old-vanilla pop genre, and I sorta-kinda recalled that the singer’s voice was sort of a histrionic baritone… It was driving me crazy. All I could remember for sure was that the song was played incessantly on New York AM radio stations in… 1979. Yes. It was definitely ’79—

Well, you can probably guess the rabbit hole that led me into. Indeed, I ended up scrolling through “top 100” pop-music lists for the years from 1970 through 1979 (working backwards, chronologically). And I was flabbergasted how much of it I remembered, despite often never hearing another song from the specific performer. So many of those songs did nothing to shift the course of musical history, but they were driven into my head just by virtue of all the time I spent in cars, with no recorded music available: at the mercy of AM-station DJs and program managers.

One of those songs in particular put me over the edge, so to speak. I am pretty sure that you’ve never heard it, or if you did, I’m pretty sure it made almost no impression on you. (The Missus, for one, said she’d never heard of it — and her pop-music tastes from the ’60s-’70s are if anything even more lowercase-c catholic than mine.) So powerfully were my emotions yesterday stirred up by this song that I thought, okay, I’ll start here: a new RAMH blog series, on music from the 1970s which AM radio introduced me to.

(Oh, I’m under no illusions that this will make me any more of a “music critic” than I’ve ever been. I’m doing this for myself, really — both to get me writing again, and to get me listening to music again. Happy to have you — whoever you are — along for the ride, so to speak, and I’ll be delighted if the project stirs up something in you… But this is entirely a selfish project.)

Anyway, below is the song which unlocked the floodgates yesterday. I may or may not write more, here or anywhere, about things going on in my life when it was popular; just know that the cascade continues. And I hope to come up with a set of 10 full playlists over the next N weeks, all using the Spotify WordPress plugin (a first for me).

Here’s Randy VanWarmer, with “Just When I Need You the Most.”

Looking forward to returning soon(ish) — a week? more or less? — with the first of ten full playlists!

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ADMIN: Returning to the RAMH Rhythm

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Today’s whiskey river Fridays post contains a minor (to me) notable element which I didn’t want to make a big deal of at the time. To wit: it was the first post here in over three years which featured commentary on music without simply embedding a YouTube video. (The last one, in June 2020, was a playlist springing from research into The Knack’s “My Sharona.”)

As I say, this is a fairly minor thing to anyone but me. But it feels like a milestone to me, because while we were on the road — and until I had my desktop computer set up at our new digs — I just couldn’t share music in any way other than embedded videos. (The latter often, for me anyhow, distract from the music.) It probably doesn’t signal a return to my once-active blogging form, but it does feel like a return of some kind!

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The Neurotic Solo Cast of the Horror Film Starring Oneself

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[Image: “Johnny Was,” by John E. Simpson. I had no idea what this sign might have referred to when I looked up and saw it hanging over a storefront in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California; I’d never heard of the apparel chain. But a chill ran up my back — I considered it something of an omen (although nobody, really, calls me “Johnny” anymore), and went about my business for the next few days in a cloud of apprehension. (See the note at the foot of this post for an additional bit of information.)]

From whiskey river:

People have gotten used to living a botched-up life — to be anxious, insecure, hateful, jealous, and in various states of unpleasantness through the day — slowly humanity has begun to see it as normal.

None of these things are normal. These are abnormalities. Once you accept them as part of life they become normal because the majority has joined the gang of unpleasantness. They are all saying, “Unpleasantness is normal. Being nasty to each other is normal. Being nasty to myself is normal.”

Someone trusted that you would be doing good things at least to yourself and said, “Do unto others what you do unto yourself.” I am telling you, never do unto others what you are doing to yourself! (Laughter) By being with people, I know what they are doing to themselves is the worst thing. Fortunately, they are not doing such horrible things to others. Only once in a while they are giving a dose to others, but to themselves they are giving it throughout the day. If you are a very blissful human being, what he is saying is great. When you are practicing to go to hell — self-torture so that the devils cannot succeed — then it is not a good idea. People have gotten used to living in a disturbed state. It is a botched-up life.

(Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The Hall of Machines: Machines of Movement (Interlocking Machine Room)

On entering the room I found it to be full of giant metal crabs. Great struts of thin metal rod crisscross from ceiling to floor, making it impossible to see very far into the room. The very air shudders with the vibration of these machines. Although the constructions vary considerably, one from the other, a large number of them have the same basic shape. Their nucleus is a mass of rods and other interlocking members, and they stand about ten feet high. The arrangement of these rods is infinitely complex. At their apex they are thickly composed, and are surrounded by other parts which join them and permit their motion. They branch out, and at floor level each machine covers a considerable area.

All of the legs of these machines are connected by free-moving joints to the legs of the other units, and a movement of one causes an adjustment to the position of the other. The whole room is in motion, and the machines twitch each other with an action that appears almost lascivious in nature.

A rod near me is moved by the action of a neighbor’s leg. This movement is communicated at the top of the unit to another of the legs, and it, in turn, imparts motion to a machine further away. As these machines work, a constant metallic clattering fills the air, as if the room is filled with typewriters.

The machines are slick and oiled; their movement is smooth, but gives an impression of great nervousness. All over this chamber are various other parts, all of which seem affected in some way by the movement of the rods. On the wall, near me, is fixed a plaque with a jointed arm extending from it. Taut wires radiate from either extremity into the skeletal gray. One end is angled up, the other down. As the wire of the higher end is pulled by some motion in the mass of interlocking parts, the arm reverses its position jerkily…

The mind drowns among the interlocking machines. Perhaps the reason is in the similarity of this abstract maze to that pattern formed by the neural current. Perhaps these patterns of motion parallel too closely the patterns of electricity that we call personality, and the one is disturbed by the other. Conversely, perhaps the very existence of a human mind in the room causes little eddies and whirls in the motion of the machines.

I was unable to stay in the interlocking machine room for more than a minute or two before the psychological effects became more than I could bear.

(Langdon Jones [source])

_______________

About “Johnny Was”: a bit of research, of course, told me that this is simply the name of an “affordable luxury” women’s clothing store. It’s still an odd name, though. The company’s Web site explains: “Music and family have always been integral to the JOHNNY WAS culture. With his children by his side, [founder] Eli Levite started to conceptualize his fashion business in the late 1980s. The soundtrack to this period was Bob Marley’s infectious Johnny Was a Good Man, the inspiration behind the brand’s name.”

It’s a bit of a stretch to call that song the soundtrack to the late 1980s — but, well, I don’t know: for Mr. Levite, perhaps it was. In any case, in case you’re curious about it (as I was, since I knew no more about the tune than I did about the clothing chain), here’s the song in question (lyrics here and elsewhere):

[back to top]

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Weekend Music Break: Tom Rush and James Montgomery, “Statesboro Blues”

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[Original “Statesboro Blues” lyrics by Blind Willie McTell are here. But of course, since this is a blues song, individual performers often wander away from the “official” version…]

Tom Rush, oh yeah: him I knew about. His Wikipedia entry summarizes:

Thomas Walker Rush (born February 8, 1941) is an American folk and blues singer, guitarist and songwriter who helped launch the careers of other singer-songwriters in the 1960s and has continued his own singing career for 60 years.

…which — because, well, Wikipedia — doesn’t tell you everything (or much, really) that you need to know about him; even the details provided there kinda skim the surface. (Visit his own site to get meatier info about him.)

But James Johnson? I confess — that was a new name to me… See, I subscribe to a newsletter — a blog, really — called “The Lefsetz Letter,” by a music industry insider named Bob Lefsetz; this post of a couple days ago alerted me to the presence of this video. It was so euphoric — rhapsodic — a writeup that I just had to see the video for myself. In typical Lefsetz fashion, he rambles quite a bit, and quite a bit entertainingly, before getting to the point; I recommend the full post, but here’s an excerpt:

Tom talks about playing a song. They’re going to do “Statesboro Blues.”

James says he’s not sure he remembers all the lyrics, but he’ll give it a whack. And then Tom starts strumming his guitar, and then James comes in on his harp… JAMES COME IN ON HIS HARP!

Man, this is the sound that launched a million careers. The blues of yore. We heard it, locked into the groove, and were influenced by it. We played the blues, we listened to the blues, but the blues are nowhere in today’s modern music world. Oh, you can hear influences. But the pure element? That’s gone. But Tom and James are locked right into it.

And then James starts to sing and…

Man, this is good!

So I go back to Wikipedia, to find out more details, I mean where’s this guy been? Performing! But in the Boston area. He’s still doing it, like a bluesman of yore. And he’s got it.

And just like pornography, you know it when you hear it, and I’m hearing it. I’m woken right up. James is positively wailing on that harp, like a pro, not an amateur, it’s everything it used to be, BUT IT’S NOW!

So this, in any case, seems an ideal excuse to resuscitate my old “Midweek/Weekend Music Break” series — something I’ve been contemplating since we finally settled down here a couple months ago. I can’t promise to post regularly in the series… but jeez, I do miss music.

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Not Necessarily Lost; Just Not Nailed Down

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[Video: “Where We Are,” by The Lumineers. (Lyrics here, and elsewhere.) As widely reported at the time of the song’s release, it was inspired by a near-fatal car crash, a decade prior; I think you’d have to be willfully literal-minded to imagine that that’s its sole “meaning.”]

From whiskey river:

Democracy
(excerpt)

I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can’t stand the scene
And I’m neither left or right
I’m just staying home tonight
Getting lost in that hopeless little screen
But I’m stubborn as those garbage bags
That time cannot decay
I’m junk but I’m still holding up
This little wild bouquet
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A

(Leonard Cohen [source])

…and:

Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.

(J. D. Salinger [source])

Not from whiskey river:

“Do you think,” said Mira, leaning on her spade, “that the kind of person who can never say sorry is also the kind of person who can never say thank you, or do you think that those are two different categories of people?”

“Ooh, that’s a good one,” Shelley said. She considered it.

“Because I saw this blog a while back,” Mira went on, “where this woman had just decided to stop saying sorry, like, ever, and every time she would have said it, she found a way of saying thank you instead. So, like, instead of saying ‘sorry for being late,’ she’d say, ‘thanks for waiting,’ and instead of saying ‘sorry for being such a mess’ she’d say, ‘thanks for being so understanding,’ and on and on like that. And she wrote in this blog how this one little change like totally transformed her life and all her relationships, like all of a sudden, her friendships got so much healthier and more mature and more honest, and because she was appreciating everyone in her life way more, they started appreciating her back, and it was this whole thing.”

“Wow,” Shelley said. “Thank you for telling me that story.”

“Thank you for listening.”

“Thank you for assuming that I was listening.”

“Thank you for not making it obvious if you weren’t.”

They dug the ground in silence for a moment, both grinning.

(Eleanor Catton [source — sorry, the book’s too recent for verbatim text to have been quoted anywhere!])

…and:

The Tale of Two Hands Clapped

Two hands clapped and made a noise. Both hands rejoiced. The noise was such that the clap had seemingly proved, once and for all, the existence of either hand. Flesh had met flesh. Skin, skin. Cells, cells. The slap had even stung a bit. The two hands were very happy with the outcome of their clapping experiment. They congratulated each other with more and more rigorous clapping and even a little bit of waving and thumbs-ups.

Hurrah! the Right Hand shouted. We’re here! We really do exist!

We’re here, said the Left, though a little doubtfully, because what had they confirmed, really, when you thought about it?

(Thomas Pierce [source])

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Raised in the Institution of Dreaming

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[Video: Florence Welch (and — or and not — the Machine), “Free”… featuring Bill Nighy “as her anxiety.” Lyrics here and elsewhere.]

From whiskey river:

Meditations in an Emergency

I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds & the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old women hawking roses, & children all of them, break my heart. There’s a dream I have in which I love the world. I run from end to end like fingers through her hair. There are no borders, only wind. Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart.

(Cameron Awkward-Rich [source])

Per usual for my Friday posts, for each quotation I found at whiskey river this week I tried to include two links: one to whiskey river itself — credit for bringing it to my attention; and one to the original, “canonical” source of the quotation, in case you want to see the context in which it originally appeared.

Tracking down those “canonical” links can be tricky, because there’s not always an “original source” to be found online — and this leads me down many rabbit holes and side alleys. I generally do a search on (in my opinion) the most striking, original phrase in the passage, to eliminate duplicates as much as possible; for Cameron Awkward-Rich’s prose poem above, I went with the same phrase I’ve used as this post’s title.

Well, I found general blogs which quoted the work in full. I found out that it came from a 2019 collection of Awkward-Rich’s poems, Dispatch. But I couldn’t actually preview the book anywhere… which is why I ultimately just fell back on a non-canonical source.

But along the way, I also searched for the phrase “Meditations in an Emergency.” This led me to Frank O’Hara’s 1957 collection of poems, which took that title from one of his own poems. It led me to a reminder that the O’Hara book was referenced several times in the Mad Men TV series, especially the second-season finale (which also shared the title). And finally, it also led me to a 2022 interview/profile of Florence Welch… which gave me the music video with which this post is topped. (In the interview, she quotes the last few sentences of Awkward-Rich’s poem as one of her “cultural hobbies and passions” of the moment.)

Of course, it helped that the video seems — to me — strikingly appropriate as a lead-in to “Meditations in an Emergency.”

The following, needless to say, does not come from whiskey river but from a book I recently read:

There’s an old story, which I’ve always liked, about a holy man who yearns for an epiphany. So he leaves the city and his rich family, sells everything he owns and gives the money to the poor, and builds a hermitage in the wilderness. For sixty years he lives there on his own, praying and fasting. He’s taken a cartload of books with him—the complete scriptures and all the commentaries—but as the years go by, he stops reading them, because he knows them all by heart. He stops praying too, because he’s said it all so many times that he can’t see the point anymore; either the Invincible Sun has heard him or He hasn’t, and isn’t there a commandment somewhere about Thou shalt not nag the Lord thy God? So he spends most of his time outside in his garden, growing food for himself and the very occasional passerby. He grows cabbages and leeks and turnips and peas and nine different varieties of beans, onions and shallots and carrots, strawberries, raspberries, redcurrants, grapes, cherries, apples, pears, plums, marrows and squashes and pumpkins the size of an ox, though he doesn’t like pumpkin very much, and who can blame him? And one day, God comes by and leans over the gate and stands there for a while, watching the old hermit raking over a seedbed. The hermit notices him and says hello, and they have a nice chat about greenfly and pumpkin blight and what to do about carrot-fly, concerning which the Omniscient turns out to be pretty well-informed, although the hermit’s able to teach Him a thing or two about earthing up fennel. Then He says he has to be getting along and they part; nice chap, the hermit thinks to himself, and not a bit like how you’d expect. And then he dies, but he doesn’t go to heaven because he’s already there.

(K.J. Parker [source])

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At Certain Strange Epochs

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[Video: Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, covering Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” in a 2009 concert appearance. I’m happy to find that they do not embarrass themselves at all — while the cover isn’t notably “original,” I wouldn’t have believed, until I saw and heard it, that any band could keep up with Grace Slick and the Airplane. As when I heard the song for the first time, the hair stood up on the back of my neck with the last few notes here.]

As sometimes (often) happens, the blogger who identifies as whiskey river led me, this week, down several rabbit holes of wonder. They reminded me — surrounded by the dull (however temporary) cardboard and other detritus of the ongoing move-in to our new home — how surprising and delightful the world can be. For instance, consider this:

Sometimes I flew to prove that I could. I was the girlfriend of the poet John Keats and I demonstrated I could fly among blackberry bushes whose fruit the size of street lamps suggested I was, we were, the size of songbirds. Other times I flew across the rooftops of the city and the view was dazzling, as was the sense of having all that space under you, like the sense of all that water when you swim in clear lakes. It was the beautiful spacious side of loneliness.

I wondered what this flying meant. Sometimes it seemed to be dreams’ impatience, a jump cut from here to there without filling in the space between. Sometimes it was escape. Sometimes it was a talent, and like talents sometimes do, it set me apart, usually literally, since I tended to fly alone, to be the only one who could fly, though sometimes I showed other people how to do it or carried them along.

It was an experience of not belonging to the ordinary world and not being bound to it. I thought sometimes that it might be about writing, about being a writer, and now I wonder why I didn’t think of it as reading, as that constant, chronic activity that had taken up so much of my waking hours since I’d learned to read, as being in a book, in a story, in the lives of others and invented worlds and not my own, unbounded by my own body and my own life and my own time and place.

I could fly, though now I wonder if the problem was how to come to earth.

(Rebecca Solnit [source])

…and, furthermore:

I don’t deny that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet.

(G. K. Chesterton [source])

At cocktail hour — when we finally for the day put down the boxes and bins needing unpacking, and put our feet up — we’ve been occasionally working our way through the BBC’s Father Brown series, an episode at a time. I’ve not yet read any of Chesterton’s mysteries featuring the eponymous priest, a failing I hope to correct eventually… but that quote per whiskey river intrigued me enough, once I’d tracked it down, that I read a bit more of the surrounding text (from a novel called Manalive).

As near as I can tell, the passage comes from a letter to the narrator which someone has written; it describes the odd behaviors of a man named Smith. Here’s some of it:

He had been sent to Cambridge with a view to a mathematical and scientific, rather than a classical or literary, career. A starless nihilism was then the philosophy of the schools; and it bred in him a war between the members and the spirit, but one in which the members were right. While his brain accepted the black creed, his very body rebelled against it. As he put it, his right hand taught him terrible things. As the authorities of Cambridge University put it, unfortunately, it had taken the form of his right hand flourishing a loaded firearm in the very face of a distinguished don, and driving him to climb out of the window and cling to a waterspout. He had done it solely because the poor don had professed in theory a preference for non-existence. For this very unacademic type of argument he had been sent down. Vomiting as he was with revulsion, from the pessimism that had quailed under his pistol, he made himself a kind of fanatic of the joy of life. He cut across all the associations of serious-minded men. He was gay, but by no means careless. His practical jokes were more in earnest than verbal ones. Though not an optimist in the absurd sense of maintaining that life is all beer and skittles, he did really seem to maintain that beer and skittles are the most serious part of it…

The uprush of his released optimism burst into stars like a rocket when he suddenly fell in love. He happened to be shooting a high and very headlong weir in a canoe, by way of proving to himself that he was alive; and he soon found himself involved in some doubt about the continuance of the fact. What was worse, he found he had equally jeopardized a harmless lady alone in a rowing-boat, and one who had provoked death by no professions of philosophic negation. He apologized in wild gasps through all his wild wet labours to bring her to the shore, and when he had done so at last, he seems to have proposed to her on the bank. Anyhow, with the same impetuosity with which he had nearly murdered her, he completely married her…

They had settled down in these high narrow houses near Highbury. Perhaps, indeed, that is hardly the word. One could strictly say that Smith was married, that he was very happily married, that he not only did not care for any woman but his wife, but did not seem to care for any place but his home; but perhaps one could hardly say that he had settled down. “I am a very domestic fellow,” he explained with gravity, “and have often come in through a broken window rather than be late for tea.”

He lashed his soul with laughter to prevent it falling asleep. He lost his wife a series of excellent servants by knocking at the door as a total stranger, and asking if Mr. Smith lived there and what kind of a man he was. The London general servant is not used to the master indulging in such transcendental ironies. And it was found impossible to explain to her that he did it in order to feel the same interest in his own affairs that he always felt in other people’s.

“I know there’s a fellow called Smith,” [he’d say] in his rather weird way, “living in one of the tall houses in this terrace. I know he is really happy, and yet I can never catch him at it.”

(Chesterton [ibid.])

I’m laughing, now.

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