{"id":23385,"date":"2020-08-26T13:57:59","date_gmt":"2020-08-26T17:57:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=23385"},"modified":"2020-08-26T13:58:04","modified_gmt":"2020-08-26T17:58:04","slug":"midweek-music-break-the-three-degrees-when-will-i-see-you-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2020\/08\/midweek-music-break-the-three-degrees-when-will-i-see-you-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Midweek Music Break: The Three Degrees, &#8220;When Will I See You Again?&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"intrinsic-container intrinsic-container-16x9\" style=\"margin-bottom: 1em;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/5OpuZzsPBhQ\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"smalltext\"><em>[Video: &#8220;official&#8221; video, I suppose, from the Three Degrees&#8217; own YouTube channel. I also found a video on the \u2019Tube of their singing the song &#8220;live,&#8221; maybe, in what appears to be a theater-in-the-round setting. The backup singers have very little to do in this video, except &#8212; in time with the lead singer &#8212; swivel on their stools.] <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">Every morning, I receive an automated email message (set it up using <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/ifttt.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">this tool<\/a>) which consists entirely of a link to a random Wikipedia article. I&#8217;m never surprised, nor upset, when the target article turns out to describe some minutely tiny corner of the known world. (&#8220;Paraguayan field hockey players, 1983 season&#8221; or &#8220;a small village in northwestern China&#8221; &#8212; that sort of thing.) But I&#8217;m often delighted when the links in such an article lead me down one unexpectedly fascinating rabbit hole or another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I don&#8217;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&#8230; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">The song isn&#8217;t much, really &#8212; it&#8217;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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>When will I see you again?<br>When will we share precious moments?<br>Will I have to wait forever?<br>Or will I have to suffer and cry the whole night through?<\/p><p>When will I see you again?<br>When will our hearts beat together?<br>Are we in love or just friends?<br>Is this my beginning or is this the end?<br>When will I see you again?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>And so on. It&#8217;s actually difficult &#8212; for me &#8212; to read the lyrics on their own and imagine how they <em>could<\/em> be sung, never mind that they <em>were<\/em> sung, and were sung <em>successfully<\/em> at that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As for what those lyrics say: if you imagine them as questions asked of the loved one, they&#8217;re, well, <em>annoying<\/em>. Clearly, the object of affection here has a problem on their hands: an obsessive, indeed <em>possessive<\/em> follower, determined to lay sole claim to their time&#8230; again, <em>if<\/em> you imagine them as questions to someone else. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yet now reconsider: suppose the song is an interior monologue?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ah, then, then the narrator becomes instantly more sympathetic: they&#8217;re not necessarily clingy; they&#8217;re <em>heartbroken<\/em> &#8212; singing not to, but <em>about<\/em> someone beloved. I am sure such a narrator would find a lot of company among the rest of us!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While researching the song&#8217;s background, I found an interesting passage to this effect in <em>Bono<\/em>, 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&#8217;re talking about the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, on March 11 &#8212; bombings which killed almost 200 people and injured ten times that many:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p><strong>What song would you have sung had you been onstage that day?<\/strong> <\/p><p>&#8220;When Will I See You Again?&#8221;&#8212;the Three Degrees.<\/p><p><strong>How does it go?<\/strong><\/p><p><em>[sings] When will I see you again? De-de-de-de-de\u2026\/When will we share precious moments?<\/em> It&#8217;s a song about loss. That song can bring you to tears. It&#8217;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&#8217;s a stadium, the Zeppelinfeld, which is associated with the Third Reich. It&#8217;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: &#8220;I&#8217;m not sure I want to do this.&#8221; I said: &#8220;Well, you don&#8217;t have to if you don&#8217;t want.&#8221; But he went on and started his set by playing the Three Degrees&#8217; &#8220;When Will I See You Again?&#8221; 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&#8217;d never met, but feeling it. I really felt this song just chase the devil away. <em>[sighs]<\/em> Because you should never think about these things on a grand scale: these are families, and sisters and brothers and uncles.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"smalltext\">[<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=r-Ygcg9jR1cC&amp;pg=PT145#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false\" target=\"_blank\">source<\/a><\/em>]\n\n\n\n<p>Again, not to say that <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Gamble_and_Huff\" target=\"_blank\">the songwriters<\/a> had anything necessarily sweepingly profound to say with &#8220;When Will I See You Again?&#8221; The songwriters-<em>cum<\/em>-producers, in particular, were all about the commerce &#8212; indeed, this song proved to be one of the first boulders pushed downhill to start the disco avalanche. But, well, maybe in &#8220;When Will I See You Again?&#8221; they accomplished something worth having accomplished in the long run, after all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">I don&#8217;t want to over-dramatize the <em>personal<\/em> significance of the song to me. I&#8217;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&#8217;ve favored it, then or later&#8230; And unlike much of the music of my adolescence and afterward, I&#8217;ve never acquired an MP3 or physical recording of it. I never &#8220;missed hearing&#8221; it, had not even thought of it &#8212; as I said &#8212; in decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And yet it has loomed large in my mind since unearthing it over the weekend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Why I would have <em>known<\/em> it at all isn&#8217;t hard to figure out. After all, except for a brief year of college, I&#8217;d lived my entire life in South Jersey. There, throughout the 1950s, &#8217;60s, and &#8217;70s &#8212; until I moved closer to New York &#8212; I&#8217;d soaked thoroughly in a bath of Philadelphia radio music, AM and FM. Besides the music popular across the nation, and world, I&#8217;d thus been exposed, repeatedly and subconsciously, to the music of Philadelphia. The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Three_Degrees\" target=\"_blank\">Three Degrees<\/a>, the group who first recorded &#8220;When Will I See You Again?,&#8221; had not only themselves grown up in the Philly area; their music in general was considered the quintessential representative of &#8212; yes &#8212; the &#8220;Philly Sound.&#8221; Their first big hit, six months earlier, had in fact been called, literally,  &#8220;The Sound of Philadelphia.&#8221; (&#8220;TSOP,&#8221; as it was called, became the theme for the TV show <em>Soul Train<\/em>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So yeah: on any given day, from September 1974 at least through the end of the year, I&#8217;d probably heard &#8220;When Will I See You Again?&#8221; three, four, five times a day. Of course it burned itself into my subconscious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The larger question is why it hit me so powerfully <em>now<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>No answers to that one, I&#8217;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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Well, whatever it was: &#8220;When Will I See You Again?&#8221; just completely saturated my mind this weekend, and it&#8217;s still pulsing in the background. Maybe posting about it here will set it &#8212; and me &#8212; free again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"highlight\"><strong>Aside:<\/strong> apparently, the Three Degrees are &#8212; or once were &#8212; the favorite musical group of Britain&#8217;s Prince Charles. Not only did they perform at Buckingham Palace; they were also among the very few American invitees to the prince&#8217;s wedding to Diana Spencer. The media supposedly referred to them as &#8220;Charlie&#8217;s Angels&#8221;&#8230; or perhaps that was just a fabrication of the group&#8217;s publicists!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[Video: &#8220;official&#8221; video, I suppose, from the Three Degrees&#8217; own YouTube channel. I also found a video on the \u2019Tube of their singing the song &#8220;live,&#8221; maybe, in what appears to be a theater-in-the-round setting. The backup singers have very little to do in this video, except &#8212; in time with the lead singer &#8212; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[38,3286,247,2252,73,74],"tags":[24,1003,2323,5201,5202],"class_list":{"0":"post-23385","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-backwards","7":"category-obsessions","8":"category-ruminations","9":"category-midweek-music-break","10":"category-radio","11":"category-music","12":"tag-nostalgia","13":"tag-songwriting","14":"tag-earworms","15":"tag-the-three-degrees","16":"tag-bono","17":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-65b","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23385"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23385\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23403,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23385\/revisions\/23403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}