Thursday, October 4, 2007

98. THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

From The Archives

(May 2005) Isn’t my title the name of a hokey early-eighties pop song? Yeah, the chorus goes “like walking in the wind and the snow when there’s nowhere to go and feeling like a part of you is dying....”

I used to be a whiz at the board game Songburst (what can I say? I spent most of my childhood living inside music and art instead of interacting with people), but just can’t remember many of those one-hit wonders’ names anymore. Who sang this song? Oh I don't know ... and I really don't care enough to google it.

I have some obscure 45s that I really ought to sell on eBay: John Travolta singing his hit single “Gonna Let Her In,” for example, and some of David Soul's (of Starsky and Hutch fame) 45s. Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” is another classic. And remember the Bay City Rollers? (“S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y Night!”)

Good lord, how many perfectly good brain cells have I wasted listening to vapid music? ’Course I listened to a lot of very good music too and have some great old albums: Maria Callas and Earl “Fatha” Hines and Louis Armstrong and Harry Belefonte and loads of classical music and the ZZ Top album Trés Hombres that isn’t all that great but does include the very cool song “Jesus Just Left Chicago” ...

... and can I say that I just love the way vinyl sounds? So much deeper, richer than the CDs and digital files that I mostly purchase these days.



Meanwhile, I keep thinking about these words:

If woman is inconstant,
good, I am faithful to

ebb and flow, I fall
in season and now

is a time of ripening.
—from “Stepping Westward” by Denise Levertov

Hope they're accurate!

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