She’ll Take Your Heart But You Won’t Feel It … But Maybe *She* Will?

According to a fact is most likely true, in the history of the Billboard Charts, only once has a duet by two gentlemen named Philip reached the Top 10: the 1984 classic “Easy Lover,” by the Phil(ip)s Bailey and Collins. I was reminded of just how awesome this song was when I was (gratuitious mention of me running in 3 … 2 … 1) running across the Longfellow Bridge this morning, as my iPod worked its way through my “Awesome ’80s Mix” (which features perhaps the finest example of a song comprised entirely of soundbytes from a documentary on the Vietnam War played over synthesized beats and primitive 1985-era sampling technology … and I say perhaps, because I haven’t totally researched this yet … “19″ by Paul Hardcastle).

A few years back I decided to stop being such an asshole (well, at least about this particular topic, pop music from the mid-1980s) and embrace my love for this song. What’s not to like about Mr. Bailey’s soulful falsetto, driven by the moderately-competent drumming from the only man to play both sides of the pond for Live Aid (and, I might add, the World’s Designated Drummer of 1985, the man who helped out any band whose man behind the kit had gone to a better place and/or choked on his own vomit), Mr Phil Collins? Nothing!

Well, except maybe for the lyrics, which I had heretofore largely ignored.

Maybe it was because I had pushed myself so hard to complete my Roger Bannister-like pace (if Roger Bannister was measuring how long it took him to run 2.5 miles). Maybe I needed something to take my mind off all the chafing. So I listened to the story being told. (Did you know that the Easy Lover was none other than Patti LaBelle? Me neither! I just made it up!)

And let me tell you, it’s not good.

Ultimately, it wasn’t the Easy Lover who had problems. It was Messrs. Bailey, Collins and co-writer Nathan East, a R&B bassist who seems like a very nice man based on his Wikipedia biography. In fact, I modified the second sentence of his biography to state that; Mr. East, I have no bone to pick with you. I’m guessing you were an unwitting participant, perhaps caught up in the excitement of working with the two Phils and a video that involved a helicopter journey to London to get to the soundstage to film the video itself.

Let’s look at the lyrics (in italics) with my snarky commentary in, um, non-italics:

Easy lover
OK, nowhere in the song do they define what that means. Context makes me think it’s something negative — but really, in this harsh world, is love that comes easy really a bad thing, Phils (and to a lesser extent, Nathan?).

She’ll get a hold on you believe it
The Miracles seemed to think having a hold on me (really) was a good thing, so I’ll assume that’s vaguely positive?

Like no other
Before you know it you’ll be on your knees
Thanking God?

She’s an easy lover
Got it. You said that.

She’ll take your heart but you won’t feel it
She’s like no other
And I’m just trying to make you see
See that she’s unique? Still good, right?

She’s the kind of girl you dream of
Dream of keeping hold of
Woah. Stop, here’s where I’m starting to think you’ve got some sort of problem. “Holding her” sounds nice. “Keeping hold of her” sounds, well, sort of controlling.
You’d better forget it
You’ll never get it
Maybe she doesn’t want to be held? Maybe she has intimacy issues? She doesn’t want you both crushing her? I mean, you don’t really establish which one of you has had the relationship with her, so I’m sort of guessing it was some sort of weird “hey, when’s the next time I’m going to be with a major 1970s R&B star and the world’s most adequate drummer?” snap decision she made.

She will play around and leave you
Gentlemen, you present no evidence here. An argument isn’t valid just because you sing it in an excellent falsetto. Trust me, I’ve tried.
Leave you and deceive you
She’ll leave me and deceive me? It’s kind of hard to do both, unless she leaves under false pretenses. Like that time I tried to use the death of my uncle to get out of going on a business trip. It was true that he had died, although he died in 1963. I went on the trip and ultimately, it wasn’t that bad.

Better forget it
Oh you’ll regret it
Nothing to say here, other than that I always enjoy the forget/regret rhyme.

No you’ll never change her, so leave it, leave it
OK, so you present a wafer-thin argument with scant evidence that she’ll leave me and decieve me. And now I’m going to try to change her? Maybe you didn’t realize this in the fall of 1984, Phils (and Nathan), but people have to want to change themselves. You can’t change them. And even then, some psychologists say that people never actually change, they just accept their limitations and work within them. Do you want her to do that? Should I really expect her to do that just because you say it’s so?

Get out quick ’cause seeing is believing
But if I get out quick, I can’t see, thus I can’t believe.

Hey!

I’m wondering if you just want this easy lover for yourselves, Phils (and Nathan) and are trying to trick me, the listener. Sure, at first blush, I’m going to trust the voice behind “September,” the man behind the moderately-succesful film “Buster,” and, um, Nathan.

But I’m much more sophisticated in 2010 then I was in 1984. Maybe not much more, but I do certainly have less hair.

It’s the only way
You’ll ever know
The only way I’ll ever know what? That you two (and Nathan) are besmirching the name of this poor woman, perhaps for selfish reasons?

[At this point, the lyrics repeat themselves, either to further cement their point, or because they had a bet to see if they could write a song in under 15 minutes.]

So, in further examining these lyrics, what did we learn?

• Even if you alternate your rhyming scheme between A-B-A-C-A-D and A-A-B-B, your song’s lyrics can be lame and unimaginative.
• It is still an awesome song.
• I would be a crappy literary critic.

Sooner or Later It All Gets Real

My name is Ed, and I am addicted to music.

(You can do the whole “Hi Ed” thing if you happen to think alcoholism is funny. It certainly wasn’t funny for my uncle. But fine. I’ll wait …)

OK, thanks.

I am a voracious consumer of many things (pancake batter in spray form, for example) – but in particular, of music. I have more than 1,100 CDs and around 23,000 songs on an oversized hard drive at home; it’s simply too much to fit on any of Apple’s various iPods, because most of Steve Job’s target market isn’t clinically insane.

My appetite for music (and Cheetos and excessive self-doubt) has defined me since my teens. You know when you ask someone who doesn’t really like music what kind of music they like, and they say, “Oh, I listen to everything?” I truly believed that I was the exception. I really do like everyting.

(Sure, I tend to gravitate toward the jangly, guitar-driven rock of the Beatles, Byrds, R.E.M., Wilco, etc. The common denominator? Catchy, jangly music by white people, for white people.)

But … I do have a lot of jazz and enjoy the Parliament-Funkadelic (I saw P-Funk in 1999 and left after three hours; as far as I know, George Clinton is still on the Roxy stage a decade hence doing another encore) and James Brown. I like some hip-hop (although I admit my frame of reference is pretty much 1986-1991), classic and alt-country … everything except opera and … well, opera.

So a real-world, hardware challenge ultimately forced me into an existential argument — one that questioned most of my suppositions.

With so much music, I really struggle with how to rotate songs onto the limited space on my iPhone. I wanted to make a “Top 20” list of my “go-to” that I would always have handy on the iPhone. The criteria for selection was relatively short: the song had to be awesome, and yes, it had to pass my pretentious “inner-aging-hipster’s limitless desire for acceptance by some vague group of like-minded aging hipsters ‘street cred’ test.” (By the way, no one does that better than Greg Kot and Jim DeRegattis, whom I often daydream are my best friends, over at PRI’s “Sound Opinions” ).)

So after some false starts and an initial Top 20 list that featured 130 songs, I finalized my list.

And it goes a little something like this, hit it!

(Author’s note: that introduction will be the funkiest part of this list)

“Alternative Ulster,” Stiff Little Fingers
“Autumn Sweater,” Yo La Tengo
“Blue Train,” John Coltrane (1)
“Can’t Truss It,” Public Enemy (2)
“A Change Is Gonna Come,” Sam Cooke (3)
“Cold Sweat, Pts. 1 & 2,” James Brown (4)
“The Concept,” Teenage Fanclub
“Dancing Queen,” Abba
“Here Comes Your Man,” The Pixies
“Higher Ground,” The Feelies (5)
“In My Life,” The Beatles
“Like a Rolling Stone,” Bob Dylan
“My Life Is Right,” Big Star
“Nightshift,” The Commodores (6)
“Pot Kettle Black,” Wilco
“Tangled Up in Blue,” Bob Dylan
“Teenage Kicks,” The Undertones
“To Love Somebody,” Bee Gees
“Train In Vain (Stand By Me),” The Clash
“Turn! Turn! Turn!,” The Byrds
“4th of July,” X

Footnoes:
(1)OK, I admit. I added this song to add some stylistic and well, racial diversity. Ultimately, I had to be true to myself and remove it. When I called myself on it.
(2)Hip-hop!
(3)Sam Cooke was black. Just sayin’.
(4)James Brown, also black.
(5)This is the song that replaced “Blue Train.” The Feelies are, well, white and jangly.
(6)The Commodores were black, though.

I was very proud of my list. Since no one else really cares, I had an internal dialogue with what I thought was my inner hipster but ended up being a more cynical part of my subconscious. I took the liberty of transcribing the conversation (as my subconscious is quite litigious):

Me: “Wow, what a cool list. So eclectic.”
Subconscious: “Eclectic? Seriously?”
Me: “Come on. I like everything. Right?”

(Taking the liberty to personify my subconscious for the purpose of completing this blog entry, its look of mild bemusement led me to believe that it was not buying it.)

So I made an effort to put my 20 into buckets on the spot. Ideally I’d have 20 songs, 20 buckets.

Ultimately, I fell a little short.

Me: “OK, Yo La Tengo. Hmm, jangly alterna-hipster. Teenage Fanclub … OK, well, that’s the same. The Byrds … ok, jangly. X … guitar-driven, hooky, OK, pretty similar. Pixies … hmm, it’s different but the same. Stiff Little Fingers and Undertones are … OK, thematically simlar to everything else but stylistically … slightly different.. OK, wait, Abba is disco! That’s different! So are the Bee Gees!”
Subconscious: “Bee Gees and Abba are in the same bucket.”
Me: “No! This is the pre-disco, chamber-pop Bee Gees of the late 1960’s. Which puts them in the same bucket as The Beatles, well and ultimately Dylan.”
Me: “Also, as you can tell by my carefully-crafted footnotes, Subconscious,  Sam Cooke, James Brown, The Commodores and Public Enemy are black!”
Subconscious: “You’ve been wearing a v-neck sweater backwards for the last two hours.”

Stopping to remove my sweater and turn it around (it did seem awfully revealing on my back), I stepped back for an assessment. My subconscious was calling me out on something I had never had to defend (the music, not the sweater, which was indefensible), mostly because I surrounded myself with like-minded musical hipster wannabes who speciously claimed eclecticism.

My musical house of cards was collapsing and there was nothing I could do to effectively argue my case to myself. I really was my own worst critic.

By the end of the argument I was a quivering mass that ultimately using affirmative action to promote the diversity in my musical tastes. Sam Cooke became the Jackie Robinson of my Top 20. If I had a black woman in there (or, for that matter, any woman), she would be the Rosa Parks (or, um, Geraldine Ferraro?).

So, in the weeks hence, four things have happened:

1. I’ve ultimately accepted that I like vast quantities of ultimately similar-sounding music. And I’m OK with that.
2. That said, I’ve tried to push myself to expand my musical boundaries.
3. I put sticky notes with “front” on my sweaters when they come back from the cleaners.
4. I really hate my subconscious.

I am reminded of a PSA I saw when I was a kid in which a martian who eats only candy bars suddenly tries Earth fruit. He finds it “yummy and not bad,” and exclaims that “by only eating candy bars, I don’t know what I’ve missed.” In this case, the jangle-pop of R.E.M. and the Feelies are the candy bars, and some recent additions to my collection (Lady Gaga, Ethiopian jazz legend Mulatu Astake (admittedly driven by a positive review in Pitchfork) and a Hank William Sr. retrospective) are my Earth fruit.

(Full disclosure: I have listened to Ms. Gaga’s The Fame Monster a lot the last few days. Usually after I finish it, I immediately throw on something like R.E.M.’s Murmur or an old Elvis Costello album just in case the street cred police are nearby. I’m making progress, but very, very slowly).

I will write more full-length posts. Tomorrow.

Wow, major case of writer's block coupled with "who really gives a crap about my take on [fill in aborted post topic]." I've started like 6 or 7 posts and they're all in the drafts folder. Time to clear things out … so here's a bulleted list of random ideas, sort of like those "clearing out the desk drawer of my mind" pieces that columnists do when they forget they had an impending deadline and have to slap something together.

Consider this the blog-entry equivalent of a colonic cleansing for the brain (although hopefully more pleasant for those who have to see the results of it):

• Another Pink Panther movie with Steve Martin? Really?
• I was talking with a friend the other day and we determined that while Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo isn't a bad sequel, the whole franchise really lost its way by Herbie Goes Bananas.
• I've started and abandoned blog entries about 1) issues I have with youth sports; 2) my excessive love of social networking; 3) how awesome our President is; 4) how impatient I am that our new President hasn't fixed everything after 9 whole days in office; 5) how much I hate winter; 6) DuraFlame logs; 7) digital pens; 8) online consumer services; 9) how unethical it would be to post shills about clients or prospects, no matter how vague the references were;
• Saturday Night Live has been getting some hip musical guests (Fleet Foxes!). Not that I watch any more. Actually, does anyone watch any more or do people just catch clips on the Hulu? Actually, in checking out the Hulu, I'd say Letterman wins the hip musical guest prize, with Vampire Weekend, Okkervil River and Ben Kweller.
• Another music clip — Feist on Conan doing "1,2,3,4" (which is a great song) backed by Grizzly Bear. Pretty cool. Is she Canadian? Man, I love Canada's indie rock scene.
• Finally took Colin for his lead test today. The snow day was good for something and now our pediatrician won't be angry or figure out I'm lying when I say, "We totally took him, the lab must have lost the results" and I won't have to blame Juliet for not taking him.
• Jacob watched his third full-length movie tonight, Cars. It's funny that he has around $9,000 in Lightning McQueen-related merchandise but has just seen the film tonight. It's also interesting that Disney is still pimping the hell out of merchandise related to a three-year old film. Then again, they do sell tons of Snow White stuff, don't they? I'm amazed they still don't productize some of their live-action films from the 1960s and 1970s like The Apple Dumpling Gang action figure or California Atoms jerseys from the eponymous film about the football-kicking mule, Gus (starring Ed Asner and potentially Don Knotts, I need to look it up).
• Speaking of Ed Asner, are there any other television characters that made the spinoff transition from a sitcom to a drama, as did his Lou Grant (from The Mary Tyler Moore Show to his character's eponymous drama (ding ding ding, my goal of two "eponymouses" has been reached without having to resort to a reference to the 1988 R.E.M. greatest hits package) where he played the same character, just that he moved from Minneapolis to LA and went from broadcast media producer to newspaper editor)? Maybe Trapper John M.D. (from M*A*S*H, as played by Wayne Rogers, to … wait for it … the eponymous program, where he was played by Pernell Roberts?
• Lou Grant was recently referenced in a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, which made me want to search out an episode or two. Not enough to actually do it, but to think about doing it. I think my grandmother used to watch it although I may be confusing that with Quincy.
• I still can't believe today was a snow day.
• Spring is going to eventually arrive, yes?

Frozen Waffle Rememberance Day

This day always makes me a bit melancholy.

For it was on this day in 1986, the day before Thanksgiving, while working the crowded afternoon and evening shift at Northborough’s now-defunct Julio’s Supermarket (although the liquor store in Westborough is doing quite well), I inadvertently ruined a pallet of store-brand frozen waffles by leaving them sitting on their pallet in the frozen food aisle (not the freezer) for three hours when I was called up front to bag groceries. I had been stocking the freezer and forgot about them; they, unfortunately perished.

Yes, it was a simpler time — no choices between paper or plastic, no credit cards for groceries, baggers who would load groceries into your car, plenty of “This Lane Closed” signs featuring the iconic KOOL Menthols logo, paisley ties on the baggers and cashiers, double-coupon Wednesdays, $3.35/hr. wages, etc. — but what does remain a constant is this: frozen waffles left sitting in an aisle for 180 minutes will melt. Which will cause certain tempers to heat up.

Mr. Colangelo, you were a very busy man, running a three-supermarket empire, yet you still managed the time to come to your smallest store that day.

Where you were met with a pallet of now soggy waffles.

If you are still alive, sir, I again empathize with your anger for the loss of inventory — those delicious, melted squares never had a chance to absorb syrup or magically come back to life in a toaster. Although, we may have rushed them back to the cooler in the back of the store and re-frozen them. I forget, actually. Perhaps I’ve been carrying this burden for 22 years for no reason.

Nonetheless, that said, let us never forget. And please, if you love your waffles, keep them frozen. Until it’s time to eat them. Then you should probably toast them.

I Fought the Law, and the Law Cut My Fine By $140

I had a hearing today at the Edward Brooke Courthouse to protest a cockamamie speeding ticket from March 27. I'll spare you the details of the actual pulling over, but let's just say my defense of "No I wasn't" probably wasn't sufficient. However, I maintained my dignity more than the gentleman in front of me who blamed his speeding ticket on a sneezing attack. Net result was a reduced fine (otherwise I'd have to go back for an appeal).

On the defensive

The following are retractions/clarifications I've issued in the past few weeks:

• "Make no mistake, I do not support drunk driving nor trying to hide the murder of a woman who drowned because you drove off of a bridge."
• "Believe me, I am not a supporter of Hitler Youth by any stretch."

Knowing is half the battle

I’m going to start a new series within harrison3.com, "Life Lessons I Should Have Learned by Now," basically to spotlight whenever I do something particularly particularly unseemly for a man of my years and/or experience.

Lesson #1: Think twice before sending (what I considered to be) a humorous e-mail response to a client, particularly a client you don’t know all that well.

Lesson #2: Six pieces of pizza is too much pizza.