Stop Me Before I Wear Plaid Again

Let’s go down the seventies rabbit hole again. What the hey, I say.

This is not nostalgia, trust me. Happiness was the seventies in my rear view mirror. I think people really have forgotten how crummy that decade was, every which way, and live in a dream world that it couldn’t happen again. I notice a certain similarity in the fiddling politically here in Massachusetts to thirty years ago, and wonder if the accompanying Rome burning will follow in its train again. Boston looked like Beirut thirty years ago, except Beirut had beautiful Mediterranean beaches; you could walk across Boston Harbor and barely get your feet wet then — no miracle involved — on the dead fish and sewage in 1975.

And disco did not suck, by the way. When times are hard, people generally turn to happy music. Disco is happy music. You can tell people don’t really have a care in the world these days; the music is miserable. No one seeks out depression if they’ve got it already.

That brings us to today’s seventies wonder, the least depressing music, well, maybe ever: Al Green.

He was born Al Greene in Arkansas; later his family moved to Detroit. He sang in the family Gospel group, The Greene Brothers, when he was as young as nine years old. My, those Detroit soul phenoms. Later, his father grew perturbed that young Al was listening to secular music, (how could you not listen to Jackie Wilson?) and booted him out of the band. His family dropped him, he dropped the “e” at the end of his name.

Al tried to be everybody but himself for awhile: James Brown; Wilson Pickett; Sam Cooke. But when he met Willie Wilson from Hi Records, he decided to be himself. Good move.

It was a good move, because there really is no one else like Al Green. He sings most often in falsetto; but unlike most falsetto singers, his voice sounds powerful and masculine despite the register. Michael Jackson, Frankie Valli, Lou Christie, BAH! Shrill dog calling. Only Marvin Gaye could go up there like Al Greene. But Al Green didn’t just go up there; he lived there, invited you over, and you better bring two girls — or you’ll end up with none.

Like the greatest nightclub singers, he could stand alone on a stage, and sing an achingly slow ballad, with nothing but his beaming face and mellifluous voice to hold your attention:

Like so many people who show a sunny face to the audience, Al Greene’s life has had a lot of darkness in it. Let’s not dwell on it. After all, he doesn’t, exactly; Al Green just keeps on smiling, and we smile along with him.

Get Rhythm

There was a certain group of people you didn’t mess with when I was a kid.

They seemed to congregate together in every city they inhabited, and their ways seemed strange to the straightlaced people. They outwardly appeared more than a little dangerous, and had a reputation for an outsize appetite for criminality. You’d never see them portrayed in a movie, unless they were doughty workers, or were carrying a knife.

People admired them for their athletic ability, as they seemed preternaturally gifted in the physical arts. Almost all of the greatest boxers of a certain period were from this group, and they inspired a sort of fear tied up with confusion; are they supermen, or does their seeming imperviousness to the normal physical recoiling from pain signal a kind of brutishness? You’d never dare ask a question like that, though, they seemed too fierce. They were kinda scary.

Man, could those people dance and sing. They always had the girls atwitter at any function, because they had none of the staid ballroom etiquette or outright distaste for movement of the Ward and June Cleaver set. They sang and danced and carried on. The girls danced with them, but thought twice about bringing them home to their parents.

They were prone to flashy clothes too. Chrome suits. Stylish, yes; but something of the peacock, too. Unafraid to call attention to themselves. Proud, down to the most mundane detail.

I was born into that group…

WHAT? WHAT”S WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE? I WAS TALKING ABOUT ITALIAN-AMERICANS. WHO DID YOU THINK I WAS TALKING ABOUT? YOU PEOPLE ARE STRANGE. FAHGEDABOUTIT.

Anyway, we watched Soul Train, just like everybody else.

Is that the Isley Brothers playing? Funky.

You Felt Good… Now You’re DYNAMITE !

Take your medication. Drink six cups of coffee. Comb your hair. Burn your chairs. Put your high heel sneakers on. GIRD YOUR LOINS. Now press the play button.

That, ladies and gentleman, is not entertainment. That is a hurricane, wrapped in a tornado, basted with the sweat of a thousand leopards, and sanctified in the Sublime Church of the OMGWTF.

Those poor benighted (French?) souls in the audience tried to sit there and listen to it. James wasn’t having any of that. He stomps the grapes of rhythm in the vineyard of the human condition, and blasts his buckshot of funk into the audience. The wounds are serious, but not fatal.

That’s real happiness on his face. It beams out from his mien like sunshine. I know how hard he worked to make it seem that effortless. I know how uncompromising and fierce he was towards his band. But all that was yoked to the service of his vision, his mission to sanctify mankind with syncopation and singing and the fury of his feet. It was so he –and in our turn, we — could get up on top of that sublime and effortless force and ride it like a wave. It’s a smile, backed up with velvet and iron and sleek sultry sex.

James is in his church. Call and response. Channeling the sublime. Please do not tell me that “Sex Machine” doesn’t belong in church. The sunny nature of mankind is distilled and fed back to us, every aspect of it a tribute to the maker of it all — and our high priest is James Brown. It’s all good, he intones. It all serves the higher power.

Can I get a Amen?

Celebrity Advice and Other Mutually Exclusive Items

I have a soft spot for weirdos, cranks, freaks, dopes, and the great majority of the minority of strangeness.

I have a great deal of respect for the mundane, the average, the square, the nerd, the: hey expecting highwater with those pants? sorts of people.

Apparently, I’ve got it exactly backwards.

You see, I don’ t fit in very well with the second group. Let’s call them the joiners. I don’t have the mental toughness to work my whole life at the same thing. I don’t have the simple piety required to enjoy the benediction of regular churchgoing. I don’t have the ability to willfully suspend disbelief enough to watch television and get any enjoyment out of it; I’m always looking at it as a useful catalog of modern day affectations and avarice, but I can’t bring myself to look at it as entertainment. In short, many would say, I belong with the first group: “Hey ottist, paint this!”

I don’t fit in very well amongst the strange set, either. I’m not able to hide my admiration for the joiners, and that’s a deal breaker with the freaks, generally. “It’s my way or the highway” sounds very second group, but it’s really the outlandish brigade that tolerates nothing outside its little world. The joiners just shrug their shoulders if you say you don’t watch American Idol for the singing, and maybe figure you’re a little odd. The freaks will picket your house if they decide your kid’s habittrail keeps hamsters against their will in your house or something. When I say, against their will, I mean against the freaks’ will; the hamsters seem to have no opinion other than a cetain enthusiasm for free sunflower seeds.

As I was saying, I seem to have the whole thing backwards. If the television, newspaper, movies, and radio are to be believed, I’m supposed to get my cues on how to behave from the freaks, and I’m supposed to get my cues on entertainment from the joiners.

Have you seen how celebrities, and celebrity politicians order their affairs? Taking advice from them on any topic seems about as efficacious as looking for a dowser on the Titanic after you hit the iceberg. Not. Likely. To. Be. Of. Any. Help.

And I said any topic, because you can’t even ask them about their own craft. They don’t even understand that, really, and it shows; How do you explain why a zillion people will line up to see an aging midget in the third iteration of an adaption of a lame television show about spies who’s simultaneously publicly demanding his third or fourth or fifth wife have a baby without saying anything? They themselves really can’t explain it either, so they go to the default position: I must be wonderful.

No. No you’re not; you’re dreadful human beings, in general — and in particular some of you are even worse than dreadful.

Conversely, a great deal of pains are taken to inform me what the great mass of people think I should be interested in. You must like this; everybody does. I know I should be interested, but I’m not. And I’m not not interested as a sort of gesture, either; I leave it to others to say one thing and then do another. I don’t secretly watch American Idol while disparaging it openly. I’m really just not interested one way or the other. If it doesn’t matter enough to me to like it, why would it matter enough to hate it?

I don’t go to the water and sewer commission meeting looking for entertainment. Why would I conversely pay any attention to advice given to me from someone who’s never gotten up before noon in their life, and demands that their M&Ms get sorted before they eat them?

Stick to your trades, people; stick to your trades.

Happy Mother’s Day

No matter how long you tarry at the metaphysical dance, always remember who brung you.