Top Of The Pops, in black and white no less.

This song predates my interest in it. It’s from 1967. But it was still immensely popular in 1975, when we were dancing in the gym to it. The girls wore dusters and had turd curl hairdos and smoked cigarettes. The guys wore farmer pants and had Vinnie Barbarino hair and bummed cigarettes off the girls. And they’d play “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” without fail, and mercifully allow us to dance with the girls close and slow for a moment.

I’m not a nostalgia freak. I talk about old things a lot, but that’s not the same thing. I’m not generally wistful for things of my youth. I’ve always been an oceangoing shark. You must always swim forward or you perish. My salad days are tomorrow. Always.

I am occasionally asked in an exasperated tone right here on my blog: ” How old are you?” when I wax poetic about Miles Davis in the fifties or Louis Prima in the forties or lumber yards in the thirties or some other anachronistic thing that caught my eye. The whole world is my high school yearbook, the way I see it.

But I’m only human. I was rooting around on YouTube, and I listened to this little trifle, and I found myself transported back a little in time, and I didn’t mind. It won’t last. Nothing ever does. And I don’t want to purchase it, or carry it around and jam it in my head through waxy earbuds. I don’t want to go to a Procol Harum reunion concert. I certainly don’t want to write a thousand word essay on how meaningful and important it is. It’s a trifle. That’s the point.

If it came on the radio, I wouldn’t change the channel. My highest praise, that.