*
So go on and live....I fell in love with this song, like so many others in the 1966 - 1967 timeframe, before dawn. The situation was this: every Wednesday evening the Williams Press truck would engine-knock up our driveway and throw me a bundle or two of The Homewood-Flossmoor Star, the biweekly area newspaper. I would roll 'em all up in rubber bands (or when they were fat or I was lazy I'd use the flat trifold method) and get to bed early. Before bed, though, I'd snatch my sister Peggy's red and white plastic transistor Sears Silvertone radio/record player, which was the size of a Belgian paver but also a marvel of miniaturization at the time, and stash it with the bulldog edition of the Star in my old-school canvas paperboy bag. Then, around 4 or 4:30 a.m. I'd drag my scrawny carcass out of bed, get dressed, and head out into the suburban dark. The important thing was that radio, even more important than the princely paycheck. I started every Thursday all alone in the calm, dark reverberating open-air auditorium of suburban concrete, brick, and cedar siding with the predawn sounds of WCFL-1000, one of Chicago's two Top 40 powerhouses in the mid-'60s. (At that time WLS-890 didn't start broadcasting music until Chrome-Dome Weber came on around 6:05, after all the farmer nonsense.) These were formative mystical experiences for me, and I gratefully soaked up everything from The Casinos to the Doors. I remember first taking note this song, "Tell It Like It Is," around February 1967. This was the same month I heard the early-morning Chicago premier of a jaw-dropping Beatles song called "Strawberry Fields Forever," which literally brought me to a dead stop in the snow flurries as I tried to puzzle out its melody and structure.
So I originally felt a little weird about luxuriating in "Tell It Like It Is" because to my innocent ears it sounded like (wait for it) serious country and western! That's right: I heard it as a crossover country-pop tune (not actually knowing that term at the time), and it would have been damn uncool for me to admit liking such a thing in the winter of 1967 even as the crocuses of The Summer Of Love were starting to think about peeping their randy little budding heads up out of the earth. (Editor's note: some country was OK by me even back then, such as Roger Miller and a Jack Jones hit or two, but that stuff kinda at least sounded like rock.) It's not that I was some kind of proto-hippie or was even aware of such things beyond how they were made fun of on "Petticoat Junction." But it wasn't rock and roll, so what the hell else could it be!?! Sorta jazzy, but definitely not jazz. Well, "country" or whatever, I'd never heard a more beautiful rhythm guitar sound before then, and the piano and percussion kept things peppy with a 6/8 beat in back of the seductive melody. And that voice... like a choir of bells.
I rediscovered this song in the mid-'70s when I started hoarding 45 rpm records from thrift stores with Larry K. With more mature ears, informed by three semesters of college-level music theory (harmony), I was bowled over by it again. By then I'd recategorized it as "country soul" in my still-underdeveloped bean, and remember thinking to myself about Aaron Neville's vocal performance, "this guy is like a white Al Green!" I don't think that it was until sometime in the 1980s that I finally discovered that Aaron Neville and his brothers were, uh, black. Today I can recognize the vivid New Orleans flavor of the chart, especially in the horn sounds and even the rhythm guitar, but I still hear "Tell It Like It Is" as a small masterpiece of country soul.
Tell It Like It Is, Aaron Neville (1966, Par-Lo Records), via YouTube.
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