Disingenuous grandstanding

*

My congressman, Tim Johnson (IL-I5), is forced by circumstance to masquerade as a somewhat independent, somewhat moderate Republican because an important part of his district includes Urbana and Champaign, home of the University of Illinois. While this is, in my opinion, one of the most redneck Big 10 campus settlements, the university still exercises a liberalizing impact on civic life that Johnson cannot ignore. Virtually a straight party-line voter over the years, he has occasionally been permitted by GOP leaders to break party ranks on votes that might have a symbolic importance to the university community but whose outcome was not in doubt.

I'm not exactly sure what Johnson's motive is for leading an effort in the House to defund Libya military operations, but disingenuous grandstanding must be high on the bulleted list of possibilities. If you review Johnson's voting record, you can see that he's not been reluctant to vote for war funding during his first decade in Washington. I suppose he's trolling for some Tea Party cred. Oddly, any number of liberals and independents might be expected to strongly support Johnson's effort, but for different reasons than are motivating him.

One thing of which I am certain: if the current President were a Republican, we wouldn't be hearing a peep about Libya out of "The Honorable Timothy V. Johnson."

"Considering all options"

*

The Associated Press, via HuffingtonPost, reports that

the U.S. military warned Tuesday it was "considering all options" in response to dire conditions there that have left people cowering in darkened homes and scrounging for food and rainwater.

So a new Coalition of the Willing implements a no-fly zone over Libya by bombing the shit out of the country. Then, due to the "dire conditions" to which Operation: Odyssey Dawn must have contributed to immensely, the omnipresent "U.S. military" seems to threaten pretty much anything in order to make things all better.

I've already registered my complaint, and Gurlitzer's, about the name given to this humanitarian military initiative. Maybe they should have called it Operation: Hey Kid Stop Hitting Yourself Or I'll Kick Your Ass.

In front of our noses

*

In the comments section of last night's post about "Operation: Odyssey Dawn," Gurlitzer observed that the name of this military intervention may be more worrisome than inartful. The name pretty well literally means "the beginning of a long, complicated journey." I wonder whether that amounted to some kind of military Freudian slip or it actually was intended to convey the meaning that Gurlitzer pointed to.

This evening Josh Marshall posted about how many ways this adventure looks like a bad idea to him. As much as liberal-minded people want tyrants like Qaddafi to disappear, and think it's a noble idea to level the "playing field" for his internal enemies, we have many more reasons to reject this kind of thinking: three of the most compelling can be summarized as Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Even if the US were the most nobleminded liberal democracy on the planet, it would still not be in our charter to try governing nations that we feel are being run by villains. Where we have national agreement that influencing certain outcomes is in the best interests of global tranquility, then the weapons of choice would be trade, foreign aid, diplomacy, and sanctions. These tools would be applied to help or hinder as required, and executed in the context of a broadly multilateral international consensus. Maybe everyone will be ready for that sometime in the 23rd century.

Another take on Operation: Odyssey Dawn is offered by Duncan Black (i.e., "Atrios"): wars are free, aren't they?! Also, "freedom bombs" may be good for the economy!

Finally, here's a post from Hullabaloo that better gets at the point pertaining to management of the public narrative that I was trying to make last night: they're using centrifuge-grade spin, but the issue is too important to greet with the knee-jerk cynicism we've been conditioned to react with.

Quaint ideas I have

*

It seems that I have a mistaken idea of what the term "no-fly zone" means. I'd understood it to mean that our UN heroes would patrol Libyan airspace and shoot down Colonel Qaddafi's fighters and bombers to prevent them from strafing protesters. But evidently it means that the US and British navies bomb the shit out of coastal cities with cruise missiles. And so begins Operation: Odyssey Dawn... which has to be the worst name given to any military operation in world history!

Setting aside the stupid name for the attack, I do understand the concept of disabling the dashing Colonel's antiaircraft batteries so UN air forces can patrol the skies. But I also understand that Qaddafi's air defense infrastructure is somewhat old and mediocre, and is not considered a high threat to Western nation's superior air power. Cruise missiles are an outstanding modality for causing "collateral damage."

Second-guessing military strategists is not my purpose, though; I'm more interested in the delicate pubic narrative versus the comparatively jarring reports arriving on our computer screens. We're told that the US has been very sensitive about being seen as the ringleader of this military action. In the same HuffingtonPost article linked above, Harry Reid coyly states

"I support the actions taken today by our allies, with the support of several Arab countries, to prevent the tyrant Moammar Qaddafi from perpetrating further atrocities on the people of Libya."

as if the United States has confined itself to cheerleading in the bleachers.

In other news, where the Kingdom of Bahrain and its subjects are concerned, it appears that the United States and European democracies have not even bothered to set up the bleachers. I wonder why.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

*

I do not wish to lead our British Cousin, Marginalia, down another maudlin path with this evening's musical selection, like I did last time. So tonight I humbly put forth a more robust offering from the spoiled-romance department.



Now I, myself, never had a problem with my girlfriends' "mamas"---they always seemed to adore me...more than their fucking daughters did, actually! In fact, it's too bad that they didn't have "cougars" back then, because I might have made it once or twice! Anyway, I consider this jaunty tune to illustrate another case of a missed Frank Zappa opportunity for a hit radio single. True, the "kill your mama" meme would probably have sent 1970 broadcast sensors into a tizzy, but maybe he could have gotten airplay with it on FM "underground" stations. In my opinion, this track has it all: an aggressive beat, great lummox-rock riff, a zillion instruments on its jazz-rock chart, and humor in both lyrics and arrangement. In a more perfect world, this song---not the embarrassing and tiresome Dinah-Moe Humm---would have been his concert encore crowd-pleaser.

The cover art of the album from which this track is extracted, "Weasels Ripped My Flesh," is also worth remarking upon, and I'm delighted that the YouTuber who posted "Guitar" included it as the visual channel. I remember "freaking out" when I first saw this hilariously creepy cover during the summer of '70, on an excursion to an incense-fogged record store in Piper's Alley, Old Town, in Chicago. Sight unheard, so to speak, I eagerly dug out my $3.25, which was plucked from my hand by a greasy longhair with 8-inch dingy yellow fingernails that sickly curled toward the palms of his hand. (What a jagoff!) Fortuitously, 40-some-odd years later it came to my attention that this album jacket artwork was inspired by the cover of a postwar pulp men's magazine. Scroll down below the song credits to see it, and note the inconspicuous article title at bottom right of the cover.

My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Mama, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention (1970, from"Weasels Ripped My Flesh," Warner Bros. - Reprise - Bizarre MS 2028), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

"Calculated risk"

*

"It would be hard to describe how alarming this is right now."

That's what a high-ranking US official told ABC News about the deteriorating nuclear reactor situations at Fukushima.

The difficulties caused by the evacuations were blamed for "escalating" the chances of a meltdown.

"They need to stop pulling out people -- and step up with getting them back in the reactor to cool it. There is a recognition this is a suicide mission," the unnamed U.S. official was quoted by ABC as saying. 

Yes sir, those "Japs" had better step up to the plate and get crackin' on that suicide mission of theirs so that anonymous high-ranking US officials, not to mention senior samurai at US Westinghouse, may sleep a little easier.

You see, they-all do the calculating and we-all do the risking.

Brutal.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

*

A rarely heard Beatles slow-dancer; one of my favorites of the era. I don't really remember it charting, possibly because there was too much competition from other Fab Four hits at the same time.



My clearest memory of it is from a 6th grade party in Nicky Bajovich's basement, spring 1965, dimly illuminated and with a certain amount of Crazy Foam being sprayed about for poorly understood psychosexual stimulative reasons. (It was a sweetly innocent era, and rapidly drawing to a close.)

The song was mainly composed by Lennon, and it was one of his least favorites. I disagree.

Yes It Is, The Beatles (1965, B-side of 45 rpm single Ticket To Ride, reissued 2009 in "The Beatles In Mono" box set, Mono Masters disc 1, track 17, EMI LC 0299), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Editor's note: the YouTube version posted here is from the "Past Masters" compilations, but I cite the mono digital remaster that I have in my library. Six/half-dozen, etc....

"Housekeeping"

*

The posting has been light lately mainly because I have a freelance editing job that will take a month or two. Also, I'm trying to rethink my posting schedule so I'm not always a prisoner to the laptop on Friday and Saturday nights.

As I've implied in recent months, I'm not satisfied with the same blogging model I've been evolving for the past few years. There are plenty (i.e., way too many) of blogs that comment hypertopically on every unprecedented or heinous development domestically and worldwide. Nothing wrong with that, but my feeling now is that there's no way to keep up with it except for full-time bloggers who specialize in domestic politics, military issues, economics, whatever. I don't have the expertise, time, or energy for that. I feel my originality lies elsewhere, if only I can figure out where. So that's what I've been trying to do for the past several months.

You knuckleheads seem to like the music posts, so those will continue. But not necessarily on Friday and Saturday any more. I can have my prayer meetings and fish fries whenever the fuck I please, so that's what I will start doing shortly.

The Fifty50 keyword system is a wreck and always has been, so I'll spend some time trying to curate it so it's more helpful in finding old posts or whatever.

I want to start including more graphical content again because visual arts are important to me and I like to share. Along those lines, comic strips and animation have always been two of my central joys in life, and I find that others often take an interest if provided a helpful context.

Some readers might remember my referring to a project I called the "Model Of Everything," then scaled back to a "Diagram of Everything." That has been percolating in back of the skullbone all along, and I want to give it some more visibility soon. The point of the project, if I can even call it that with a straight face, is to step back as far as necessary to view science, on one hand, and philosophy/religion, on the other hand, as residing within the same reality context... and, in fact, providing indispensable services each to the other. More later. I do not claim that this is a modest or even achievable endeavor. But I do believe that it's necessary for practitioners in each domain to let go of their blinkered outlooks in order to break a tenacious impasse in human evolution. And if anybody can do that, the fuckin' RubberCrutch can!!!

Finally, I'm closing in on an alternative approach to political and economic commentary. It involves taking about 10 steps back from the "dailiness" of everything; contemplating a much longer timeline than political commentators normally do; and squinting like a painter does to blur out nonessential details and better see the true colors of things. The biggest challenge is to avoid getting sucked into the "dailiness" every time we're treated to a new outrage. In my continuing surveys of philosophy and history I'm finding that there's really nothing new going on. I'm interested in the historic conditions that lead to a revolutionary break from seemingly eternal political, religious, and economic impasses. They do happen, and civilization does move forward. Our jobs are to stop worrying about things that we do not individually control, keep our heads down, and squirt our chromosomes into the gene pool if we wish.

Literally speaking

*

I think this FireDogLake blogger takes John Boehner's "machine gun" imagery too seriously, as if this pickled Ohio sad sack was crafting some cunning subliminal message to god-knows-who about who-knows-what. I think a more straightforward interpretation of Bohener's remark is that people of his ilk are every bit as delusional as Colonel Qaddafi. One is left to wonder why the Times and the Post and NPR and [~] use Quaddafi as the gold standard for insanity and megalomania when we have so many competitors right here in the good old USA.

I'll acknowledge that the previous sentence was a mere rhetorical device: no one really is "left wondering" about that for very long.

Vandalizing the capital building?

*

As seen on Eschaton, an AFL-CIO blog accuses "Governor Scott Walker" of welding capital windows shut to prevent outsiders from passing food through to protesters who have been occupying the building since Sunday.

True? Who knows? I haven't heard a peep about this elsewhere. But if it is, this tactic would seem to violate any reasonable state life-safety standards and possibly cross over into the realm of criminal damage to property. Unless state governors are allowed to do whatever the fuck they want when their "subjects" assemble to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Yesterday, Paul Krugman noted the eerie silence of mainstream (i.e., corporate) news shops about the historic political demonstrations in Madison---crowd sizes unprecedented since the Vietnam era. Getting to smell a lot like Red China around here these days.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

*

Here's a sound that my friend Gurlitzer might enjoy; a jazz waltz of sorts. From a surprising source.



Gurlizer knew me back when I thought it was hip to smoke blueberry Tiparillos and wear railroad-striped bell bottoms. And that was when Frank Zappa recorded this song, a year or two after flower power had flared into full-fledged revolt in some major cities. But I was "enjoying" all that at a distance during high school, vicariously, through music, underground comix, black-light posters, incense, and other lifestyle accessories. This was the same general timeframe when a Mothers concert in West Berlin ended in a fairly violent riot instigated by German revolutionaries affiliated with the Red Army Faction, not to mention the Altamont Speedway deaths and mayhem. This recording was actually left over from the Hot Rats sessions, which produced a late 1969 jazz album of the same name. It's an odd inclusion in the Burnt Weeny Sandwich album, which is mostly avant garde rock-jazz with some straight-ahead comedy blues and other miscellany.

Zappa could have written sweet, lyrical compositions like "Twenty Small Cigars" until the cows came home. Not that he should have, necessarily. And furthermore, he might have authorized his effective but ethically dubious manager of the time, Herb Cohen, to spread around some payola---or at least some fellatiola---to get tracks like this aired on FM "underground" stations during the late '60s and early '70s. By all accounts I've read, though, Zappa always refrained from payola. But maybe he shouldn't have. And so now, maybe because he shied away from his gentle side and mostly wrote compositions better suited to frame his endless social satire and raunchy comedy, Zappa is remembered by the general public not for his astonishing writing and performing capabilities, but for novelty songs like "Don't Eat The Yellow Snow," "Dinah-Moe Humm," and "Valley Girl." And also for eating one of his own turds live on stage during a mid-'60s concert. (The last item being someone's invention, of course, and one that annoyed FZ.)

"Twenty Small Cigars" belongs to a very small category of Zappa recordings that not only documents songs that he composed with emotion, purely for beauty of melody and setting, but also performed without any of the clowning or sarcasm that marred most recordings of such compositions. There are few others like this one in Zappa's catalog. I think it's a gem

Twenty Small Cigars, Frank Zappa (1970, from "Chunga's Revenge," reissued 1995 as RykoDisc RCD 10511), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Today's doke

*

Haha!

But our Republican stalwart might not even have wanted that government job, anyway. I'd think he would have felt morally compromised by having those taxpayer-funded healthcare and paid holiday benefits forced upon him against his will. Farewell, asshole.*

Furthermore, a thought experiment: Imagine how much faster Rachel Maddow or Bill Maher would have been gone than this guy if they'd even thought of wisecracking about labor protesters expressing their Second Amendment rights at Madison.

* Even worse for Mr. Former Indiana Deputy Attorney General Jeff Cox: he was not a political appointee, as I'd assumed---he was in "career status," meaning that he might have some difficulty being rehired in the public sector. And I'd think that even conservative firms would probably want to keep hands off his resume, just to demonstrate "civility."

Separated at birth?

*

Here's a riddle for you on a lazy late-winter night:

Q: What do former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum and fading Libyan Strongman Moammar Gadhafi have in common?

A: They both accuse their homegrown protestors of being on drugs.

PS: "Santorum." Hehheh heh. Heh heh....

Saturday Night Fish Fry

*

A lyric emblematic of the nation I've lived in for the past 10 years. [End of pseudo-topical but not insincere political lead-in hook.]



Oddly, and apropos of nothing, in the back of my mind this song always reminded me vaguely of Jesus of Nazareth. No, really. It may have something to do with the upbeat treatment of the narrator's comeuppance, and my derivative interpretation that Bobby Fuller was somehow really telling us that the law really didn't win.

And in the case of Fuller's 1966 death, the law really didn't win. Accounts of his demise indicate that the investigation was seriously inconclusive, and the purported cause of death (self-asphyxiation by gasoline in a closed but unlocked automobile) seems a bit farfetched as a suicide mode for a successful, rising rock star. Some theorize that Fuller was done in by the notorious LAPD due to his relationship with a mob-connected girlfriend, but if we want to theorize it would seem to make more sense that the mob might finish him off, perhaps for "dishonoring" his young lady or maybe because he accidentally ended up with some dangerous information. Not exactly JFK at Dallas, of course... but then there is that Lone Star connection with Texas native Fuller. Hurm.

Anyway, this is a neat performance from Hullabaloo. I like the rocky jailhouse set, but I think that a few more imprisoned go-go girls are called for here. As always, I wait with anticipation for the crowd-pleasing, percussive six-gun sextuplet (over a whole measure). As a kid I imagined performing this passage with a quintuplet over the measure, instead of six, to indicate a bad round in one of the revolver chambers... perhaps in order to help explain how the law beat down the irrepressible Bobby Fuller.

Personal indulgence detour: As I watched the close-up of Fuller strumming the rhythm solo at the bridge (about 1:20 into the clip), I was reminded of an occurrence at Blackburn College during fall 1977, shortly after I returned there to complete my bachelor's degree. I had dragged my thrift store 45 record collection with me to Carlinville, Illinois, stuffed in a thrift store physician's bag, and came to share many of these '60s sides with an interesting kid named Bruce Pavitt, then from Park Forest, Illinois (near my hometown). I will take credit for first exposing Pavitt, who later went on to found Sub-Pop Records in Seattle, to a number of proto-punk sounds from my 45 collection, in particular "Talk Talk" by the Music Machine. I can't remember if I actually introduced him to "I Fought The Law" or if he previously knew it, but I clearly remember that he was absolutely awestruck by the bridge; as an interested but not highly motivated guitar noodler, he confessed that he had no idea how Fuller played that solo. We listened to it over and over on the third floor of Butler Hall during my "salad days."

I Fought The Law, The Bobby Fuller Four (1965, date unknown, live performance broadcast on the pop music variety show Hullabaloo, NBC-TV), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Addendum: double-dig the groovy band intro provided courtesy of The Serendipity Singers!

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

*

A reader (I think I know who he is) planted a link to this Phil Ochs performance in the comments section of last evening's post. I feel that the lyrics of this song are much more timely now than they were in the late '60s.



I was never a big fan of folk-type singers as a youth being as my predilection was for big powerful urban sounds, so people like Dylan, Neil Young, and others flew under my radar. But whenever someone refers me to a Phil Ochs lyric I come away ever-more impressed with his mind and somewhat disappointed that I was never able to connect with him at the same time a few of my high school pals did.

This song, unlike so many of the era, is not about "recreational" revolution or a vehicle for radical chic, but (to my ears, at least) a very impressionistic thought experiment of what it might be like in this country when a majority of disenfranchised people come to one clear mind about who is the real enemy of America: the parasite class and its vassals. The galactic levels of wealth accreted to these winner-take-alls is setting the stage not for another glorious 1,000-year reich, but for the onset of decadence along every axis of human endeavor. Their heirs will not inherit their drive for earning, investing, and stealing because they will already have plenty of free money in the vault. The parasite class cannot possibly keep a lid on their laissez-faire paradise if they don't even possess the skills to change a flat tire on the BMW. The tipping point---which nobody should believe will lead directly to a New Morning In America---will be defined by the congealing of a common awareness. This will be embodied in the emergence of a new story line about what has really been going on here since the 1970s; a plot that is Occam-simple and explains pretty much everything that has happened, from the repudiation of the social contract to the dissolution of American civic comity to the end of our illusion that anyone can be "middle class" if they work hard and play by Ronald Reagan's rules.

I don't necessarily believe that the parasite class will literally come to the end envisaged here by the lyrics of Phil Ochs (read them on the YouTube page where this video comes from), but I am certain that the metaphorical content is prophetic. Hopefully in my lifetime, but if not, then certainly by the time my offspring are writing blogs in order to forestall Sudoku and crossword puzzle hell. Not that I'm a big fan of flames and violence and the like, but rebirth and renaissance are welcome concepts.

The Ringing of Revolution, Phil Ochs (1966, from "Phil Ochs in Concert," Elektra Records [catalog number not available]), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Aside to AnarchistOpposition: if you are who I think you are, then I owe you a treat from the Lummox Rock files as soon as I can come up with a worthy surprise.

Barometer of pathos

*

I live in a Big 10 university community, which I believe to be the lamest in the conference. I've always been amazed by how little this town has going on for itself in any respect---musically, artistically, socially, politically. But just how pathetic is it? Well, my friends, these twin cities, occupied by close to 150,000 souls, can literally generate only two Craigslist "missed connections" ads a month... and one of them is usually spam!

This city typically has about as much life as you might expect in a place like Tuscola. The leatherfaced men gaze hatefully through dead cinder eyeballs from under the visors of NASCAR baseball caps; all women seem to be upholstered with cottage cheese and cud. I see more fire in the eyes of a single Amish lady on her quarterly field trip to Target than I can sense upon walking the entire length of Green Street in campustown, where the girls seem to use Photoshop instead of makeup, and boys roam in herds from bar to bar dreaming of their next opportunity for date rape.

Take, that, Garrison Fucking Keillor!

The Cheesehead Revolution

*

From completely off my radar I'm now reading about a state governor who has ordered the state police to round up members of the Wisconsin legislature. TPM reports:

...the state's Democratic senators have left the state entirely, putting them out of the reach of the state police who have been ordered to round them up so that Republicans have a quorum and can take up Gov. Walker's union-busting budget bill.

There's a whole separate discussion we might have about the state's power to legislatively "bust" labor unions. But the thing to think about is this: since when in the United States can the executive branch of any state "round up" members of the legislature and make them participate in a session? That is how a junta works, not a democracy.

Can the governor also order the state police to round up members of the opposition party for any other reason? What is the legal theory that justifies an apparent violation of the separation of powers in any state of this union? Does the 10th Amendment permit states to establish forms of governance that are forbidden by the U.S. Constitution? What specific law are the Wisconsin legislators violating here?

An interesting aspect of this executive coup against workers' rights in Wisconsin, again according to TPM, is that

...Scott Fitzgerald, who is ordering the state police to track down the wayward Democratic senators is the son of the head of the state police, Steve Fitzgerald, who in turn was appointed to the top spot by Walker. Steve Fitzgerald is also the father of the state's speaker of the House, Jeff Fitzgerald.

The denial of a quorum by a minority group of members is a legitimate parliamentary maneuver. It's no more obstructionist than what happens in the U.S. Senate when the minority party filibusters bills that clearly have support of the majority. It's no more obstructionist than Ronald Reagan's famous "veto pen," which he smugly wagged into the Kliegl lights the many times he shot down laws passed by both chambers of Congress in the 1980s. So the issue shouldn't be whether obstructionist tactics are legal, because they are, and Republicans are much more adept at using them than Democrats.

The issue is this: is an obstructionist parliamentary maneuver by members of a state legislature illegal in the State of Wisconsin? How about in other states?

This is going to be really interesting. Wisconsin was an incubator of American progressive politics in the first half of the 20th century, and the tradition persists. Nobody knows how this will play out in terms of union busting, but it should give a significant stimulus to the concept of union solidarity in the Cheesehead state.

And in my opinion there is not a single working man or woman in this nation who has any smidgen of "enlightened self interest" in rooting for "Governor Scott Fitzgerald." "Governor Scott Walker" (duh).

For Marginalia

*

In previous comments, Marginalia reminisced about an O.V. Wright single, "Gone For Good." I'd never heard of Wright, but thanks to YouTube I found the song in question. Unfortunately, the poster disabled the embed code so I can't display it on this page. But here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuCrSDFK0vk

Give it a listen. The band sounds very "Memphis," and Wright reminds me strongly of someone---Otis Redding, maybe? I like it: this sound has the unmistakable sound of a very specific place in time, and it makes the intervening years fade from memory for a coupla minutes.

And you're right, Marginalia: you really were cool listening to Stax while your pals were listening to the Rockin' Berries. (Nothing against the Berries, but I never heard them until a few minutes ago on YouTube; don't remember them ever charting in Chicago, but then there was a strong regional rock and pop scene that may have crowded them out where I grew up in the mid-60s. I'm guessing from the sound of those guys that they were a group the girls really "dug".)

Aside to Marginalia: I notice you've adopted an alias. I hope this doesn't mean you've had to enter the witness protection program....

Saturday Night Fish Fry

*

I'll wrap up my current mini soul fugue, as prompted by a flash from Big Hussein Otis in last night's Fish Fry comments Thread. It's my favorite cut by the pride of Harvey, Illinois: The Dells!



Most Chicagoland kids who listened only to the city's two Top 40 stations never heard of The Dells until 1968, with the release of their first crossover single, "There Is." Several more big hits crossed over to Top 40 playlists over the next year, including "Stay In My Corner," "Oh What A Night," and this one, "Wear It On Our Face."

What we didn't know was that The Dells had been around since 1952, and were masters of doo-wop, jazz, and R&B in addition to the soul mode they hit big with in the late 1960s. And what I didn't know until tonight is that they provided backing vocals for the likes of Ray Charles, Dinah Washington, and Barbara Lewis. Neither did I know that the omnipresent Quincy Jones worked with them to help refine their sound.

As inferred by Big Otis in the comments, the Dells were at least indirectly part of the same galaxy that spawned the Twinight label in Chicago, all of them working in the orbit of a large independent soul and R&B promotional firm that handled groups signed to Chess Records, including subsidiaries Checker and Cadet (not to mention national labels like Atlantic, Motown, and Stax). But these guys were the old timers of the scene, all members having been born during the Great Depression---some of them were practically 35 when they released this side, fer crying out loud!

Wear It On Our Face, The Dells (1968, original 45 rpm release Cadet 5599, reissued on CD compilation "There Is," Chess [MCA] CHD-9288), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

*

Maybe the love I'm looking for
Is just a wayward dream
Oh yeah...



Tonight I feel like going back to another Twinight Chicago soul recording from about 1970, which I have in my library on a CD reissue set. These compilations of little-known vintage soul recordings by The Numero Group, which I wrote about a coupla weeks ago, represent something important to me: that first-rate talent grows almost everywhere, and us ordinary citizens would get our fill of swell entertainment without Hollywood, Madison Avenue, Time-Warner, Sony, Disney, and so on.

Listen to the horn attack after the little four-bar guitar intro. That's some top-drawer shit! And the string arrangement is not merely there for "sweetener," but to help sound out the poignant atmosphere created by the plaintive vocalist, Annette Poindexter (the girlfriend of Syl Johnson, the record's producer).

The band is The Pieces of Peace, a congregation of somewhere between five and eight musicians (not clear from the skimpy documentation I've read), which was hired as the house band by the Twinight label during summer 1969. I was entertained to learn, from the Numero liner notes, that this is pretty much the complete band you hear on Young-Holt Unlimited's 1968 hit "Soulful Strut," before PoP signed with Twinight. According to the notes, "neither Isaac Young nor Redd Holt played on that session." (!)

The arrangement was powerful and beautiful, the lyrics innocent and bittersweet. I can think of only one reason, other than possibly a failure of payola, why this track didn't climb high on the soul charts, and that reason is Ms. Poindexter's performance. I don't mean that in a assily critical sense, though, because I personally enjoy it and try to dig in a bit deeper each time I listen. To the casual pop-listener's ear, Poindexter may sound like she's landing north, south and east of every other pitch, and those are the ears that promoters and radio DJs are always surrogating for. So nobody at a Top 40 or Soul powerhouse broadcaster in the mid-60s would likely give her quirky performance, ornamented with gospel sensibilities and half a dozen different kinds of blue notes, the time of day. Sides like this and others issued by Twinight in its heyday were given the "time of night," however, to brighten the hours "east of midnight" for third-shift factory laborers, cabbies, and young African American nightflies in general. In the radio business, this domain used to be known as the "lunar rotation." It was essentially a promotional "limbo" for local musicians, but probably no more hit-or-miss in quality than whatever rocketed up the national pop charts fueled with rolls of hundred-dollar bills.

Wayward Dream, Annette Poindexter and The Pieces of Peace (1970, original 45 rpm release Twinight Records [catalog number not known]; reissued on "Eccentric Soul: Twinight's Lunar Rotation," Numero 013-B), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.