Great thread, Barry!
So Gracey wrote,
>One day I'm driving along in the Austin sunshine, top down, radio on
>loud, and the first splash of "Like A Rolling Stone" comes on the radio
>and I crank it up to speaker-cone shred volume, jam the car a gear
>lower, stomp it up to 85 and hold it way up there close to the redline
>and it feels like musical sex.
>
>This is what music is supposed to do to you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah (oh hey, that reminds me of a single)... but it doesn't
have to be fast, hard & dangerous -- GUYS, jeez <g>. It's not a single,
that I know of (how about that for a thread: not singles but should be),
but the beginning of "If You Were A Bluebird" by Joe Ely, with its cascade
of shimmering notes, makes me feel *deliciously* shivery all over. Then,
the song builds, and builds, oh my my! Actually, "Treat Me Like A Saturday
Night" on the same album does that too, but it starts slowly, builds and
builds, then goes all er, soft at the end -- sort of including the
afterglow, you know what I mean?
They always talk about how the old "cock rock" songs build to a climax,
just like GUY sex supposedly. But what about songs like "Eleanor" by the
Turtles? That song climaxes several times... and ends in an "ahhhhhh." Heh
heh.
Hevvins, my palms are getting sweaty.
One thing about the Era of Perfect Singles (yeah, I Wuz There, with a cheap
transistor radio glued to my ear) was how *many* of them fade out at the
end. And of course the DJs talked over the fade-out.
But for great endings that END, you can't hardly beat James Brown's "I Feel
Good."
I watched that Temptations TV-Bio (the first part with guilty-TV-viewing
pleasure, the last part like a train wreck) and -- wasn't the (brilliant)
beginning of "Papa Was A Rolling Stone" kind of *unusual* for
transistor-radio radio? Seems to me I thought so at the time.
Getting all nostalgic here, I remember the demise of my red transistor
radio -- I was taking a bubble bath, with the radio perched on the side of
the tub. I reached over to tune it in better and knocked it into the water,
right in the middle of "Incense and Peppermints." For an agonizing second
there I thought I was gonna be electricuted, but all that happend is that
the Strawberry Alarm Clock went "glub glub glub."
--Cheryl Cline
