Grass Roots "Let's Live for Today" (1967)

ARTIST: GRASS ROOTS
FORMAT: 7" 45 RPM
TITLE: "LET’S LIVE FOR TODAY"
YEAR: 1967
LABEL: DUNHILL

The Grass Roots’ story is a fascinating one. For starters, Grass Roots wasn’t a band. It was more of a name in search of a band. The name came from the songwriting team P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri (best known for penning Johnny Rivers’ “Secret Agent Man”). They convinced a band called the 13th Floor to adopt the Grass Roots name and perform some songs Sloan and Barri wrote. The songs were also recorded with only marginal involvement of the band. This created a bit of a problem when it came time to tour. Creed Bratton, one 13th Floor/Grass Roots’ founding members (and a cast member of The Office!), recounted that they didn’t “sound like the records” live, because the recordings were mostly the work of talented session players like The Wrecking Crew. 13th Floor traded artistic ownership for near instant success, getting major radio play with a slew of hits like “Temptation Eyes,” “Midnight Confessions,” and “Let’s Live for Today.” The latter, to add yet another layer of abstraction to the Grass Roots’ story, was borrowed from a British-turned-Italian band The Rokes, who originally released “Let’s Live for Today” in Italian as “Piangi con Me.”

I like the structure of “Live for Today.” The verses are rhythmically simple and business-like, almost like a nursery rhyme. The vocals are paired with a slow build of guitar and drums. It’s as if the verses model the kind of rote, frustrating, measured-out lives that could explode, like the chorus does, at any time. That explosive chorus has to be one of the most unforgettable melodies of the sixties: “Sha-la-la-la-la-la live for today.” It’s so indelibly of the era that it gives me a nostalgia for a time I didn’t even experience. I also like how the chorus pulls back slightly with the line “and don’t worry about tomorrow,” allowing us to hang suspended for just a second in a kind of simulated present before giving way to the force of the signature melody’s command.

Like every other self-obsessed, privileged person I’ve been thinking a lot about being “present” and “mindful” — things I can’t imagine my mom ever concerned herself with. Part of this reflection has forced me to catalog moments when I was or wasn’t present and it mattered. Which I’m pretty sure is not what I should be doing.

I often return to the last time I saw my mom before I recognized her mind had gone. This was before I even thought it was a possibility. Given how little I visited home when living in California, and how rapidly her mind went, there was only a year gap between this moment — when she seemed herself — and the next visit when it was too late. It’s typical of grieving people to do this, to hold on to the last moment and trace over it until it’s well worn, remembered, and mythic. It’s just so strange because she lived for seven more years.

It’s typical of grieving people to do this, to hold on to the last moment and trace over it until it’s well worn, remembered, and mythic.

The moment was mundane. I was visiting from California, mainly to see my one-year-old nephew. My mom lived alone in the house I grew up in. I stayed at my dad’s when I visited, so I drove out special to see her in my rental car.

It’s hard to recall much more than a sketch. She was sitting in her spot on her faux-leather brown couch, a well-worn spot (even though it was a fairly new couch) that only she could sit in. It was also the only place she ever sat. As long as I knew her there was always a couch and a spot that was only hers. As ever, there was also a side table full of things: magazines, notes, Diet Coke. She asked brief questions, her eyes locked on the always-on TV.

She was warm, distant, and awkward as usual. Two people couldn’t be more comfortable together, yet we struggled to find things to say. Watching TV — a movie I think — was enough for the both of us. It mediated our relationship. I wish I could remember what we watched, but I think it slipped away.

I was the sickest I’d ever been in my life, on the losing end of a two year takeover by ulcerative colitis. I’d told her a few times before what was up, but she kept forgetting. At the time, I chalked it up to her detached personality, and not the barely used inhalers and pills that sat on her side table next to the Diet Coke; her last line of defense against failing lungs starving her brain of oxygen.

“Are you taking your medication?”

“Yeah, yeah,’ she’d say, in between wheezes, as annoyed with me as she was at the doctor.

My 40-pound weight loss triggered yet another conversation about my health. She had the same pained reaction as before, and asked me what it was like. I downplayed it like I always had with her and just about everyone else, escaping quietly when I could to the bathroom, my ulcerated gut twisting and bleeding. Later that year I had my first surgery. I called her afterward. She feigned recollection of the illness but the surgery was a total surprise. My dad, who’d flown out to L.A. to be there and help me recover for two weeks, was angry. “It’s just mom,” I said.

What I remember most about that last night was leaving. She walked me up to the front door. I noticed a dried up piece of dog shit on the welcome mat. I was a bit taken aback — she was pretty messy, but that kind of thing grossed her out. I pointed it out to her, and she was flustered and dismissive: “Oh, that’s from Courtney’s dog. I’ll clean that up.” We hugged. I remember her slightly hunched back and the feeling of her thin, cheap shirt, probably a QVC purchase. She was choked up like usual, her face puffy and her nose and eyes watery. There was a bird feeder outside, overflowing with seed. I think she said “I love you.” I playfully squirmed away. I backed away from the driveway and she stood in the front door, orange light behind her. I smiled to myself about her dramatic, red-faced goodbye, as if it was the last time we’d ever see each other.

Photo Credit: Thomas Jordan

Every Mother's Son "Come On Down to My Boat"

ARTIST: EVERY MOTHER'S SON
FORMAT: 7" 45 RPM
TITLE: "COME ON DOWN TO MY BOAT"
YEAR: 1967
LABEL: MGM

I don't have much to say about this band or song, but I was obsessing about something while listening to it that I've gotta exorcise. 

Earlier this week I was watching Josh and Benny Safdie selecting some of their favorite films from the Criterion vault. After pulling The Player, Benny mentioned that he was moved by a part of Robert Altman's speech at the 2006 Oscars (given just months before he died). I've excerpted it below, but you should watch it.

I've always said that making a film is like making a sandcastle at the beach. You invite your friends and you get them down there and you build this beautiful structure, several of you, and then you sit back and watch the tide come in. Have a drink, watch the tide come in and the ocean just takes it away. And that sandcastle remains in your mind.

There's a few things about this metaphor that I find therapeutic. First, the centering of creativity on process. Any person who has done publicly-consumed creative work (and believe me most stuff I've done -- including this thing -- has been seen by only friends and acquaintances) can understand the feelings of despair and satisfaction unique to the process. Meaning: the final product, as it's received in the world and, if you're lucky, gets circulated or reinterpreted, never quite matches how it takes shapes to you when the final brick is placed in your mind. There's a special thrill to the mental model made during the process.  If you're like me, inevitably the shape that model finally takes here and now i some physical form is a shadow that, as Altman says, gets swept away. I've always found it interesting who can and can't reckon with that. 

Discover & share this Sand GIF with everyone you know. GIPHY is how you search, share, discover, and create GIFs.

For those in the latter group (me included), I think Altman offers a way forward, in that the "sandcastle remains in your mind." There's something to be said for every person taking pride in some simple, habitual act of creation (not thing created) -- finding comfort in the process and not its product -- both to allay the difficulty of something you've made being dispersed (in those rare instances when a creative thing actually gets seen/heard/read/etc.) as well as the far more common case of your made-thing just remaining, forever, a part of an ephemeral, creative moment that took place. If we're to live good lives as humans we might as well make use of what makes us special, and as far as I can tell creativity is about it.

And while I appreciate the thought behind the oft-uttered advice of "Just finish the damn thing" when it comes to creativity (and to be honest this is some of the best advice for dissertation writing), I also think it occludes the potential satisfaction in tinkering and ephemeral making that has no end game: crude, improvisational sandcastles welcomely swept away. I'm starting to think that that's the real work: the Algebra doodler, the subway knitter, the tabletop drummer, the walking freestyler.

If it's not obvious already, all of this is me trying to come to terms with how my own writing has been going for about three decades. It's something my mom always encouraged, and I guess why this project is this project. Her death was a galvanizing moment for me. It showed me that time might be running out faster than I ever thought (she died at 65 but dementia took her at 58-59). I'm now a person I would've never imagined I'd be: I have a notebook with a multi-year plan for my writing.

Dignan's notebook from the movie Bottle Rocket.

During her time with me, my mom was never that creative -- although she was constantly scribbling in Mead notebooks: making lists, writing short reflections, doing endless budget calculations. I don't recall her doing crafts or creative writing, however. She'd play piano, but only Christmas songs during December. My dad did mention here and there that she'd written poetry. On a couple occasions, my mom even pulled out some of her poems. They were mostly love letters to my dad, stuffed in a shoebox or something like that. I can't recall much of them beyond her quintessentially 1960s-teenage-curly-cursive writing (truly a lost art form) and the aging loose leaf paper and envelopes.

She also loved, as was her baby boomer duty, Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" -- that famously misinterpreted and misapplied poem if you, like me, side with David Orr's interpretation. My mom, like just about everyone else in the world, saw Frost's narrator as reflecting on and affirming his unconventional, non-conformist choices in life (i.e. taking the "road less travelled" which "made all the difference"). She explained this poem to me in this way using her copy of Frost's collected poems, one of the very few books she had that wasn't a biography or cookbook.  

For people like my mom, I wonder how creativity is expressed through home and family?
 

Frost's poem, however, is more cleverly about how choices, in the moment, are arbitrary, and it's in retrospect that we make sense out of them, weaving narratives that apply order to the chaos. For many of us, this means convincing ourselves we broke from the norm and followed the less-traveled path. We string together moments, manufacture decision points, and apply a teleology where everything makes sense. It's a romantic notion of rugged individuality, particularly for Americans. But what was my mom's narrative? Which road was she on? What of her box of poems? I'm not sure, but I do know she supported every one of my ever-altering creative vectors.

For people like my mom, I wonder how creativity is expressed through home and family? Perhaps that sense of the collaborative, generative process can also be applied to the memory one has of being in a household, sharing a space and a set of experiences, building a micro-culture. For my family, our home was, mainly, my mom's -- a kind of exoskeleton bearing the marks of all her eccentricities, from piles of magazines, to Coca-Cola memorabilia, to unopened VHS tapes of Eric Roberts movies. She built something there for sure. It was an artful mess.

Even though our family as it was then is gone now, swept away in a protracted tide of mental illness, divorce, foreclosure, dementia, and death, I'm left with something in my mind that feels created and complete, a fading design carved in the sand. And when I drive by our old house that was once ours and then a bank's and then a house flipper's and now a home to some new family, I just see a house.

The American Breed "Step Out of Your Mind" & "Same Old Thing" (1967)

ARTIST: THE AMERICAN BREED
FORMAT: 7" 45 RPM
TITLE: "STEP OUT OF YOUR MIND" & "SAME OLD THING"
YEAR: 1967
LABEL: ACTA RECORDS

The American Breed's "Step Out of Your Mind" was released as a single in 1967, a year prior to the band's biggest hit "Bend Me, Shape Me." Interestingly enough, "Step Out Of Your Mind" was recycled for that release as the B-side -- and that seems to be where it belongs. There's no question "Bend Me, Shape Me" is the better pop single. Still, "Step Out of Your Mind" surprised me with its lyrics. While they're a bit corny they ride the late 60's line of psychedelia/teenage ennui well. Honestly, though, the lyrics are a bit on-the-nose for a project about my mom's life, mental illness, and dementia.

"You gotta get out of your head
You gotta step out of your mind

You gotta be able to bend your brain
If you want to get on in this world
And you've got to be just a little insane
If you want to get on in this world"

While I'm no expert on 60's pop bands, one thing that struck me about The American Breed was that one of the four core members, Charles Colbert, Jr., was black. While there are rock bands of the period with both black and white members (e.g. The Jimi Hendrix Experience), I can't think of any in the chart-topping world (please let me know of other examples). Beyond the rarity of a not-all-white band 60's pop rock band, Colbert's presence is significant because he makes visible the occlusion of black influence on just about every record of the era.

Cover of Pumpkin, Powder, Scarlet & Green LP

Of course, I had to find out more about Colbert. Prior to joining The American Breed, Colbert was active in the Chicago doo-wop and soul scenes as a member of The Trinidads and The Daylighters. After The American Breed he's had a varied career, starting the funk band Rufus (which later featured Chaka Khan), producing records, and singing backup on Peabo Bryson's "Feel the Fire" among other things. I find myself drawn, specifically, to Colbert's work in the Daylighters.

The first of those tracks, "Cool Breeze," was recorded prior to Colbert's tenure with the group and written by Gerald Sims. The second track, "Oh Mom," was written by Colbert, and, I believe, backed by Gary and The Knight Lites who Colbert helped found and would eventually become The American Breed. Colbert's influence on the Daylighters sound is tangible, shifting the group away from the crooning and harmonies of doo-wop to the driving beat and raspy vocals of rock and soul. It's as if he and The Knight Lites were using the Daylighters to prototype their band's sound.

My mom wasn't much of a doo-wop fan. I think it was just a tad before her time. But, like most metro-Detroiters and kids of her generation, she was obsessed with Motown, which energized the doo-wop sound with denser instrumentation and faster beats. I think that's why she would've preferred Colbert's version of the Daylighters. And maybe, like for me now, it was Colbert's contributions that made The American Breed connect.

Postscript

You might've noticed "Oh Mom" has a subtitle: "Teach Me How To Uncle Willie." If you're like me, then you have no idea what this dance is. Well, watch as this half-in-the-bag guy -- who may or may not actually be named Willie and an Uncle -- demonstrates.

Tommy James & the Shondells "I Think We're Alone Now" & "Gone, Gone, Gone" (1967)

Artist: Tommy James & the Shondells
Format: 7" 45 RPM
Title: "I Think We're Alone Now" & "Gone, Gone, Gone"
Year: 1967
Label: Roulette

Talk about a song that doesn’t out stay its welcome. Tommy James and the Shondells’ “I Think We’re Alone Now” fades out at the two minute mark. (The b-side, “Gone, Gone, Gone,” does too.) It has the feeling of a song that wove a magical hook but could only stretch it so far. Even so, I can’t help but love it as pop schlock in its pure, uncut form. In that sense, at least, it’s near perfect. Not surprisingly bands, particularly punk bands who seems to take reducing the song’s short run time as a challenge, have mined the song’s depths. (Screeching Weasel got the song down to a blistering 60 seconds and completely divested it of any pop sentimentality.) Tiffany’s 1987 take is the most well-known, hitting #1 twenty years after the song’s initial release. Strangely enough, Billy Idols’ cover of Tommy James and the Shondell’s “Mony Mony” was #2 (and later #1 as well) at the same time.

I’ve long appreciated pop’s deep scratching of musical itches. Well, at least since the late nineties. It was then that my friend Scott re-introduced me to Depeche Mode. They were just barely cool and interesting enough to start eroding my metalhead ego and open my mind. But ultimately, it was my mom’s influence that prepped me to fall hard for pop hooks. Her record collection is chock-full of pure pop acts like Tommy James and the Shondells, Herman’s Hermits, and The Turtles. Her favorite band was Sonny and Cher. I remember her blasting, on repeat, All-4-One’s “I Swear” on her bedroom’s boombox in 1994. She found value, maybe solace, in the superficial.

I don’t know that she saw depth though, but I tend to. On its face, there seems to be nothing but chorus and melody in “I Think We’re Alone Now,” and little to dig into lyrically. It feels abbreviated in almost every way. So why does it work? There’s a surprisingly clever unity between narrative and form in the song: a young couple running into the night, escaping the adult world that sees them as too young to be publicly in love. In this context, the rush of the song seems to fit. It’s as if we’re part of the paternal gaze, and just as they find their way out we’re shut out too. While a bit corny, the bass line, mimicking footsteps and heartbeats, also matches the narrative. This muted, driving eighth-note bass line -- the song’s defining feature -- was spur-of-the-moment invention by Tommy James as he and the song’s producers transformed a slower ballad into a light pop song. In his view, the bass line, along with the fourth-note piano punctuation and nasally vocals, invented bubblegum pop. 

Tommy was only 20 when “I Think We’re Alone Now” was #4 on the Billboard Hot 100. My mom was 16. It’s weird to think of Tommy James and the Shondells being a boy band, but they were. They started in Niles, MI when Tommy was still in high school. He toured Michigan and the midwest, so it’s no surprise how many of his records appear in my mom’s collections. She was the bullseye of the target market.

"She found value, maybe solace, in the superficial."

When my mom was my age in 1987, Tiffany’s version of "I Think We're Alone Now" was everywhere. The following summer, my neighbors and I formed a "band." We didn't play music though; we acted it out, using tennis rackets as guitars, a keyboard cobbled together with Construx, and a toy mic. I was the drummer, and I set up shop in a large, cushioned armchair. My drum sticks were blocks, and my drums were a random assortment of buckets balanced on the chair's edges. The cymbals were frisbees. We'd lip sync and mime along to a mix tape of songs like Genesis' "Invisible Touch," The Bangles' "Walk Like an Egyptian," and our big closer George Harrison's "I Got My Mind Set On You."

I'm pretty sure we also played Tiffany's "I Think We're Alone Now."

My mom, along with the other band members' moms, put together a concert for us. It was one of those summer days that only happen when you're a kid. Summer then was a time without time when hours and days were left behind. Hot pavement gave way to crickets and back again. Life was a slowly widening expanse when it was free of school bells. Somewhere in there in 1988 this concert happened. The moms made us shirts. They were bright red with chest pockets. One mom, Mrs. D., decorated them with puffy paint and personalized them for each band member and his instrument. Everyone gathered for the big show in my neighbor's basement. We queued up the songs on a gray boom box (you know the one). We'd practiced for days ahead of time, and took it very seriously. Not long into the set the youngest kid on the block, Danny, invaded my drum set. I was so mad that he'd ruined my perfect show and taken my spotlight. It's so hard to imagine now taking anything so seriously. Still, I was proud and felt as if I’d really accomplished something. Thinking back it’s a good metaphor for my creative life: mostly half-assed simulation.

For some reason, much of my memory of that day is filtered through my mom's experience. She loved it and talked about it often. At the time, I can remember her making me feel special, as if I was actually talented, while also enjoying, without mockery or irony, how absurd and funny it was. It took me a long time to find that perspective, but I think I have. 

"Summer then was a time without time when hours and days were left behind."

And yet, every similarity with her scares me. I wonder if my mind is like hers, and is doomed at 58. Are there only twenty two years left? This dread is the engine of this project, for better or worse.

She thought this way too, fearing Alzheimer’s all her life. I’m not sure why; I think there might’ve been a family member with it, but my family is so fractured it's hard to know for sure. Alzheimer's is on her death certificate, but I got the sense there wasn't much effort put into the diagnosis which is probably how dementia goes for many people with a public guardian. . 

It’s just as likely that my mom's  COPD starved her brain of oxygen, a kind of self-inflicted Alzheimer’s from decades of chain smoking and neglect. My sister says a doctor told my mom this was gonna happen if she didn't keep up with her meds. My mom, however, was the self-sabotaging type. When she quit smoking, she ate so many starlight mints that she destroyed her teeth. Our dentist said he’d never seen anything like it.

One of the last times I talked to her she was wheezing terribly. I asked her if she'd been taking her inhaler. "Yeah, yeah, yeah," she said in that way that I knew meant, "No, no, no."

Ever-nostalgic and sentimental, my mom saved my band shirt from the summer of '88. She stuffed it in the hallway closet outside my bedroom along with other odds and ends from me and my sister’s lives. Nearly thirty years later, I found the shirt -- almost good as new having only been worn once -- while digging in my grandma’s garage. I stumbled on it while searching for the records for this project.

The shirt's in my underwear drawer now.

Martha & the Vandellas "Jimmy Mack" & "Third Finger, Left Hand" (1967)

ARTIST: Martha & the Vandellas
FORMAT: 7" 45 RPM
TITLE: "Jimmy Mack" & "Third Finger, Left Hand"
YEAR: 1967
LABEL: Gordy Records

"Jimmy Mack" is one of those songs that seems like it was unearthed rather than composed. It's simple and timeless with a hook that you just want to hear over and over. Lamont Dozier discovered it and broke it free in 1964 after seeing the mother of "He's So Fine" writer Ronnie Mack accepting an award on his behalf. This somber context comes through in the song which while guided along by upbeat handclaps finds its true center in Martha Reeves' measured vocals which aren't lovestruck, sugary-sweet, or even distraught, but instead full of conflict over Jimmy's absence: do I hold out or move on? 

While Martha and the Vandellas released "Jimmy Mack" on their Watchout! album in 1966, it didn't get put out as a single until a year later under the Gordy Records imprint. This was near the height of the Vietnam War with 485,600 US troops deployed. There's no doubt this added a special resonance to the song's central refrain -- "When are you coming back?" -- taking an already irresistible song to #1 on the R&B charts (and #10 overall). There's speculation that Barry Gordy waited a year to release the song as a single because he feared it'd be inappropriate for Motown to promote a record about an absentee lover in the early days of an uncertain war. By '67, however, anti-war sentiments had grown, making the message both more relevant and palatable for Motown's mass audience.

My dad, whose draft number was low (047) was able to get college deferments. Still, Vietnam was a presence in my house, my neighborhood, among my friends, and still is. Vietnam was/is pure trauma. For one of my closest friends, it's a thing that defines his dad to this day. He, like many veterans, says little, but the war is always there somewhere. What does make its way out is tragic and damaged. There's none of the grim heroism of so many WWII stories. Nostalgia never took hold.

Both my parents were anti-war, but my mom in particular. She'd often tell me (especially in the days of the Gulf War) that if a draft were to happen, she'd get me to Canada. I didn't doubt it. I grew up feeling that my family, for a generation, had dodged a bullet. It was odd when I eventually worked with a wife of a Vietnam vet who insisted the US won the war, and it was a just cause. I suppose I understood why they needed that to be true. 

"I grew up feeling that my family, for a generation, had dodged a bullet."

Growing up, we played "guns" a lot. It wasn't much more than running around the neighborhood or nearby forest making gun noises or recreating our favorite movie scenes. As we got older, our play grew more sophisticated thanks to clothing and equipment from the Army surplus store or garage sales, almost all of it from the Vietnam or Korean War. 

It was the 80s, and both Sheena Easton and Sandii and The Sunsetz had their own upbeat versions of "Jimmy Mack." War was either cold and distant or fictionalized and exotic, a playground for Stallone and Schwarzenegger in made up jungles like Val Verde. Our backyard neighbors, the L.’s, invited me over the fence to their garage sale one afternoon. Their fence wasn’t hoppable (every kid knew whose was and wasn’t), so I  rounded the block on my Huffy. 

Mr. L. led me through their garage sale and into their house. He was, I imagine, in his late 40s or early 50s, with glasses that matched his squared and rounded frame. He had a standard issue side-part haircut — basic brown — like mine now. I’d never been inside his house, but it had orbited my life for as along as I could remember. Any new house, especially those I knew well but hand't visited, felt electric and revelatory. To me, houses held the key to people. My own house was a reflection of my mom — a hazy, messy cornucopia, full of stuff to be discovered. It held little imprint of the rest of us. It was one of the spots on the street any kid could feel welcome, and I’m sure the other parents were happy my mom carried that burden. 

I don’t remember much of the L.’s house. We went into the basement where Mr. L. explained he had other stuff that didn’t quite make the cut for the sale. It felt, at least, like these were special things not for everyone, and, well, I was his backyard neighbor after all. I don’t remember much of the stash beyond what I took: a couple faded Army green satchels. They were frayed and scuffed with use, sun and water damaged. I didn’t know where they’d come from or what they were for; I hadn’t even put together at the time that they were Mr. L.’s. I just felt some history there and thought they looked cool. Mr. L. had held onto them all these years. His own boys had played with them, but they were teenagers now. I imagine he wondered what purpose they served sitting there in the basement. 

Those satchels were mine for years. We’d use them to play Rambo or Predator. As we entered junior high we even brought them into the woods to camp, stuffing them with fireworks and cans of Hormel chili. Over time I pieced together their history just as my militarism turned to pacifism. 

"My own house was a reflection of my mom — a hazy, messy cornucopia, full of stuff to be discovered."

I imagine after one of those camping trips — maybe the one the cops broke up when we were too old to be doing what we were doing — the satchel made its way into my mom’s basement. It sat there for fifteen years while her dementia worsened. I was away at school and real sick when things turned: a loan was forgotten, the bank foreclosed. My sister was there when my mom’s house was cleaned out. I told her a few things out of the thousands to save. A guitar. Comic books. Some videos. No satchels.

The Supremes "The Happening" & "All I Know About You" (1967)

ARTIST: The Supremes
FORMAT: 7" 45 RPM
TITLE: "The Happening" & "All I Know About You"
YEAR: 1967
LABEL: Motown Records

50 years ago this month "The Happening" topped the Billboard singles charts. The film this song supported, also titled "The Happening," flopped and was widely panned. (Bosley Crowther's New York Times review ends viciously: "It isn't as long as 'Lawrence of Arabia,' and that's the only good thing to be said for it.").

Both the song and film were, in some way, inspired by artist Allan Kaprow's concept of a "happening": a somewhat spontaneous, somewhat planned art event, often involving the audience as participant rather than observer. Happenings aimed to inhabit and expand the shared space between art and life, blurring the boundaries like a pair of discarded glasses drawing crowds at a gallery. It was a movement contemporaneous with John Cage's conceptual performances and Fluxus' playful, avant-garde re-configuration of art practice.  

It's hard to imagine the out-there work of Kaprow making its way into pop vernacular ("What's happening?") and spawning a hit song and wide-release film, but it did. In fact, it caught on so much that Kaprow promptly ditched the term, feeling that it had escaped him and been mis-appropriated. The Supremes' song, however, written by super team Holland-Dozier-Holland along with Frank De Vol (the film version's music director), has some striking lines that allude, quite faithfully, to Kaprow's work. They cleverly refract happenings through the perfunctory romantic context of a Supremes song:

Hey life, look at me
I can see the reality
'Cause when you shook me, took me, outta my world
I woke up
Suddenly I just woke up to the happening

Is it real?
Is it fake?
Is this game of life a mistake?

I like to believe that these references to seeing differently and acknowledging artifice are riffs on the meta-commentary that happenings offered the art world.

Beyond the surprising allusions in the lyrics, there's another power to this track and other Motown singles like it: they're just flat out louder. This is something I've noticed while digitally transferring Motown music alongside other labels. It seems the Motown formula was not just to be universally and irresistibly appealing, but to shock you to attention. In a way they had their own Spector-esque "wall of sound." Instead of deep, resonant reverb (although there is a bit of that) there's highly emotive performances, both vocally and instrumentally.  "The Happening" could be a fairly low key R&B song, but it is instead a flood of noise jarred by some tempo changes. In some ways it mirrors Diana Ross's radiant performances, which crackled with personality in a way you didn't see very often in groups of the era. She was able to balance the Motown-mandated live-performance polish with a Diana-specific flourish of casual, personable gesture and delivery. 

You can see this personality -- winks, nods, and bobs -- in The Supreme's performance of the song from The Ed Sullivan Show, a show The Supremes performed on many times, but this one was a bit more special. It just so happened that "The Happening" hit during the Montreal World's Fair -- branded Expo 67 -- and Ed Sullivan was broadcasting live from the event. The Supremes traveled to Montreal to perform live on the show on Sunday, May 7, 1967. 

The Supremes at Expo 67 in Montreal

I bet my mom watched this live. The Supremes were ever-present when I was growing up with her in the suburbs of Detroit. My mom would listen exclusively to Oldies 104.3 (WOMC) during car rides and at home, and as a byproduct I know the lyrics to just about every major Motown single. "The Happening," however, is missing from my memory. The first time I heard this song wasn't a cigarette smoke-filled car ride to the local coney island, but when I started writing this post. 

Since my mom died, I've been thinking a lot about these tiny unknowable details about her life, and all life, that disappear in death: every memory, decision, thought, conversation, experience, movement, sensation, emotion, creation, and on and on. So much of this is shed like skin throughout life, but, if my mom is anything like me, a lot is purposefully locked away. We accumulate a lot and share only a little in sanctioned bits of confession -- a spontaneous heart-to-heart, a drunken night, a post-breakup email, a funeral. Some are better at this than others, but I've always found it mentally and physically challenging to express myself. I think my mom did too. I mean let's be clear here: this blog scares the shit out of me. I worry it's bad, self-indulgent, pretentious. As I type I'm fighting the urge to delete it all and retreat.

I continue it would seem out of a sense of service to these unknowable aspects of my mom's former life. That is, after all, the pitch behind this project. But, if I'm being honest, it's a facade to protect the liminal, risky space my mom's death opened up here between what I've lived and performed, experienced and communicated. That is, I hope, something worth saying.

James Brown "I Got You" & "I Can't Help It" (1965)

Artist: James Brown & The Famous Flames
Format: 7" 45 RPM
Title: "I Got You (I Feel Good)" & "I Can't Help It (I Just Do-Do-Do)"
Year: 1965
Label: King Records

I don't recall my mom liking James Brown, but how can you not like this record? There is, of course, the ubiquitous "I Got You," but, for me, the real star here is the b-side: "I Can't Help It." It's a flip in tone from the bursting bravado of the a-side; a melancholy, yearning, unrequited love song -- the kind of track that would calm a dance floor and let people, and the room, breathe. It's also a song you can see appealing to a 14-year old girl, especially one like my mom: deeply emotional and the sappiest of romantics.

The song bears Brown's signature conversational lyricism that feels wonderfully improvised, casual -- "If you were me, would you take it?" And, as always, there's the hopping horns and guitar that Brown rides. This creates a wonderful tension in Brown's music. His performance is so large and vital that it almost exceeds what the backing band can bear. The song is always on the edge, about to give way. Brown screams and sweats. He walks off stage and comes back. He orbits the band who press on, only to return to their comforting rhythms, bob along, and then spin out again.

My mom could be like this at times. In a family of quiet, non-confrontational, introverted types -- of which my mom was one -- she had a tendency that was foreign to the rest of us. She'd explode. She'd strike suddenly like lightning, and we'd wait for the storm to pass: maybe hours, maybe days, and sometimes months. Often it'd pass with no closure, and we'd all take a breather and wait. The event was the event, and inside of it was its cause, meaning, and resolution. Only later did I recognize that in those moments was a yearning. We all could've done more to help.

"He orbits the band who press on, only to return to their comforting rhythms, bob along, and then spin out again."

One of the last times I saw my mom she was in a run down nursing home in Detroit. She was impossibly thin and aged. Everyone else on her floor was silently surrounding a TV in an adjacent room. She was slumped in the hall in a wheelchair, noisy and unsettled. I dragged a nearby chair to her side and set down. There wasn't much to say at this point. She pounded on her armrests, her neck and face muscles tight as she battled to verbalize. Words and sentences came out here and there, but they seemed like messages from someone or somewhere else.

I sat there awkwardly for a half hour saying nothing important. She kept grabbing my hands and kissing them; it was not all like her. The nurses said she did this to everyone; it was common among people with severe dementia.

"Only later did I recognize that in those moments was a yearning."

I got up to go and said goodbye. It felt like her contorting got worse. She turned her head which settled into a slow side-to-side bob. She stuttered out a mixture of groans and half-words, then, finally: "I thought you didn't love me anymore."

"No," I said, not sure who I was talking to. "I do. I do. And always did." She didn't respond. I left her in that hall. She didn't seem to notice.