"Kinda Wild and Free": the Good Little Bad Girl in '60s pop music

This is one of those posts that has been kicking around in my mind forever. There is a certain genre of vintage pop that can only be described as "class distinction morality tales". Songs like Down in the Boondocks and Dawn ("go away, I'm no good for you")  are nothing but self-pitying screams from "poor boys" who can never be good enough (economically? Socially?) for the wispy, likely virginal maidens they yearn for.

Then there's that other kind of girl.

Not on a pedestal. She don't have no money, her clothes are kind of funny, her hair is kind of wild and free. . . You know the kind. 

Windy. Eleanor. Rosemary. Sloopy. And those others, literally nameless, the "rag doll" and the "brown-eyed girl", immortalized in song and trapped forever in the fiery amber of 1960s youth.

There's something sweetly loose about these girls, the swingin' hair and slightly raggy, thrift-shoppy clothes, a free spirit who might be a little more than free with her sexual favors. It's there, not spelled out, but implied. In some ways this is only a celebration of non-conformity and breaking free from the dreadful shackles of convention. It's as if these guys (whoever they are - there must have been a lot of them) can only find personal freedom through these barefoot waifs who wade right into the public fountain and don't mind getting their (long, swingin') hair wet.

I can't possibly get into all the lyrics of these things - you can play them if you want! But there are themes which can be gleaned from taking a closer look at them.

Windy (The Association)

Who's trippin' down the streets of the city, smilin' at everybody she sees? Everyone knows it's Windy. It's a strange name, and I wonder if she was actually called Wendy in the first draft. This is the quintessential free-spirited-girl anthem, and it's fairly unremarkable except for a couple of truly memorable lines: "And Windy has stormy eyes/That flash at the sound of lies." This is startling, and reveals the core of morality in this raggedy girl who cannot stand phoniness and posing. Windy is going to be a bit of a challenge to anyone who can't see past her out-at-the-knees jeans and split ends. She'll find you out, catch you out, even as she reaches out to capture the moment. 

Eleanor (The Turtles)

This is kind of a strange one: "Eleanor, gee I think you're swell, and you really do me well, you're my pride and joy, ET CETERA". This is the ultimate blow-off of someone you care about: "I love you, etc. etc." - but it's also uniquely '60s, that offhandedness which is a thin disguise for a profound yearning to be captivated and captured by a free-spirited girl. The title of the movie Love, Actually seems to borrow from this sentiment. 

Love Grows (Where my Rosemary Goes)

"She ain't got no money, her clothes are kinda funny, her hair is kinda wild and free. . . " Oh yeah. You might not take this girl home to meet your mother, but you'd take her to the park, maybe even in the dark, smoke up, and get down to basics. "She talks kinda lazy, people say she's crazy, and her life's a mystery" - a common element among these characters, later immortalized in John Lennon's magnificent line: "It's a love that has no past." Like a lot of these girls (and by the way, they ARE girls, not women), there is an element of magic power and even mysticism about them: Rosemary  "really has a magical spell/And it's workin' so well" - that he can't get away.

Hang On Sloopy (The McCoys)

This is the true nitty-gritty, a real wrong-side-of-the-tracks scenario in which Sloopy lives in a very bad part of town, and "everybody, yeah, tries to put my Sloopy down". Sloopy reminds me a bit of "sloppy", of course, but a sloop is also a boat, and thus a symbol of freedom (remember the Beach Boys' sublime Sloop John B?). For some reason, in picturing Sloopy, I think of a girl in a torn grey sweatshirt hanging off one shoulder, and jeans so tight they look painted on. Long black hair and thick Cleopatra eyeliner, like very early Cher. 

The most provocative line, "Sloopy, I don't care what your Daddy do" makes you wonder: just how bad IS he, anyway? A thief, a pimp, a drug dealer, or just the local rag-and-bone man doing a dirty low-status job because somebody has to do it? The repeated chorus of "hang on, Sloopy/Sloopy, hang on" is a strange one - does he mean "hang on to your self-worth", or what? A loose girl hanging on - to what, we can never be sure. 

Along Comes Mary (The Association)

This one has a VERY interesting lyric, which I will actually reproduce here because to me, it has elements of Mariology (the study of apparitions of the Virgin Mary). The tune is basically one note, which is intriguing as the lyrics tumble over each other in one long blurt. But the words are unusually complex, a long skein of poetry with a subtext that is almost disturbing. This song was quoted in one of Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts as an example of the Dorian Mode, though I doubt if The Association was thinking in those terms when they wrote it. You know you are NOT in typical pop-music-land when you hear lines like these: 

And does she want to see the stains, the dead remains of all the pains she left the night before

Or will their waking eyes reflect the lies, and make them
Realize their urgent cry for sight no more

Every time I think that I'm the only one who's lonely
Someone calls on me
And every now and then I spend my time in rhyme and verse
And curse those faults in me

And then along comes Mary
And does she want to give me kicks, and be my steady chick
And give me pick of memories
Or maybe rather gather tales of all the fails and tribulations
No one ever sees

When we met I was sure out to lunch
Now my empty cup tastes as sweet as the punch

When vague desire is the fire in the eyes of chicks
Whose sickness is the games they play
And when the masquerade is played and neighbor folks make jokes
As who is most to blame today

And then along comes Mary
And does she want to set them free, and let them see reality
From where she got her name
And will they struggle much when told that such a tender touch as hers
Will make them not the same

When we met I was sure out to lunch
Now my empty cup tastes as sweet as the punch

And when the morning of the warning's passed, the gassed
And flaccid kids are flung across the stars
The psychodramas and the traumas gone
The songs are left unsung and hung upon the scars

And then along comes Mary
And does she want to see the stains, the dead remains of all the pains
She left the night before
Or will their waking eyes reflect the lies, and make them
Realize their urgent cry for sight no more

When we met I was sure out to lunch
Now my empty cup tastes as sweet as the punch 

Brown-eyed Girl (Van Morrison)

This one is literally about "makin' love in the green grass/Behind the stadium," which doesn't get much more nitty-gritty than that. It's all about having sex on the ground, outdoors, in public. The brown-eyed girl automatically has connotations of a girl who ISN'T blue-eyed/blonde (Aryan? Just kidding) - in fact, this may even be a way to racialize her in a subtle way, or paint her as a little exotic. Hey where did we go, days when the rains came? Down in the hollow, playin' a new game. Laughin' and a-runnin', skippin' and a-jumpin'. . . You know the rest. 

Rag Doll (Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons)

We're not even pretending that this girl is respectable. She's nicknamed "Hand-me-down" by the mean, judgemental folks in town, and is likely called much worse things. "Such a pretty face," Frankie Valli croons in that supernatural falsetto voice of his, "should be dressed in lace". This song has elements of fairy tale about it, portraying a sort of hidden worth that transcends rags and tatters, an inner purity and nobility which. . . well, maybe not. Cinderella this girl ain't, in fact she sounds kind of iffy to me. 


The rest of the town sees her as "easy", but Frankie insists she's so much more than that, and does not even want to change anything about her: "I love you just the way you are." But the last verse takes a pretty dark turn: "I'd change her sad rags into glad rags if I could/My folks won't let me 'cause they say that she's no good." It doesn't get much more graphic than that.

Baby Don't Go (Sonny and Cher)

This is one of my all-time-favorite songs by a vastly underrated pop duo, Sonny and Cher. Sonny wrote most of their hits, including Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves, Little Man, Bang-Bang, and A Cowboy's Work is Never Done - all sharply witty, even edgy songs with smarter lyrics than people seem to realize. He's just dumb old Sonny Bono, isn't he? But without Sonny, there never would have been a Cher. 

He created her, Pygmalion-like, and she even acknowledged the fact long after they parted. She practically climbed up on his funeral pyre when he died skiing into a tree, and completely hijacked the funeral with her sobbing histrionics, embarrassing his widow who was sitting right there watching the production. At any rate, this time there's a twist to it and the song is from the girl's perspective, a teenage girl who has been traumatized by unspoken abuse. She comes across as an orphaned waif who "never had a mother" and hardly knew her Dad, and (of course) buys her rags and tatters at the second-hand store. 

The plaintive chorus "baby, don't go" seems to come from a phantom lover in response to her truly poignant and soul-baring soliloquy. It's as if she must spell out or even insist that "you're the only boy I've had" to try to defend her tattered reputation. The tight chords in the chorus with their astringent dissonance have the plaintive pull of a train whistle in the distance, the train she's about to catch as she leaves that intolerable place, that town without pity (to quote another classic). "When I get to the city/My tears will all be dried/My eyes will look so pretty/No one's gonna know I cried." Those are great lines, along with her promise to "be a lady some day". 

So what IS the scenario here? She has to go away - where, and why? To have an abortion? To evade a vagrancy charge? To get away from an abusive stepdad, or maybe just to prove that the town is wrong about her? It's never spelled out, but like Sloopy and Rag Doll, she has been surrounded by judgement and disapproval all her life just for being who she is, and must escape, must run for her life.

But the melancholy half-promise to that phantom lover adds another level of poignancy: "Maybe I'll be back some day." The implication is that she can't return until she has made herself worthy. I love this particular video from a '60s pop music show in which the dancers, all doing the jerk and the shing-a-ling, are photographed in a kind of kaleidoscope effect, while Cher, eyes rimmed in black Cleopatra kohl, sings this knockout song with a kind of expressionless deadpan. But my oh my, how Cher could sing back then, before she ruined her voice with that godawful forced-sounding vibrato. She sang with warmth, clarity and passion. As with the best poetry, so much is left unsaid, and we must fill in the blanks with our own yearnings. 

SPECIAL BONUS VIDEO! This is the clip with Leonard Bernstein playing an excerpt from Along Comes Mary, a song he was said to have admired for its dynamic chord structure and complex lyrics. Sweet as the punch!

I read the news today, oh boy

A Day in the Life

I read the news today, oh boy 

About a lucky man who made the grade 

And though the news was rather sad 

Well I just had to laugh 

I saw the photograph.

He blew his mind out in a car 

He didn't notice that the red lights had changed 

A crowd of people stood and stared 

They'd seen his face before 

Nobody was really sure 

If he was from the House of Lords.

I saw a film today, oh boy 

The English army had just won the war 

A crowd of people turned away

But I just had to look 

Having read the book 

I'd love to turn you on.

Woke up, fell out of bed,

Dragged a comb across my head

Found my way downstairs and drank a cup, 

And looking up I noticed I was late.

Found my coat and grabbed my hat 

Made the bus in seconds flat 

Found my way upstairs and had a smoke, 

And somebody spoke and I went into a dream.

I read the news today oh boy 

Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire

And though the holes were rather small 

They had to count them all 

Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall. 

I'd love to turn you on.

Last words: a day in the life

It seems incredible that this is the first take of the Beatles' dizzyingly-powerful masterpiece A Day in the Life. The pieces of it are already coming together. Certain elements that will appear in the finished song jump out, such as the weird, disturbing counting that seems to go on forever. You wait and wait for the mounting cacophany of the orchestra, but it doesn't come, perhaps because it hasn't been thought of yet. In fact, it almost certainly hasn't. This is process in its truest, most raw-minded and risk-taking form. 

I just watched a PBS doc - it was OK but could have been better - which took apart some of the most (they thought) influential songs on Sgt. Pepper, particularly this one. But can they get to it? Can they get inside it at all? My God. "Just" the lyric, seemingly the simplest part of it, contains a compressed, crammed autobiography of John, not to mention all four Beatles, all of their generation, and all of post-War Liverpool.

Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire. Mine disaster? Bomb craters? Like the rest of them, Lennon never outdistanced the war and all it did to his country.

It amazes me that the "woke up, fell out of bed" section has already been mapped here, not just roughed out, with that amazing sophisticated McCartney keyboard work. This is literally two completely different songs put together, one inside the other, and though it shouldn't work at all, it does. The workaday McCartney section in the middle, what John called the "middle eight", pulls us into a crazy normalcy that will soon slip sideways. Then there is that incredible line, "And somebody spoke, and I went into a dream . . ." 

Take one? My God. The mind or the ear or memory fills in all the rest, but this is the naked version, not just bare bones but bare genius. That final, silencing, deafening, aurally incomprehensible piano chord doesn't happen here, because it has either not been conceived of yet, or they haven't figured out how to achieve it technically. In the end (so I learned tonight on PBS), they used EIGHT pianos and an organ, which pumps up the sound so abnormally that it is impossible not to be overwhelmed by it. The "decay" lasts an incredible 43 seconds, whereas the average piano chord might make it to 10 or 15. And the mikes are cranked so wide open that you can hear the technicians minutely moving about, breathing. (A side note: more techically sophisticated re-releases of this song reveal that the massive piano chord was still reverberating, so that they could have gone on recording for another five or ten seconds.)

I post this now because this whole thing stirred up stuff in me - can't really describe it, and it made me listen very carefully to the original Day in the Life (in yet another re-release) with its much cleaner, more defined sound. It made my hair stand on end.  It did then, too. What was it about this album? Of course the songs were wildly original, and the arrangements simply mind-blowing in their originality. My favorite effect is Henry the Horse: George Martin took old calliope recordings, cut them up into one-inch pieces, threw them up in the air, and spliced them back together to make a psychedelic crazy-quilt of sound. 

But there was more to it than pyrotechnics. The album was - what? -approachable, somehow. Like someone you knew, and came back to visit again and again. Whatever facet of itself it was displaying - and there were so many of them you couldn't count - it was sure to stick to you powerfully in a place you didn't know you had. 

Most of all, listening to this made me miss John. I don't like the line "he blew his mind out in a car" because it reminds me of his fatally-wounded body lying on the ground outside the Dakota, uttering his last two words: "I'm shot!" And the sense of impending terror - even more naked here than in the final track - is raw in me now because of all that is happening around me.

I read the news today, oh boy. 

I don't mind it for myself. It's the children I worry about. They face so many problems I never had to think about because they didn't exist, and it is harder and harder to be optimistic. And yet, I go about my business day to day, like Paul running to catch the bus, and surprise myself with an unexpected level of happiness. It makes no sense, so I just decided to accept it, a gift.

But it's still there, the undercurrent. God, what is it about genius? You're dead 36 years, and still you express people's unspoken terrors better than anyone ever could, billions of people you will never even meet! How many people who are grabbed by this song weren't (even remotely) born when it came out? How many of their PARENTS weren't even remotely born? How many will get to listen to it, be moved by it, terrified and disturbed by it, who aren't born yet? 

I have a better question. Will they have the chance?

Try to love one another

Oh no. Oh no. Oh no no no no no

Sometimes I get into these FITS where I must make something. Just. . . something, and because I don't draw or paint or sing any more, or any of that, I make gifs.

I got thinking about Detroit (because of that wretched Born in Chatham Facebook page I have disappeared into), and girl groups in the 1960s. Though I wasn't a huge fan at the time, I was aware of the Shangri-Las, mostly from The Leader of the Pack ("Where'd you meet  him?" "I met him at the candy store. . . "). This was the ultimate tough-girl group, and with those little gossipy conversations within their song lyrics, it was all very rough and real.

Remember (Walkin' in the Sand) wasn't my favorite Shangri-Las song, not by half. I was grabbed by a lesser-known one called I Can Never Go Home Any More, about a runaway girl whose mother is taken away by the angels. But this one, this seagull one that's really kind of sappy, earwormed me today, and I HAD to do something to exorcise it. 

I hate cheesy photo montages like death, but I did one, mainly because this song seemed to call for it. The group lasted but a short time, had a few monster hits that I don't feel like looking up, and kept getting back together for concerts (and for all I know they're still doing it). One of the girls was pretty; the other two were not. It just worked, somehow. They were only about 16 years old, and that kind of fame, so fast, has a false bottom in it.

But enough about that. I tried to co-ordinate my cheesy beach images and Shangri-La photos with the music, so that the "remember" part with the seagulls will have the same beat to it as the slide show.

It gave me something to do on kind of a crap day. I just felt like crap, and slept for two hours this afternoon. But enough about me.

WIKI-CHUNK!

The Shangri-Las' "tough girls" persona set them apart from other girl groups. Having grown up in a rough neighborhood of Queens, New York, they were less demure than their contemporaries. Rumors about supposed escapades have since become legend, for example the story that Mary Weiss attracted the attention of the FBI for transporting a firearm across state lines. In her defense, she said someone tried to break into her hotel room one night and for protection she bought a pistol.

Whatever truth these stories may have, they were believed by fans in the 1960s, and they helped cement the group's bad-girl reputation. According to Weiss, that persona helped fend off advances from musicians on tours.

The Shangri-Las continued to chart with fairly successful U.S. hit records, specializing in adolescent themes such as alienation, loneliness, abandonment and death. Singles included "Give Him a Great Big Kiss", "Out in the Streets", "Give Us Your Blessings", the top ten hit "I Can Never Go Home Anymore", "Long Live Our Love" (a rare example of a song dedicated to the men at the time fighting overseas in Vietnam), "He Cried" and the spoken-word "Past, Present and Future", featuring music from Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata". Noteworthy B-sides included "Heaven Only Knows", "The Train from Kansas City", "Dressed in Black" and "Paradise" (written by Harry Nilsson).

Among titles in critics' favorites lists is "I Can Never Go Home Anymore", the story of a girl who leaves home for a boy; her pride keeps her from returning to her mother who "grew so lonely in the end/the angels picked her for their friend". Lines from "Give Him a Great Big Kiss" include "When I say I'm in love, you best believe I'm in love, L-U-V", and "Well I hear he's bad." "Hmm, he's good-bad, but he's not evil." "Past, Present and Future" has been said to be about rape, something Weiss disagrees with. She has said it is about "teenage angst," heartbreak and "being hurt and angsty and not wanting anyone near you."


I know the feeling.

Cynthia on the throne

Get up and dance to the music!

Get on up and dance to the fonky music!

Dum-dumm du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm

Du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm - du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm

[All:] Dance to the Music, Dance to the Music

[Freddie:] Hey Greg!

[Greg:] What?

[Freddie:] All we need is a drummer,

For people who only need a beat, yeah!

[Drummer]

I'm gonna add a little guitar

And make it easy to move your feet

[Guitar]

[Larry:] I'm gonna add some bottom,

So that the dancers just won't hide

[Bass]

[Sly:] You might like to hear my organ

I said 'Ride Sally Ride'

[Organ] 

Cynthia, Jerry!!

You might like to hear the horns blowin',

Cynthia on the throne, yeah!

[Trumpets]

Listen to me

Cynthia & Jerry got a message they're sayin':

[Cynthia:] All the squares, go home!

Aaaaah, yeah!!!

[Trumpets]

Listen to the basses:

Dum-dumm du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm

Du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm - du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm

[All:] Dance to the Music, Dance to the Music

Written by Sylvester Stewart • Copyright © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Warner/Chappell Music, Inc

It took me a while to deal with this song, and it's not because I don't like it. Quite the opposite. I wanted to find the original so I could do a "mondegreen"/lyric clarification on it: none of us ever knew what all the words were, especially not through tinny AM radios in the mid-'60s. And it was intriguing to decipher them at last. The song is an example of soul music at its finest, flamboyant, infectious, full of spangles and stars. Later versions of Dance to the Music, some of them 14 minutes long, really let the band rip, and boy are they good, better than I ever remembered. This version seems tame by comparison.

Listening to a really clear stereo version of this is a revelation. We never had such an option back then. The little "guitar riff" I hear right after "dance to the music" isn't guitar! It's saxophone. Cynthia screams her head off like a banshee, which is great: whereas then, I wasn't sure there WAS a Cynthia. That shows how much I knew. This band not only has women in it (unheard-of in a major rock band), it has women brass players! And everyone knows a woman can't blow a trumpet. Don't tell that to Cynthia.

There was something glitzy about Sly and the Family Stone which would later be transmogrified into the much-slicker Fifth Dimension, but since they had the incredible Marilyn McCoo, all was forgiven in my eyes. I've never heard a voice with greater honesty and clarity, but at the same time, it was plaintive. "Bill!" she keened. "I love you so, I always will. . .Oh won't you marry me Bill, I've got the wedding bell blues." And this was right around the time I met MY Bill. Hey, the pop music of that era is so potent in my mind, so fused with those dizzy times, that I still do a little mental back-flip when I hear Crocodile Rock.

I'm working up to it, I'm working up to it, what I am going to write about. I can feel it coming on like a bad cold. It was the summer this song came out, my sister was home from university or Europe or wherever-the-hell-she-always-disappeared-to, before reappearing with something like an illegitimate pregnancy, a new fiance or a few quarts of very expensive booze. She considered herself to be a Liberal with a capital L, consciously cultivated friendships or at least associations with non-whites and radicals at whatever-the-hell-school-she-went-to, but when she came home one weekend from wherever, I made some reference to Motown music. 

She said, her face puckering in a disdainfully puzzled way: "What's MOW-town?"

I had the radio on CKLW (Windsor/Detroit), like I always did. Hey, this was Chatham, Ontario, with one of the largest black populations of any city in Canada, and a terminating point for the historic underground railroad (which I wouldn't find out about until many years later). Motown music was the pulsebeat of our lives. We were saturated in it. It blasted open the stodginess of this Victorian small town and brought it alive.

So. . . what is MOW-town. I will show you what is MOW-town.

I turned up the radio just as this song was starting. Well, someone on YouTube just pointed out to me that technically it's "soul music" (some might say "funk"), because it was never on the Motown record label. But never mind, it's the spirit of the thing.

To her credit, she did listen to it, all three minutes of it. I don't remember what she said, if she said anything, but her reaction was a sort of puzzled disdain.

The unspoken message was: if it wasn't by Brecht and Weill, if it wasn't by Alban Berg or Rautaavara, it was primitive and declasse and not worth listening to.

You can see why I have trouble with this. Oh, it's not this, not specifically. She was thirteen years older than me, and lived in another universe. I'd go stay with her in Toronto - it was a real treat for me, or at least it was seen that way - and she'd take me (I was fifteen) to adult parties and encourage me to drink heavily, and sometimes smoke pot. Older married men (I mean, in their 30s) hit on me constantly, since I was tender meat and would never say anything. The one time I DID go to my sister, terrified I would get pregnant, she looked at me with an arched eyebrow and said, "Nothing wrong with a little smooch and a snuggle after a date."

I understand all this somewhat better from my vantage-point of being about a million years older. I see now she was likely jealous of the fact that I attracted so many men - and I did, though the sloshing drunken atmosphere at these things was a factor, for sure. She once slashed at me for wanting to go sit in the living room: "Oh, so you want to go in there and sit with Derek and snuggle up to him and romance him?"

The really weird thing is, I didn't even know it was emotional abuse for years and years. The reason is, I was supposed to be grateful for this opportunity to have a social life. They were being nice to me by allowing me to drink and dope among them. And the weird thing is: I was grateful. It was a chance, and I was lucky. A chance at what? I probably had nine or ten full-strength hard-liquor drinks at these things, and went home and barfed my guts out.

What about my parents? Did they not have a clue, or what? My parents turned over in bed and went to sleep, telling themselves my sister and older brother were "taking care of me" and protecting me. But they attended some of these parties themselves, and they knew exactly what was going on. They even watched it happen.

So this song is like one of those jack-in-the-boxes, or those things that jump out of a can - you know, like the magicians have. This is but the tip of the iceberg, of course, and the abuse went on for years and years and years, but the very suggestion that ANY of it was abusive would be met with a "whaaaaat?" or a "Well, Margaret. . . you're crazy", said with a dismissive, who-gives-a-fuck shrug. In fact, "I don't give a shit" was one of her favorite expressions.

The thing is, though, my sister not only didn't find lasting happiness, she didn't seem to find any at all. She gave away her baby daughter, went through men (most of them married) like water, then slammed the door and decided she didn't need anyone. Maybe she doesn't. I am not sure.

I'm not big on this forgiveness stuff that is so fashionable right now, nor do I think I'll be consumed with anger and never find any peace unless I forgive her. A lot of people only pretend to forgive because they feel like they're supposed to. It's the thing, nowadays - you see it on television, on Dateline maybe - someone murders someone's daughter and they forgive the killer. Makes them look pretty damn saintly, so there is payoff. 

You know, this is pretty incredible, but I actually found a Facebook page for my sister, though it was established in 2012 and has two posts. I see this a lot, and I am not sure what it means. Why establish something you're not going to use? I also found a Facebook page for one of her old boy friends. I really liked him, and though he was very nice to me and flattered me, he never once made a pass. That was rare. I found a photo of him, and he's just an older version of himself, and you see the goodness shining out of his face.

But she dumped him. He had problems (her being one of them). He wasn't good enough. So fuck him, he was out.

There's a lot on the internet now about narcissism. Back then, I called it "Pat". It was this inchoate mass, this churning in my stomach, this feeling I would never be good enough and I wanted to die and it was my own fault. Now I know my sister was the queen of gaslighting, and she did it due to the sucking void, the great nothing, the three zeroes at the centre of her own life.

"So now you think you've got your whole life solved. Is that what you think?" This is what she said to me, verbatim, at my wedding. After watching me play Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, her reaction when she came backstage was, "You weren't boring." When I looked hurt, she gave me the "whaaaaat?" reaction. It's just incredible. But that's how it was, and maybe still is, or maybe not. Though I think she is still alive now, and living alone. She'd be 75 years old.

This always brings me around to "where we are now", and it does seem like a bloody miracle that my current family brings me such joy, such pride, so many good times, such laughs. But in spite of what she thinks, it didn't land on my head out of the sky. I co-created this situation with my husband, over 40-plus years of commitment and devotion. Some of it was very, very hard. Can you believe there was fallout from all that sexual and emotional abuse? I once told a psychiatrist about it, and halfway through the story I noticed his mouth was hanging open. "Why didn't you tell me about all this before?" "I didn't think it was important."

I was on the track of forgiveness, and got sidelined. What I can manage, at least part of the time, is pity. I just feel sorry for anyone who would feel that OK about slashing and burning and leaving the scene. I don't think she feels this nearly as much as the people in her path, however. Narcissists are good at dealing out cards, poison-dart tarots of death, but lousy at playing the cards they are dealt.

I'm not sure how Dance to the Music got me here, and I was sure if I followed this path it would take me into some rough waters. I still feel baffled, and I feel pity - I suppose condescending pity, but that's all right. Hey, feeling anything at all, being above GROUND after going through all that, is quite admirable, I think. 

My sister has always called herself a writer, and when she decided to be a novelist, she took home a hoard of my grandmother's old diaries and believed that if she read them, a novel would appear. She kept talking about wanting to get in touch with Margaret Atwood. They were obvious colleagues and just hadn't met yet. The novel never materialized, nor did anything else. In what world would a person like that ever risk shattering her most cherished illusions?

I've pursued my writing doggedly, written three published novels and keep on blogging, I suppose mainly for myself. But I do the work, that's the thing, I don't just talk about it. For some reason, trying to wind this up, I keep thinking of the setting for a gemstone. It has to be held by something, surrounded by something. In my case it was a sort of molten meteorite hurtling down from a death-planet, but somehow or other, the gemstone, the amber or hematite or whatever-it-is, stayed intact. It didn't really crack up after all.

Post-whatever. It occurs to me that my representation of the lyrics to Dance to the Music sucks raw eggs, because you can't even tell what it SAYS. I was too busy being fancy with the text, playing around with colour, etc. So here are the "real" words. I did change one word, sensing a mondegreen. Instead of "listen to the basses", I substituted "the voices", because I can hear an "oi" sound in there.


Get up and dance to the music!
Get on up and dance to the fonky music!

Dum-dumm du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm
Du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm - du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm

[All:] Dance to the Music, Dance to the Music

[Freddie:] Hey Greg!

[Greg:] What?

[Freddie:] All we need is a drummer,
For people who only need a beat, yeah!

[Drummer]

I'm gonna add a little guitar
And make it easy to move your feet

[Guitar]

[Larry:] I'm gonna add some bottom,
So that the dancers just won't hide

[Bass]

[Sly:] You might like to hear my organ
I said 'Ride Sally Ride'

[Organ] 

Cynthia, Jerry!!
You might like to hear the horns blowin',
Cynthia on the throne, yeah!

[Trumpets]

Listen to me
Cynthia & Jerry got a message they're sayin'

[Cynthia:] All the squares, go home!
Aaaaah, yeah!!!

[Trumpets]

Listen to the voices:

Dum-dumm du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm
Du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm - du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm

[All:] Dance to the Music, Dance to the Music

Written by Sylvester Stewart • Copyright © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Warner/Chappell Music, Inc