The Feeling

Recently, the heaviest stuff in the world to me has come from the unmatchable talents of Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, and Gladys Knight and the Pips. I won't go into length on the obvious connections between these three artists, rather, I would like to pinpoint a few of the things that actually do run common through them on a musical level. I know there are many more factors that go into making these three acts as badass as they are, but I'm just gonna have to go with they all had great production, they all had wonderful voices, and they all had incredible bands. Three songs recorded by Franklin, Ross, and Knight that just feel so right to me are, respectively, "I Ain't Never Loved a Man the way that I Love You," "Someday We'll Be Together," and "Midnight Train to Georgia."


Lately, "Midnight Train..." has really been talking to me. Maybe it's the perfect melding of driving rhythm and laid-back, smoky room contemplation of bygone (or impending) sadness. If you've ever sat in the upper room (sans communion or tongues of flame) at Spaceland in LA, you may know the feeling I'm referring to. Perhaps it's knowing that the subject of the song realized that it wasn't going to happen (dreams don't always come true... uh-uh, no, uh-uh...), and the awful reality of that stings just long enough before the wonderful truth of his lady's unconditional love usurps the pain of those sun-shriveled raisins of deferred dreams. Maybe I just love it because it was on a tape my Dad bought for me at a gas station right before a trip when I was eleven.

It's gotta be that voice. Just like the other aforementioned goddesses of soul, Knight's voice just makes me feel so good. I could go on and on with adjectives and comparisons and metaphors, but if you've ever really listened, you know the only way to truly describe what happens when you hear that voice, or those voices, is that it just makes you feel so damned good.

In the end, it doesn't matter what it is about the song that makes me feel it so deeply. Feeling it so deeply is what matters. I hope you know the feeling.

So maybe I strayed a bit from my intention of detaining for you what these three acts share. I'm okay with that. Once again, I was derailed by The Feeling.

Mark Kurlansky, or How I Stopped Reading and Learned to Soak In It.

If you know the name Mark Kurlansky, kudos to you. If you've even read his books, please take a moment to high-five your screen.


Ever been completely engrossed in a book that was totally devoted to the history of one breed of fish? I have.

 

I can't recommend this book enough. It's been about a year since I last read it, but I liked it so much I'm constantly talking about it to friends, who, I'm sure, think I'm a moron for getting all pumped up on Gorton's Fisherman. At any rate, my enjoyment of this work truly speaks to the talent of Kurlansky, who has the wondrous ability to take the histories of seemingly mundane subjects and create page-turners out of them. Passages like the following somehow put me on the edge of my seat:

  

The Basques were getting richer every Friday. But where was all this cod coming from? The Basques, who had never even said where they came from, kept their secret.

Kurlansky has my head filled with images when I read something like that. Dark men in dark clothes in dark boats, nurturing a secret commerce and winking to each other when their less-than-successful market-stall neighbors grumbled about the Basques' mysterious source of product. The last fish to truly stoke my imagination in this manner was this guy:

Although I was surprised by many of the things I learned about cod, I was not at all surprised by the fact that there was so much to learn. Kurlansky had done a fine job of prepping me for that by writing this book, which I had read prior to reading Cod:

 

Yep, you guessed it. It's about salt. And it's one hell of a story. Kurlansky, through the tale of the only rock we eat, even turned me on to the language and poetry of the Basque people (who factor in largely to this fish story) to the extent that I had a poem by Basque poet Gabriel Aresti tattooed on me, and my wife and I have plans to have another of his poems done together. There's blood and ink and pain and love all bound together in those little white crystals. 

Next on the Kurlansky list? 

 

If he can turn a fish and some flavor into two of my favorite reads, I can't wait to see what he does with this.

Read Kurlansky, and I promise you, you'll never look at this little guy the same...

Mad ups to my old buddy Jeff Zielinsky for giving Salt to me for my birthday several years ago. Thanks Crazy JZ!

The Bee Gees, or: How I Stopped Worrying About Life and Learned to Love Disco

Monsters of Folk? Seriously? You guys are monsters of nothing but putting me to sleep. So, I guess, now that I think about it, the name works.

Jimi Hendrix was a monster guitar player. So was Stevie Ray Vaughn and so is Slash. Ginger Baker is a monster drummer. So was Keith Moon. AC/DC is a monster rock band. Kool and the Gang was a monster funk band.

And the BeeGees were the Monsters of Disco. Man, those dudes were out of their heads with weird ideas and talents. And check out those smiles:


Dynamite.

"Nights on Broadway" is my fave, and "Stayin' Alive" is simply one of the best-sounding songs of all time! It's so freakin' tight and slinky and sexy. You can just see Travolta in that suit and that dumb-ass grin on his face STRUTTING down the street.

Seriously, I love the Bee Gees. Even the weird early folkie-Ren-faire stuff like "I Started a Joke" and "Every Christian Lion Hearted Man Will Show You" is killer, but songs like "Jive Talkin'," "More Than a Woman," "Stayin' Alive," and "Night Fever"... Dude. So good. So hot.

The Friggin' Bee Gees, man.