The Offspring of Affection

Song 344: This week on the playlist is the week to hear Love Child by Diana Ross & The Supremes, written by R. Dean Taylor, Frank Wilson, Pam Sawyer, and Deke Richards. In the fall of 1968, not long after I started my HS senior year, this single hit the airwaves, and as much as I might have liked earlier Supremes cuts, I felt like they had just topped all of their previous efforts. In that era I often had trouble picking out the words on a track, and I had enjoyed listening to this record many times before one of my friends expressed moral disapproval at the suggestion of premarital sex wrapped in some of the lines. As the conversation progressed, he also enlightened me about the street meaning of the term love child, which I had never heard before this 45 came along. While a clearer understanding of the message did rattle my ongoing internal religious conflict over enjoyment of the devil’s music, it didn’t dampen my appreciation of Diana’s saga, and when I heard her sing, “Don’t think I don’t want to please you,” I felt quite certain that she did want to please me, which she managed to do very well by the end of the song, with her voice fading into the distance as she repeated, “I’ll always love you.”

Keep On Truckin’

Song 343: This week on the playlist seemed like the right time for Drivin’ My Life Away by Eddie Rabbitt, written by David Malloy, Eddie Rabbitt and Even Stevens. As the 1970s unfolded, the RnR scene seemed to sink deeper and deeper into a sea of slick commerciality, losing much of its soul along the way, but among the occasional bright spots that would still shine in that era came a few courtesy of the country charts, with this one showing up shortly after the turn of the 1980s. While I didn’t recognize Eddie Rabbitt as the writer of the Elvis hit Kentucky Rain, I had become aware of some of his records as he racked up a string of major successes over the previous 2 or 3 years, but this 45 immediately grabbed my attention when it hit the airwaves in the spring, exceeding my expectations, and though he had even greater success with the follow-up I Love a Rainy Night, I soon had my fill of that one, whereas I never tired of hearing this cut. If there’s any truth to the rumor about me playing bass in a country-bar pickup band in the mid-1980s, then it’s quite possible that Eddie’s truck-driving anthem featured prominently in that bar band’s set list. On a side note, this track is a fifth sly reference to the second verse of my own song As Long as Merle is Still Haggard, where the second line begins with But Dwight was only Yoakam when he said Eddie’s Rabbitt died. That line is, by itself, a sly reference to an old pregnancy test, and I did not mean it in any sort of derogatory sense, or as a death wish, but sadly, Mr. Rabbitt did die of lung cancer in May of 1998 at the age of 56. On a happier note, you can find the As Long as Merle is Still Haggard video here.

A Heart in the Right Place

Song 342: This week on the playlist you’ll find Righteous Love by Joan Osborne, written by Joan Osborne and Louie Pérez. As I mentioned in an earlier post about JO, I first heard her on a TV show where she performed songs from her Righteous Love CD, and this cut is the title track for that album. I liked what I heard on the TV program, so not long after, I picked up a copy of the CD, and it quickly found a place on my iPod as well as my CD player. With Valentine’s Day arriving very soon, this record seems like a good way to observe the heart holiday, particularly during a time with so much hate on the rise, because personally, I’ve never been so sure of love, and especially sure of the power of love to change the world. For this 2/14, I sincerely wish everyone peace and righteous love, and I wish it even more so for those most in need of it.

Getting In Too Deep

Song 341: This week's playlist pick is Over My Head by Fleetwood Mac, written by Christine McVie. Sometime in the middle of 1974, I caught Fleetwood Mac on a TV broadcast doing a song about the Bermuda Triangle, and while I thought it was an OK cut, I wasn’t all that excited by it, but I remember having this notion that someday FM would finally get their act together. The following September of 1975, this single hit the airwaves, showing off a finer sound that the group had achieved through a personnel shuffle that included the addition of the Buckingham-Nicks duo, and the LP it showcased made it clear to me that they had arrived at their together moment. Around the time of that record’s release, I made my first and only attempt at ice skating, which went about as badly as my first and only roller skating attempt a couple of years earlier. It was early fall, but back then, Evanston had, and probably still does have, an ice rink open to the public year-round. That bad skating experience remains forever linked with this track in my mind, though it doesn’t diminish my listening pleasure. It sure didn’t feel nice that day to be over my head so often, and a lot more got hurt than just my pride in that room that was cold as ice, leading me to conclude that any further skating effort would be wasting all of my time, but, given how it turned out for the singer and her bass player husband, my dark side was probably not as bad as hers.