A couple of years ago my son Nicholas commented that he found that if he was down that he listened to upbeat music when he was feeling down.  Seems like a simple solution eh?  Well I think he said this to ME in particular because he noticed I had stopped listening to MY music and was listening to my girlfriend at the time’s music, or the music that her son listened to.  She liked the current generation of POP and he, well he was a self absorbed, nihilistic teenager who hated me.  His music was dark, full of violent messages and posturing.  This is a kid who once said that the first place he wanted to go when he came to California was Compton.

Compton.

When I asked him why he said that “…the brothers would recognize that I was a white guy who was black on the inside!” When I pointed out to him that indeed they might, but they also might require further investigation and those would involve a rather large knife I was told that I “Didn’t know NOTHIN!”

Ok…moving on citizen, nothing to comment on here.

I have always been one to embrace what is new in the world, there is so much I haven’t seen and so much I haven’t done, but I have learned that if you take that attitude you risk losing good things you know to new things simply because they are new.  That is especially true in regards to music.

Now I am not going to launch into a tirade against the pseudo-sample-clip-beatbox-rap manner in which music is ground out by artists who have never learned to play an instrument because they can do it in Garageband, Acid or Hollywood. Well, I said it all in that one sentence I think. What I will tell you is that I was listening to a lot of Scissor Sisters, international stuff (I love a good French Chanteuse, especially Patricia Klass) when I made a connection.  Since going to work for VICTORY LANE I have been doing a lot of thinking about the early sixties when I was learning about the world by climbing around on hay bales at racetracks and reading cast off COMPETITION PRESS.  At the same time my sister was screaming at the Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl (I remember hearing all of them screaming from the car two blocks away where my Dad and I waited for the concert to end so we could all drive back to Rialto).  In our house K/Men 129 was constantly playing the Top 40 hits of the time, on Mom’s radio in the Kitchen (it got turned up there when Dean Martin came on, which he occasionally did), in My sister Leslie’s Room when the Beatles weren’t on the HiFi then the radio was on playing whatever.  In the room my brother Bruce and I shared it was Stones if Bruce was there, Beatle or Beach Boys if he wasn’t.  In the garage, well the music was just background to grinding, pounding, welding and laughing so Dad listened to just about anything.

What everyone didn’t know was that little Marty, always advanced for his years, had a secret crush.  I was in love with Petula Clark after I saw her on Ed Sullivan.  It was easy for me to fall in love with her because I loved anything English and she was about a perfectly BRITISH as anyone could be.  Big bubble hair, clear blue eyes and beautiful airbrush smooth complexion. She was a young would be MOD’s dream girl. In the intervening years there were other crushes and loves, they are the realm of every hopeless romantic’s life, but in the back of my mind Petula was still there.

So a couple of weeks ago I was in a moderately goth state of mind, listening to John Cameron Mitchell sing about the ORIGINS OF LOVE through perfectly glossed lips, when a whim sent me to iTunes.  I found myself looking for a lost love, looking for something pure in a world that has gotten scarier of late.  There she was, Pet was waiting for me.  A quick transaction and I clicked on DON’T SLEEP IN THE SUBWAY.

The world got better, I am not kidding.  Maybe it was the flowing tones of Pet’s voice, maybe it was the knowledge that the music backing her up was being made by real musical instruments played by real people rather than silicon dopplegangers (there are TAMBOURINES for crissake!). Maybe it’s because I am a geezer and have closed off my mind to anything new, but I don’t think so.  Somehow I don’t think 40 odd years from now some other artist will be scrolling through a pneumonic store looking for old recordings of P-Diddy.

Or maybe he will, but at least I can whistle my memories when I head off to Starbucks for some Java.

Ciao!