The Big Picture and the Closeup

The big draw, of course, was the main title and the rest of the source music and score by Herbie Hancock. Unbeknownst to me, Hancock was providing me a brief (far too brief) glimpse of the main current of jazz at that moment: modal jazz. If you listen to that main title, you’ll hear that about half of that brief minute-and-a-half is taken up with powerful rhythm guitar and then blasting trumpets doing complicated things that resonate with the G-major 7th and G-minor 7th chords Herbie Hancock is laying down on the piano. This willingness to work away at single chords for extended musical passages, along with not worrying much about orienting entire pieces toward single keys, is the hallmark of modal jazz. For me, a marker had been laid down.

That was kind of the impression I got of Dorothy Ashby’s harp – that she had some abnormal number of fingers and strings to syncopate with. It was a preternatural experience. Which, come to think of it, is exactly the kind of thing orchestrators rely on harps to convey anyhow. I wanted to locate things that no one else knew were there, not just my parents but my contemporaries. Developing a taste for something obviously objectively very good, not just an affectation, which no one else I knew even knew about, that was one way to do it.

Theme Songs Page | Previous Theme Song | Next Theme Song Someone’s Hopeless Romance Elusive Butterfly, by Bob Lind (1965), encountered 1966 Buy it here | See it here and here | Lyrics here | Sheet music here There are going to be a few times in these music memories when I can’t tell the […]

This Casanova stuff was terribly exciting, but in the psychotherapeutic language we all use today, I needed to process it. And that’s when I had my California Girls moment.

The Buckinghams prophesy that “Girl, I still love you,/ I’ll always love you,/ Anyway.” That’s the way it feels at the time, but of course we all move on, especially from yearnings that afflict us in younger years.

Kate, I guess, continued to date that other guy, Jim, until the school year ended. That summer, she was somewhere else. I knew she was out of town, and yet somehow, I kept finding reasons to visit her home. Not knocking, not asking if anyone else was there. Just walking by. That fall, the fall of 1966, the Four Seasons came out with a song that expressed exactly how I felt, their cover of Cole Porter’s immortal I’ve Got You Under My Skin.

And yet, cursing my ineptitude, I could not get up the courage to put myself next to her and talk, let alone ask her to dance with me. But oh, I wanted to! Then the not very good band started to play once more. This moved fate into my corner, because the band had left a ukelele on the stage. Picking it up and plucking at it, I found I could more or less fake my way through a melody. Kate’s friend broke the ice, and asked me if I played.

When Mick sang “I can’t get no girl reaction,” I’ll bet half the listeners heard what I heard: “I can’t get no girlie action” – which is a little bit more risqué. And on the other hand, I’ll bet lots of people heard “I’m trying to meet some girl” rather than the blunter “I’m trying to make some girl,” which was what Mick actually sang.

Damn! This was stereo! I just kept playing it. I’d keep coming back to those two speakers and the fact that I could close my eyes and lose myself in an imaginary space. I was so taken with the sound that the music almost didn’t matter to me for a while. Eventually I stopped listening to the sound and started paying attention to the record. I’m not sure I found the music overwhelming. I think the effect was subtle, like the very sound of the bossa nova itself. Still that rich Nelson Riddle orchestral palette elucidated part of the truth about bossa nova, which is that, while it may be quiet and subtle, it’s often about passion and excitement. It’s not just in the breathless frustrated eroticism of The Girl From Ipanema On this very album you can hear Surfboard, which somehow captures the thrill of waiting for and then riding a wave.And then there’s Samba Do Avião, which is about riding a plane coming in for a landing at Rio de Janeiro’s Galeão Airport, and looking down at the town as one goes.

It spurred me to try to find shared topics to fascinate her with. Which is where Beatlemania came in. I persuaded my father to take me to see the Beatles’ movie A Hard Day’s Night, largely to have something to talk about with her. But of course, to a teenager in 1964, Beatlemania was like a Roach Motel: you could check in, but you couldn’t check out.