{"id":1996,"date":"2011-03-01T23:59:06","date_gmt":"2011-03-02T04:59:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=1996"},"modified":"2015-09-25T20:35:56","modified_gmt":"2015-09-26T00:35:56","slug":"elusive-butterfly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=1996","title":{"rendered":"Someone’s Hopeless Romance"},"content":{"rendered":"

Theme Songs Page<\/a> | Previous Theme Song<\/a> | Next Theme Song<\/a><\/p>\n

Someone’s Hopeless Romance<\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Elusive Butterfly, by Bob Lind (1965), encountered 1966<\/h3>\n

Buy it here<\/a> | See it here<\/a> and here<\/a> | Lyrics here<\/a> | Sheet music here<\/a><\/p>\n

There are going to be a few times in these music memories when I can\u2019t tell the story.\u00a0 When it comes to this Theme Song, I have hit the first of them.\u00a0 And fortunately it\u2019s less important an omission than you might think, because the story is really not about me, but rather about some people that I knew and still know to this day.\u00a0 Because this time it\u2019s their story, and their privacy, and the major way I come into it is as an observer, which is to say it\u2019s only barely my story, I\u2019m not going there.<\/p>\n

I will say just this: my<\/em> elusive butterfly was someone I had feelings for and admired, and I was concerned for her at one point.<\/p>\n

The song, by contrast, is not about a person, but rather about the elusiveness of love itself.\u00a0 It\u2019s kinda folk and kinda country (covered, for instance, by Glen Campbell and Dolly Parton<\/a>), and as such pretty close to the margins of the kind of music I liked back then.\u00a0 (I\u2019ve said it before and say it again here: that was one of the glories of the Top 40 format: you could hear almost anything, including things you might not otherwise have been prepared to like.)\u00a0 That kind of squareness is perfect for this song, however.\u00a0 It\u2019s about love without earthiness (the Four Tops\u2019 version<\/a> doesn\u2019t work very well), love without cheekiness (you can\u2019t imagine the Beatles doing it), a yearning for love without enough history of success or failure to have bred any depth or introspection (impossible to imagine a sadder-but-wiser voice like Tina Turner\u2019s, say, singing it).\u00a0 From the melody and Bob Lind\u2019s presentation, it\u2019s the call of the hopeless romantic.<\/p>\n

Even in the fall of 1966, the period I mainly associate it with, Elusive Butterfly<\/em> would never have spoken to me about myself.\u00a0 Notwithstanding the ongoing history with Kate, I never thought of myself as a hopeless romantic.\u00a0 I was a little tougher than that.\u00a0 As the person with whom I did associate the song also fortunately turned out to be.<\/p>\n

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for commercial images<\/p>\n

Theme Songs Page<\/a> | Previous Theme Song<\/a> | Next Theme Song<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019t tell the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,968],"tags":[2275,2350,2345,2348,2346,2344,2349,2905,2351],"class_list":["post-1996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-closeup","category-theme-songs","tag-2275","tag-beatles","tag-bob-lind","tag-dolly-parton","tag-dont-be-concerned","tag-elusive-butterfly","tag-four-tops","tag-glen-campbell","tag-tina-turner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1996"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5480,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1996\/revisions\/5480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}