{"id":2144,"date":"2011-03-27T00:02:48","date_gmt":"2011-03-27T04:02:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=2144"},"modified":"2015-09-25T20:48:51","modified_gmt":"2015-09-26T00:48:51","slug":"didnt-want-to-have-to-do-it-and-no-fair-at-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=2144","title":{"rendered":"Summertime, Betwixt and Between"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

Summertime Betwixt and Between<\/h1>\n

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

Didn\u2019t Want to Have to Do It, by The Lovin\u2019 Spoonful (1966), encountered 1967<\/h3>\n

Buy it here<\/a> | See it here<\/a>[1] | Lyrics here<\/a><\/p>\n

No Fair At All, by The Association (1967), encountered 1967<\/h3>\n

Buy it in a different mix here<\/a> | See it in a different mix here<\/a> | Lyrics here<\/a> | Guitar tabs here<\/a><\/p>\n

As I wrote in the last piece<\/a>, we were leaving home.\u00a0 Only not just yet.\u00a0 College started in September.\u00a0 There was all that time between graduation in June and matriculation in September to get through first.\u00a0 This one is about getting through that summer.\u00a0 It was, I think by my own\u00a0choice, a rather solitary time for me, both busy and languid.<\/p>\n

Sitting by Myself Writing<\/h3>\n

All three of us in the Gohn household withdrew into ourselves, under the shadow of the coming separation that college would bring (I was headed for the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, hundreds of miles away) \u2013 and my stepdad\u2019s illness, mentioned in the previous entry.\u00a0 Though to modern ears, conditioned by the way health care is delivered and paid for these days, it may sound incredible, it appears from the evidence that he was in the hospital for most of two months, and seriously convalescent for another month.<\/p>\n

My mother, worn out with nursing him, changing dressings, etc., hardly wrote an entry in her diary, which was highly uncharacteristic of her.\u00a0 And I nearly stopped journaling myself.\u00a0 I also stopped writing to a confidante\/pen pal in Rome.\u00a0 I was too focused on other things. \u00a0But as a side effect, all of a sudden there isn\u2019t much of a documentary record for a while, and I have to rely on my dangerously unreliable memories.<\/p>\n

And what do those memories tell me?\u00a0 They pretty much confirm what one little scrap of evidence tells me, a letter I wrote to my step-grandmother exactly a month after my graduation.\u00a0 \u201cMy summer is perfect.\u00a0 I\u2019m not working: couldn\u2019t find any.\u00a0 So I keep my own hours \u2013 noon to 3 a.m.\u00a0 I work on writing a book between 11 and 3.\u00a0 Nobody calls up and there\u2019s nothing else to do, and so there are no interruptions.\u00a0 I go to every single movie I want to.\u00a0 I share a fairly regular date with this other guy, and have enough friends to pass the time.\u00a0 I do chores around the house, read \u2026 occasionally play tennis or billiards or canoe.\u00a0 I imagine this is the last chance I\u2019ll get in my life for this kind of existence.\u201d<\/p>\n

So I was keeping to myself, and writing.<\/p>\n

The Wrong Models<\/h3>\n

My writing project: the Great American High School Novel \u2013 based, of course, on my own recent past, despite the fact that, on the evidence, I really had nothing to say about high school.\u00a0 I lacked any theme.<\/p>\n

I also was working from the wrong models.\u00a0 There was Middlemarch<\/em> and War and Peace<\/em> and Tai Pan<\/em> (which had just come out the previous year) and Kristin Lavransdatter<\/em>.\u00a0 And Advise and Consent<\/em> (though as literature it doesn\u2019t measure up to any of these other models, not even Tai Pan<\/em>, a potboiler if there ever was one).[2]\u00a0 Epics, one and all.<\/p>\n

Now you can write about high school, or you can write epics, but you cannot do both at once.\u00a0 High school is for sensitive novels about the shaping of the artist, about first love, about sports, and, now that we have YA fiction, about kids confronting various big life problems and social issues.\u00a0 But, in the phraseology of this blog, it\u2019s closeup work, not big picture material.<\/p>\n

And even if I\u2019d employed a reasonable focus, I had no idea about what tone to adopt, and no idea how to shape a story.<\/p>\n

The result, of course, was that the 200 or so pages I completed that summer[3] are about as unreadable as anything I ever wrote.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think I ever supposed they were all that good, but I kept thinking I could fix it all in \u201cpost,\u201d[4] that I could take this shapeless, toneless, theme-less mass and make something of it.<\/p>\n

What I Was Really Getting At<\/h3>\n

And, as near as I can tell in retrospect, there was<\/em> a kind of unarticulated (even to myself) design there.\u00a0 The real<\/em> plan was to write a story in which I got the girl.\u00a0 If you\u2019ve been reading these pieces, you know what had really happened.\u00a0 Whatever else I might have accomplished in high school, I would still have had to acknowledge that I didn\u2019t<\/em> get the girl.\u00a0 As Don McLean so riotously put it (\u201cAll the victories I\u2019ve led\/ Still haven\u2019t brought you to my bed.\u201d)[5]\u00a0 But I think my inchoate hope was that by making sense of it all through a fictional reinterpretation, I could still get the real-life girl to love me.\u00a0 She would read the story and see how foolish she\u2019d been.\u00a0 And she\u2019d come to that realization by reading a story in which a character like her sees how foolish she\u2019s<\/em> been.<\/p>\n

Glancing at this huge unfinished typescript (I can\u2019t really bring myself to read<\/em> it), I think I can see how that reinterpretation was expected to work.\u00a0 The character who stood in for me would achieve a kind of moral grandeur through dealing compassionately with other characters\u2019 difficulties and avoiding their shortcomings, persuading one or two girls (I think I hadn\u2019t worked out the number) to fall in love with him.\u00a0 Maybe, if there were two, he would break the heart of one of them because he had grown too lofty for her.<\/p>\n

That might have been doable, in a jejune kind of way, if I\u2019d had any idea how to plot a story, but I didn\u2019t.\u00a0 I wanted to afford the interactions of a bunch of high schoolers the kind of treatment Tolstoy gave to Russia\u2019s Napoleonic wars or Allen Drury gave to the machinations by which the U.S. Congress came to vote on a presidential appointment.\u00a0 I grasped from these sources that everything that happens is a consequence of a vast number of other events, and that providing a truly contextual understanding of anything requires the recreation of an entire web of human interactions.\u00a0 What eluded me, apparently, was that no one wants a truly contextual understanding of young love.<\/p>\n

Undeterred, I was listening to music that constituted Theme Songs to my one or two ultimate story lines.\u00a0 (This time the term is actually employed more specifically; I was dreaming of having a movie made of the book, and was thinking along the lines of actually having these numbers played in it.)<\/p>\n

The Songs<\/h3>\n

The Lovin\u2019 Spoonful\u2019s Didn\u2019t Want to Have to Do It<\/em> was the music for the story line having to do with the girl who didn\u2019t quite measure up.\u00a0 The singer has had to disappoint a woman who \u201ckeeps on a-tryin\u2019\/ And I knew that you\u2019d end up a-cryin\u2019.\u201d\u00a0 Actually, this was pretty much what had happened to me<\/em>, not to the girls in my life, and I\u2019m sure that\u2019s the real reason it resonated so much with me.\u00a0 It is an extraordinarily beautiful song, with heavy, heavy vibrato on John Sebastian\u2019s guitar (or is it autoharp?), while in the lyrics, Sebastian is continually if reluctantly drawn to the two words \u201cthe end.\u201d\u00a0 But I\u2019ll leave it to a pseudonymous YouTube poster to summarize in slightly technical terms what happens when Sebastian gets to \u201cthe end\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u201cAbsolute genius songwriting and performance. It’s not just John Sebastian’s beautiful “…the end” vocal… After he hits that beautiful Db note over the Gmaj7 chord, we have to endure Joe Butler’s gorgeous vibrato echoing “…the end” with an equally devastating A note (which makes the chord an intolerably emotional Gmaj7\/9\/add Db!!). But then it gets worse (better)…\u201d[6]<\/p>\n

Yes, it does.[7]<\/p>\n

Meanwhile The Association\u2019s No Fair At All<\/em> was the song for the happier love story. \u00a0Jim Yester\u2019s lyric is a scales-falling-from-the-eyes tale:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never seen the sight of you before<\/address>\n
\u2018Till now.<\/address>\n
I\u2019ve never knew that you could feel this way<\/address>\n
\u2018Till now.<\/address>\n
After all this time we\u2019ve spent together<\/address>\n
Just doesn\u2019t seem fair<\/address>\n
At all.<\/address>\n

\u201cNo fair at all\u201d gets sung at the end by several voices, in something like a round, while a recorder weaves in and out.\u00a0 It\u2019s devastatingly beautiful.[8]\u00a0 That scales-from-the-eyes experience conjured up by the song, of course, is what I wanted to happen to the girl in my life.\u00a0 I wanted to be seen in all my magnificence.\u00a0 And since in real life I was a little deficient in the magnificence department, and she seemed quite content to keep the scales on her eyes, fiction was the only route to that experience.<\/p>\n

I know that The Association never gained much respect, as their music was too pretty, and too closely orchestrated.\u00a0 With around six male voices it could call on, and some slick arrangers, it could be called ear candy.\u00a0 (Although I challenge anyone to say that about their anti-war song Requiem for the Masses<\/em>.)[9]\u00a0 I\u2019ve never liked putdowns like \u201cear candy.\u201d\u00a0 If it\u2019s moving, say I, it\u2019s good.\u00a0 So I wear my heart on my sleeve unapologetically for the Association.<\/p>\n

Still, I\u2019ll grant you that it was no summer for profundity.\u00a0 As exemplified by the book I was trying to write, I lacked enough depth, perception, experience to do anything except wait for the seasoning that college was about to bring me.<\/p>\n

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[1]\u00a0\u00a0 This video is someone\u2019s very personal collection of the images he\/she associates with the song, interspersed with some stills of the Lovin\u2019 Spoonful.\u00a0 But the sound is crystal clear and gorgeous.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[2]\u00a0\u00a0 To be fair, Advise and Consent<\/em> (1959), a Pulitzer Prize-winner, still has page-turning qualities; most of its sequels are unreadable rubbish marred by an utterly loony right-wing world-view.\u00a0 The steep decline in the quality of Drury\u2019s fiction has led to him being almost utterly forgotten.\u00a0 But he did move youngsters to embrace politics.\u00a0 Peggy Noonan, Reagan\u2019s speechwriter, has been quoted as saying<\/a> that all the baby boomers in the Reagan White House \u201chad read Advise and Consent and at least one other of Allen Drury’s wonderful old novels about Washington. We had read them in the Sixties, when we were young, and they were part of the reason we were here.\u201d\u00a0 I think what Drury managed to do was animate the process, the procedural rules of political bodies, and legislative life, and make it seem not only overwhelmingly important but enormously interesting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[3]\u00a0\u00a0 There are over 400 pages in my incomplete typescript, but I think half of them may have been written the following summer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[4]\u00a0\u00a0 A bit of film-maker slang my older son taught me when he was being a film-maker, short, of course, for post-production.\u00a0 It\u2019s such a handy phrase I find myself mentally using it all the time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[5]\u00a0\u00a0 Everybody Loves Me, Baby<\/em><\/a> from American Pie<\/em> (1971)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[6]\u00a0 Quoting a poster called blackmore4 at http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=dfqwx7pMsqs<\/a> .<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[7]\u00a0\u00a0 It wouldn\u2019t be accurate to suggest that that was the only Lovin\u2019 Spoonful song I was playing over and over again that summer.\u00a0 I was actually going through the entire Best of the Lovin\u2019 Spoonful<\/em> album (released in March<\/a>) again and again.\u00a0 I\u2019d dubbed a tape of it on reel-to-reel from my friend Walter\u2019s copy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[8]\u00a0\u00a0 It should be strenuously noted here that the version I listened to all that summer is not<\/em> the one widely commercially available today.\u00a0 For some reason, when the song was remastered somewhere along the line, the mix in which the lead was sung by Jim Yester was wiped out, and the ensemble carries the melody in harmony.\u00a0 I prefer it with Yester front and center.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[9]\u00a0\u00a0 Bruce Eder claims in his entry on The Association at Allmusic<\/a> that Requiem for the Masses<\/em> was \u201ca searing social indictment, originally dealing with the death of boxer Davy [sic] Moore.\u201d\u00a0 I can find no evidence in the text of the song, admittedly somewhat abstract, that it has anything to do with Davey Moore<\/a>.\u00a0 Perhaps Terry Kirkman, who wrote it, has said so.\u00a0 Absent such information, anyone hearing the song when it came out in 1967 would have thought it was talking about soldiers and war.\u00a0 I did and do.<\/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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The summer after my graduation was perfect. I wasn’t working; couldn’t find any. So I kept my own hours — noon to 3 a.m., working on the Great American High School Novel. Only problem: I really had nothing to say about high school. But I think my inchoate hope was that by making sense of it all through fiction, I could still get the girl to love me.<\/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":[2275,2411,2470,2472,2476,22,2487,2488,2489,2459,2475,2486,2473,2442,2466,2471,2482,2481,2480,2477,2474,2463,2467,2479,2460,2485,2465,2484,2462,2483,55,2478,2469,2490,2461,2458,2464,2468],"class_list":["post-2144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-closeup","category-theme-songs","tag-2275","tag-2411","tag-advise-and-consent","tag-allen-drury","tag-american-pie","tag-ann-arbor","tag-blackmore4","tag-bruce-eder","tag-davey-moore","tag-didnt-want-to-have-to-do-it","tag-don-mclean","tag-everybody-loves-me-baby","tag-george-eliot","tag-graduation","tag-great-american-high-school-novel","tag-james-clavell","tag-jim-yester","tag-joe-butler","tag-john-sebastian","tag-kristin-lavransdatter","tag-leo-tolstoy","tag-matriculation","tag-middlemarch","tag-napoleonic-wars","tag-no-fair-at-all","tag-peggy-noonan","tag-philadelphia","tag-pulitzer-prize","tag-renaissance","tag-requiem-for-the-masses","tag-ronald-reagan","tag-sigrid-undset","tag-tai-pan","tag-terry-kirkman","tag-the-association","tag-the-best-of-the-lovin-spoonful","tag-university-of-pennsylvania","tag-war-and-peace"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2144","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=2144"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5490,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2144\/revisions\/5490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}