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Thursday, October 18, 2007
I'M NOT LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE
The Chocolate Watchband
1966
Available on : Melts in Your Brain Not on Your Wrist: The Complete Recordings
Big Beak UK : 2005
[Buy It]
I'M JUST LIKE YOU
6ix
1971
Available on : What It Is! Funky Soul and Rare Grooves (1967-1977)
Rhino : 2006
[Buy It]
I BELIEVE I FOUND MYSELF
Sir Stanley
1970
Available on : Chains and Black Exhaust
Jones : 2002
[Out of Print]
DO UNTO OTHERS
Pee Wee Crayton
1954
Available on : Complete Aladdin and Imperial Recordings
EMI Int'l : 1996
[Buy It]
SICK OF MYSELF
Matthew Sweet
100% Fun
Volcano : 1995
[Buy It]
LET ME BE MYSELF
Roscoe Robinson
Paula : 1971
[Out of Print]
I once had a problematic friend, a writer, who would always tell me how the world was a place of moral drought and psychological dropsy. She talked like that. She was problematic to me not because she was inherently annoying--she was, but she was my friend--but because of a habit she had of saying something preposterous and then turning to me and saying, "You understand what I mean, I'm sure, because you're exactly like me." Later on, I had another friend who did something similar. When someone offended his sensibilities, he would say, "They're not like us." I found this troublesome, as he was a neo-Nazi. No, no. Just kidding. I found this troublesome because he wasn't me. Who wants to be lumped in like that? My individuality, which can't be separated from my separation from others, is one of the few things I really own. I don't mind bonding with other people, but I want it understood that we're different individuals choosing to agree on something temporarily. There are a million ways to disagree, and that's why this temporary agreement is miraculous. If you listen to "I'm Not Like Everybody Else," either the Kinks original or the superb Chocolate Watchband cover, you'll see why identity is such a vexed issue. This whole anxiety reached its nadir a few years ago. I was in line at a Wendy's and there was a little person ahead of me--an actual little person, not just a small guy--and I noticed from the leather tag on the back of his jeans that he wore the same size pants as me. His were cuffed or cut, obviously. I am six feet tall. In the car with my wife, I made a big comic production of being bothered to conceal how deeply bothered I actually was.
All of these traumatic experiences have led me to develop a rule: People aren't just like me and I'm not just like them, unless I'm not looking closely enough. Different strokes for different folks, as Sly Stone said. Though, of course, Sly also said "I'm just like you." The song in which he said it, conveniently titled "Just Like You," was written and produced for a group called 6ix, and it's a skeletal, spooky bit of business built on sparse percussion and Charles Higgins's vocalsCross the track and take a look
Turn the page and finish the book
Yeah I know that scares you too
I know how you feel I'm just like you I read it as sarcastic.
Now, of course, there is a conspicuous exception to my rule, and that's romance, or more specifically the first phase of romance. You don't have to be like everybody else, but everybody needs somebody to love, right? And sometimes you can get off by recognizing how different you are from the woman or man you're dating, but just as often, you get off on the similarity. It might be narcissism (on Seinfeld, didn't Jerry marry a woman who was exactly like him?) and it's certainly not true, but the draw is powerful. People are always telling their lovers that they were lost without love, that without love they were nothing, that love helped them find themselves. One of those people is Sir Stanley. Actually, to be honest, I'm not sure if Sir Stanley is the name of the singer or the band, but either way, the song remains scorching:The woman that I got
She fulfills my ever hour
I believe that I have all I need
To live my life just as I please Between friendship and romance, there's a third category: friendship between men and women. I have written about this before, particularly about the way that romance (call it sex if you want) grows through the cracks in the pavement. You can stamp it down, of course. You can call for the city to come out and fix the sidewalk. You probably should. But while you're waiting for the crew to arrive, it's worth thinking about exactly what it is that's sprouting up. Years ago, I had a female friend who passed through a period of extended romantic misery. As I was not the cause of her misery--and as I was in the kind of stable relationship that she envied, or at least thought she envied--I got to hear all about her sadness. I listened with the right mix of sympathy and amusement, gave some advice, withheld other advice. Then one Friday night she was going off on a date she assumed would be another terrible date. It seemed so: the guy was a neo-Nazi. (Again, kidding.) But I didn't hear from her Saturday, didn't hear from her Sunday, and finally ran into her Monday on the way to work. The date had gone well: seventy-two-hours well. Her hair was a mess. I told her I was happy to hear it. She said she was glad to see me. We were both lying.
I went to work feeling terrible. I went home and fought with my wife. Here's a good question: why? Some would speculate that I had feelings for that friend, and that I was feeling jealousy that stemmed from the thought of (as opposed to the fact of) her seventy-two hours of continuous screwing. When you imagine a carpentry job, it's never with someone else's hammer. But I think it's even simpler than that. I think I missed her and worried she wouldn't return the friendship intact. When you get especially close to someone else, when that person permits you to see his or her fears, lusts, and hopes, you start to take ownership of that person, and that person of you. Leakage occurs. That's an exhilarating feeling. I think they call it intimacy. But it's also a terrible feeling, because it's nonsense, or at the very least unsustainable. It's a high and it's illusory. It's like standing on a cloud.
This is something you learn in marriage, which may start as an exercise in this ecstatic leakage but usually becomes a push and pull of drawing your partner close and pushing your partner away. It's not, however, something you learn (at least not efficiently) from close friendships with people of the opposite sex. Those people remain, in many ways, idealized, which is to say that they become solipsized. Many experts believe that you should treat other people as you want to be treated. Pee Wee Crayton, a blues singer who grew up in Texas and then moved out to California, applied the golden rule in "Do Unto Others," which was written and produced by Dave Bartholomew and has a somewhat familiar guitar solo. (Easiest question in rock history: Can you guess what song later lifted it?) But the golden rule has a flaw. It doesn't account for self-annihilating impulses. What if you're lonely and you want someone else to absorb you, envelop you, or numb you? In that case, you can end up with a friendship that's more properly curative, that takes what's wrong and makes it right. That's better, but it's worse, because it collapses the boundaries between people. I direct you to Matthew Sweet, the poet laureate of self-loathing:You don't know how you move me
Deconstruct me and consume me
I'm all used up--I'm out of luck--I am starstruck
By something in your eyes that is keeping my hope alive
But I'm sick of myself when I look at you
Something is beautiful and true
In a world that's ugly and a lie
It's hard to even want to try
And I'm beginning to think baby you don't know In my case, I had come to depend upon my friend to see myself and I was deeply disappointed when the mirror turned away. Except that, of course, she wasn't a mirror at all. She was another person--translucent, flawed, needy of love and approval, willing to trade up for a better deal, horny, lonely, alternately circumspect and short-sighted, with a body that could please or fail and had hairs in errant places. I guess in that sense, she was a mirror. See how this gets confusing?
Questions of this nature are often most productively settled by obscure soul singers from Alabama--Roscoe Robinson, for example, whose short career was revived by Northern Soul enthusiasts. There are other soul songs about how love can repair you, or transform you, or make you see someone else's essence in a way that alters your own (Sir Stanley, above, or Carla Thomas's "I Like What You're Doing (To Me)," for example) but Robinson stays levelheaded. He doesn't ask his woman to let him be part of her (or, more egotistically, for her to be part of him). He isn't looking for a mirror with a glory hole carved in it. He respects the differences between people, and the distances, and in this sense he seems to be writing more about friendship or partnership than about romance:If you want me baby let me be myself please darling
So many ruin their lives trying to be somebody else
I may not can do what other men do
But I try my best to please you
If you want me, come on, baby let me be myself If she was a midget, he wouldn't try on her pants. He wouldn't even check the size.Labels: ben, power-pop, soul
posted by Ben
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