No meese this time.

But I'm just going to quasi free associate, since I'm not doing the ITunes random xnumber of songs. Just blowing.

I was heading in to do a couple of hours of work today -- I go in on Friday or Saturday during non-official office hours to pick up slack and do things like move files and do cleaning that I really hate to do in $35 chinos I ordered from Land's End, that sort of thing. While I was driving in, Sirius played the Rolling Stones' Let's Spend The Night Together. I know, I know -- there's a lot of shit hung off that one. Ed Sullivan asked them not to sing 'let's spend the night together' (the title of the freaking song, mind you), and to sing 'let's spend some time together,' which they sort of pretended to do, and whatever.

This isn't about the lyrics to the song, so much. It's about that break in the middle. That snarky and yet quasi-reverent middle eight from the song that is both paean and parody of the Beach Boys.

No, really -- listen to it! Tell me it ain't!

I laughed my ass off when I heard that, in the car. I'd heard the song about a million times, over the years, but I'd never noticed that the Stones had actually hip-checked Brian Wilson. What a riot.

Another song from roughly that era that, when I realized what was going on, I damned near had to pull the car over to laugh is Flo & Eddie's So Happy Together. Okay, it's actually the Turtles. Still, I'd heard the song a blue million times when I was a kid, on the radio, and the real mechanics of the song hadn't ever hit me until about a dozen years ago. I was driving home from work and had the classic rock station on, and they played the song.

Everybody thought Every Breath You Take, the Police song off 'Synchronicity,' was a stalker song. You'd have thought it was the first stalker song ever written. Well, shit -- Screamin' Jay Hawkins wrote what may well have been the first rock and roll stalker song with I Put A Spell On You, and Every Breath You Take doesn't really give that one a run for its money in any credible way. It's a midtempo pop song with fairly laid-back lyrics, and only the 'big picture' of the song really gives you a taste of what an obsessive, potentially dangerous set of lyrics it is.

The Turtles did that one one better, though, I hate to tell Gordon. Happy Together doesn't even sound all that much like a compulsive stalker love song until you really pay attention to the mechanics of what's going on with the music behind the lyrics. The choruses are nice and sunny, 'I can't see me lovin' nobody but you for all my life,' you know the drill. It's the minor-key, partly-cloudy verses that made me want to pull over and pound on the headliner of whichever Toyota I was driving at the time. Happy Together is a stalker tune, honey -- listen to what's happening in the music behind the lyrics. When you see the 'Imagine me and you -- I do. I think about you day and night' lyrics set against the troubled, diminished/minor chords, it all makes sense.

Well, that and the fact that Flo & Eddie worked with Frank Zappa, and therefore anything that seems to be unalloyed sentiment must, therefore, be considered suspect. Not that Frank and Gail didn't manage to make a marriage work around the road life for a very long time, but Zappa was not the kind of guy to get all mired down in sentiment.

I'm with that. Sometimes, the best relationships consist of laughing at the most puerlie expressions of the things you're feeling. Sometimes, the laughing is the best of it, and if you can laugh at just about anything, that means you can talk about just about anything, too.

I don't know. It just seems like taking anything too seriously is asking for it.

TAFN