As a born and raised protestant in a fairly “heavy” part of the country, I don’t really have carnival traditions, nor knew about Shrove Tuesday until Sandra introduced me to it. Making pancakes that day was an old family tradition of hers, something her father did and she did as well, if she remembered in time. And as with most of her cooking, her pancakes, especially the light crepe like ones we ate with a bit of sugar and lemon, were wonderful. So much better than anything I could make that I didn’t bother to even try, but rather heated up some store bought poffertjes in the oven, the sad single man’s best alternative…
Not feeling too wonderful anyway, as my brain seems intent to slowly leak out of my nose and eyes: either I got someone’s cold, something Cronenbergian is going on in my skulll or hayfever season has started even earlier than normal. All in all I feel like death warmed over, poffertjes the most substantial thing I felt like eating.
Not to end on a bummer, here’s George Benson with Breezin’:
Indeed, it is as angry a cry from the belly of a wounded America as has been heard since the dustbowl and Woody Guthrie, a thundering blow of New Jersey pig iron down on the heads of Wall Street and all who have sold his country down the swanny. Springsteen has gone to the great American canon for ammunition, borrowing from folk, civil war anthems, Irish rebel songs and gospel. The result is a howl of pain and disbelief as visceral as anything he has ever produced, that segues into a search for redemption: “Hold tight to your anger/ And don’t fall to your fears … Bring on your wrecking ball.”
“I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream,” Springsteen told the conference, where the album was aired for the first time. It was written, he claimed, not just out of fury but out of patriotism, a patriotism traduced.
“What was done to our country was wrong and unpatriotic and un-American and nobody has been held to account,” he later told the Guardian. “There is a real patriotism underneath the best of my music but it is a critical, questioning and often angry patriotism.”
A large portion of Springsteen’s appeal for me is the same as Captain America’s: they’re both symbols of the American Dream who aren’t blind for the American Reality. Despite his multimillionaire status, Springsteen never has lost sight of his roots, never forgotten what it’s like to be a working stiff. He still has his heart in the right place.
So yeah, one of the ways in which I miss Sandra this Valentine, apart from the obvious ones, is in sharing music. Between the two of us, I was always the obsessive compulsive High Fidelity gotta catch them all collecting nerd, while she was more the cool saw Blondie in Plymouth back before anybody in Europe knew who they were, used to dance at the Wigan Casino, used to have a shedload of hard to find imports when finding music was still difficult, but it’s all gone now type. She was into funk and soul, hip-hop, good, intelligent pop music, punk and jaz and everything else as long as it was mellifluous, I was more into metal and prog rock — still am, but she influenced me a lot. Not that I didn’t listen to some soul or funk or whatever before she came along, but it was she who pointed me to a lot of the artists that I couldn’t live without now.
And I’m still discovering “new” bands and artists that she knew long ago and probably saw live. Like Heatwave, that British-Swiss-American group whose greatest hit you surely recognise:
Somewhat more obscure: Brick, an Atlanta band she must’ve heard or seen when she lived there in the early eighties, but it’s too late to ask her now. They play disco-jazz, or Dazz, as seen below:
Here’s another well known song from a fairly obscure band: Lakeside, who do deserve to be better known than just for this fantastic slab of early eighties funk:
Let’s end with an old favourite of the two of us I knew she really liked a lot: Strawberry Letter 23 by the Brothers Johnson.
Memo to self: do not listen to maudlin Sandy Denny songs when already feeling a bit blue. This and Meet on the Ledge can always get me.
I never really rated Fairport Convention, or Richard Thompson or any of the other English folk rock acts until recently. Too quiet, too earnest, too embarassing to like if you’re not an aging baby boomer. All prejudices I had to rid myself off before I could get to appreciate these sort of artists. I’m glad I did, even if it hurts sometimes listening to these songs.
Sandra was never much impressed by prog rock dinosaurs like Emerson, Lake and Palmer, but despite this
greg Lake’s I Believe in Father Christmas was one of her favourite Christmas songs. It’s the melancholy she liked.
