That's Where I'm At
Love - Colored Balls Falling (1966 / Psych)
Hello internet pals of music, remember us? We’ve had some good times, and here’s another: a perfectly Sunday jangly psych-pop beauty from Arthur Lee and company.
I haven’t been writing much lately.
I’m approaching the second year anniversary ( like it’s a relationship, or a baby…) of the impulsive idea to make a not-so-enjoyable situation a bit less bewildering by getting back to a joy that I’ve always found in blabbing on about my music obsession to anyone who would listen.
Also, the writing was a way to sublimate my emotional neediness to connect while I found myself in a lonely situation. Reflecting back, it’s both therapeutic and narcissistic; to think that anyone really needs my little stories about my own life, stories everyone has.
Art, in music, in writing, in theory, is such a strange personal pursuit. My entire life it seems has been as if the impulse to create (heretofore referred to as art) was a sweater that has grown old, and that I can’t actually take off. And I’m constantly tugging absentmindedly at the threads that fray from its aging shape.
Is that a blessing? Is it a curse?
We’re all born wearing this sweater. Most of us take it off, or have it taken off us, when we stop being children; like the quaint old Victorian rule that a young boy wears shorts until a certain age, then it’s long pants only for them until they finally fall into the grave.
Maybe you can excuse that exclusive analogy; I’ve only had two cups of coffee, and the usual sleep interruption of a hungry cat who doesn’t understand the value of sleeping in a bit on one’s day off…(and by sleeping in, I mean sleeping past 7 am).
I recently found a stack of reading material I kept from a class I took on the history of the zombie in popular culture. One of them is particularly fantastic, although it’s buried away somewhere (har har) and I can’t be bothered to go dig it up. In it, the writer is discussing the 1978 Dawn of the Dead as an allegory on the American consumer.
Humans, the writer discusses, have an inherent need to produce and so when we prioritize consumption over production, we tend to get a bit listless and lost.
So that’s where I’m at, to quote Alvin Lee.
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Love (the band) is strange to me because they’re a well-enough known name, but I don’t know many people really love Love. They’re a bit of a bellwether maybe, of the shift to more real vulnerability in Western pop music? This is from 1966, and has an honesty that seems ahead of a lot of their contemporaries.
But it’s like they’ll always remain a cult band.
When I listen to this, I’m thankful that Arthur Lee tugged at the frayed ends of his sweater, even if it never made him a household name.
Two years on, I’m using this song as reminder to keep picking at those loose threads.
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