HUMAN WRECKAGE

Saturday Night’s All Right

Ann said, “You’re having fun, aren’t you?”

B.W. Stevenson’s neglected 1973 hit “My Maria” is 2:33 of repetitive addiction. But it was never produced for digital file compression, for earbuds nor the minute tinny speakers of pocket devices. The listener must move air, fill a room with fat, rich sound: Gypsy lady, doing miracle work for me…

I am having fun. Saturday night started off with The Best of Sam and Dave. I’m seated on a footstool facing our stereo and cuing vinyl sides and tracks. I was doing the same thing forty years ago in a Montreal studio apartment with cockroaches for company. In those days there was a Maxell Chrome 90 cassette in the deck, the Dolby Noise Reduction switch on the second-hand Kenwood amp switched to OFF so I wouldn’t lose the highs. A notepad filled with themed mix tape song sequencing. Now it’s us having a lark.

From those days and cranked in the Crooked 9: God, it’s so painful when something is so close and yet so far out of reach… Tom Petty’s hook-laden, soaring jangle of despair with some portions of the vocal delivered full force, cocaine nasal. Take it easy, baby, make it last all night. A few minutes later, Ann and I danced ourselves from the kitchen, through the front hall and onto the porch accompanied by the Doobie Brothers.

There were two revelations in the night. One was music related. The second one was mildly embarrassing. First, Waylon Jennings’s “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” is not outlaw country music; it’s a Rolling Stones song. It’s prime Keith Richards riffing, a Telecaster statement of complaint and, curiously, fittingly, the Stones have even covered “Bob Wills Is Still The King,” the 1975 single’s B-side.

As for the second revelation, well, gee, I don’t have quite enough material to form a cult, engineer a new religion for subscribers. While refiling the Doobies my gaze paused on the spine of a Jim Croce album of Ann’s. I thought “Bad Bad Leroy Brown” would amuse us. Who does not know the words? And I was thinking way, way back to Burt Sugarman’s Midnight Special and Wolfman Jack and the modern miracle of colour TV and how every Friday night show featured either Three Dog Night or Jim Croce.

Ann and I sat on the front porch. Time was inching toward midnight. We listened to the stereo through the open door. We let side one play through. “Operator” came on. Ann said she’d always liked that one. She wondered what would happen now should somebody dial 0. Ann could’ve said, “Why don’t you stand under our bedroom window and I’ll drop a water balloon on your head?”

Okay. So I did. Saints preserve us, somebody answered almost immediately. I almost dropped my beer. I was woefully unprepared, no words rehearsed, no witticisms. I blabbered about Jim Croce and Chuck Berry’s “Memphis, Tennessee.” I’d no whit to wonder why the telco’s toll-free customer service line was significantly less responsive. The operator sighed before wishing me a long, slow ride into the gentle good night. I hung up too. Ann asked, “How’d that go?” She only heard the half of it. Mono, maybe.   

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative insight into of the heart of Saturday night since 2013. My novella Of Course You Did is out now. Visit www.megeoff.com to find your preferred format and retailer.