One Track Mind

Love and Happiness - Al Green (from I’m Still in Love With You)

love is... wait a minute...

That moment in "Love and Happiness," from I'm Still in Love With You (1972), when Al Green presumably stumbles on a lyric but makes it sound like he's not ready to finish the line, like he must not be rushed, is... wait a minute... a moment of genius. He doesn’t stop the tape or overdub, he recovers and makes a dance of what could have been a mis-step. He's talking about love, trying to convince a lover, and anyone else who's listening, that he means what he's saying. This wait a minute addresses the multiplicity of his audience (listeners and intended), and captures a sense of urgency and bravado that temper doubt, while also cloaking themselves in languor. It's almost impatient, just as a lover cannot wait to be with the beloved (but must wait, so wait a minute absorbs that impatience); just as the lover is impatient with everyone else, those who cannot possibly understand this love. Only the beloved can understand*, and only if the lover does not rush. Wait a minute...
 
*Listening to the song, we all get to be the lover and the beloved; everyone else, everyone who is not listening to the song, cannot understand our love. Wait a minute, we say, and the words do not come.

Jeff T. Johnson lives in Oakland, CA, and was a founding editor of *Kitchen Sink* magazine. He is the author of numerous poetry chapbooks, including *The Record Room*, and he is a co-creator of the zine *I Think We Should See Other People* (http://www.myspace.com/itwssop).

Here Comes A Regular – The Replacements (from Tim)

This is the national anthem for inertia, the theme song to everyone who never left his or her hometown but continued to trudge along the same leaf-blown streets, kicked down as kids with better, more hopeful things in mind than future failures and alcoholism.

For everyone who never made it further than ten miles from the house that played scene to a very first diaper change, Paul Westerberg has a few things to say, a few truths to reveal: “a person can work up a mean, mean thirst after a hard day of nothin' much at all”, “everybody wants to be special here”, “opportunity knocks once then the door slams shut”, “all I know is I'm sick of everything that my money can buy”, “everybody wants to be someone's here”.

These lines should be writ large on bright banners slung across every tiny main street in every godforsaken town stretched straight across this country so every kid must contemplate the lines like they were zen koans or private prayers of attrition, something to be repeated just under your breath that both explains this sad world and begs for salvation from the same.

It’s a saloon song in the best Sinatra tradition. At once a celebration of and rebuke to the after hours loneliness and alienation that kicks in most nights after the pouring of drinks loses its early celebratory joy, then later its brave fuck the world antagonism, finally settling into the cold cradle of why am I alone and disastrously in debt and still living in, at best, a crummy efficiency or, at worst, my parents’ house. 

This is every novel Richard Russo has ever written condensed to four and a half minutes. It’s also, perhaps, Paul Westerberg’s finest moment, the very reason he’s worth mentioning in the same breath as Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, and Townes Van Zandt. Dig this: “You're like a picture on the fridge that's never stocked with food”. That line alone puts Westerberg in the pantheon of Greatest Songwriters Ever. Hell, he even gives Richard Hugo, the Homer of the American dive bar, a run for the money with that one.

Ultimately, what draws me to this tune over and over, and why with every hearing I stop in my tracks and just freeze feeling like I might cry, is the dignity that Westerberg brings to lives that never made it past go and the careful intimacy with which he reveals said lives. It explains, at least a little bit, all the nights my father disappeared after bumming a twenty from me and promising me to a private father-son secrecy, “Don’t tell your mother”, to drink and smoke and tell tales astride some favorite stool in some cherished dive. It explains my own need for the same kind of place, why the tumbler of whiskey and bottle of beer feel so good, so reassuring in my own hand, why the lights of the jukebox mean more than the sweet, incensed light of candles burning in a church. It’s a comfort, really. It’s a shot of the good stuff on a cold night when there’s no one waiting up for you at home, and really, with songs as good as this why would anyone ever want to go home anyway.

Daniel Crawford is a writer living in Pittsburgh.