The Problem With Perfection

Album: The Radiators, Law of the Fish, 1987

Best Track: "Like Dreamers Do"

Lasting Memory: Two very specific, completely unrelated, and head-shakingly insignificant memories are cued like grainy 16-mm home movies in my mind's eye every time I spin The Radiators' Law of the Fish.

The first shows me sitting on the top step of the staircase leading from the living room of my family's first house in Virginia Beach to the second floor, listening to "Boomerang" on my knockoff Walkman tape player and thumbing through a Boy Scouts uniform catalog. The details of that pointless moment remain perfect 22 years later, but to what purpose?

The second memory reel has me waiting at a table in the Lafayette Branch library repeatedly singing "Doctor Doctor" to myself while waiting for my group project partner from 12th-grade religion class to show up and complete our "wedding" budget. The first verse and chorus to "Doctor Doctor" run

Talk about the heartache,
Talk about the pain
Ti Jean said the only real thing,
Was to live and love in vain
Talk about the silence, and the
Pre-dawn firing squad
Lost cigarette, never will forget
That look on the face of God

Doctor doctor, you know I feel so bad
Doctor doctor, she was the best
Thing I never had

I guess I didn't have high hopes for my and Vicky's(?) ersatz couple actually making to the imaginary altar. But, again, why that particular memory would be formed and recur makes little sense.

I'll leave the mysteries of memory unsolved for now and instead take intellectual refuge in the certainty of the statement that "Like Dreamers Do" is one of the most perfect rock/pop/New Orleans blues/blue-eyed soul/toy piano/bad junior high poetry songs ever recorded.

Doubt me? Watch this video (can't get the thing embedded).

Still not convinced? Read these lyrics:

I've been waiting for you
'fore I call your name
I've been longing for you
In sunshine and rain

Oh oh black diamond,
Oh how she shine
Oh black diamond,
Let's close our eyes

I've been pulling for ya
In everything you try
I've been weeping with ya
Every time you cry

Now the sun Is sinking,
Can't wait to get to sleep
See the black diamond
Shining in the deep

I'll meet you on the vast plains
Behind the gates of dream
Laughing dancing in the sand
Like dreamers do, uh huh uh huh
Like dreamers do, uh huh uh huh
Like dreamers do

Won't you look at you now
Oh you crazy fool
Won't you look at you now
You mad molecule

I'll meet you on the vast plains
Behind the gates of dream
Laughing dancing in the sand
Like dreamers do, uh huh uh huh
Like dreamers do, uh huh uh huh
Like dreamers do

Perfection, thy name is "Like Dreamers Do." The problem is, the song is so good in every way that even the strongest other tracks on Law of the Fish, like "This Wagon's Gonna Roll," wind up sounding like filler. The very good pales alongside the perfect. Pity about that.

Up Next: The Radiators, Zig-Zaggin' Through Ghostland, 1989