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

Don't Rock the Yacht

Album: Poi Dog Pondering, Poi Dog Pondering, 1989

Best Track: "Circle Around the Sun"

Lasting Memory: Poi Dog Pondering has a lot of goodwill attached to it for me because it was a go-to album for dinner parties hosted by my graduate school classmates. I wouldn't characterize my class as a community of scholars, but we did fully embrace the aspects of Renaissance and salon culture that involved eating well and drinking a little too much a little too often while heatedly debating questions such as "Is oxygen really any different from phlogiston?"

Excellent times, those.

Without the overwhelmingly positive associations, the PDP would hold little appeal on its own because it is essentially gimmicky background music. The gimmick is Hawaiian-meets-70s soft rock, and the atmosphericness is exemplified by the track "Wood Guitar."

PDP does have a couple of standout songs, and readers may even remember hearing "Living With the Dreaming Body" back in the day. The best song is "Circle Around the Sun," which would not be at all out place on a 12o Minutes-based version of VH-1's 40 Most Softsational Soft Rock Hits.

Like all yacht rock, the music on PDP is best enjoyed through inattention -- Muzak for the less-than-mundane.

Up Next: The Radiators, Law of the Fish, 1987

Love Conquers Some

Album: The Plimsouls, Everywhere at Once, 1983

Best Track: "Play the Breaks"

Lasting Memory: The Plimsouls were the bar band in the classic 1983 teen romantic comedy Valley Girl. The band's "Everywhere at Once" plays as Romeo stand-in Nick (what happened?) Cage escorts Juliet surrogate Deborah (still a major crush) Foreman past the bouncer and to the night club table right after the "save the radio" scene."

Then, the band fires up with "A Million Miles Away." You won't find a more on-the-nose musical number this side of "76 Trombones." Still, it works. And it's what led me to fish Everywhere at Once out of a $2.99 bargain tape bin 20 years ago and enjoy the album's "Magic Touch" ever since.

I love Valley Girl. I love The Music Man. Hell, truth be told, I'm a sucker for any well-done rom-com. Give me The Truth About Cats and Dogs over Star Wars any day, and give me Say Anything, The Philadelphia Story, and Some Like It Hot twice on Sunday. This makes me a sap -- a 6-foot, 300-pound, goateed, wrestling-refereeing sap. But for all that, a well-entertained sap.

And if I had a single word to describe The Plimsouls' Everywhere at Once, that word would be "entertaining." The album is the acme of early-80s power pop. The guitars chime and lope (especially on "Play the Breaks"), the lyrics are just deep enough to stick with you, and lead Plimsoul Peter Case's voice is just rough enough around the edges to be engaging and endearing without being distracting. Plus, having produced no actual radio hits, the Plimsouls are just under-the-radar enough to gain me back some much needed street cred.

The way I see it, it's okay to have Bringing Up Baby on my DVR "Do Not Delete" list as long as I have Everywhere at Once in my music collection. Right?

Right?*

Up Next: Poi Dog Pondering, Poi Dog Pondering, 1989

* Thank goodness Facebook doesn't have an e-wedgie app.

Tell Me Some Tales

Regular posts resume tomorrow. Ain't that ...




the oldest story in the world.

And Now, We're Communists

I promise to get back to the music posts eventually. Until at least some time next week, though, I'll be too busy to do anything with this Web forum but clear my political throat.

Here is an e-mail that I sent into my local NPR current-events call-in show, Hearsay. It was read over the air and everything. This is my second Hearsay appearance in the past 70 days. I may be becoming a crank, but I still have a long way to go down that slippery slope before I can be found typing my manifesto in a one-room cabin.

Anyway, Obama's talk about pay-plan limits for bank executives makes my palms itch. What do you think?

=======

Kathy,

I have two questions about President Obama's announcement that annual salaries for some financial institutions' executives will be capped at $500,000. I have no answers, but I'd be interested in hearing thoughts other than my own, which come down to, "While I'm as upset with the likes of John Thain as anyone, I also think setting hard limits on executive pay is a bad and probably illegal idea."

Here are my questions:

-- Without fully nationalizing the banks and making bank executives federal employees, how can the government set salaries?

-- If pay is limited to $500,000 per year, what will happen to the rest of the, say, $25,500,000 that had been paid out to bank executives in the last few years? It seems likely that the money will just disappear. How can actively taking money out of circulation during a financial crisis help anyone? I suppose the cap satisfies some desire for vengeance, but isn't that kind of cutting up our credit cards to spite our wallets?

=======

A Paypal Penny for Your Thoughts

I have no time to share my own thoughts, so I'll post this video from one of my favorite bands, The Old 97s.

The song is about lead 97er Rhett Miller asking his girlfriend to marry him, but its chorus encapsulates an essential exitential poser:

Someday
Somebody's gonna ask you
A question you should say "Yes" to
Maybe tonight
I've got a question for you

What will you say when asked the big question?

If asked today, I'd have to say, "Sorry, I'm on deadline."

Ain't that a shame.

Tim Geithner ... SUPER Genius

The man who let the horses out the barn has just been hired as the world's foremost gate-closing expert.

Confirming Tim Geithner -- shown at left making his "grrrr" face -- as U.S. Treasury secretary makes as much sense as electing John Rambo to be mayor of Hope, Washington.

I'll readily confess that I've drunk three-quarters of a gallon of the Obama Kool-Aid, but I just can't swallow Geithner's nomination and confirmation to the post of financial savior. Unlike most people, I care not a whit that Geithner cheated on his taxes. What makes me pig-biting mad about his ascendancy is that

A. As a Clinton administration official, Geithner played a key role in building the financial house of cards that began collapsing this past summer;

2. The five years that Geithner spent working for the International Monetary Fund were probably the worst half-decade the IMF ever experienced in terms of efficacy and esteem; and

iii. As chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Geithner failed to see, prevent, or stem the tsunami of bank and investment house failures.

How could a man who has done nothing throughout his career but prove his incompetence rise to such a powerful -- and at this moment, world-shaping -- position? Sure, Wiley E. Coyote got a multifilm deal on account of being a colossal screw-up, but I cannot understand why Geithner should be rewarded for failing spectacularly at everything he's ever done in his chosen profession.

All I can figure is that the primarily long-serving members of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee chose not to press him Geithner on his leadership role in putting the world's economy on the brink of unprecedented disaster because they didn't want light shed on their own complicity in setting the stage for the crisis. So dang them all to heck, as well.

Given his track record, my unfortunate prediction for Geithner's run as Treasury secretary is that he will make us pine for the excellence Alberto Gonzales showed at Justice. I hope I'm wrong, but Geithner has demonstrated little to merit such hope.