September 24, 2008 Earworm

We here at beautiful the Hilltop Inn have been watching the television spin off of Del Shores' "Sordid Lives" on Logo and laughing ourselves silly over this "black comedy about white trash". Leslie Jordan as Brother Boy, a Tammy Wynette obsessed drag queen who has been confined to a mental health facility by his mother for more than two decades, is the absolute gem in this so wrong it's right comedy.

During a recent viewing I was asked if there was any female entertainer with whom I identified when I was younger. My first answer was no - but then I got to thinking...

I can not say what it was that left me fascinated by Tammi Terrell at the time, but I can vividly recall a pre-school/kindergarten age me sitting on my grandparents front porch with my Close 'N Play, belting out a special duet with her singing "Come On And See Me". I can't say that identified with her as Brother Boy does with Tammy Wynette but, with arms wide open and absolutely no embarrassment, for a few minutes I was that record, if not Tammi herself, and without any thought as to what the neighbors may have been thinking about the baby drag show that occurred.

As I got older, I was able to articulate that everything about "Come On And See Me" sounds like an arms wide open welcoming; the horns, the backing vocals, and Tammi's warm and smiling delivery pour out of the speakers like sun shining on a sandy beach. Naturally, I picked up copies of her albums with Marvin and her stitched together solo album to keep me company during the rare moments when there was not enough noise or as a welcome respite from when there was too much.

Eventually I found a friend who happened to have the same fondness for Tammi and after we became room mates, there was a mutual, if unspoken, understanding that she was one of the very few things that was off limits to criticism. Probably because the cold reality of the death of such warmth left us with little interest in pointing at flaws. Even the tracks on the final Marvin and Tammi album, "Easy", where rumors that Valerie Simpson was Tammi's stand in when Tammi was too ill to sing, were left unscathed when noted.

Along with Tammi, Kenny and I shared a love of duets - the cheesier, the better - and given enough alcoholic fuel, hairbrushes would be wielded to the amusement of ourselves and the horror of others. Nancy and Lee, Sonny and Cher, and, at our most surreal, Paul and Paula, were our favorite fodder. While there was never a conscious decision that I can recall, Kenny was always happy to drape anything that was handy over his head to slip into falsetto and it always worked out fine until someone played Marvin and Tammi's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough", which happened quite often at Allegro, our favorite no-one-will-bother-us-here bar. After a year or two of watching us slipping into our roles and doing our thing, a bartender leaned over the bar, pointed at me, and said, "Why is is that you slip out of Marvin and into Tammi every time she sings, 'my love is alive, deep down in my heart...'? I think there's a baby drag queen somewhere in there."

July 30, 2008 Earworm

By sheer persistence, Matt Bianco's "More Than I Can Bear" may be my ultimate summer song. As track two on "Whose Side Are You On", their debut LP, it closed out my summer of '84 and, in this mix, forever conjures up the smell of New York and the not so fresh feeling that accompanies the steamy heat of that city in August.

The remixed single version or, as I call it, Basia's last dance, was one of the few records that I carted around as I tried to reaffirm my footing in the hazy heated blur that was Baltimore in the summer of 1985. It played constantly as a main character of my childhood suddenly wandered into my second attempt at one, and as three new characters, all of whom I'm happy to now find within reach if not close enough to touch, joined in the dramedy of my life.

The inclusion of the remix on the US edition of the band's second album filled the summer of '86 with moments where I would play it as the evening began at The Depot, dropping the tone-arm and rushing to the bar to join that childhood friend in a campy duet, the soda dispensers as our microphones; lying on the living room floor in the dark with Renee, drunk on her despair, and chain smoking our way through repeated plays while singing every word as an attempt at exorcism; make out sessions with a beautiful boy in his tower high rise, in front of a wall of windows as the headlights from the cars below crawled across the ceiling and down the wall, stopping briefly on our faces before returning to us our privacy.

The next three summers brought new characters - fresh crop, we'd call it - and inevitably one of them would love the song as much as I and so it played on and on until it was time to go. Rummaging through endless mix tapes made over the years confirms its endurance and, by examining what proceeds and follows it, how it has fit so many occasions and moods, becoming timeless in my process.

As I look back at how the time has flown, realizing that it was nineteen years ago this week that I left home again, and finally for good it appears, and as the temperature rises into the 90's, the appreciation of my treasures from the 80's climbs even higher. And while I wouldn't change a thing that has happened since then, I'd give anything to have all those treasures together again, if only long enough to listen to "More Than I Can Bear", and to see if we've held up as well as it did.