Yet ANOTHER Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50

#201) "If You Don't Know Me by Now" by Simply Red - To be perfectly honest, the original 1972 version of this song by Harold Melvin and The Blue Notes, with Teddy Pendergrass tearing it up vocally, is the better version. Downright gorgeous, in fact. But I prefer Simply Red's interpretation on account of when it was released - the summer of 1989, when I was sixteen years old. That was a true summer of firsts for me - first with a driver's license, my own car, staying up and out all night, first time for a lot of things teenagers experience as rites of passage (including horrendous acne...but I choose not to remember that ;-).

Not only do I think Mike Hucknall's reliable crooning does the original justice, but it was the first time I ever heard a song on the radio and felt it was telling my story in real time. Sure, I had plenty of songs placed on the newly burgeoning "soundtrack of my life" by then, but all of those were rooted in teenage fantasies - overly dramatized and highly idealized mental illustrations of how I felt things should have been, or at the very least would be someday. That is: the way I saw myself in the new, summer blockbuster movie of my life, as opposed to how I actually was. Most of it was pie-in-the-sky, to say the least.

But when "If You Don't Know Me by Now" by Simply Red played on the radio that summer (back when radio still mattered), I remember thinking, for the first time (in keeping with that summer of firsts): holy shit, what he's singing about is happening right here, right now, right in front of me, and there's nothing dramatic about it. In fact, I'm standing at a frustrating impasse.

It was a lesson (in preparation for impending adulthood) that not everything in life is a scene in a movie from which there is an escape, or even a solution. Sometimes (most of the time) life just happens. You don't get to go anywhere. But you still have to move on.

I'll definitely be bringing memories of my summer of firsts along with me on 1/48/50.

Just thankfully not the acne.

Hopefully. ;-)

"Just get yourself together, or we might as well say goodbye / What good is a love affair, when  you can't see eye to eye...?"  

#202) "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)" by Marvin Gaye - Talk about gorgeous...musically speaking, what's not to love about this song? The rhythm, the melody, the strings, the message about the environment so ground-breaking for the time (AHEAD of its time, really). The song climaxes with one whippersnapper of a sax solo, then dissolves into a musical horror at the very end - an auditory warning (not always heard on the radio edit) that perhaps we shouldn't let that same thing happen to our planet. 

Marvin Gaye was an incredible talent. And the 1971 album on which this song appears, What's Going On, will definitely be placed on my next "Whole Albums to Travel By" list.

 "What about this overcrowded land, how much more abuse from man, can she stand...?"