See that girl with the soft blue eyes
They never seem to close or show surprise
They never seem to close or show surprise
I've decided to devote that month to resurrecting some of the most significant 2 or 3 lines posts from its first year – which was probably its best year.
There's a lot of gold in those 88 posts, but there’s a lot of dross as well – broken links, embedded videos that don't play (usually because their copyright holders have had them taken down), and other blemishes.
So I fixed all those problems, added photos, and tidied up the prose. I think we're ready for our close-up now, Mr. DeMille.
Without further ado, here's a cleaned-up version of the very first 2 or 3 lines post ever posted on November 1, 2009. The featured song is The Last's 1977 release, “She Don't Know Why I'm Here” – a song I was semi-obsessed with for over a quarter of a century without knowing its title or name of the band that recorded it.]
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I'm not going to beat around the bush – this is the best rock single in history, and it's really not even close. And I could easily have missed it altogether – which makes me wonder what other great records are out there that I've never heard.
I moved to Washington, DC, in the fall of 1977, and quickly discovered the Georgetown University radio station – like a lot of college radio stations, it played a lot of crazy, random stuff you never heard on commercial radio stations. For some reason (there were different conspiracy theories going around at the time), that station went off the air a year or two later.
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Fast forward to the 21st century, and my discovery that you could easily find song lyrics on the Internet. This song was a live recording, and my copies of it were often incomplete and always pretty hissy, and I couldn't begin to decipher all the lyrics. But I did pick up the phrase "plastic naugahyde" near the end. ("Modified hypocrites" probably would have worked just as well as a search term, but I had no idea that's what they were singing.)
This one's for you
You modified hypocrites
God! To raise your children like goldfish
In plastic naugahyde cells
You modified hypocrites
God! To raise your children like goldfish
In plastic naugahyde cells
My search was over. Eureka!
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Oddly, I never listened to any other music by The Last (a band that has been described by reviewers as bringing together surf music, British Invasion harmonies, pop-punk, and neo-psychedelia). I really should go back to the "LA Explosion" site or iTunes or Amazon or wherever and give some of The Last's other songs a chance – they might be just as good as this one.
So how do I plan to top this song? I don't. This blog isn't like those lame syndicated "top 40" radio shows that start with #40 and count down to #1. I could drop dead before I find time to post again, or I could simply forget my password. So I want to be sure that if this blog turns out to be a one-post wonder, that this song is the subject of that post.
Speaking of the girl with the soft blue eyes who is described in the two lines from the song that I quoted at the beginning of this post, I think I've been looking for her since I first heard this song in 1978 or 1979. (She doesn't have to have blue eyes, although that would be a nice touch.)
Click here to watch a video of The Last performing "She Don't Know Why I'm Here."
Click here to watch a video of The Last performing "She Don't Know Why I'm Here."
Click below if you want to buy the live version of "She Don't Know Why I'm Here" from Amazon:
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