Roy Loney and the Phantom Movers – "Act of Love" (1980)

If you want action

I can tell you where to go

If you’re a regular reader of 2 or 3 lines, you know the oft-told origin story of my wildly popular little blog.  

It all started with the “Mystic Eyes” radio show on WHFS-FM, which I regularly listened to in 1980 when I was a young lawyer living in Washington, DC. 

I heard great records on “Mystic Eyes” that I never heard anywhere else, which inspired me to start taping the show whenever I found myself at home with nothing better to do on a Saturday night – which was pretty much every Saturday night.  

One of the songs on those tapes became my personal white whale.  I thought it was the best record of all time, but I didn’t know its title or the name of the group that recorded it.  

Many years later – with the help of the internet – I finally figured out that the song was “She Don’t Know Why I’m Here,” by The Last.  I featured it in the very first 2 or 3 lines post I ever wrote.

If you missed that post – which originally appeared just over ten years ago – you can click here to read it.

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I decided several months ago that I would celebrate the tenth anniversary of 2 or 3 lines by interviewing Steven Lorber, the legendary Washington DJ who was the brains behind the “Mystic Eyes” program, and featuring some of the best records he played on that show.

This summer, I listened to every one of my “Mystic Eyes” cassette tapes, and created a spreadsheet with the title of each song on those tapes, the name of the group who recorded it, the year the record was released, and other information.  (The identity of a few of the songs on those tapes remains a mystery, but I haven’t given up trying to identify them.  Dum spiro spero!)

Steven Lorber

For the next several months, 2 or 3 lines is going to feature only music from my “Mystic Eyes” tapes.  Trust me, those tapes contain more than enough great material to keep me going for the foreseeable future.

By the way, I plan to focus on records that were relatively new when I was taping “Mystic Eyes” in the spring and summer of 1980.  Steven Lorber didn’t only play new records on his show – he played a lot of great sixties music as well.  But I’m going to stick mostly to records that were released in 1979 and 1980.  

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I stopped recording “Mystic Eyes” because I moved from Washington to San Francisco in the fall of 1980.

San Francisco was a wide-open place back then.  At one end of my daily bus commute was the so-called “Polk Gulch,” where gay bars stood cheek to jowl.  (No one knew about AIDS in 1980 – the first cases of what soon became an epidemic were reported in 1981.)

Carol Doda

At the other end of my bus route were the legendary topless joints of North Beach – including the infamous Condor Club, the home of Carol Doda, who was the first topless dancer to have silicone breast injections.

The lyrics of today’s featured song pay tribute to the shameless barkers who stood outside those topless bars and tried to persuade passers-by to come inside:  “Admission’s free! . . . No need to be shy there, champ!”  

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Roy Loney and the Phantom Movers released “Act of Love” on their Phantom Tracks album in 1980:

Loney was a Bay Area native who had co-founded the Flamin’ Groovies – another group whose music I heard first on “Mystic Eyes.” Several years after leaving the Groovies, he formed the Phantom Movers, which performed regularly in San Francisco rock clubs when I lived there. 

I bought the Phantom Tracks album in San Francisco, but I first heard “Act of Love” on the “Mystic Eyes” show before I moved west.

Click here to listen to “Act of Love.”

And click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Robin Tyner & the Hot Rods – "Till the Night Is Gone (Let's Rock)" (1977)

Stood in a queue for what seemed liked hours

Finally got in and the place was packed

[NOTE: Today’s 2 or 3 lines features the final installment of our three-part interview with Steven Lorber – the man behind the radio program that was the inspiration for 2 or 3 lines.]

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Q:  The Georgetown University radio station, WGTB, went off the air in 1979, and later that year you moved to WHFS, which was a progressive radio station that had a real cult status in the Washington area.  HFS was a commercial station, but like GTB, it played a lot of music that you never heard on other radio stations.  How did you get the job at HFS? 

A:  A few months after GTB was no more, I got a call from David Einstein, who was the program director at WHFS.  He had heard about my show, and he wanted to do some new wave thing because HFS was known for playing a lot of what my friends and I called “granola rock” – we made fun of all the Grateful Dead and Flying Burrito Brothers music they played, which wasn't our thing.  David wanted to be hip and start playing Joy Division and so on, so we had a meeting and he hired me.   I worked there for about a year or a year and a half, and then they fired me. 

Q:  That sucks.  So when did you leave HFS?

A:  Late 1980 or early 1981 – I can't remember exactly. 

Q:  The first tape of “Mystic Eyes” that I recorded was from March 1980, and the last one was from October of that year – I moved to San Francisco in November, so I guess I missed your last few months.  Was the show always on Saturday evenings?

A:  Yes.  I think it ran from 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm.

Q:  The first couple of hours of the show, you would mostly play three- or four-song sets by different groups – maybe they would have something in common, or maybe they wouldn’t – and talk a little about each song at the end of the set.  But the last hour of the show was a little different.  You would sometimes just play a whole album side, with no talk.

A:  That’s called laziness.  

Q:  It seemed like you had sort of lost interest by that point and were just killing time until your three hours was over  

A:  Maybe that was my ADHD kicking in – or I was just bored.  

Q:  As I recall, you often repeated several songs you had played the previous week.  

A:  I would make jokes about that.  But I would run out of new stuff to play.  I’m doing a show now on the Takoma Park community station, and I still find myself running out of stuff because I have a hard time finding new music that I like.

Steven Lorber with his record collection

Q:  Do you still have a network of people with similar musical tastes like you had in the seventies and eighties, or do you find new music by going online and looking around?

A:  I have to admit that I’m a true Luddite.   The whole technical revolution has left me behind.  I see that you are way, way ahead of me.

Q:  [Laughs.]  That’s a sad admission if it’s true.  I still listen to music on a iPod shuffle, which Apple discontinued in 2017.  I don't have any music on my phone because I don't know how to do that.

A:  I don’t have any music on my phone either.  I still listen to CDs.  No Spotify, no iPod – nothing like that.

Q:  But you don’t just recycle old music on your new radio show – you mix in some new stuff with the older music, right?  How do you find that new music?

A:  Basically word of mouth.  People will tell me to check a new group out, or I’ll read something about them – for example, I read 2 or 3 lines regularly, and if you say something good about a new record that you found, I would go search for it and listen to it.  

Q:  I don’t remember hearing much of what I would call punk music on “Mystic Eyes.”  I guess you left WHFS about the time that the DC punk scene was just starting to take off. 

A:  I’m not sure how much I would have embraced or played that music if I had continued on the radio – a lot of it didn’t really touch me musically as much as other stuff.  Too much of it was kids who were sort of spoiled brats who wanted to start playing that day, and couldn’t be bothered to even learn three chords from the Mel Bay guitar instruction books.  They were running on raw power and anger and unhappiness and illiteracy.  I don’t know – had I still been on the radio, I might have given them a chance and supported them just because they were local.  

Q:  And you did play a lot of records by local bands on “Mystic Eyes” – the Insect Surfers, Tru Fax and the Insaniacs, the Slickee Boys, and so on.

A:  Yes, I tried to promote local bands.  

Q:  You he Slickee Boys were the biggest local band in those days.  I think they still hold the record for the most appearances at the old 9:30 Club.

A:  I put out the Slickee Boys’ first seven-inch record, Hot and Cool, and I helped with their first album, Separated Vegetables – I don’t know why, but we only put out 100 copies of it – and I got them booked into Max’s Kansas City.

Q:  Did you have ambitions of becoming the Colonel Tom Parker of the Washington area?  Or at least the local Malcolm McLaren?

A:  Working with musicians is no picnic.  I think it’s best if you keep your relationships with musicians at arm’s length, and don’t get involved with them financially.  Just be their friend.  

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While the late, great “Mystics Eyes” program exists only in the memories of its fans – and on those two dozen cassette tapes that I recorded in 1980 – you can still hear Steven playing a great mix of old and new music on the radio.  He and his old friend John Paige alternate hosting the “Rock Continuum” show on Mondays from 4:00 to 6:00 pm on the Takoma Park, MD community station, WOWD-FM (94.3).  Click here to listen the show online.

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The late Rob Tyner (born Robert Derminer) was the lead singer for Detroit’s legendary MC5.  He’s the guy who shouts out “Kick out the jams, motherf*ckers” at the beginning of that band’s best-known song, “Kick Out the Jams.”

After the MC5 broke up, Rob Tyner performed as a solo act for several years.  In 1977, he hooked up with Eddie and the Hot Rods, a British pub rock band.  They called themselves Robin Tyner and the Hot Rods, and they released one and only one record, a seven-incher titled “Till the Night Is Gone (Let’s Rock).”

“Till the Night Is Gone” tells the story of a young rock ’n’ roll fan who fights his way into a crowded rock club, gets all liquored up, and enjoys the hell out of himself.  If the band he went to see played “Till the Night Is Gone,” I can understand why he had such a good time – ever bar band in the world should add this song to its repertoire and close their shows with it.  It is that good.

I would never have heard “Till the Night Is Gone” if it wasn’t for Steven Lorber, who played it on his “Mystic Eyes” program one Saturday evening in 1980.  Thank goodness I had my cassette deck rolling that night – missing that song would have been a tragedy.  It’s a stick of dynamite if there ever was one.

Or – as Rob Tyner might have put it – it’s a stick of dynamite, motherf*ckers!  (Especially Steve Nicol’s drumming.)

Click here to listen to “Till the Night Is Gone (Let’s Rock).

And click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Gruppo Sportivo – "Mission à Paris" (1979)

I'll buy a dictionary

And look up what you said to me

[NOTE: Today’s 2 or 3 lines features part two of our three-part interview with Steven Lorber – the man behind the radio program that was the inspiration for 2 or 3 lines.]

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Q: After graduating from high school in New Jersey, you came to Washington, DC,  in 1971 to attend Georgetown University.  

A:  I was a student in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, but that didn’t work out.  Toward the end of my sixth year of college – which should have been the fourth year – I realized that I was never going to pass the foreign language requirement.  I wrote letters to Georgetown every year for the next 10 or 15 years, begging and cajoling them to give me my degree.  I got a call out of the blue in 2001 – which was more than 25 years after I should have graduated – from a Jesuit priest in the administration at Georgetown.  He said “I just happened to come across your file, which is very thick, and I can't believe no one has responded to you.”  He gave me the name of a neurologist to consult, and after this doctor tested me for about eight hours, he told me that I was functionally almost retarded in terms of my ability to understand and learn foreign languages.   He gave me a 50-page report that I sent to the guy at Georgetown, who called me after he had read it and told me it confirmed what he suspected.  

An aerial view of the
Georgetown University campus

Q:  So did they waive your foreign language requirement?

A:  Yes, but he said I’d probably have to take one more course in another area to get my degree.  Three weeks later he called me, and said, “Guess what?  I called a meeting of the committee that handles cases like yours, but everyone was on vacation.  I was the only one who showed up, so I voted to grant your degree immediately.”  So that’s how I got my degree.   

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Q:  When I came to Washington in 1977 as a brand-new government attorney, my officemate and I used to listen to WGTB – the Georgetown radio station – where you were a DJ.

A: I was at GTB a long time – from 1974 to 1979, which is when the university’s administration decided to give the station’s license to the University of the District of Columbia for a dollar.

Q:  My understanding is that the staff of the radio station got very political, and ran ads and public-service announcements that were very controversial.

A:  If the people that were in charge of the station had just played records and broadcast the Georgetown basketball games and done what they were told, a lot of the problems would have been avoided.  But the station had really been taken over by people that were not students, and they thought the station was theirs and they could do whatever they wanted, and they mishandled it.  I didn’t care about all the political stuff – I just wanted to get high and meet girls and play good music.  I wasn’t politically minded at all.

Headline from a Georgetown student newspaper
article about the battle over control of WGTB

Q:  I don’t remember specific songs that I heard on GTB, but I remember thinking, “Where did this stuff come from?”  I had never heard any of the music that was played on GTB anywhere else.

A:  GTB attracted people with niche interests.  There was a strong progressive-music group that played Genesis and European progressive bands like PFM – a DJ who called himself Dr. Progresso used to play a lot of weird progressive stuff.  There was a guy who loved metal before metal became popular.  I liked garage.  Everyone was in a different camp – GTB was very eclectic.

Q:  How did you get your show on WGTB?  Was there some sort of audition for on-air personnel?

A:  It’s funny how I got the job at GTB.   When I went to the guy that ran the station and said that I wanted to do a show, he said to me, “Can you get me some acid?”   This was 1974 – I knew what acid was, but I never did it.  I told him I’d need a few days, and then I went to everyone I knew, and somehow I got two tabs of acid and he gave me a show.  I called it “Mystic Eyes” after the record by Van Morrison and Them.

Q:  Did you choose that name because the song had some special meaning?

A:  Not really.  I just liked the song and thought it would work well for me to start to play it, and then break in and say, “I’m Steven Lorber, and you’re listening to the ‘Mystic Eyes’ show.”  Also, my first time slot was from midnight to 3:00 am on Sunday mornings, and the first line of the song is “One Sunday morning.”  So that’s another reason I picked it.

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Q:  A little earlier you talked about being a big fan of garage music.  What exactly do you mean when you use that term? 

A:  I define “garage” as being white kids interpreting blues records.  I think the first really good garage record was the George Harrison song, “Don't Bother Me,” which was released on the Meet the Beatles album.  That to me was the first garage record, although you can make a case for “Satisfaction” by the Stones or others – like “Louie Louie” and “Gloria.”

Q:  Which were simple three-chord songs that almost anyone could play.  

A:  Exactly.  So I started with garage records, and later got into psychedelic music, and then pub rock, with Dr. Feelgood and Ducks Deluxe and the Count Bishops.  Then the punk thing came along, with bands like the Sex Pistols and the Buzzcocks.  

Q:  This was long before the internet existed, of course.  How did you discover those groups?

A:  I was reading Goldmine and Trouser Press and Melody Maker and other record magazines in those days.  I’d get the names of other record collectors from the classified ads and start exchanging letters and trading records.  I started trading with this one guy in England, and I remember him telling me that I was really going to like a record that had just come out over there, which he said he would mail to me the next day.   So a couple of weeks later I got a copy of “Anarchy in the U.K.,” which was the first Sex Pistols single.  This is going to make me sound like a boastful schmuck, but I can’t believe that anyone played it in the U.S. before I played it on WGTB. 

Q:  I know you were a friend of the late Skip Groff, who owned the legendary DC record store, Yesterday and Today.  

The late Skip Groff, flanked by DC punk
legends Ian MacKaye and Henry Rollins

A:  He was the most serious record collector and music fanatic I ever met – he had an encyclopedic mind when it came to records.  Skip wouldn’t wait to get English records from American distributors – he would go over to England a couple of times a year, get to know the people who ran the English record labels, and ship thousands of records back to DC.  I got a lot of the records that I played on my show from Yesterday and Today. 

[NOTE: Soon after Skip Groff’s death in February 2019, Steven hosted a two-hour tribute show to him on the Takoma Park, MD community radio station, WOWD-FM (94.3).  Click here to listen to that show.]

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That does it for part two of our three-part interview with Steven Lorber.  In the next 2 or 3 lines, we’ll cover Steven’s years at WHFS, the legendary Washington, DC, progressive station.

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Gruppo Sportivo was a Dutch band with an Italian name (which translates as “sports team”) that sang in French and English.  They are another one of the great bands whose music I might never have become acquainted with were it not for Steven Lorber and his “Mystic Eyes” radio show.

“Mission à Paris” is the first track on Gruppo Sportivo’s first American album, Mistakes, which I went out and bought after hearing that song and several others from that album on “Mystic Eyes”:

Steven is still playing Gruppo Sportivo songs on his “Rock Continuum” radio show, which airs Monday afternoons on WOWD-FM (94.3).  Click here to listen to  his past shows.

The band’s official website describes the song as “a dime-store spy novel of stolen NATO plans and secret rendezvouses at the Eiffel Tower.”  (In case you’re wondering, rendezvouses is the correct spelling of the French plural form of rendezvous.)

Click here to listen to “Mission à Paris.  Everything about it is wonderful, including the kazoo part at the beginning.

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Troggs – "Too Much of a Good Thing" (1967)

Too much of a good thing

Is gonna be the end of me

[NOTE: The story of how I finally identified The Last’s “She Don’t Know Why I’m Here” roughly 25 years after first hearing it on legendary Washington DJ Steven Lorber’s “Mystic Eyes” radio show is an oft-told tale.  Suffice it to say that the first 2 or 3 lines post featured that song, and that a number of subsequent 2 or 3 lines posts featured other songs that I first heard on the “Mystic Eyes” program.  Here's the first installment of my three-part interview of Steven Lorber, the brains behind “Mystic Eyes.”]

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Q: Steven, I know you’re a big fan of 2 or 3 lines.  

A:  2 or 3 lines first caught my attention because it was about music.  But I found the personal elements of the blog more enchanting than the music history information, which for the most part I already knew.  It was the way you put your own personal observations about what was going on in society in general and in your life in particular at the time the featured song was released.  I liked the way you brought yourself into the picture.  

Steven Lorber with his record collection

Q:  My original plan for 2 or 3 lines was to make it mostly about the music, but it’s turned out to be more about me.

A:  And I would say keep going in that direction.  

Q:  I’m glad you feel that way, but I don’t need any encouragement to write about myself.  But enough about me – let’s talk about you.  I remember from hearing other interviews you've done that you lived in Pakistan when you were growing up.  What took your family there?

A.  My father was an engineer who was hired to help draw up plans for dams and other flood-control structures on the Indus River, which is the longest river in Pakistan. We ended up spending eight years there.  It was kind of a bizarre way to grow up, going to an American school while living in a third-world country that was so behind the times.  We had to boil the water that came out of the tap the whole time I lived there, and every six months I had to get a barrage of shots – shots for cholera and typhoid and hepatitis and so on.

Q:  Did you ever come back to the U.S. during those eight years?

A:   Yes, every two years we got to go back home for three months of home leave.  I would use that time to load up on and hamburgers and milkshakes and records.

Q:  Other than the records you brought back from the States, what were your sources of music when you were living in Pakistan?

A:  We had American families constantly coming in and others leaving, so every year a new bunch of kids would come in and bring their records.  My school had maybe 300 kids in grades one through 12, and everyone was friendly – if you were in 5th grade, you knew the people in 6th and 7th grade and you all hung out together.  You found out who had the records, and you borrowed them or went to their house, and you listened to them ad nauseam.  And we all had transistor radios, so we could listen to the BBC late at night and hear what was going on.

Q:  What were some of the records you remember listening to back in Pakistan?

A: Everyone had Beach Boys and Beatles records, of course.  Even my father was a Beatles fan – I remember he came back from one of his trips to the States with the A Hard Day’s Night album.  Someone had the Seeds’ first album on GNP Crescendo Records, and the Seeds became really popular in my group of friends.  Also the first Love album – not Forever Changes, but their first album – we listened to it a lot.

[NOTE:  The Seeds’ eponymous debut album, which  was released in 1966, included the group’s biggest hit, “Pushin’ Too Hard.”  The British music magazine Uncut described the album as “[a] brilliantly simple, headlong surge of fuzz-drenched guitar, bubbling organ riffs and [Sky] Saxon’s raw, throat-tearing vocals.”  AllMusic said that The Seeds “is probably the best album by any of the original American garage bands, without the usual time-filling cover versions and elongated jams.”]

Q:  How old were you when you moved back to the States for good?

The Fillmore East

A:  I spent my last two years of high school in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, which was a suburb of New York City.  The first thing I did when we moved to Fair Lawn was convince my parents to let me take the bus across the George Washington Bridge to hear Country Joe and the Fish, who were very big in Pakistan – very big.   I ended up seeing a lot of great shows at the Fillmore East between ’69 and ’71, which was when I moved to Washington, DC, to go to college at Georgetown.

[NOTE:  Rock promoter Bill Graham opened the Fillmore East in March 1968.  It closed in June 1971.  The performers who played at the Fillmore East in the three-plus years it was open included the Allman Brothers, Joe Cocker, Derek and the Dominos, the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Traffic, the Who, and Frank Zappa.  Click here to read a classic 2 or 3 lines post about a 1971 Black Sabbath show at the Fillmore East.]

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Here endeth part one of our three-part interview with Steven Lorber.  In the next 2 or 3 lines, we’ll cover Steven’s years at WGTB, the late, lamented Georgetown University station.

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American boomers know the Troggs’ #1 hit single, “Wild Thing,” and most of them probably remember the group’s 1967 hit, “Love Is All Around.”

But the Troggs did so much more than those two hits.  While I wouldn’t put the Troggs on the Mt. Rushmore of British Invasion groups instead of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Kinks, or Who, they were a great band that is underappreciated and underrated today.

Steven Lorber and his ex-pat friends listened to the Troggs in Pakistan in the sixties.  He regularly featured the Troggs on his “Mystic Eyes” show on WHFS, and he continues to play their music on his WOWD “Rock Continuum” program today.

“Too much of a Good Thing” was released on the Troggs’ third studio album, Cellophane, in 1967.

Click here to listen to “Too much of a Good Thing.”

Mazzy Star – "Fade Into You" (1993)

I look to you

To see the truth

[NOTE: In this fifth and final (finally!) installment of our interview of 2 or 3 lines, 2 or 3 lines reveals what you can expect from everyone's favorite little pop music blog in the year to come.]

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2 or 3 lines: I understand you have some big plans for the blog’s 11th year.

2 or 3 lines:  That’s a fact, Jack!  Starting with this interview of myself, which is unprecedented.

Q: Assuming that this interview ever ends, what can we look forward to next?

A: I’ve interviewed a number of musicians for 2 or 3 lines – Chris Wilson (frontman of the Flamin’ Groovies), Joe Scott (the brilliant arranger behind the Arbors’ cover of “The Letter”), Diane Quinn (Tru Fax and the Insaniacs) and the multitalented Niagara (Destroy All Monsters and Dark Carnival), just to name a few.  I think those interviews represent the very best of 2 or 3 lines, and I want to do interviews more frequently in the future.  So after we finish with my interview of myself, you’ll be treated to an interview of Steven Lorber – the DJ behind the legendary “Mystic Eyes” radio show.  

Q: To circle back for a minute, the music that Steven played on “Mystic Eyes” – in particular, The Last’s “She Don’t Know Why I’m Here” – was the inspiration for 2 or 3 lines.

  

A:  After the Lorber interview, I’m going to feature a number of the other songs from all those “Mystic Eyes” shows that I recorded on cassette tapes in 1980.  I’ve recently gone through all those all tapes, and the experience was a revelation.  There was so much great music on those tapes – music that I might have never heard if it weren’t for Steven Lorber.  I could easily do a year’s worth of posts featuring only great songs from those tapes, most of which would be new for the vast majority of 2 or 3 lines readers.  

Q: Is that the plan?

A:  Not exactly.  Starting with the next 2 or 3 lines, it’s going to be “Mystic Eyes” songs for the rest of November and all of December and January.  As those who read 2 or 3 lines regularly know, I post every single day in February – and twice on SuperBowl Sunday.  

Q:  This year is a leap year, so can we expect “30 Posts in 29 Days”?

A:  I may decide to skip the post featuring a song by the SuperBowl halftime performer and give you “29 Posts in 29 Days.”  I’m not sure yet if I’m going to bother featuring a Jennifer Lopez or Shakira song.

Q:  Have you decided on the “29 Posts in 29 Days” theme yet?

A:  I have.  This year’s theme is going to be underrated and overrated artists – the odd-numbered dates will feature songs by underrated artists, and the even-numbered dates will feature songs by overrated artists.  

Q:  Oooooh, I smell controversy!  Some of your readers are going to be bitter when you opine that some of their favorites are overrated.

A:  If they can’t handle the truth, that’s their problem – not mine.

Q:  Then what?

A:  After February, I’m going to go back to “Mystic Eyes” songs until I run out of great ones.  I’m guessing that will carry us through March, April, and May.  In June and July, I’ll announce the new inductees into the 2020 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME and the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME – and because this is a very special year for 2 or 3 lines, August will be devoted to the music of the first group of inductees into a brand-new 2 or 3 lines “GOLDEN DECADE” hall of fame.  Stay tuned, bubelah! 

Q:  It sounds like 2 or 3 lines will be focusing on music – not you – over the next year. 

A:  That’s the plan.  Of course, a famous general once said, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.”  We’ll see if my plan does any better.   

Q:  Anything else up your sleeve, Great Wizard?

A:  Actually, yes.  I talked earlier about why I cut back from doing three posts a week to two.  I’m going to make up for that by cleaning up some of the more notable 2 or 3 lines posts from past years and reposting one each week.  I know there are a lot of people who came a little late to the 2 or 3 lines party, so those posts will be new to them.  Since a lot of my older posts are in desperate need of a makeover, I’ll be killing two birds with one stone. 

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2 or 3 lines:  I have to say that today’s featured song is something of a surprise.  I didn’t think you were a fan of nineties indie music with breathy female vocalists.  “Fade Into You” sounds more like something a teenage girl with a crush on a guy who doesn’t know she exists would like, but not something you’d be into.

2 or 3 lines:  You know what they say – never ASSUME, because when you ASSUME, you make an ASS out of U and ME.  

Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star

Q:  Where did you first hear “Fade Into You”?

A:  I have no idea.  It’s on the American Honey soundtrack, so maybe that’s where I first heard it.  I don’t know any of Mazzy Star’s other songs.  All I know is that song absolutely paralyzes me.  I should probably be embarrassed to admit that, but I’m not.

Q:  You often choose to feature a particular song in order to send a message.  Is “Fade Into You” intended to send a message?

A:   I suppose.

Q:  And that message is?

A:  That you don’t know 2 or 3 lines – not really.  Most of the music featured on 2 or 3 lines isn’t all that surprising.  But sometimes I surprise you.  Sometimes I surprise myself.

Click here to listen to “Fade Into You.”

You can use the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Yardbirds – "Happening Ten Years Time Ago" (1966)

Walking in the room I see

Things that mean a lot to me

Why they do I'll never know

[NOTE:  Today's 2 or 3 lines features the part four of our groundbreaking interview with . . . 2 or 3 lines!  Just click here if you missed part three.]

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Q: The prolific novelist Joyce Carol Oates once wrote, “I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all.”  She has also said, “I probably spend 90% of my time revising what I’ve written.”  How much time do you spend revising 2 or 3 lines posts?

A:  One reason I force myself to post at least twice a week is to force myself to stop revising and move on.  It’s tempting to revise, and revise some more, and keep revising – but sometimes less is more when it comes to revising.  At some point, you have to stop revising and post the damn thing and move on to the next one.

(Not me!)

Q:  How would you describe your writing process?

A:  I throw everything into my first drafts – I just keep writing until I can’t think of anything more to say.  For me, the process of revising is mostly deleting stuff.  The more time I spend on a post, the shorter it gets – and shorter is almost always better.  But there comes a point of diminishing returns when it comes to editing something I’ve written – the writing becomes less spontaneous and more labored.  If I’m finding it hard to stop revising a post, that usually means there’s something seriously wrong with it.  My best posts are those that were easy to write and required relatively little editing.

Q:  Here’s another Joyce Carol Oates quote: “Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.”  Do you agree?

A:   Yes.  As Oates noted, you have privacy, autonomy, and freedom when you’re alone.  But it’s easy to become bored when you’re alone.  Working on 2 or 3 lines is one of the ways I keep myself from getting bored.  It’s also one of the ways I distract myself from feeling lonely.  I usually don’t mind being alone – which is fortunate, since I think I spend much more time alone than most people.  But sometimes I do mind.

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2 or 3 lines:  Here’s one more Oates quote: “One of the qualities of writing that is not much stressed is its problem-solving aspect, having to do with the presentation of material: how to structure it, what sort of sentences (direct, elliptical, simple or compound, syntactically elaborate), what tone (in art, "tone" is everything), pacing.  Paragraphing is a way of dramatization, as the look of a poem on a page is dramatic; where to break lines, where to end sentences.”  Any thoughts on that?

2 or 3 lines:  She’s absolutely correct when she says that paragraphing is important.  Nothing annoys me more than paragraphs that are too long – I find it almost impossible to read a book with long paragraphs.  The blog format I use has a much narrower space for text than a typical webpage does, so my paragraphs can look very long unless I keep them very short.  But I would keep my paragraphs very short regardless.  Paragraphing is not the only aspect of the look of 2 or 3 lines that I worry about, of course.  I worry about every aspect of the graphic design of my blog – including what font to use, what photos to use and where to put them . . . all that is important.

Q:  You’re not worried that you’re elevating form over substance?

A:  Form is just as important as substance.  The presentation influences how the reader perceives content.  If I’ve learned one thing about great pop music in the ten years I’ve been writing 2 or 3 lines, it’s that the arrangement of a recorded song is just as important as the words and music.  The same is true of 2 or 3 lines – how I present what I write is just as important as the words themselves.

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Q:  I’ve noticed that the posts from the blog’s first year or two do look different than more recent ones. 

A:  I’m truly appalled by how amateurish some of my early posts look – so appalled, in fact, that I often won’t share one of them with a friend or potential interview subject until I’ve gone back and cleaned it up.  In fact, one of my long-term goals is to clean them all up – I want every post on the blog to have a consistent and professional look.

Q:  Give us some examples of the specific changes you’ve made over the years to clean up the appearance of 2 or 3 lines posts.  

A:  When I started writing 2 or 3 lines, I used the 16-point Georgia font.  But I eventually switched to 18-point Georgia for the body of the posts and 20-point Georgia for the two or three lines of song lyrics at the beginning of each post.  Not only does that make the blog easier to read, it also encourages me to shorten my paragraphs further – the larger font makes them look longer.    Also, I’ve stopped embedding Youtube videos of the featured songs a couple of years ago – now I use “click here” links for those songs.  And I used to make a dash by hitting the hyphen key twice.  But then I learned about en dashes, which I prefer to em dashes because you can make an en dash on a Mac by pressing two keys, while an em dash requires you to hit three keys.  I also put a space before and after my en dashes.

(The official font of 2 or 3 lines)

Q:  I’ve noticed your earlier posts use straight quotation marks, while the newer ones use curly quotes.  Do you plan to go one way or the other with all of them?

A:  [Pause.]  You don’t expect me to believe you actually “noticed” that, do you?  Someone told you about that – probably hoping that you would ask me about it and get me all riled up.

Q:  No comment.

A:  There’s a good reason that I have both straight and curly quotation marks in 2 or 3 lines.  I’m not going to go back and change the straight ones to curly ones, or vice versa – which would require me to do a lot of cutting and pasting.  I may be obsessive, but I’m not that obsessive.  But you can be assured that each individual post will contain only straight or curly quotes.  I won’t have both types in a single post.  

Q:  Well, that’s relief! [Laughs.]

A:  There’s one other change I’ve made to 2 or 3 lines in recent years.  I now use five spaced asterisks – centered, not left-aligned – to indicate a change in topic.  Like this:  

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Q:  I’ve noticed these in your recent posts, but haven’t given much thought to them.

A:  I have.

Q:  Obviously.

A:  Those five centered asterisks perform two functions.  First, they break up long posts – make them easier on the eye.  Second, they free me up as a writer.

Q:  How so?

A:  Let’s say I write an uninterrupted 20-paragraph post.  Each paragraph needs to be logically connected to the next, which isn’t easy to do – if you want to change the subject within a post, you have to come up with some kind of transition.  It’s very constraining and limits your choices as a writer.  But those five little asterisks create a clean break between what comes before and what comes after.  I can switch topics without worrying about transitioning from one to the other – the asterisks take care of the transition.  It’s like abrupt cutting in a movie – you can jump from place to place as you like.  I might have a thought or an anecdote that takes only a few paragraphs to communicate – I can just drop it in without worrying about formally connecting it to what comes before and after.

Q:  Who would have thought that five asterisks could make such a difference?

A:  Believe me, that device makes a huge difference for me as a writer.  It’s impossible for me to overstate how significant a discovery that was for me.

Q:  More significant than using en dashes instead of em dashes?

A:  I know you’re being sarcastic, but I couldn’t care less.  In case you’ve forgotten, I’ve been writing a wildly successful little blog for TEN YEARS, so I might know a thing or two.

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2 or 3 lines:  Speaking of ten years, today’s featured song is titled “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago.”  Not to be a nitpicker, but there should be an apostrophe after “years,” which is possessive – “Happenings Ten Years’ Time Ago.”  

2 or 3 lines:  I noticed that as well.  I thought about just adding that apostrophe without telling anyone, but that would have been wrong.

Q:  The Yardbirds had a great run in 1965-66, when they had five singles in a row make it into the Billboard top 20.  But “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago” didn’t do as well.

A:  It was a top 40 hit, but I don’t remember hearing it when it was new.

Q:  You’re celebrating the tenth anniversary of 2 or 3 lines, so I’m not surprised that you chose to feature a song with “ten years” in the title.  Did you find it by doing a Google search for songs with that phrase in the lyrics?

A:  There you go assuming too much again.  No, I didn’t do a Google search for “ten years” songs – I was randomly flipping around Sirius/XM channels in my car earlier today and came across this song.  One of the reasons I picked it was that it had “ten years” in the title, but there were other reasons as well.

Q: Such as . . . ?

A:  For one thing, it’s a great song –  I think it’s as good as any Yardbirds song, which is saying something.  For another, serendipity is a recurring theme on 2 or 3 lines – that’s the way I’ve discovered a lot of my favorite songs.  Call it luck, or coincidence, or kismet, or “God’s way of remaining anonymous” (in the words of Albert Einstein), but the fact remains that if I had turned off my radio two minutes earlier, I would have missed “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago.”  It deserves to be featured today for that reason alone.  

Click here to listen to “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago.”

And click below to buy the song from Amazon: