Spirit – "I Got a Line on You" (1968)

My summer, she's comin' on strong

I can love you, love you, love you, love you 

All year long!

[NOTE: "I Got a Line on You” peaked at #25 on the Billboard “Hot 100” in 1968.  I find it mind-boggling that it didn’t make it all the way to #1.  (I also find it mind-boggling that Randy California of Spirit, who wrote the song when he was 16 years old, was playing guitar in Jimi Hendrix’s band when he was only 15!)  To help make up for the American public’s failure to give “I’ve Got a Line on You” its due, I’ve decided to include that record in this year’s group of 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME.  Here’s a slightly-edited version of my original August 16, 2013 post about that record.] 

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Summer has been comin' on strong for some time now.  It was beastly hot when we went to Cape Cod for vacation [in July 2013], which is unusual.

I'm hoping the driver of this seafood delivery truck remembered to plug in his refrigeration unit when he parked it for the night.  I hate to think how many people could have been laid low if the oysters, clams, scallops and other fruits de mer in this bad boy had been allowed to ripen.

Speaking of spoiled seafood, here's an amusing little exchange I found on an online discussion board:

CHEESEFUNGUS:  i bought a swordfish felle on monday and just took it out of the fridge, it smelled a little . . . fishy.  [NOTE: I assume "felle" means "filet."]  dude at my work said you have to eat fish right away cause they can go bad quick.  dont have much fish knowledge here.  [NOTE: Or any other kind of knowledge, I'd wager.]  its on the grill and will be done in about 10 min. BADGERBOY1:  if it was frozen the whole time then it should be fine. Unless it was bad before you froze it. Did you check to see if it had an expiration date? CHEESEFUNGUS:  I didn't freeze it I bought it fresh on Monday. 48 hrs can't be too bad?  My friggin grill ran out of gas and I had to run inside and pan fry.  [NOTE: Cheesefungus don't have much gas grill knowledge either.]   looks fine, tastes alright.  i'm about to mix it in to some cheesy noodles should be decent.  [NOTE: Is there anything that cheesy noodles doesn't make better?] Grilled swordfish (sans cheesy noodles) SALMON401: You'll be fine.  Put an extra roll of toilet paper by the throne . . . Just in case. *     *     *     *     *

I'm surprised that 2 or 3 lines has featured well over 500 songs, and that only one of them is a song by Spirit.  That's a major oversight on my part.

How would I describe Spirit's music?  Let me begin by reminding you of the traditional Indian tale of the six blind men and the elephant.

As the story goes, six blind men are asked to touch an elephant and describe it, based on what their hands tell them.  One touches the elephant's tusk, and says the elephant must be very like a spear.  Another touches its trunk, and announces that the elephant is very like a snake.  A third man touches the elephant's knee, and opines that the creature must be very like a tree.  And so on, and so forth.

Each one of the blind men was right, yet each one was wrong.  

The same is true of the music critics who have described Spirit's music as psychedelic, jazz-rock, progressive rock, or just plain pop music.  They're all right, yet they're all wrong.

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Spirit's music is uniquely eclectic, which isn't surprising given the diverse musical backgrounds of its members.

Vocalist/songwriter Jay Ferguson took classical piano lessons when he was a child, but then got interested in the banjo and started a bluegrass group with his brother.  

Drummer Ed Cassidy was a veteran jazz drummer who played with legends like Art Pepper, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and Gerry Mulligan.  Cassidy – who sported a shaved head, dressed entirely in black, and positioned his bass drum sideways with pedals on both sides so he could play it with either foot – was 44 years old when Spirit's eponymous debut album was released in 1968.  (Cassidy died of cancer less than a year ago.  He was 89 years old – older than my parents.  I can't quite wrap my mind around the fact that there existed a major rock music figure who was older than my parents.)

Ed Cassidy

Cassidy's stepson, guitarist/singer/songwriter Randy California, was not quite 17 when that album hit the stores.  Born Randy Wolfe, Spirit's wunderkind was given his stage name by Jimi Hendrix.  

Randy played in a band that Hendrix formed in New York City in the summer of 1966 – he was 15 years old at the time! – and Hendrix called him "Randy California" to distinguish him from another band member named Randy (whom Hendrix christened "Randy Texas").

Randy California

Hendrix invited California to come to England with him and be part of his new band, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, but his parents wanted him to finish high school.

(Time out, boys and girls.  I have a feeling that most of you who have kids would have made the same decision.  So would have I.  If Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had been our son, we probably would have told him to quit spending so much time playing the piano and do his arithmetic homework because WE ARE MORONS!) 

A Molokai beach

Sadly, Randy California died in 1997, when he was just 45.  He and his 12-year-old son were swimming off the coast of Molokai, Hawaii, when they got caught up in a riptide.  Randy managed to push his son free of the riptide, but he was pulled out to sea and presumably drowned.  (His body was never recovered.)

Spirit's first album was quite good.  Its second album, The Family That Plays Together, which was released less than a year later, was outstanding.  (I got both LPs -- gently used -- from a fellow college student in 1972.  Cost me a buck, as I recall.)

The group's fourth album, Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, is one of the great albums of all time.  

We'll be featuring some of the great songs from Dr. Sardonicus in the future, but today's post is about the group's only top-40 single.  "I Got a Line on You" (grammar was not the group's strong suit) is a classic three-minute (actually, 2:38) AM-radio, sing-along-to pop song.  It features one of the catchiest riffs ever and some great back-and-forth vocals in the chorus singing.

Click here to listen to "I Got a Line on You."

Click here to buy the song from Amazon.

Raspberries – "Go All the Way" (1972)

I never knew how complete love could be

'Til she kissed me and said, "BABY,

PLEASE GO ALL THE WAY!"

[NOTE: I was thinking that "Go All the Way" might be the best record never to have been featured on 2 or 3 lines.  But I just discovered that I featured it in a February 13, 2015 post.  (Who knew?)  A lot of people think that "Go All the Way" was mixed to sound great when it was broadcast by an AM station and listened to on a cheap transistor radio – not a fancy-schmancy stereo rig.  So maybe the best way to listen to it today is on your cell phone's itty-bitty internal speaker.  In any event, "Go All the Way" would be in the 2 OR 3 LINES "STICK OF DYNAMITE" RECORDS HALL OF FAME if such a hall of fame existed – the Raspberries held nothing back when they recorded it.] 

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I know it's Friday the 13th, but if this song doesn't get the job done for you tomorrow night, you need to work on your game, bro.

Here's a Valentine's Day tip for all of you: no homemade cards, please!

Dale Carnegie, the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, wrote that "There is no sweeter sound to any person's ear than the sound of their own name."  (He should have written "the sound of his or her name," of course, but we'll overlook that for the time being.)

Carnegie's words are true for most people, but are not true for teenaged boys.  If you are a teenaged boy, there is no sweeter sound to your ears than "BABY, PLEASE GO ALL THE WAY!"  (By "teenaged boy," I of course mean "male of any age.")

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The Raspberries released "Go All the Way" in the summer of 1972, and it was a big hit.  Which should come as no surprise, given that it may be the ultimate AM radio song.  

"Go All the Way" is crammed full of hooks and riffs and other pop-music goodies.  A parsimonious songwriter might have squeezed three or four songs out of "Go All the Way."

But God bless Raspberries frontman Eric Carmen, who wrote "Go All the Way."  Instead of prudently setting off each of his Fourth of July rockets and fountains and Roman candles one at a time, he just threw a match into the box and then ran like hell before the whole kit-and-kaboodle blew up in one magnificent eruption of sound and fury.

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Carmen a Cleveland native, was a precocious little son of a b*tch.  At age two, he was entertaining his family by singing Tony Bennett and Johnnie Ray songs.  When he was six, his aunt – a Cleveland Orchestra violist – taught him to play the violin.  

Carmen was also a classically trained pianist.  After hearing the Beatles' early records, he taught himself to play guitar and started writing songs.  (There are a lot of self-taught guitarists, but I have yet to hear of a self-taught classical pianist.)

When the Raspberries broke up, Eric Carmen went on to have a successful solo career.  His first hit single, "All By Myself," was inspired by one of the themes in Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2.

Eric Carmen had fabulous hair:

But what was he thinking when he went blond?

"All By Myself" was released on Carmen's self-titled debut solo album, which I gave to a young woman I was seeing in 1975.  It was a very successful gift, although I don't remember her shouting "BABY, PLEASE GO ALL THE WAY!" when I gave it to her. 

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Click here to listen to "Go All the Way."

Click here to buy the song from Amazon.

Spiral Starecase – "More Today Than Yesterday" (1969)

I love you more today than yesterday

But not as much as tomorrow

[NOTE: 2 or 3 lines originally featured “More Today Than Yesterday” – the newest of the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME – on May 14, 2019.  Here is a very lightly edited version of that post, which is certainly one of the very best of the more than two thousand that I’ve written since giving birth to this wildly successful little blog in 2009.]

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When I pick my grandson Jack up at day care, I usually sing along to the SiriusXM ’60s on 6 channel during the short drive to his home. 

A few weeks ago, today’s featured song popped up on that station.  Jack isn’t even three years old yet, and I wasn’t sure if the lines from the song that are quoted above would make any sense to him.  

But I started half-saying, half-singing those lines to Jack when I said goodbye after dropping him off at home.  I’m not sure if those lines are really true – do I really love Jack more today that I loved him yesterday? – but I thought it was a nice way to tell him how much I loved him, and might give him something to think about, too.

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Earlier today, my daughter Sarah – Jack’s mother – sent me two short videos of Jack singing to his baby brother Hunter, who just turned six months old.  To say that I was surprised by what Jack did in those videos is the understatement of the century.

Here’s the first video:

Here’s the second one:

(Note how Jack has captured the essential rhythm of these lyrics – the way he pronounces “yesterday” and “tomorrow,” and the pause between the two lines.)

Jack never really reacted to my singing those song lyrics to him – he certainly never sang along with me, or repeated the lines back to me.  

I hadn’t told anyone else about my reciting those lyrics as a goodbye catchphrase.  My daughter had no idea that I was doing that, so she couldn’t have prompted him to sing the lines to Hunter while she recorded him.

Jack has always seemed very taken with little Hunter – he stays pretty close to him when both boys are at home, and I’ve never seen him exhibit any jealousy or resentment when we are paying more attention to Hunter than to him.  But I can’t quite comprehend how his not-quite-three-year-old brain figured out that the song lyrics about love that I recited to him were appropriate for him to sing to his brother.  

I’ve been blessed with four grandsons, and a fifth is on the way – perhaps I’ll be fortunate enough to have even more grandchildren in the future.  I have a feeling there are other little miracles like this one in store for me, and I am very much looking forward to them.

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The Spiral Starecase’s “More Today than Yesterday” made it to #12 on the Billboard “Hot 100” in 1969.  

Pat Upton in 2013

In 2013, the group’s frontman, Pat Upton, talked to a newspaper reporter about writing the song:

I wrote “I Love You More Today Than Yesterday” in a motel room in Las Vegas.  I was thinking about Bobby Goldsboro singing it when I first wrote it.  Musically, I had a chord progression in my head, and I knew the only way I’d ever get to use it was if I wrote a song around it.  [The group recorded the song and] three months later, it took off.

After the Spiral Starecase broke up, Upton became a session musician and a member of Ricky Nelson’s band for a few years.  

On December 30, 1985, Nelson performed at Upton’s club in Guntersville, Alabama.  He was scheduled to play at a big New Year’s Eve show in Dallas, and invited Upton to join them, but Upton declined.  Nelson’s plane – a 40-year-old DC-3 with a history of mechanical problems – crashed about two miles from the airport where it was supposed to land, killing Nelson, his girlfriend, his manager, and all four members of his band.

Here’s a photo of Upton and Nelson taken just before Nelson’s ill-fated flight took off:

Upton died in 2016 at the age of 75.  I wish I had been able to share these videos of Jack with him – he had six grandchildren of his own, so I’m sure he would have enjoyed them.

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In 1889, the 18-year-old Rosemonde Gérard wrote the following lines to Edmond Rostand, a young playwright (he wrote Cyrano de Bergerac) whom she would soon marry:

Car, vois-tu, chaque jour je t’aime davantage,

Aujourd’hui plus qu’hier et bien moins que demain.

French poet Rosemonde Gérard

One English-language dictionary of quotations translates those lines as follows:

For, you see, each day I love you more,

Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.

Years later, a French jeweler came up with the idea of making a medallion engraved with an abbreviated version of the verse.  

The medallion depicted below reads has a plus sign followed by qu’hier, a minus sign, and que demain – in other words, “more than yesterday, less than tomorrow.”

The plus and minus signs on these medallions are often enhanced with gemstones – a romantic poem is all well and good, but diamonds are a girl’s best friend!

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Click here to listen to “More Today Than Yesterday.”

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.

Glen Campbell – "Wichita Lineman" (1968)

And I need you more than want you

And I want you for all time

After he reads a question, my favorite trivia host plays music to fill the time that teams are allowed to think about that question before turning an answer in – which is usually two minutes. 

One of the reason that my favorite trivia host is my favorite trivia host is his playlist – which includes songs like “Pepper” by the Butthole Surfers, “88 Lines About 44 Women” by the Nails, “People Who Died” by the Jim Carroll Band, and “Flagpole Sitta” by Harvey Danger.

But my favorite of the songs that this host plays regularly is “Wichita Lineman” by the late Glen Campbell.  

You didn’t see that coming, did you?

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As much as I like that record, it wasn’t on my original short list for this year’s class of the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME.

“Wichita Lineman” made it all the way to #3 on the Billboard “Hot 100,” so it certainly qualifies as a hit single.  (Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” held down the number one spot that week.)

And “Wichita Lineman” had a hall-of-fame-worthy pedigree: it was written by Jimmy Webb, who was one of the truly great pop songwriters of all time.  (That statement would be true even if the only song he had ever written in his life was “MacArthur Park.”)

But the real reason I chose to include “Wichita Lineman” among this year’s group of “Golden Decade” hit singles hall of fame selections was that I learned recently that no less a cultural icon than Bob Dylan himself has called it “the greatest song ever written.”

(Oh yes he did!)

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Of course, Dylan’s other favorite songs include “I Want to Hold Your Hand” by the Beatles and “Pretty Maids in a Row” by the Eagles . . . which proves that his musical judgment is a little suspect.

But while it’s fair to discount Dylan’s enthusiastic endorsement of “Wichita Lineman,” there’s certainly no reason to discount mine.  If 2 or 3 lines tells you that a record is great, you’d best believe that record is great.

And those of you who don't agree that "Wichita Lineman" is a great record can just form a line to kiss my ass!

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Click here to listen to “Wichita Lineman.”

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.

Five Man Electrical Band – "Signs" (1971)

The sign said

You got to have a membership card
To get inside (GRUNT!)

[NOTE: This resurrected 2 or 3 lines post – which originally appeared on July 23, 2010 – features a great song that I will always associate with the jukebox at Nina's Green Parrot, a Kansas bar where many of my high-school friends and I misspent our youth sucking down cheap 3.2% beer.  "Signs" is a one-hit wonder with not only a capital "O-H," but also with a capital "W."  That's why it's a member of this year's class of 2 OR 3 LINES "GOLDEN DECADE" HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME inductees.] 

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Les Emmerson of the Five Man Electrical Band doesn't sing the word "Grunt!" on today's featured record – he just grunts.  And that grunt is the emotional highlight of this song.  

We'll get back to this song a little later, but first let's set the stage – which means traveling through another dimension . . . a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind . . . a journey into a wondrous land whose inhabitants float in a sea of cheap 3.2% beer.

Our destination: Nina's "Green Parrot" bar, in Galena, Kansas.  The time: a hot Friday evening in July 1971.

Galena (with sphalerite)

Galena – named after the most commercially important lead ore mineral, which was discovered in abundance in the area in 1877 – is and always has been (as far as I know) a depressed and depressing old mining town.

Within a few months of the discovery of lead ore, Galena was home to 10,000 souls, and its population eventually peaked at 30,000.  The 2000 census reported that Galena had only 3287 residents, and I have to think that every single one of them would move away if they had their druthers.

Of course, I haven't been to Galena in years – I'm basing my opinions on what the town was like in the early 1970's.  Maybe things have changed for the better.  But I doubt it.

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I don't think I ever took today's featured song too seriously, but I'm guessing a lot of people did.  I sort of bought into all that counterculture stuff when I was in college, but I wasn't totally committed to it like a lot of people back then were.

"Signs" hit #3 on the Billboard chart in 1971, and was very successfully covered by Tesla in 1990.  If you don't remember the gist of it, here's a very learned exegesis courtesy of Wikipedia:

The song was released during an era of social and political change, and its lyrics carry themes of tolerance and inclusion.

In the first verses of the song, the main protagonist (a hippie) expresses his frustration over a series of signs he encounters. One of the signs discourages "long-haired, freaky people" from applying for a job, while another expresses the "trespassers will be shot on sight" threat; yet another proclaims that membership cards are required to get into a club. 

While he is able to fool or dissuade his would-be antagonist in the first two instances — first, by tucking his hair up in a cap; the second, by telling the homeowner that God would frown upon his behavior — the protagonist, since he isn't wearing a button-down shirt or tie, is turned away at the door by the club usher.

In the final verse, the hippie shares his experiences of going to a church, where he is finally accepted for who he is. After pointing out a sign reading "Everybody welcome, come in, kneel down and pray," he is asked to contribute to the offering; however, when he realizes he has no money, he takes out a slip of paper, writing on it "Thank you, Lord for thinking about me, I'm alive and doing fine." 

Did the author pull this from a paper he did for a college English class ("English 323: Popular Song Lyrics from the Psychedelic Era")?  I've never read such constipated prose.  "Able to fool or dissuade his would-be antagonist"?  "Telling the homeowner that God would frown upon his behavior"?  You gotta be kidding me.

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I remember this song being on the jukebox at Nina's.  Nina's wasn't the only bar in Galena, but it was the one favored overwhelmingly by Joplin teenagers.  The summer of 1971 was the summer after my freshman year in college, when – and I am not exaggerating, as several other members of the Parkwood High School class of 1970 can testify – I spent six nights a week at Nina's.  (On the seventh day, Nina rested – and I dried out.)

I worked from 7:00 AM to 3:30 PM that summer unloading railroad cars at a grocery warehouse for four bucks an hour.

Did I ever tell you the story about having to unload a Clorox car that had been humped – that's a technical railroad term – a little too brusquely?  That resulted in a few dozen cases of gallon jugs of Clorox being crushed, leaving undiluted chlorine bleach an inch or two deep in the bottom of the car?  (Where was OSHA when I needed them?  My lungs have never been the same.) 

A vintage Clorox ad

And what about the time the Ralston-Purina car got banged around somewhere on the Frisco railroad tracks between St. Louis and Joplin, and after unloading Quaker Oats and Cap'n Crunch and a bunch of other stuff, I came to a few damaged cases of dog and cat food that had been festering inside the cars for several days in the August sun, and were literally crawling with maggots?

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When my daily shift at the grocery warehouse was over, I came home and took a bath, gobbled down a home-cooked dinner (with nary a words of thanks), and headed out after a "conversation" with my mother.

This "conversation" generally went something like this:

Her:  "Where are you going?"

Me:  "Out."

Her:  "When will you be back?"

Me:  "Not too late."

Then it was off to Galena – via old Route 66, part of the nightly convoy of Missouri teenagers heading to Kansas for 3.2% beer, which could be legally purchased by 18-year-olds.

Going in the other direction was an equally heavy stream of Kansas 21-year-olds beating it to Missouri to visit our many classy cocktail lounges – liquor-by-the-drink (not to mention many other accoutrements of civilization) being illegal in Kansas.  

It's amazing there weren't more automobile-related deaths and dismemberments at the end of the evenings as both groups returned home (usually much the worse for wear) but it was only about a 10-mile trip, and I don't recall any serious accidents during those summers.  However, I do remember a few close calls passing buses and 18-wheelers on the two-lane highway.  But my 1970 Olds Cutlass Supreme has a 350-cubic inch V8, so passing didn't take long when you really stomped on the gas.

(NOTICE:  Please drink responsibly.  Always have a designated driver.  Do as I say, not as I did.)

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We usually hit Nina's shortly after 7 PM and stayed until closing time, which was midnight.  Usually, I drank two quart bottles of beer each night – occasionally three.  (Sometimes, I would order a 24-ounce "tall boy" to go and down it on the drive home – a decision I would really regret when my mother rousted me out of bed at 6:00 AM the next morning to go to work.)

I could talk about Galena for hours.  I remember an amazing number of details, like the beer prices at Nina's.  My friends and I usually went for quarts of beer – not regular bottles.  (We were frugal types – children of children of the Great Depression.)  The premium brands – Budweiser, Schiltz, Coors – were 35 cents a quart, while the bargain brands – Pabst, Hamm's, Stag, Busch – went for 25 cents, as I recall.

You could get the premium quarts for a quarter each at "Uncle" Buck's Recreation Parlor across the street, plus watch domino games between farmers in bib overalls and play pool on non-coin-operated pool tables, with the balls hand-racked by a gnarly little dude wearing a carpenter's apron full of change.  It was right out of a Dickens novel – if Dickens had written any novels about rednecks and beer-soaked teenagers, that is.

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We spent so much time at Nina's that we ended up hanging out with the bartenders after hours – a couple of cousins named Ron and Marilyn, who gave us extra beer-company lights and window signs that Nina didn't need.

I fondly remember one very chic Hamm's lamp, which was by far the most notable piece of decor in my college apartment:

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What did we actually do for those five hours a night, six nights a week?  Drinking two quarts of beer didn't take all that much time, and Nina's didn't serve food.  (Well, they had chips and Beer Nuts and pickled hard-boiled eggs and SlimJims -- but not much else.)

We didn't dance to the jukebox – I don't think that was allowed.  (Nina, the mean, squinty, uncommunicative old woman who owned the joint, had a lot of rules, and you either followed them or got kicked out.)  There was a coin-operated pool table, but I rarely played it – I wasn't good enough, and it was always in use.  I don't think we played cards while we were at Nina's – spades and hearts were obsessions of ours in those years – although we might have.  And there were no TVs to watch.

So I assume we mostly talked.  Talked with the girls who came to Nina's – or talked about the girls who came to Nina's (or the girls who didn't come to Nina's).

Sometimes one of the smart, quiet girls from your English class would show up and it would suddenly dawn on you that she was really quite attractive, and you wondered why you never asked her out back in high school because she was not only cute, but also nice and not stuck-up and no doubt would have made a much more satisfactory girlfriend than most of the girls you did pursue.

A Schlitz "tall boy" can

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Some nights – especially Fridays and Saturdays – we ventured further west, to Baxter Springs or even to Pittsburg, a college town with more varied entertainment opportunities.  But most nights, it was Nina's.

I don't know Nina's last name.  But I can see her right now, almost 40 years later, wearing a white waitress's uniform, sitting behind a hostess podium just inside the front door, checking IDs under a small desk lamp with her beady little eyes.  (It did not matter one whit if you came to Nina's every Monday through Saturday for three months – as I did – because she would still look at you as if she had never seen you before and simply hold out her hand for your driver's license.)  I know she died years ago, and I heard they auctioned off the bar's furnishings after her passing.

In 2006, a mine-shaft collapse resulted in the 114-year-old building that housed Nina's being condemned and later razed.   Here's what the old gal looked like in her final days:

Click here to read more about Nina's.

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I had a hard time deciding which song from Nina's jukebox I should honor.  Some of the songs I remember vividly from Nina's were "Long Cool Woman In a Black Dress" (the Hollies sans Graham Nash), "Sweet Hitchhiker" (Creedence Clearwater Revival's last big hit before they broke up), "One Fine Morning" (Lighthouse, who were Canadian – as was the Five Man Electrical Band), and "Liar" (Three Dog Night's darkest single). 

The Five Man Electrical Band

Then there was "Brandy" (by Looking Glass), a favorite of a girl I hung out with one summer.  (I hesitate to say I "dated" her because about the only thing we ever did together was go to Nina's and get drunk.)  

At night when the bars close down

Brandy walks through a silent town

And loves a man who's not around

She still can hear him say

She hears him say "Brandy, you're a fine girl –

What a good wife you would be.

But my life, my lover, my lady is the sea"

That song seems to have been a major favorite among girls of that era, but it made no sense to me.  Why in the world would a girl like a song about a sailor who told the woman who loved him that the sea was more important to him than she was, and then sailed away for a couple of years.

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Maybe those girls agreed with this line from humorist Anne Taintor:  "She liked imaginary men best of all."

Here are some more good Anne Taintor lines:

  – "Had she punished him enough?  How could she be sure?"

  – "One just had to admire his deluded self-confidence!"

  – "Looking for trouble?  Look no further!"

And my all-time favorite:

  

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Hmmm . . . now where was I?  Oh, yes . . . now I remember.

Click here to listen to "Signs."  (If you're from Joplin, close your eyes and pretend you're hearing it on Nina's jukebox back in 1971.)

Click here to buy "Signs" from Amazon.