Dave Edmunds – "Girls Talk" (1979)

Thought I heard you mention my name

Can't you talk any louder?

As unbelievable as it may seem, today marks the tenth anniversary of everyone’s favorite little pop music blog . . . the one, the only 2 or 3 lines (and so much more).

Many people overlook the and so much more part of my blog’s name.  Perhaps that’s because I usually refer to the blog simply as 2 or 3 lines.  Or perhaps it’s because I put the and so much more in parentheses, and parenthetical expressions are considered to be “nonessential” by the grammar powers-that-be.  

Don’t sleep on and so much more.  One could argue that the and so much more stuff is not only essential to the blog, but is even essentialer than the 2 or 3 lines part.

It’s certainly something to think about, n’est-ce pas?

Oui, oui, oui!  But not right now.

Because right now it’s time for 2 or 3 lines to give you a heapin’ helpin’ of and so much more in the form of an interview with . . . none other than 2 or 3 lines himself!

(In parentheses, yes – but nonessential?  NO!)

That’s right!  2 or 3 lines is going to interview 2 or 3 lines!  It’s groundbreaking . . . it’s unprecedented . . . it’s meta to the meta power!

But most of all . . . it’s sooooo 2 or 3 lines (and so much more)!

Without further ado . . .

*     *     *     *     *

2 or 3 lines:  Let’s begin at the beginning.  Tell me about the genesis of 2 or 3 lines.

2 or 3 lines:  That story really begins in 1980 – a couple of years after I graduated from law school and moved to Washington, DC.  I discovered a radio show called “Mystic Eyes” on the old WHFS and started recording it on cassette tapes.  The DJ played records that I never heard anywhere else, including one that became a particular favorite of mine – I thought it was maybe the best rock song ever, but I didn’t know the name of the song or the group that recorded it.  

Q: Didn’t the DJ announce the titles of the songs he played?

A: He did, but I would usually hit “pause” on my cassette deck when the music ended and the DJ started talking – trying to conserve tape, I suppose.

Q: So how did you manage to identify the mystery song? 

A:  About 25 years after I first heard it, I plugged a very distinctive phrase from its lyrics into a search engine (probably Alta Vista, not Google – this was a long time ago) and got exactly one hit.  That hit took me to the website of a Los Angeles band called The Last, where I found everything I wanted to know about "She Don't Know Why I'm Here.”  (You can click here to go to that website.)

Q: And that inspired you to create 2 or 3 lines?

A:  I wanted to tell the story of how I finally figured out what the song was, but mostly I wanted to share the song – which is relatively obscure – with a wider audience.  That gave me the idea of doing a blog about other great records that had somehow fallen through the cracks.

Q: On the same day you posted about "She Don't Know Why I'm Here,” you wrote sort of a FAQ for 2 or 3 lines titled “What? Who? Why?”  It states that “[w]ho I am and how I became what I am today is very relevant to the songs I've chosen to feature on this blog, but . . . [t]his blog is more about the music than it is about me.”

A:  I really should revise that.  A lot of 2 or 3 lines posts are more about me than they are about the featured songs.

Q:  A lot of your posts are quite autobiographical.

A:  “Narcissistic” is another word that has been used to describe them.

*     *     *     *     *

Q:  You’ve said that the first year of 2 or 3 lines was probably its best year.  In 2016, you wrote that your blog “started to go downhill in 2013, I think.  Since then there have been flashes of brilliance, but they’re getting to be few and far between.”  Do you still feel that way?

A:  Absolutely.  I’ve started cleaning up my old posts – by “clean up,” I mean I fix broken links, change the font so the appearance of the old post is consistent with the appearance of newer ones, and so on – and I am often almost moved to tears by how good the old posts are compared to most of my recent ones.

Life was good during
the Golden Age of Greece

Q:  The ancient Greeks had a Golden Age, a Silver Age, a Bronze Age, and an Iron Age.  What age would you say 2 or 3 lines is currently in?

A:  Maybe the Crap Age?

Q:  What makes the older posts better?

A:  The best posts from the “Golden Age” of 2 or 3 lines always began with a great song – usually (although not always) a song that wasn’t very well-known.  Some of those posts focused almost entirely on the song – I might have analyzed the song’s lyrics or musical structure at length, or discussed the life of the songwriter or performer who recorded it.  But the more interesting posts addressed topics that had only a tangential relationship to the song.  The song was the starting point, but where the post went from there was unpredictable – the journey was more important than the destination.

Q:  What changed?

A:  After a few years, I was having a harder time coming up with interesting content.  A lot of my best posts have autobiographical elements, but my life isn’t all that interesting – I had only a limited supply of good stories to tell about myself.  So it became something of a struggle to come up with interesting content – I would have to pull my topic from a newspaper or magazine, then find a song that had a connection to that topic.  Half the time, the song was an afterthought – sometimes I didn’t even like the song, but featured it simply because it fit the content of the post.

Q: Is part of the problem that you committed to writing three posts a week?

A:  Absolutely.  At the beginning, I would only do a post when the spirit moved me, which wasn’t very often.  I produced only 21 posts in the first six months after I started 2 or 3 lines – that’s less than one post per week.  I more than tripled my output over the next six months, and settled into a three-posts-a-week schedule after that.  Plus I started posting daily in February, which meant I was cranking out about 170 posts a year.

Q:  Here’s how you answered an interviewer who asked you a few years ago what the biggest problem with 2 or 3 lines was: “The fact that I insist on doing three posts a week even when I don’t have anything to say.  In the last couple of years, I’ve been too busy and too distracted to write three good posts a week.  So I’ve written three crappy posts a week.”  Given that, why did it you insist on maintaining the three-posts-a-week schedule for so long?

A:  I’m stubborn.  I’m also lazy, but my decision to go from three posts a week to two posts a week wasn’t really motivated by laziness.  I’m spending as much time on 2 or 3 lines as ever, but I’m hoping that devoting the same amount of time to fewer posts will mean those posts will be better.  

Q:   You retired from your law firm two years ago, so I assume it’s easier to find time for  2 or 3 lines?  

A:  You would think so, but so far it hasn’t worked out that way.  Somehow, it’s become harder for me to find the time to write.

*     *     *     *     *

Q:  You say that the decision to cut back from three to two posts weekly wasn’t the result of laziness.  But I have to say that you’ve done some things recently that seem to indicate that laziness may be at work here.  For example, your June and July posts were mostly recycled posts that you had previously published.

A: My June and July posts featured the new class of inductees into the 2 OR 3 LINES "GOLDEN DECADE" HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME and the 2 OR 3 LINES "GOLDEN DECADE" ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME.  It should come as no surprise that I had previously written about most of those songs – after all, they’re some of the greatest rock songs of all time.  I didn’t hold anything back when I wrote those original posts – if I had written new posts about the same songs, they would have been redundant at best and inferior at worst.  Plus I went to Europe in June and to Cape Cod in July.  Maybe you work year round and don’t take vacations or holidays, but I do.  I could have just shut 2 or 3 lines down during my vacations, but instead I prepared the hall of fame posts in advance of my departure so my loyal readers wouldn’t have to go weeks without 2 or 3 lines.

Q: What about last month, when 2 or 3 lines consisted of recycled posts from 2009-2010?

A: In case you’ve forgotten, this is the TENTH ANNIVERSARY of 2 or 3 lines, which is kind of a big deal.  I decided to mark the occasion by picking out a few of the very best posts from the blog’s first year of existence and republishing them.  What you refer to as “recycled” posts represent the crème de la crème of the first year of 2 or 3 lines, and those readers who became aware of 2 or 3 lines only recently deserve the chance to read them.  Plus this past October was a very busy month for me – I’ve been working on a lot of very special surprises for my readers, which we can talk about later in this interview.  

*     *     *     *     *

2 or 3 lines:  I’m sure you thought long and hard before choosing the song you would feature on the tenth anniversary of 2 or 3 lines.  Why “Girls Talk”?

2 or 3 lines:  It’s a great song.  In fact, it may be my favorite song not to have been featured on 2 or 3 lines to date – I’m surprised that I haven’t written about it already.

Q:  Elvis Costello, who wrote “Girls Talk,” is a favorite of yours.  But you’ve chosen to feature the Dave Edmunds cover of the song, which was released in 1979 on his Repeat When Necessary album:

A.  The story goes that Costello handed Edmunds a cassette tape with a rough demo of “Girls Talk” on it one day and said, “Here’s a song for you.”  Edmunds wasn’t crazy about the song.  But he liked the opening line – “There are some things you can’t cover up with lipstick and powder” – so he decided to spend some time coming up with a completely different arrangement.  

Q:  Costello recorded the song a year later, and his version is quite different.

A:  I’ll take the Edmunds “Girls Talk” any day of the week.  Costello deserves credit for writing the very clever lyrics, but Edmunds’ arrangement is just as important.

Q:  What makes the arrangement so noteworthy?

A:  For one thing, listen to the introduction.  You expect the opening two-measure guitar riff to be repeated four times, but Edmunds jumps in and starts singing after only three repetitions of that riff – plus the song changes keys when he starts singing.  You’re immediately thrown a little off balance, but the song has already found a solid groove, so it doesn’t lose you.  When the guitar solo begins, there’s another key change just to keep things interesting.  The arrangement is unconventional, but not so much that it’s annoying. 

[NOTE: Here endeth part one of the 2 or 3 lines interview of 2 or 3 lines.  Click here to go to part two of the interview.]

*     *     *     *     *

Click here to read what Dave Edmunds told Carl Wiser of Songfacts about “Girls Talk.”

Click here to listen to the Elvis Costello version of “Girls Talk.”

Click here to listen to the Dave Edmunds recording, which was a top five single in the UK.  (I told you it was better than the Costello version.)

Click here to buy the Edmunds version of “Girls Talk” from Amazon.

Misunderstood – "I Can Take You to the Sun" (1966)

‘Cause words are words

And they mean nothing more

(But as the brothers Gibb once said, words may be all you have . . .)

It hit me only a couple of hours ago that 2 or 3 lines is six years old today!  (By the way, today’s post is number 942.  That’s a lot of songs, not to mention a heapin' helpin' of narcissism.)

How could I have almost overlooked such an important milestone for my wildly popular little blog?

That’s a good question, and I wish I had a good answer for it.  (I don’t even have a bad answer for it.) 

Ordinarily, 2 or 3 lines operates like a well-oiled machine – especially when it comes to planning ahead.  

We usually decide what songs will be featured on particular dates well in advance of those dates – especially when the date has some special significance . . . like when it’s an anniversary of something particularly meaningful to 2 or 3 lines.  (You can click here for an example.)    

But our best-laid plans were ganged aft agley today, boys and girls.  That’s why I had to scramble tonight to come up with a post and get it online before November 1 had become November 2.

Robert Burns

I hate it when someone excuses his or her failure to complete a task in a timely fashion by saying “I’ve been sooooo busy lately!”  (If you didn’t spend so much time complaining to everyone about how busy you are, you wouldn’t be so damn busy!)

But I’ve been sooooo busy recently myself – I'm working under a tight deadline to come up with a plan to deal with a very difficult situation.  

In case you wondered, here are the songs that were featured on each of the previous five birthdays of 2 or 3 lines:

#1 – “Birthday,” by Underground Sunshine.  (This is a cover of the famous Beatles song.)

#2 – “Happy Birthday,” by Steppenwolf.  (Just call me “Captain Obvious.”)

#3 – “It’s Never Too Late,” by Steppenwolf.

Matthew Sweet with Susanna Hoffs

#4 – “Girlfriend,” by Matthew Sweet.  

#5 – “Five Years,” by David Bowie.  (Another Captain Obvious pick.)

Not to change the subject, but you’re probably wondering what an appropriate 6th anniversary gift would be 2 or 3 lines.

It turns out that the traditional 6th wedding anniversary in the U.S. is something made of iron.  That’s not very promising, is it?

In the UK, the traditional 6th anniversary gift is something made with sugar – like candy.  Now that’s a little more like it.  

Librarians at the Chicago Public Library suggest a “wood object” as a 6th anniversary gift.

(NOTE: When did Chicago librarians decide to get into the anniversary gift racket?  They should be practicing that move where they take off their glasses and let down their hair and become super hot instead of wasting their time coming up with anniversary gift lists.) 

Those same Chicago librarians suggest engraved marble or granite gifts for a 90th wedding anniversary.  (The only suitable gift I can think of that fits that bill would be a nice tombstone.)

Today, 2 or 3 lines is featuring a song by the Misunderstood, a California band that moved to the UK in 1966 to record.  Click here to read more about the Misunderstood.

The Misunderstood has been called “the greatest lost band of the sixties.”  One reviewer wrote  in 1999 that the 1966 Misunderstood single that is today’s featured song – “I Can Take You to the Sun” – still stood up to the singles that were being released at that time by Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, and others.

But that’s not why I chose to feature a song by the Misunderstood today.  I’m featuring this song because – like the Misunderstood – I am also misunderstood!  Terribly misunderstood, as a matter of fact!  (It’s true . . . just ask anyone!)

If you don’t believe me, think about this: for as long as I can remember, my favorite soft drink has been Dr. Pepper, which has been notoriously misunderstood for years:

Dr. Pepper, so misunderstood

If anyone would try you

They’d know you taste good!

(The star of that commercial is indeed Carol Kane, the star of stage, screen, and television, who is exactly 19 days younger than me.)

One final note.  As you regular 2 or 3 lines readers know, I’ve been posting every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday for years.  Henceforth, I’ll be posting on Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays instead.  (My staff and I have been running the numbers, crunching the data, and kicking the idea around with some focus groups for some time now, and it seemed like the right move.)

We dipped our toes into those waters this past Thursday and Saturday, when we posted our two-part interview of Michael Mariotte, the one and only drummer for the legendary Washington, DC group, Tru Fax and the Insaniacs (which my spell-checking program just attempted to change to “Insomniacs”).

We have to post something today because it’s our anniversary, but we’re going to pretend that it’s Monday instead of Sunday, which means that our conversion to a Monday-Thursday-Saturday cycle is official.  

Look for the next 2 or 3 lines to appear on this coming Thursday, not this coming Friday – I promise you that the first post of our 7th year will be a humdinger.

Here’s “I Can Take You to the Sun”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Chester French – "She Loves Everybody" (2009)

Well she craves affection

So I use protection

That's always a good idea, of course.  But it's an especially good idea given the title of today's featured song.

"She Loves Everybody" plays during the closing credits of the first episode of the fourth season of the HBO comedy, Entourage.

I've currently watching Entourage on DVD.  (Thank you, public library!)

The show, which ran for eight seasons, depicts the career of a young, up-and-coming movie star who grew up on the mean streets of Queens.

The boys of Entourage

The actor's entourage consists of an older half-brother (a lesser TV and movie actor) and two childhood friends – one is his driver and all-around gofer while the other one becomes his manager.

Entourage was inspired by the career of movie star Mark Wahlberg, who grew up in a tough part of Boston.  Wahlberg was a bad, bad boy who was arrested many times while still a teenager.  (We're not talking jaywalking or littering, boys and girls – once he was charged with attempted murder.)  

Wahlberg eventually cleaned up his act.  After fronting a hip-hop band (Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch) and gaining fame as a Calvin Klein underwear model, he made his movie debut at age 22 and today is a successful leading man.

Mark Wahlberg in The Departed

Vincent Chase, the fictional star of Entourage, is Wahlberg without the rap sheet.  He and his buddies live the good life in L.A. – their life abounds with sex, drugs, and sex 'n' drugs.

There's not quite as much nudity as you might expect from an HBO show, but that's really my only complaint about Entourage.

Click here for a list of the 100 hottest women to appear on Entourage.

I'd call Entourage a guilty pleasure except that I don't feel the least bit guilty about watching it.

"She Loves Everybody" is a pretty good, but the backstory of the two-man band that recorded it is why I'm featuring it today.  

Chester French consists of D. A. Wallach and Maxwell Drummey, two friends who met as Harvard College freshmen in 2003.  

The group is named after sculptor Daniel Chester French, who is best-known for the iconic 19-foot-tall statue of Abraham Lincoln that is the centerpiece of the Lincoln Memorial:

French's other works include the famous statue of a Minuteman in Concord, Massachusetts, and the seated statue of the founder of Harvard College, John Harvard, which stands in Harvard Yard:

By the way, the French statue of John Harvard is known as "the statue of three lies."

First, the statue isn't a likeness of Harvard – no one knows what John Harvard looked like, so the sculptor used a friend as the model for the statue.

Daniel Chester French

Second, John Harvard was not Harvard's founder, although he was the college's first major benefactor, leaving half of his estate and his library of some 400 volumes to Harvard.

Third, Harvard was founded in 1636 – not 1638, as the engraving on the statue says.

Wallach and Drummey learned how to record and produce music at Harvard's recording studio, and put together a demo album their senior year.  That demo ended up in the hands of Kanye West and Pharrell Williams, among others, and became the subject of a full-scale bidding war that was eventually won by Interscope Records (whose other artists include Eminem, Lady Gaga, and the Black Eyed Peas.)

Maxwell Drummey and D. A. Wallach:
a/k/a "Twee and Tweer"

Vocalist/songwriter Wallach has a very interesting biography.  It's so interesting that you have to wonder if it's really true.

Wallach was a two-time finalist in the Federal Reserve Bank's "Fed Challenge," a monetary policy competition for high-school students.

Here's the Wikipedia description of the "Fed Challenge":

The Fed Challenge begins with regional and district rounds of competition.  Each Fed Challenge team, consisting of three to five students, presents an analysis of the current state of the economy backed by current economic data and a monetary policy recommendation for the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC).  Following the presentation, judges question each team about their presentation and their knowledge of macroeconomic theory.  Federal Reserve Bank economists and officers judge the district competitions.

(I did a lot of really nerdy stuff in high school, but I never did anything that was nearly that nerdy.)

At Harvard, Wallach won a prize as the outstanding African-American Studies major.  (He is white.)  He also studied the Gikuyu language, which is spoken primarily by Bantu tribesmen in Kenya.

Today, Wallach is not only a member of Chester French but also a solo recording artist.  He is the official artist-in-residence at Spotify and an investor in a number of technology companies (including a digital currency network and a telemedicine provider).

"She Loves Everybody" was the first single from Chester French's 2009 debut album, Love the Future.  The packaging for the single resembled a condom wrapper:

The "She Loves Everybody" video features a hot girl beating the crap out of Wallach and Drummey.

It goes without saying that a video that featured a guy doing one-tenth as much violence to a girl would likely result in the party responsible for it being drawn and quartered.  But I don't recall hearing any protests over this video's depiction a woman whaling away on a couple of males:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

April Wine -- "You Could Have Been a Lady" (1972)

They all love you

You're a good girl

Mae West was not very interested in being a good girl.

"When I'm good, I'm very, very good," she once said.  "But when I'm bad, I'm better."

She also said this:  "There are no good girls gone wrong – just bad girls found out."

And this: "I was once pure as snow . . . but I drifted."

Recently, I was talking to a friend who would like to be more like Mae West.  But I just don't think she has it in her to be a bad girl.

Mae West

We were in a bar in Washington that was so crowded that I wondered if President Obama had issued an executive order reinstating Prohibition the next day and nobody had told me.    

The bar was so crowded that I went across the street to another bar, but it was even more crowded than the first one.  So I returned to the first bar.

I was stunned by something that happened there later that night.  It was a Thursday, so there was an NFL game on the TV above the bar.  The sound was off, or at least turned down very low -- not a big deal because you could see the score any time you looked at the screen.

But near the end of the first quarter, the bartender changed channels so the customers could watch President Obama give a speech about immigration.  

I have never been in a bar where they switched from an NFL game to a Presidential speech.  Even in Washington, DC – where I've lived since 1977 – I've never seen that happen.

It's not like the Chinese Army had just invaded California.  The President's announcement that he was taking executive action to shield five million illegal aliens from being deported is hardly the kind of earth-shattering news that justified interrupting a professional football game, even though the Oakland Raiders were one of the teams playing.

The bartender's changing channels was shocking enough, but he also turned the volume up loud enough so the President's remarks could be heard above the roar of the crowd.  That was the biggest surprise – I've never seen that happen.  

I was at an Irish bar, but I couldn't think of any connection between the Irish and U.S. immigration policy.  Irish immigration peaked in the 1850s, when Ireland was devastated by the "Irish Potato Famine." 

Irish immigrants on the way to America

I don't think anyone's trying to keep the Irish out of the country any more – I'm afraid we've lost that battle already – so I'm not sure why people at an Irish bar would really care about what the President had to say about immigration.

Fortunately, President Obama stopped verbally flipping the bird to Congressional Republicans after only 15 minutes or so, so I didn't miss tonight's featured song when it came up on the bar's musical playlist.

The din in the bar was such that I couldn't hear the vocals to April Wine's hit, "You Could Have Been a Lady."

But I could hear the bass line, and that was enough for expert ears like mine to immediately recognize the song.

The pride of Nova Scotia: April Wine

I would have sworn that I had already written about this song, but I would have sworn wrong (and possibly been indicted by a grand jury for perjury).  I have a vivid memory of recently reading about April Wine, the best little rock-and-roll band ever to come out of Halifax, Nova Scotia.  But it appears that my interest did not result in my putting pen to paper (or fingers to computer keyboard) and posting the resulting hot mess to my wildly successful little blog.

"You Could Have Been a Lady" was a UK for the British funk band Hot Chocolate in 1971.  April Wine's cover was a big hit in Canada, and made it to #32 on the U.S. singles chart the following year.

Hot Chocolate's version is pretty good, but it doesn't hold a candle to April Wine's cover -- especially the part near the end where the guitars drop out and the band's members sing "nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah" over a hi-hat and tambourine accompaniment.

You'd best believe April Wine is tight, boys and girls – this song is silly.

Here's "You Could Have Been a Lady":

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Outkast -- "Hey Ya!" (2003)

Y'all don't want to hear me

You just want to dance

"Hey Ya!" topped the Billboard "Hot 100" for nine weeks in the winter of 2003-2004, when my daughters Sarah and Caroline were juniors in high school.  

That may explain why it was on the playlist at Sarah's wedding reception last week, and why so many of her high-school and college friends sprinted to the dance floor when the DJ started playing it.  

As I watched my daughters' friends dancing to our featured song, I was reminded of the 2005 movie, Wedding Crashers. 

Have you seen Wedding Crashers?  It's a truly execrable movie about a couple of louts who crash wedding receptions in order to snarf up free food and drink and bag babes. 

It will come as no surprise that most of the babes the two louts bagged in the movie were drunk. 

It was a case of life imitating art Sarah's reception, where a number of the female guests were posilutely, absotively hammered by the end of the evening.  

There are at least two songs about drunk girls that would have been perfect choices for this post.  But 2 or 3 lines has already featured LCD Soundsystem's "Drunk Girls" and Kanye West's "Drunk and Hot Girls."  So I went with "Hey Ya" instead.

At Sarah's wedding reception

Oddly, none of the guys at the reception acted very drunk.  I'm sure some of them were quite inebriated, but none of them kicked off their shoes, raced on to the dance floor, and started writhing around like so many dogs in heat. 

I'm happy to say that my daughters were not out of control like some of their friends.  That's not to say they abstained.  Au contraire, I saw each of them down more than one bottle of beer.

But they limited their beer consumption.  So there was no risk they would end up like this girl:

Drunk girl

(My daughters are such classy broads.  You'd think they might go for a nice glass of wine, or at least pour those beers into glasses.  But no . . . when it comes to drinking, my girls usually choose beer right  out of the bottle.  I guess the redneck genes my daughters inherited from me were dominant.)

I don't want you to get the wrong impression of Sarah's wedding.  Up until the girls got bombed, it was a classy affair.  

The wedding itself was at the 200-year-old St. John's Church (Lafayette Square), which was designed by Benjamin Latrobe, who also designed the U.S. Capitol.  

St. John's is known as the "Church of the Presidents" because every sitting President since James Madison has attended services at the church.

Here's a picture of Sarah and her soon-to-be husband at the wedding rehearsal:

The weekend of the wedding was a bit chilly for mid-November.  Sarah must have been freezing when she posed for photographs in Lafayette Square before the ceremony.  But as Frank Zappa once said, "Beauty knows no pain"!

I took this picture of Sarah and her bridesmaids -- two high-school friends, two college friends, and her twin sister Caroline (who had been married only seven weeks earlier) as matron of honor -- just a couple of minutes before we walked down the aisle:

The reception was at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, which was built as a Masonic temple in 1903:

The building was used as a movie theatre -- the Town Theatre -- between 1959 and 1972.  Washington author George Pelecanos remembers seeing The Dirty Dozen there with his father, and he later set a scene in one of his books there.

I have to share this photo of Sarah's chocolate Lab puppy, Remington:

Yes, that's Sarah's wedding dress.

"Hey Ya!" was written and produced by André 3000, one of the two principals of the very successful OutKast.  As my son Peter has noted in his blog, André 3000 is a dead ringer for Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III:

André 3000 and Robert Griffin III

Here's "Hey Ya!":

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Chuck Berry -- "I'm Talking About You" (1961)

I'm talkin' 'bout you

I do mean you

Nobody but you

In the very first post I ever wrote for this wildly popular blog -- an introduction of sorts titled "What? Who? Why?" -- I said that 2 or 3 lines "is more about the music than it is about me."  Which is a very big lie, if not the BIGGEST LIE EVER TOLD.

2 or 3 lines is MUCH more about me than it is about the music.  But today's post is going to be different.  Today's 2 or 3 lines is going to be all about YOU!

Let's get started with some basic background info -- what's your height, weight, eye color, hair color, age, marital status, religion, and political affiliation?  Hearing and vision normal?  Any scars or tattoos?  Also, what's your Social Security number?  (I'm only asking for your protection.)

Now tell us a little about yourself -- where you grew up, where you live now, what kind of work you do . . . the usual stuff.

Do you have children?  If so, which one of them is your favorite?  (Oh, come on . . . of course you have a favorite.  No one likes all his or her children just the same.)

What do you want from life?  An Indian guru to show you the inner light?  A meaningless love affair with that girl you met tonight?  To get cable TV and watch it every night?  Something else?

What do you wear when you're sleeping?  And what are you wearing right now?  

What in the world is in that bag?  What you got in that bag?

This is a music blog, so let's turn our attention to music for a moment.  What kind of music did you listen to in high school?  What kind of music do you listen to today?  How about a "desert island" list -- give us five albums you'd want to have with you if you were stranded on a desert island?

Finally, where's the weirdest place you've ever gotten the urge to make whoopee?  

Let's stop there for a moment and think about your answers.  How interesting are they?  Can you truthfully say that your answers are compelling enough that others will want to read them?  

Most importantly, is stuff about you more interesting than the stuff I write about me?  Be honest -- really, really honest. . . .

I didn't think so.  But don't feel bad.  Most people are like you -- not that interesting.  Certainly not interesting enough to be the heart and soul of a wildly popular blog.

But I am that interesting.  As a very wise man once said about me, "He's got it, he was born with it, and he washes it twice a day."  (Exactly!)

"I'm Talking About You" was released by Chuck Berry in 1961.  The Rolling Stones covered the song (which they titled "Talkin' 'Bout You") on their 1965 December's Children album, and that's the version I know the best.  The Hollies, Beatles, Yardbirds, Hot Tuna, and Delbert McClinton are among those who have also covered it.

Here's "I'm Talking About You":

Click below to order the song from Amazon: