I was walking through the local park on Saturday, and near Lakeside, the new skating rink, there were two bedreaded young guys working on acrobatic dance moves. These involved slow motion tips into hand stands, slowly rotating feet above their muscularly balanced arms, and easy dismounts into cagey ready poses, all with massive dreadlocks working as a counterbalance and a flourish, depending on the move. One of the two men was clearly the teacher, the other clearly the grasshopper, but their confidence together was collaborative, as was the roots reggae that issued from the little boom box they had set up nearby.

I was reminded of the demonstrations of capoeira, the Brazilian martial arts discipline that used to be performed between acts at SOB’s, the great dance club at the corner of Houston and Varick, still today, even as it was in the early 80s.

Which got me to thinking about how I learned of reggae music, which led to this song. The Beatles are given a lot of credit for Obladi-oblahda, which does have a character named Desmond and in retrospect is fairly ska-like. But for those of us who didn’t know Desmond Dekker’s music at the time, the song seemed like more of the British vaudeville era than something exotic and international. I’ve read that Three Dog Night had a hit covering the Maytone’s Black and White in 1972 as well, but I don’t remember that. For me it was I Can See Clearly Now, which with it’s clean sound and intoxicating beat lit up the radio that year.

It was a thing that this tune used the Jamaican sounds and rhythm, and they were glorious.

The next year my friends and I went to the movies in Port Jefferson to see The Harder They Come, the first feature film made in Jamaica, and not long after that Clapton’s cover of Marley’s I Shot The Sheriff grabbed the same sonic space as I Can See Clearly Now. Infectious rhythm and clean open sound, with spare declarative vocals, but by that point, new sounds started to bubble up. Most importantly and immediately Marley, but that was just the start that closed out the days before we knew reggae.

I was playing a Neil Young greatest hits album yesterday, since that’s what came up first from my streaming service while I was prepping dinner. Great song after great song, none of them really hits since they were all seven minutes long, but all played a million times on the radio and on turntables across America back in the day. When I was in college my go to paper-typing album was Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, because there was close to 20 uninterrupted minutes on each side. The only other disk with so much music was Dylan’s Blood On the Tracks.

But listening to all those songs again, and you know which ones they are, reminded me that Young has released albums and box sets and live discs with those same songs over and over, and yet has continued to make original and vital music up to the present day, too. That’s vital as long as you remember his riposte to someone shouting a request for a tune captured on one of those live albums. Shouter: Play “one of those songs.” Young: Don’t worry. It’s all the same song.

In 1996, Young made an album with Pearl Jam. They went into the studio and bashed this thing out in a few days. It’s a sonic mess, called Mirror Ball, and there are some forgettable tunes/jams, and some that stretch their neck and stand out. I’m the Ocean is one of those, a typical cascade of hippie dippy associations over a churning maelstrom of noises. It requires volume to make sense, and when you find the piano in the bottom, battling with the guitars, you’ve got it loud enough.

I never got Pearl Jam. They always sounded leaden to me on record, but when I finally saw them live (on Saturday Night Live) I started to understand. They weren’t as deadly serious as Eddie Vedder made them sound. Neil Young can sound pretty serious too, he’s the Ocean after all, but you can also be pretty confident that he understands that the joke is in his hand.

It’s all, life I mean, an act of balancing.

When I praised Slade I’d forgotten about all their sins. Like this one, which is wildly popular.

But that’s the issue. When I wrote about John Legend’s new record last fall I was appalled. But this week it was the most popular album in America, by some measures at least.

If we’re paying any attention to popular music, shouldn’t we pay attention to what is popular? I think the better answer is no, fuck them all. But I want the music I love to be popular, and I want popular music to be the music I love.

Is there something wrong with that?

I loved John Legend when he was striving, and I don’t get at all what he’s become.

Slade fans can probably better explain this tune, which is catchy and lovable and like giving whisky to drunks. In other words, great crap.

My flurry of Declan McManus posts earlier in the week started with a search for a great B-side non-album cut called Heathen Town, that was recorded in the Punch the Clock sessions, I think.

Heathen Town is a great song, melodic and moody, elegant and dark, damning and just a little proud, too. But, amazingly, I could not find a youtube version up right now. I thought. Then, after I found that fabulous video of the Hoover Factory, and after I fell into the delightful rabbit hole of Radio Sweetheart and that excursion into George Jones’s world, things changed.

Tonight I went to see a friend of my daughter’s in his high school musical version of Guys and Dolls. Julian was Nicely Nicely Johnson, which meant he sang the show’s showstopper, “Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat.” Which has the line, “The devil will drag you under, by the…” which is also a line in Costello’s Heathen Town. So I searched again and was pleased to find this demo recording of Heathen Town on YouTube, an apparent English-y b-side to the English-y single of the fantastic pop song (but not so popular tune) Everyday I Write the Book.

The great thing about the demo is the Elvis overdubbed harmonies, which are lovely. The great thing about the actual produced recording that isn’t out there for free consumption, at least, is that those harmonies are encased in a psychedlicious mix that I’m sure the Flaming Lips would be proud of–a quarter century later.

But, more importantly, it all started with Guys and Dolls. Please pass the Bacardi.