I’m blowing the cobwebs out of my mind.  So, expect a lot of stuff from me today.  As Bobby Brown would say, THAT’S MY PREROGATIVE!  (Or, did Britney Spears say that…)

As you well know, I’m a diehard XM fan.

And I’ll tell you why.  They played Bryan Adams’ "Cuts Like A Knife" on the HITS channel.  That was never a single.  At least I never heard it on the radio.  But, it’s a hit in MY book.  And the programmer at Top Tracks KNEW that.

Program by statistic and you’ve got terrestrial radio.  Let humans do the job and you have a living, breathing thing.  That other humans FLOCK TO!  Even if, like with Top Tracks, there’s no announcer/deejay whatsoever.

ANYWAY, I have one friend who doesn’t like XM.  My ONLY friend who doesn’t like the outlet.  She says she can’t find HER station.  She’s missing the point.  The whole SERVICE is your station.  You find the twelve or fifteen stations you love and you push the button.  THAT’S how you listen to XM.

Which is how I found myself at the Sixties on 6, listening to the Hollies’ "Dear Eloise".

I could break out my Joel Whitburn book, maybe this track charted somewhere.  But I never even heard it until I bought a Hollies greatest hits album WAY past the band’s peak.

Funny band the Hollies.  One could argue, QUITE STRONGLY, that the act’s best track came AFTER their heyday.  I’m speaking, of course, of "Long Cool Woman (In A Black Dress)".

Saturday night I was downtown
Working for the FBI!

Oh, it’s that slapping guitar.  That long, back-tickling intro.  God, this is a masterpiece one can listen to forever.  In the league of Free’s "All Right Now’, but even BETTER!

Still, it’s the original period that we remember.  That we SHOULD remember.

Maybe the most famous cut is "Bus Stop".

But maybe the BEST track is "Look Through Any Window".

And you’ve got to mention "Stop Stop Stop", "Carrie Anne" and "On A Carousel".

Then they start to get a bit more obscure.

There’s "Jennifer Eccles".  The slightly more obscure "Pay You Back With Interest".

Yet the one that would blow the mind of newly-minted anglophiles, kids under the age of twenty five exploring the golden era, would be "King Midas In Reverse".  It’s got the driving sound of the deeper, more meaningful ALBUM-ORIENTED English acts.  God, the intro sounds like it’s off a latter-day Faces record.

"Dear Eloise" is not as modern, it’s not a breakthrough record, rather it’s got that MIDSIXTIES feel.  From the era of Gerry & the Pacemakers and Herman’s Hermits.

Then again, with a LOT MORE sophistication.

The amazing thing about "Dear Eloise" is all the different musical sections!  It starts off slowly, then takes off on a tear.  And there’s not only a chorus, but a BRIDGE!  And a vocal nonsense workout of the type which the Turtles would perfect.  And, there’s a STORY!

You hear something like this on the radio and it IS nostalgic.  But it’s not the music itself that’s retro.  It’s that hearing these sounds brings you back to that era, like a great book, a great movie.  It’s a window to a past world.

Listening to these Hollies songs makes the case that Graham Nash was certainly Crosby’s equal in their partnership with Stephen Stills.

As for Stephen…  Well, of the initial solo albums, Graham Nash’s "Songs For Beginners" was the best!