In that eerie twilight after the sun sets, just before total darkness descends, I heard this string flourish come out of the speakers that I hadn’t heard in decades but was as familiar as my foot.\u00c2\u00a0 It was part of me.\u00c2\u00a0 Kind of like running into an old friend from summer camp, who you spent every summer with for years, "Baby, The Rain Must Fall" brought me right back, with instant familiarity.\u00c2\u00a0 I thought I was in touch with my personal history from the sixties.\u00c2\u00a0 I was wrong.\u00c2\u00a0 This song brought back long dormant memories.\u00c2\u00a0 Of doing my homework in the winter of ’65, when this record emanated from the leather-clad transistor next to my blotter.<\/p>\n
Before you drive, you’re just a passenger.\u00c2\u00a0 While your mom steers, and only my mom would allow us to play WABC in the car, you look out the window and daydream as the songs wash over you.\u00c2\u00a0 And in 1965, it wasn’t only rock and roll on the radio, but all kinds of strange stuff in between the latest British Invasion hits.<\/p>\n
I looked down at the readout…Glen Yarbrough.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s right.\u00c2\u00a0 I heard it backannounced ad infinitum.\u00c2\u00a0 But not for years.<\/p>\n
"Baby, The Rain Must Fall" is the anti-rap.\u00c2\u00a0 Play this for today’s youngsters and they’ll cover their ears.\u00c2\u00a0 This isn’t Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd.\u00c2\u00a0 This is old fogey music.\u00c2\u00a0 And we thought so too.\u00c2\u00a0 But we weren’t so removed from the past, our world wasn’t sliced into such narrow niches, that we couldn’t allow the curious, oftentimes strange and bizarre, in.\u00c2\u00a0 And with repeated plays, we got hooked.<\/p>\n
Sure, Glen didn’t write the song.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s a performance.\u00c2\u00a0 But it’s got the feel of a movie.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe because it was written by Elmer Bernstein, for a movie.\u00c2\u00a0 But I never saw it.\u00c2\u00a0 Flicks weren’t the blockbusters of today.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, eventually they made it to "Saturday Night At The Movies", but that was years on.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe when you were already in college.\u00c2\u00a0 The song, it had an identity all its own.<\/p>\n
"Baby, The Rain Must Fall" makes me feel powerful, in a manly kind of way.\u00c2\u00a0 Like I’m equal to every other human being on the planet, and I have to fight my way forward, not with technology, but my physicality and my intellect.\u00c2\u00a0 We still rode bikes with baseball caps, we had never heard the term "playdate".\u00c2\u00a0 Our imaginations ruled.\u00c2\u00a0 And they were filled by songs like "Baby, The Rain Must Fall".<\/p>\n
"Baby, The Rain Must Fall" was not on my iPod.\u00c2\u00a0 I’d never downloaded it.\u00c2\u00a0 I hadn’t thought of it.\u00c2\u00a0 I had to be reminded of it by the radio, XM Radio’s "Sixties on 6".<\/p>\n
Radio is a powerful medium.\u00c2\u00a0 But it became so beholden to advertisers and research that it lost its hold upon its audience.\u00c2\u00a0 Radio is much more powerful than television.\u00c2\u00a0 If it’s done right.\u00c2\u00a0 And it’s never done right musically on terrestrial anymore.<\/p>\n
XM and Sirius will merge.\u00c2\u00a0 And talent payments will drop dramatically.\u00c2\u00a0 But maybe the resulting company will gain traction.\u00c2\u00a0 And, if it has the breadth of programming of XM, if it’s vital, not a service, but a religion, numerous newbies will be enthralled.\u00c2\u00a0 We’ll be in a new golden era.<\/p>\n
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In that eerie twilight after the sun sets, just before total darkness descends, I heard this string flourish come out of the speakers that I hadn’t heard in decades but was as familiar as my foot.\u00c2\u00a0 It was part of me.\u00c2\u00a0 Kind of like running into an old friend from summer camp, who you spent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,7,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business","category-radio","category-the-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-g3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/995\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}