"Rescue Me" and the Death of Soul Music
Put a Lidl love in your heart!
Depending on who’s telling the story, I’m either frugal or, in the words of a once-famous Los Angeles actress and singer, spectacularly cheap. I can’t help it. I am the son of parents who were teenagers during the Depression. As a child, Mama had been sent home from school for smelling. Her family couldn’t afford enough hot water for bathing, and sometimes had to evacuate rented lodgings in the dead of night because they had no money for rent.
And yes, I am well aware that a great many people whose parents were teenagers in the Depression are fiduciarily footloose and fancy-free. So maybe the simpler explanation is that there’s something wrong with me.
That admitted, I will admit further that I do all my grocery shopping at local outlets of the two pan-European German discount supermarket chains, at the Aldi in Kingston-on-Thames, or the gigantic Lidl in Norbiton-on-the-way-to-Kingston. Unlike the heartbreakingly claustrophobic Richmond Lidl, to whose opening I looked forward a few years ago as eagerly as I used to look forward to the beginning ot the baseball season or, rather later, the release of the latest Beatles album, the Norbiton one is gigantic, as befits what used to be a Wickes DIY emporium.
In the United Kingdom, and probably Ireland too, for that matter, supermarket cashiers sit on comfy stools, and shoppers bag their own groceries. Aldi’s cashiers are mostly Eastern European, while Lidl’s are mostly Asian (in the British sense — of Indian or Pakistani parentage) or Middle Eastern, though the Norbiton store used to have a prolifically tattooed, multi-braceleted Italian who was insufficiently amused by my informing him, “Io sono attacabottoni,” one of the phrases I remember from my early-80s study of his language. My fave checker is a small white, seemingly British person of indeterminate gender, the (very) wispy mustache notwithstanding. They [!] have perpetually greasy solar plexus-length hair (in spite of Lidl carrying Pantene and own-brand shampoos and conditioners galore), and look around 11. We commonly have this conversation:
THEY Do you have Lidl Plus [an app that entitles one to discounts, and allows Lidl to monitor my purchases]?
JOHNNY I don’t, no.
I’m pretty sure that if the Norbiton Lidl were to hire me, which it has shown no interest in doing, I would go mad within 48 hours, as the store plays over and over again, all day, every day, a playlist of around eight songs apparently compiled by a deaf person on a malfunctioning Commodore 64 with 16K of RAM.
There is Dire Straits’ “The Walk of Life”, the Four Seasons “Walk Like a Man”, one-hit wonder Aztec Camera’s one hit, “Somewhere in My Heart”, Jackie Wilson’s sublime “Higher and Higher”, the excruciating “Funky Town,” by Lipps Inc., and Fontella Bass’s beyond-excruciating “Rescue Me”.
Beginning at around 14, I would sneak my little transistor radio into bed at night to listen to Dodgers baseball and Lakers basketball games while waiting for the Sandman. After discovering that I adored the Beatles, I began leaving the Dodgers and Lakers to their own devices, and to listen instead to music on KRLA. There were a great many records I loved, and two I passionately detested — Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders’ “The Game of Love” and “Rescue Me”.
There is no accounting for musical taste. That which delights your ear may offend mine, and vice versa. For instance, I cannot for the life of me figure out why anyone would listen voluntarily to Tom Petty, whereas you may not regard Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ “C’mon Eileen” as a work of sublime genius. I do know that, for reasons unknown to me, I find “Rescue Me” not just uningratiating, but deeply annoying. In seeming to go round and round in a little circle, it set the stage for Elton John and Kiki’s Dee’s even worse “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart”.
I suppose the late Ms. Bass’s singing is pretty good, if not remotely distinctive. If you have not heard Lorraine Ellison’s colossal “Stay With Me”, you have not heard soul singing, and I will not theorize about why Lidl’s freezer section no longer offers delicacies like kangaroo nostrils (I might be exaggerating a little), as it did when it occupied the space in Kingston that Aldi usurped.
I didn’t notice at the time, 57 years ago, that when Ms. Bass performed her hit on ABC-TV’s Shindig, the great Larry Knechtel seems not to have remembered his guitar strap, and nearly drops his bass not just once, but twice!
https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/we-will-not-let-them-ghadffi-you?r=7yu5q