Please Be With Me

8 May 2020

Little Bits of Surprise

There are these songs that are kind of in the background of your mind for years. You have heard them a number of times but they never became part of your regular go to music.  Suddenly and without explanation these three and a half minutes relics show up once or twice in the space of a couple of days.  Maybe you hear them on the soundtrack of some angst-ridden TV drama or then again, they may crop up on the forgotten deep tracks channel of Sirius XM.

When you hear a song like that you go, “Ah, I remember that.  The guys in 231 West with the cowboy hats would play that all the time on Saturday night when they were stoned back in the dorm”.  Maybe you make a mental note of the title and decide you will add thes

 song to one of you playlists on the internet music service you use.  But then you forget.

So, one night when you go out for a ride to relieve that imprisoned feeling the pandemic has given you.  Your iPhone gets jacked into the car stereo and you start listening to Boz Scaggs singing A Rainy Night in Georgia.  While he his bending those notes and making you feel just as forlorn as when you heard Brook Benton singing that song for the first time decades ago you remember that Boz sang a killer version of Brother Can You Spare a Dime with Duane Allman. 

You start looking for that track searching Boz Scaggs Duane Allman on Apple Music but it doesn’t come up. So, then you remember that there was an anthology double LP that was put out posthumously with the work Duane did at the famed Muscle Shoals studios.  So, you search that and yes, the track is there but it is greyed out.  Must be a rights battle between Atlantic Records and Polydor, the company that took over Capricorn Records when Phil Walden went bankrupt.

So you look to see what songs aren’t greyed out and there is that song you have heard a couple of times in the last six months that you never got around to putting on a playlist from that one moderate hit wonder band Cowboy called Please Be With Me, And you realize you never knew Duane was the lead guitar player on the track and you put it on.  

Suddenly you smell patchouli and see black lighted felt posters of Jimi Hendrix.  And somebody is rolling a joint with cherry flavored rolling papers and somebody else is looking out the window and talking about moving out west to get back to the natural way of living.  

And then it is gone because the song is over.  You sit back as you head on down the road noting the full moon. What a long you have travelled since 1972.