Spring Ahead

    

Because April was freezing raw of late, I chose The Rite of Spring.    The Adoration of the Earth, the Dances of the Young Girls, the Mysterious Circles of the Young Girls, the Glorification of the Chosen Victim … fit my mood.

There’s nothing like returning home with a vintage sealed record, then slowly cutting it open with a penknife, thinking nobody has touched this record since someone slid it into its cover at the manufacturing plant in the 1970s.  So, instead of looking around the record store as usual, I went straight to the counter to buy it.

The girl behind the counter gave me a quick smile and took my record.  Her long hair was amazing: waves of yellow and white curls like the fur coat of a dancer.

“This record is awesome,” she said. “It’s intensely compelling in its cumulative drive, seismic power and irreproachable precision.”

I’m never very good at chitchatting with the staff at a record store (as I’m distracted by the music playing in the background), but this girl was obviously exceptional.

“I figured it might be,” I said. “I mean, it is Pierre Boulez with the Cleveland Orchestra in 1969.”

“1969,” she said, then something no other clerk behind a record store counter ever asked me before: “What’s your name?”

I stuttered as I told her.  “And what’s your name?”  I said.

“Lassie Young.”

Exceptional, I thought.  She knows classical music, obviously, so she’s the one to ask what she and her generation thought about the group seriously on my mind these days.

“Tell me what you think of when I say Monkees,” I said.

“The group from the Sixties,” she said.  “They had a television show.  We used to watch the old reruns every week when I was in college.”

“So you like them?”

Sure.  We had a stack of their records come in last week, and they were gone in two days.”

“I ask because I have this friend who’s been throwing me shade about The Monkees lately.”

“What’s his problem?”

I shrugged.  “I don’t know.  He’s posing some sort of attitude against them all of a sudden.”

Lassie Young made a face at that.  “How could you not like Mickey, Mike, Davey and Peter,” she said.  “That’s like not liking Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny …”

“… or friendly collie dogs.”

“Yeah.  Nobody can hate the Monkees.”

“And it’s getting personal too.  A couple of years ago, he gave me a vintage Monkees souvenir, this big stuffed vinyl guitar shaped pillow with The Monkees spelled out on the side.”

“How cool is that?”

“Then, the other day, he all of a sudden accuses me of sleeping with it.”

She moaned a bit and shook her head with the long, flowing hair.  “Where did he get that idea?” she said. “Maybe he was the one sleeping with it before he gave it to you.”

“That’s what I thought after he said it.  So I put it in the closet.”

“That’s too bad.”

“He might be a closeted pillow case.”

“So he didn’t always hate the Monkees.”

“No.  One time, he gave his girlfriend the very first Davy Jones solo record …”

“Cool.”

“… and he gave me the double record set Arista put out of their greatest hits before Rhino records bought them out of the Monkees catalog.”

“Now he hates them,” she said.

“Well, he’s been moody and sour lately because he lost his job.”

“He should be listening to more of the Monkees then.  They would make him smile.”

I sighed and shrugged my shoulders.  “Maybe it isn’t the Monkees.  Maybe he’s just mad at me because I have a job.  You think if I quit my job, everybody around me who doesn’t have a job would be happier?”

“No, no, don’t do that,” said Lassie Young.  “Then you’d stop listening to the Monkees.”

“Good point.  So what should I do?”

“This should help him,” she said, as she bent down beneath the counter and began rummaging underneath.  She came up to show me an impeccably sealed record with Mickey, Davey, Mike and Peter in psychedelic swirling clothes, all smiling like they were bathing in the graces of universal karma.

“Pleasant Valley Sunday,” she said, with a smile.  “The original 45 single mix and 14 alternate versions, in mono and stereo.”

“One of their best songs,” I said.

“Nobody can’t smile after hearing Pleasant Valley Sunday.  Especially when the song heads for a vanishing point somewhere on the sound-horizon and rather than simply fade on the repetitions of the title, the sound is instead overdriven to the point where everything is louder than everything else.”

“I must have it.  How much?”

She handed it to me.  “Free,” she said. “We Monkees fans are a rare breed.”

I thanked Lassie Young and, after paying for my record, touched my right hand to my forehead in a gesture of a salute, and headed outside.

Though the weather was still chilly and grey, I could think of nothing but a sunny spring day at the end of a two-part TV episode.  Believing he has lost his pet forever, Timmy weeps as he buries the dog toys at the bottom of a green hill; then, suddenly, he hears the old familiar barking in the distance and he leaps to feet to see the handsome collie running from out of the horizon down the slope toward him.

Timmy, opening his arms to the faithful.