[This was written in September.]
The soundalike song has been around as long as pop music. The Supremes, The Temptations; even Stevie did it. I can’t say if it was by choice or not, seeing as I wasn’t there and all, but I’m familiar with the practice. The song “I’m Your Puppet” was a big hit in ‘66 for James and Bobby Purify. Their only hit. They did a soundalike, ironically titled “You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down,” which failed to chart. Never heard from them again.
When you think about it, every song’s a soundalike. It’s all been done, this is what my kid tells me. He’s in some kind of modern lit class now, and everything’s depressing; everything’s
old, and
it’s all been done. I don’t know that I believe that, but I can tell you that I haven’t heard anything really interesting come out of my stereo since Zappa died. And I’ve been listening. I guess I thought the Talking Heads were pretty good, but then David Byrne got too big for his britches.
This guy I work with likes to listen to a classic rock station in the morning. He likes this DJ – Alice something. She’s pretty good. Got a smoky voice, like a man’s, and a butch laugh, but she’s pretty good. Plays the Beatles on Fridays, and takes requests from 10 to noon. Reg – the guy I work with – he calls and makes a request now and then, and she chats him up, off the air. I tell him all the time that he should ask her out, but he says he’s got a girlfriend.
Me, I don’t know. Single’s the word. The kid’s the only family I like to keep around, and that’s fine. Never married his mom, which was just as well for both of us when she died a few years ago. Life insurance policy didn’t look too kindly on our “commonlaw” thing, but they kicked over a few bucks to send the kid to school, and that was okay by me. Didn’t know he’d be wasting it getting depressed over everything, but that’s his choice.
I miss her, sometimes. She had a way of making situations seem less pathetic, and I’ve always needed that. When the stereo was busted and we couldn’t afford to get it fixed until the end of the month, she brought me my guitar and told me to play. Stone-faced, no sorrow and no sympathy. We were in it together, even though we weren’t. When the kid came along, it was just assumed that we would stay a couple, and apart from a few discrepancies over the years, we did.
We did the Cancer thing, twice. One win, then the eventual loss. She’d be a few hours out of radiation, asking me to roll her a cigarette, and I’d be blowing the smoke from my last in her face. Almost five years of this before she’d had enough. The kid stole some matches from the funeral home and almost lit the place on fire. I couldn’t much blame him.
It was just the boys after that. I messed around with a driver for one of our distributors, but her husband could smell me on her so we decided to cut that short. I didn’t much need it anyway. She was a big barrel of a woman, and before her I’d been with the kid’s mom, who had shrunk into a toothpick the last few years before she died. Too much contrast can really mess with your head. You want what’s familiar. What’s
comfortable. You want the soundalike.
