Those D.J. Shows (Episode #4)

“I dig the records that they play” – The Supremes “Those D.J. Shows” (1961)

Again, I wouldn’t be as far as I am down the road of ‘time’ if people didn’t notice certain traits about me. People wisest to my game of life know how staunchly I can love or hate things. Those people give me the space to be excited, and also to retreat when I feel my sensibilities are threatened. I’ve had to come to peace with how tactile existence is for me. Sometimes it’s extremely overwhelming to feel the air around me sometimes. I wonder if I’m the only one that recognizes how much content is in the invisible.

Sound is very much invisible until you see the impact it has on the surroundings. Sound is this hidden current that accelerates motion. This is perhaps why I love my Corvair so much. The more speed, the more sounds it makes. There’s a certain combination of lovely sounds the car makes when it’s in its ‘happy zone.’ The irony of that happy zone seemingly to me is when it’s carrying 2 or 3 people, sparse luggage, conquering rolling hills or undulating country highway at 65 to 75 miles an hour.

Gracie, and even Frankie in her more shambled state, also loved a quick burst above 75 to 85 to clear their lungs and prove their strength. Just like the Starship Enterprise, you can only sustain Warp 8 for so long tho. Both old girls like(d) showing a little bit of gusto amongst the ‘youngins’ that have so much more resources and advanced technology to do the same thing. Gracie, being healthier, only asks for about 1 gallon of gas every 21.2 miles on average on a long trip to share in the pleasure of movement and the ecstasy of arrival. I’m rewarded with the sensation of the tactile road mixed the sublime silkiness of a car that moves as a unit when we travel. That keeps me grounded in the reality of movement that driving truly should be about.

In that comfort zone, the ride becomes compliant, but not isolated. I can pretty much tell you which freeways might have had cheap, expedient asphalt repaves because I’m aware, not in a harsh way, of all the imperfections. Away from the surly burble and grunt of city driving errands, harmonious sounds of movement crackle from the car itself. There’s the wail of the expended gas and oxygen post explosion leaving the single exhaust pipe. At the same time, there’s the slightly faint jet turbine whine of that massive magnesium fan spinning at horrific velocities to keep the ‘air cooled’ flat six cool enough not to burn too much oil or explode from the expansion of aluminum and iron.

Like the magnesium fan, there’s an additional whine from the torque converter turbine blades situated just aft of the back seat in the Powerglide automatic. This is of course before some other factors like mildly creeping wind noise, surprisingly little tire noise layered over whatever I might be playing on a streaming bluetooth speaker. I’ve been ambivalent about installing an aftermarket radio considering the original AM radio still technically works, but what’s on AM radio these days sucks.

All of these factors point out that after I lost Frankie in March, 2023, I never really got over the happiness and joy that car provided. I had come to rely on it as relief from a lot of other things I sought refuge from in the world. There’s not a single film photo of the 2005 Volvo S40 I had for what turns out, an extremely brief period of time of April 2023 thru February 2024. The Aisin transmission in the car gave up the ghost over the 2023 holiday season. It was not a nice car in a lot of leaden ways. It had really no enthusiasm about going about the tasks of moving through the world. I’ll give it feeling solid. It also reminded me why I didn’t enjoy, despite their evergreen snobbery popularity, owning a Volvo 240 nearly 20 years earlier.

Frankie, by contrast, even if she wasn’t driven everyday towards the end of our relationship, was the car I owned the longest, at just over 3 years. I’ve spend a healthy part of my life being a Goldilocks about seemingly every relationship to existence I’ve had. At the same time, when I love something, I try my best to not prevent anything getting in our way. I’m a person of extremes dressed up in a very tailored, mid-century aesthetic if you haven’t figured that one out already. Despite advice to push me into the current, I find so much of what those suggestions are completely laughable. I take it always right back to one of the first songs a D.J. at a night club said they knew I’d love from the first needle drop. It takes keen observation to be right about me. We go to Detroit, but not Motown, in 1964, and meet Rose Battiste:

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4. Rose Battiste – I Can’t Leave You (1964)

My friends are telling me that I should put you down, yes they do…

‘..Cause you lie and you cheat and you treat me so low down, oh yeah

But Baybeee, that’s what I’m tryin’ to do, oh yes I am

oOh but because of the way I love you, I just

Can’t make up my mind, to leave you”

And there’s a long disgraced DJ that was right about me. Soon as the song fires off like a Highland Park “Whirly Bird” starter in a Plymouth Valiant with that Guitar/Piano riff? There’s a few nods to a few southern traditions in this very Detroit record. While “Chicken Scratch” guitar licks are all over 1960’s soul songs from across the United States, the tempo, therefore emotional cadence of each one is so wildly different. It’s used as a foreboding, subtle cue to ‘fuck off’ in Dionne Warwick’s legendary “Walk On By” from the opposite side of 1964. Here it’s front and center as an exuberant dose of anxiety. It’s running ‘toward’ the subject despite all so-called good judgement, instead of crossing the street in avoidance.

Then Rose Battiste coos into the kitchen of this record as some thick, juicy, if still subtly strong drumming comes online. Then she starts ‘cookin.’ I love the dilemma presented in a number of records around the consequences of being coy. It’s very heavy lifting to shield your desires while trying to hold up a veneer of societal expectations. I’m always gonna be slightly stuck, slightly annoyed that my body often betrays what society tells me to do.

There’s all these ridiculous rules about how I should act in the world. They have no clue how sensitive I am to the unseen textures and what they tangibly mean. I’m not gonna be shy to say that I know the lovin’ is gon’ be real good by the inflections in someone’s voice. The voice may be absolutely invisible as the air forms over someone’s vocal chords, but it lands on my ears and skin and sets every nerve ending alive in delightful ways, if delight is intended.

There’s so much delightful, grounding weight in how we fix the way air flows over our vocal chords to convey our feelings. I try my best to unabashedly do the same in return. To me, it’s perhaps in the top 5 reasons to be alive. It seems to be also one of the most policed forms of expression. This society forces you to choose words ‘wisely.’ Economy of words and making sure you’ve got a catchy hook is seen as more valuable than letting words marinate in their complexities between souls.

I get it, it often leads to one real big reason where all the sensations come to a thrilling climax. I’ve been prone to chase ‘it’ over and over again when it is this rich, this nuanced, this….robust. I know some others have seen that smile I get, that bashfulness that arrives on my face with a clear flushing of my skin when I know what you meant. In that top 5 is probably the rhapsody on your face if I’ve said something of similar weight or heft that defines the future possibilities expressed with my words.

I’m probably dying inside at the excitement of what you want to do together. I’m mortified that even in my 40’s, it’s not easy for me to admit that I just wanna go find the nearest tree and get on with it barely in the shadows. The rules of the world say I shouldn’t feel this way. This society, given we don’t even know if Mitch McConnell is alive to even do anything with his damn paycheck as of today, is also, really fucking ridiculous. Granted, I do love playing with the teetering at the precipice of giving perhaps a wee bit too much. It makes the release all the more delightful in the intensity.

It’s one reason why I find Whitney Houston a boring singer; it’s clear she wasn’t feeling all that much despite the power of her voice. This too clearly aligns with the fact that she was more or less prevented from having the queer intimacy life she craved. There’s the bitter irony that I find her mother’s voice more delightfully intense, if a bit shrill at times. It’s interesting to think that she perhaps trained her daughter towards using sheer power of her pipes, but none of the emotional weight behind it as to not frighten mainstream white audiences.

The gospel conviction turned secular that Cissy Houston brought to many an ordinary love song during the 60’s was only truly understood by the commons once. That was when she was balanced by Sylvia Shemwell, Estelle Brown and Myrna Smith on “Sweet Inspiration” in 1968. Barbra Streisand’s metallic textured solo medley take a few years later proved to be too overwhelming, which is a lot given the lack of texture that made Streisand’s voice so mainstream, so saccharine. Streisand’s rise to fame seems so bratty in comparison to the omnipresence of lurking in the shadows that Cissy Houston endured. She played Yeoman as her nieces, the Warwick sisters, garnered more attention. You’ll be surprised all the places you find her lingering as a voice that’s playing second hand to someone else.

I can hear the fact that her daughter’s personal life was tuned out, suppressed. Whitney Houston was to be as commercial as possible. She was meant to appeal to the fraudulence of heterosexuality. She was forced to sell consumption, entering the pop consciousness reviving a Marilyn McCoo number about being the other woman. This undervaluing of the voice centered expressing pleasure to a dedicated source.

The catch was that the object of affection was happy to divide their attention in return between the stability of clearly being a married man while crumbs were dispatched to Houston’s protagonist. It’s not lost on me that all of these commercial veneers were the product placement desires to make money off of misery courtesy of closet case and clear vampire Clive Davis. Davis was trying to sell the world the lie that this was the fate that Houston, or any woman, should long for herself. He cashed in, who knows how much Whitney got in regards to true financial benefit. Regardless, for relative pennies on the dollar, her first success was clearly a curse perhaps worse than the one Dorian Gray accepted.

It’s why I find Luther Vandross a frustrating singer as well. It’s not lost to me that Davis was instrumental in Vandross’s rise to fame either. I can tell who he wanted to sing for, yet something leaves me limp about who he had to sell records to. The main push of Luther’s work seems to also, sell the masses on the inadequacies of heterosexuality to the largest number of people as well. There’s so few moments where he’s honestly displaying any full, robust desire for unity that seems sustainable. There’s his notable cover of “A House Is Not A Home” originally done by Brook Benton but previously more associated with, ironically, Dionne Warwick.

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I might feel so much kinetic energy towards somebody that it heals my and perhaps your broken heart. If I can say anything about my last 3 years of life, despite the strife, I’ve been able to heal a little bit more of my heart that the medications can’t touch. It’s taken a lot to admit that absence makes the heart grow fonder. You can’t help but feel the fibers of your heart start to re-stich itself where ruptures had happened if you’re lucky to survive. It can be still a little bit painful if you don’t realize what’s happening. It can be painful to realize that both parties don’t know how essential that connection is towards life itself. Others can’t really see what’s happening internally with you, so you ‘keep tabs’ in contrast to how you see yourself, how others see you, and how you see others as well.

This is where if you know my closest relationships, you can track their progress in the pictures I’ve taken of people. It’s also deeply rare that I allow, or am documented as ‘seen’ by someone else. There’s been times I know I’ve been documented, but I’ve never seen the results. The times I love the most are when the hunter is happy to share that they’ve caught the game, so to say. I resolutely hate when people take a piece of me and don’t bother to share it back. I like the honesty, the reality of who I am even when I’m not in control of the image.

It often gives a benchmark of ‘why.’

There’s a lot of reasons why that I can explain over and over again about why I do the things I do. There’s moments where I’d rather just live those moments with ‘you’ or have something beyond words, especially written words that expresses the feeling. Hence, imagery. Hence the auditory. You can just make sounds. You can just take a picture. But why? Where’s the subtlety of texture that informs the motivations of why. There’s coloring, shading, and contrast that gives more details that inform a level of richness that makes the world more vibrant than it may have been before.

Now my mama & my papa try to give me good advice, yes they do

They say I should leave ‘cause you never treat me right, oh no

Dontcha know Baybeee, that’s EXACTLY what I should do, oh yes I should

oOh but because of the way I love you, I just

Can’t make up my mind, to leave you”

The Rose Battiste number ambles along like it’s on a controlled boulevard as it comes to the instrumental break. There’s a lot of elements percolating along, that piano is sparkling with joy, there’s saxophones and a full horn section just a honking away like they’re delighted someone’s grabbed their ass. Despite the warnings of disaster, despite warnings that this love ain’t ‘right’ everything seems so goddamn happy. There’s some tickling of ivories here that reminds you one of the most delightful things is to see if tickling someone with a joke, maybe even a dirty one, stirs within them a desire to be touched more tangibly.

I’m notoriously susceptible to what’s being whispered in my ears.

There’s often an external skepticism from the general population if it is observed by the crowd. The rest of the world wonders what secrets are being shared between me and someone bold enough to make sure my ear is the only shot they’re trying to shoot in. Sometimes the subject is a joke about the crowd. Sometimes the subject isn’t exactly joking but even more fun than making fun of those that aren’t included in on the special, weighty words just for my listening. They’re often calls to ditch the crowds, and all of their burbles about what is proper and what I should do. More often than not, it’s on the subject of the fun we could have together if we just focused on the ‘we’ being ‘us two.”

The saxophones fade, Rose steps with a smile back to the microphone…

So I’m tellin’ ev’rybody to leave you and I alone, yes I am…

There’s a bit of mumbling about being exactly where you belong, yes there is. There’s the true declaration of being in love with someone. The slightly confused, anxious element of all the advice still swirling around Rose hoping she considers another outcome, another man continues. She stands resolute in her truth:

But Baybee, I’m so in love with you, oh yes I am

oOh but because of the way I love you, I just

Can’t make up my mind, to leave you”

I sit here and think of the observation and advice that comes when people ‘think’ they know what an intimate relationship looks like from the inside. Sometimes the advice comes from pure envy of what they don’t see, hear, feel or understand. Quite often, they are trying to cover up something they’re witnessing that’s lacking in their own lives. All I can say is that if I still feel the same way about you as I always did, there’s nothing anyone else can say that will change that. Chances are, you’ve made me feel the same old delightful feeling too many times in a row that it’ll take a lot of times of you making me feel bad to cancel out those good times.

I’ll never ever leave you

I just can’t make it up in my mind to leave you.

The feelings deep within screws up any possibility that the equation my mind does that may be labeled as the ‘rational’ option. There’s been way too much STEM focus. It’s left too many children behind, loveless and lonely. The metrics and math of this world say it’s more efficient to start fresh with some new flesh than to try it again. Yet I can’t find the low end torque to push off and to walk out the door to leave you behind. The key element is I might sometimes want to leave where we are. I’m hoping to find a more hospitable crowd. There’s nothing within that thinking about leaving you behind me. You’ve made me smile, laugh, dance and frankly sparked an urge to merge far too often to ever do that.

I just can’t make it up in my mind to ever ever leave you.