Meade chose the old Neil Diamond song as the soundtrack for one of this morning's sunrise videos:
Anyway, watching that video — in which I, unaccountably, look like Sasquatch — I glommed onto the words "A girl who... won't play games behind me." I wondered if Neil was the source of the "no games" concept. He was not. There was a very popular book that came out in 1964, "Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships." Wikipedia says:
It has been described as one of the first "pop psychology" books. As of 1965, there had been eight additional printings after the initial run of 3,000, and a total of 83,000 copies had been published. A Time magazine article titled "The Names of the Games," speculated that the book's popularity was due to its applications for both self-help and "cocktail party talk." Carol M. Taylor, in the Florida Communication Journal, noted that many concepts and terms from transactional analysis had made their way into everyday speech.
So when you talk about "games," know the roots. It's the 1960s. The best of times, the worst of times.
The Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders song "The Game of Love" came from 1965 — still a year before "Solitary Man" — but I don't think it's expressing hostility toward games. They're all come on, let's play:
I adored that kind of thing at the time. Wayne and his co-musicians didn't seem too old. I was 14, and my dear friend Meade was only 11. Anyway, speaking of old, Meade, now 72, chose the Johnny Cash version of "Solitary Man" for his Sasquatch-at-Sunrise video. Johnny Cash always seemed mysteriously old. Born old, I think:
Posts
14 comments:
“ in which I, unaccountably, look like Sasquatch”
Now we know! It was you all along.
I was wondering what all those "250" symbols were about this year. Turns out that this year is the Sasquatchtenial.
Who knew? I certainly didn't
Its good that Althouse disliked at least one of his songs. Because I dislike all of Neil Diamond. A smary mediocrity loved by chicks. My favorite Diamond lyric:
I am"... I said
To no one there
And no one heard at all
Not even the chair
Sunny is a great song. Honey is a good song, but too sad for my taste.
In the islands, they have a way of saying this, it's called an 'old soul'. I have a niece that's an old soul, we've said that about her since she was a toddler. Once you see it, you know.
Self help books are infinitely perfectible. There's always one on the best seller lists. Nowadays they use psychology, but there used to be versions based on Christian tracts. The highest paid performers weren't actors in Shakespeare's London, but rather preachers. Visiting preachers used to pack in the crowds and were suitably recompensed......Well, they really work. Just look how nice the human race is becoming.
One thing about Neil Diamond: you don't have to do a lot of searching to find the meaning of his lyrics.
Strange - when I play Meade’s video, I can hear geese honking, but I don’t hear any music.
We actually had a couple geese when I was young. I loved them and enjoyed their honking. But they left a mess. They supposedly "ran away" one day. I think my mother just got tired of the goose poop.
Neal Diamond was sort of a messed up way station between the Kingston Trio and the Byrds. Never particularly like it, but didn't actively hate it.
“ Strange - when I play Meade’s video, I can hear geese honking, but I don’t hear any music.”
Me too, now. It must have been censored. Just cue up Johnny Cash’s version of Solitary Man.
“There was a very popular book that came out in 1964, Games People Play”
Since we’re free-associating, Joe South recorded a song with the same name in 1968:
Oh the games people play now
Every night and every day now
Never meaning what they say now
Never saying what they mean
And they wile away the hours
In their ivory towers
Till they're covered up with flowers
In the back of a black limousine
Oh we make one another cry
Break a heart then we say goodbye
Cross our hearts and we hope to die
That the other was to blame
Neither one will give in
So we gaze at our eight by ten
Thinking 'bout the things that might have been
And it's a dirty rotten shame
Look around tell me what you see
What's happening to you and me
God grant me the serenity
To just remember who I am
King Crimson recorded a really lovely instrumental version of the same song in 1970.
In 1975 The Spinners recorded a different song with the same title, which was changed to ‘They Just Can't Stop It’ The (Games People Play) for the single release (punctuation verbatim).
And finally, The Alan Parsons Project recorded a different song with the same name in 1980. In a word, forgettable.
Chris Isaak does a great “Solitary Man” cover on his 1993 album San Francisco Days
Post a Comment
Please use the comments forum to respond to the post. Don't fight with each other. Be substantive... or interesting... or funny. Comments should go up immediately... unless you're commenting on a post older than 4 days. Then you have to wait for us to moderate you through. It's also possible to get shunted into spam by the machine. We try to keep an eye on that and release the miscaught good stuff. We do delete some comments, but not for viewpoint... for bad faith. Also: No italics, even briefly. Use asterisks for emphasis. And don't play with the format by changing fonts or using boldface or all caps. Never include more than one extra line break between paragraphs.