Once in a while, I develop a minor obsession for some old song that, until that point, I hadn't thought of for years. Sometimes, the stimulus for the obsession is mysterious, but more often, it's the obvious one: I hear the song again, and am reminded how much I used to like it. Increasing the odds of this sort of retrospective exploration is one advantage of the fact that my car doesn't have a CD player and radio mostly sucks: it does have a cassette player, and I'll end up randomly going through elderly cassettes and hearing things I wouldn't have intentionally chosen to listen to.
This week's obsession is "The House Song" by Peter Paul & Mary. When I used to make cassettes, I'd generally record entire albums, but I'd put stray tracks at the ends of sides to fill up the tape. This one ended up at the end of a 10c.c. album or something (along with "The Great Mandella," another favorite). I'm not a Peter Paul & Mary fan - I doubt I've given them a moment's thought for a decade or more - but evidently my parents were, as I remember four or five of their records being around the house when I was growing up. Since they weren't major music consumers, it was unusual for them to buy that many records by the same artist. Anyway, these two tracks were from their 1967 release Album 1700 (probably the first album to utilize the rather minor titling subgenre of borrowing the label's catalog number for the title: Dave Davies had one, and of course there's Yes with 90125 ). The hit on this album was their version of John Denver's "Leaving on a Jet Plane," but "The House Song" was always my favorite. The album found them moving away from their iconic incarnation as purist folk trio (a la A Mighty Wind) and making use of some rock instrumentation and production techniques (as well as wicked impersonations of the Mamas & the Papas and Donovan, on "I Dig Rock & Roll Music").
What's interesting to me about my reaction to "The House Song" is that, even as a child (I was five in 1967 - although it occurs to me my folks may not have bought the record until "Jet Plane" became a hit a couple years later), I got the emotional timbre of the song...even though I obviously knew nothing about the breakup of a love affair, still less the "house" metaphor the song works with. That metaphor isn't always the most gracefully deployed, and I remember as a kid thinking, "well how come no one wants to buy his house, and why does he keep trying to sell it?" But it wasn't the lyrics that communicated to me then (obviously), it was the music: the way each verse begins hopefully in the singer's upper register, and gradually falls away to a despondent, near-mumbling by the ends of the verse. And if the house in the song is haunted by the narrator's memories, the aural equivalent is the spooky treatment of the backing vocals: lots of reverb, but the original signal is muted nearly to inaudibility, so what we hear is almost exclusively the reverb: spirit without the flesh, gesture without the feeling.
It's funny: in my mind, and in my memory, had you asked me, I would have said the song was a minor hit - but it appears to have sunken into almost total obscurity. Our own mental jukeboxes differ from the physical variety. Seeking to replace my worn cassette, dubbed from a record subjected to all the abuse a child playing the same song over and over again could muster, I was unable to find a copy online (the album's in print, though - but I can't see paying full price for two songs I want, one or two I wouldn't mind having, and another six or so I'm indifferent to). Apparently, Rhino's preparing a Peter Paul & Mary box set - so who knows, maybe legions of fans will end up making available digital copies of the track.
(Segue to a rant about how if record companies were smart, they'd've realized long ago that with catalog items, casual fans would be more interested in ad hoc collections than whole albums. If Warners were to make the track available for a dollar or so, or say five or ten dollars for a twelve-track self-assembled collection of Warners catalog tracks, I'd pay for it. Instead, I'm forced to illegally download a copy - okay, "forced" is too strong, but it seems reasonable to me that the economics of MP3s might return the basic unit of popular music to the song, as it was in the days of singles, rather than albums. Or even better, allow the coexistence of both: I'm generally an album-lover, but I wouldn't want to just eschew stray tracks for that reason.)
