"tunacy"

You see, I have this tendency... to obsess over particular songs... or even entire albums, depending on how perfect they sound... I end up listening to them repeatedy, as a subtle form of brainwashing I suppose... there's something in these recordings that makes me want to hear them over and over again and again...

When sampling became the big rage in hip-hop, I understood its purpose: there are small parts of songs that hit you so close to home that you wish the entire song were made up of just that one killer part. You want those pristine moments to never end.

I haven't changed much in that regard. Currently, I am obsessed with a nearly-forgotten pop nugget from the mid-'70s. I have it burned onto a CD-- the only song on the CD, I might add... this automatically causes the stereo in my car to play it again once it reaches the end.


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I'll tell you about the song but I'll have to demonstrate sheer restraint when describing it to you, because I also have a tendency to deconstruct these things limitlessly. This includes recitations of the lyrics, pointless-yet-somehow-related anecdotes and footnotes, and my own personal meanings invested in the fabric of the song itself.

Before I tell you about the song, I have to build up to my discovery of said song. It is well-known that I am a virtual encyclopedia of useless knowledge. I routinely win Trivial Pursuit games and have been urged to sign up for numerous game shows (I have only been on one: Win Ben Stein's Money, where I lost to a former Jeopardy! champ)

For me to come across a song and not know who the band is nor the song's name is usually an adequate trigger for my obsessiveness regarding popular music. It's one thing if I discover something either obscure or dated, but it's another thing altogether when I hear a song that was a major hit and yet I have no point of reference.


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The catalyst for my latest foray into "tunacy" ("tune" + "lunacy"= "tunacy"-- get it?) was Jack FM, the new format over at KCBS-FM that is also sweeping the nation as we speak. Check the link for my initial thoughts on Jack, but I have to admit that I never changed the station on my car stereo presets because... well, there's that sense of familiarity with all the songs on their playlist, most of them being lost gems that I hadn't heard in a long time.

One day, I switched over to Jack and I caught a song midway through. It held my interest and I listened until the end. I'd never heard it before, and I was curious. It sounded familiar but I couldn't place it. And, of course, one of the more retarded aspects of the Jack FM format is that there isn't a DJ, and no one announces the songs before or afterward.

Later on in the week, I heard it again, this time at Paulie's Garage. I was working on the animation (second episode) and it came on the speakers. No one knew who it was, but Paulie's brother Peter claimed that he'd heard it recently in a movie.

The song's production values led me to believe that it was either something from the late '70s or a current piece of retro-rock. And before I knew it, I was humming what little of the melody I could recall.

That humming turned into a bona-fide obsession as it swirled inside my head, looking for some sort of emotional anchor. Pretty melody, typically vague lyrics about love and baby and all that jazz... I couldn't shake it. The voice-- who was singing? I've heard that voice on other occasions...


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Two weeks passed, and the song was growing to epic proportions inside my skull. I tried to remember lyrics but the ones I had were of no help (it bears noting that my interpretation of the words turned out to be dead wrong) and I didn't know where to begin with a search engine. I tried looking up Jack's playlist online, but that led nowhere.

I was starting to see myself as a musical detective, and I had a very thin lead.

I tried to forget about it but it kept creeping up on me everywhere I went. I kept the car stereo set to the Jack FM preset, hoping to catch it one day while commuting. But it seemed like the song disappeared from their playlist, because they I haven't heard them play it since-- the watched pot never boiled. They have probably played it a million times since the last time I heard it, but I haven't been so lucky as to catch it.

After a while, the song started to fade in my mind. I didn't have anything on deck to replace it but I think I also knew it was necessary for me to let go of this one for the time being. If past experience with tunacy has taught me anything, it's that I'll eventually come across it again in a bout of synchronistic epiphany-- what I've woefully termed "serendipity" as of late.

What do you think happened next?


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Late night, or early morning (whatever you like to call it), sitting on the couch, smoking pot and reeling from a night of drinking with friends... lighting the bowl in my darkened living room, the TV blaring an infomercial for a CD compilation, hosted by Barry "Greg Brady" Williams... paying just enough attention to keep me from changing the channel...

Then, I heard the song.

I dropped my pipe and stood up. There it was, in bold '70s-style bubble lettering: "Go All The Way" by The Raspberries, superimposed over a live clip of the group performing-- their hairdos and clothes were ridiculously anachronistic. The clip lasted five to ten sceonds, but it was enough for me to register.

I froze. How awesome was this? I felt like Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, recognizing the Devil's Tower; I felt like Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, seeking out Terence Mann after encountering the ghost of Shoeless Joe...

But then another realization set in...

"Who the fuck are The Raspberries?"


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Ever heard of Eric Carmen? Women will know him as the singer of "Hungry Eyes" off of the Dirty Dancing soundtrack. More people know him for his doleful solo hit "All By Myself".

But before he was all by himself, Eric Carmen was the singer of The Raspberries, ancient rock dinosaurs who roamed the Earth around 1971 A.D. One biographer noted that groups like the Small Faces and the Who were "the blueprint for The Raspberries." Other influences included the Kinks, the Left Banke, the Beatles, the Byrds and the Beach Boys. And you can definitely hear those influences in The Raspberries' music: in the song "Go All The Way", there's even a direct bite from The Beatles' "come on come on" chorus from "Please Please Me".

Most of those groups I listed above are British, and The Raspberries were trying to make music in that vein: a throwback to the singles-oriented days of the British Invasion. Those legendary groups built the bulk of their reps on strong, well-written Top 40 singles.

Very few artists today take the single-oriented tack because the way the music industry works nowadays only gives birth to disposable one-hit-wonders, as opposed to pop bands with a long shelf life.

Coming from Cleveland, Ohio and forged from the ashes of countless other bands with varying line-ups, The Raspberries had some hits in the early-to-mid 1970s, but never went further than simmering mainstream courting. Eric eventually went solo and made mad cash, but The Raspberries were his catapult.

I learned all of that online, poking my nose around. And now that I know about The Raspberries and the song of theirs that Jack FM plays the most, my life should be balanced again. Everything must return to normal again, right?

Wrong. It only opened a whole new can of worms, because then I wanted a copy of the song to play in my car.


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Whenever I go into a fit of tunacy, I hesitate from jumping in completely. It could cost me lots of money if I start buying up everything I can get my hands on that will temporarily sate my appetite for more knowledge.

For example: I used to be obsessed over the song "They Don't Know" by Tracey Ullman. Yes, she recorded a song... an entire album, in fact. You Broke My Heart In 17 Places, I believe it was called. Released in the early 1980s. Paul McCartney was in the music video. The song was originally recorded by the late Kirsty MacColl, one of the most underrated songstresses of the past two decades.

That album is hard to find now, so when I re-discovered the song years later, I settled for just finding a copy of the single. I had it on a cassette that I looped by hand, so that it would flip sides in my car stereo and repeat. That's all I needed-- no need to buy the album, although its rarity makes me wish I had begun collecting vinyl at a much earlier age.

I wasn't sure if I wanted to buy an entire Raspberries album, even a Best Of comp. Those suits, those hairdos... it really kind of made me sick, seeing what they looked like. But then, I found a free version online somewhere, went through all the necessary wrangling and hacking in order to get a downloadable version, cleaned up the sound a bit... and now, it's on repeat in my car.

I haven't stopped listening to it. Once in a while, I pop in something else (I am also concurrently addicted to Captain Beefheart, but not as much as this) but I always go back to that song and listen to it. And I can't figure out what holds more fascination: the relative obscurity of this tunacy, or the fact that "Go All The Way" is (in my opinion) a perfectly crafted pop song?

I theorized, while driving stoned through smoggy L.A., that maybe what I am responding to is the sheer superficiality of the song. The lyrics, as stated earlier, are the usual pap that gets foisted upon the listening public: when I was struggling to recall the lyrics, I came up with "If the love is true/ I still care for you" and found out later that the line was "It feels so right/ being with you here tonight"...

I may have been off in terms of actual wording, but the sentiments are interchangeable. Pretty generic, no?

Plus, the title... go all the way? Does anyone even say that anymore? I can't imagine any of today's generation of teens trying to seduce their crushes with such verbiage. And yet, I do have a vivid image in my mind of shaggy-haired youths coming of age in 1972, high off of Quaaludes and wearing tight soccer jerseys, making out with their beloved in the back of someone's van, looking like extras from that TV show with Ashton Kutcher...


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So anyway, back to my theory...

My obsession with this song stems primarily from my response to pretty pop records, but it also has to do with an imagined reality, as if I am eavesdropping on the shared dreams of a manufactured culture, one that exalts the precision of three-part harmonies, soulful crooning, and Anglophilic cock-rocking above all, christening such creations with the bland lyrical fantasies of adolescent sex and insecurity...

Basically, it recalls a time that never existed for me, and one that probably never existed for anyone except for people like my parents.

For me, it is akin to digging up a time capsule from a long-dead era and finding something that is so far removed from my everyday experience that I have to bask in it for a while in order to fully understand it. For all my admiration of this tune, I could never fathom myself ever writing a song such as "Go All The Way"-- and that qualifies it as both a blessing and a curse.

You see, I'd like to write a song like that one day. But if I ever did, I wonder if it would be sincere. Would it pour from my soul fully formed? Or would I have to treat it as a work-for-hire type of deal?

It doesn't really matter at this point, because I'm not sick of it yet. And when I finally do become sick of it, will it be relegated to the dustbin of my mind, where esoteric pop cultural references go to die? Or has this whole tunatic episode been merely a preamble to something more?

I don't know. But could you do me a favor and find a copy of the song and listen to it, and then tell me if you think I'm fucking nuts or not?

I think that would help a lot.