Rant #1,709: I Know a Place

It's summer.

I am always warm.

I look forward to air conditioning.

I also look forward to swimming in our backyard pool.

I don't know how I am going to tie this all together with Petula Clark, but I am going to try to do this seamlessly.

It is the summer, and I am in my car just about every day, while it is driving to work, or driving home from work, or driving my son to his own work, or ...

I think you get the idea. During the summer, we do spend a lot of time in our cars.

Anyway, I listen to music in my car, only the stuff I want to listen to, whether it is on satellite or on CD, CD-R, or on a thumb drive.

No more having to sit through "Stairway to Heaven" for me anymore.

Anyway, around July 4, I needed something else to listen to in my car, as what I had been listening to--basically my treasure trove of Monkees stuff--had just about dried up.

So what was next for me?

Petula Clark, that's who.

I have had a fascination with this woman, and her music, since I was a little kid and saw her singing "Downtown" on "The Ed Sullivan Show."

She was unlike the other singers I watched on the show, unlike the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five and Herman's Hermits, and yes, it had to do with her gender, but there was also something else that I fell in love with.

Getting past her funny and unique first name, her songs were just so energetic and vibrant, her voice crystal clear, and her demeanor on stage as ladylike as it could be.

But she wasn't a kid like the other singers. You could tell that she had been around a while--actually, she had been a star in Europe for decades before she ever broke over here--and I think that looking back, what myself and countless others fell in love with was the fact that it was as if our own mothers were singing to us whenever we watched her on the Sullivan show or whatever show she was on, and she was on plenty of them way back when.

Anyway, I simply love to hear her music to this day, and she is certainly what some people would call a guilty pleasure, but what I call something of that and also simply a fascination.

We all know her singles--"Downtown," "I Know a Place," "This Is My Song," "Don't Sleep In the Subway," etc., etc.--but we generally aren't that familiar with her LPs, which are filled with her hits, her cover versions of popular tunes of the day, and other material, including a lot of songs that she wrote herself.

So I decided to digitize her Warner Bros. catalog, the label from which she became a household name. I am also in the process of digitizing her two major soundtrack albums of the time, "Finian's Rainbow" and "Goodbye Mr. Chips," and I will also try to gather the 45s she put out for a hit single compilation, too.

It will take some time, but I think I can get everything done this month.

Her music just simply warms me, but in a positive way during the hot summer, and in particular after a hard day at work, there is no more relaxing music to hear.

Sure, at lot of it is schmaltzy, but it is done so well that you barely notice.

Interestingly, Clark never had a top 20 album in the U.S., only reaching No. 21 with her "Downtown" album, with all the others on Warner Bros. making the Top Albums charts, but no real big hits in the bunch.

People bought her singles, whether they were younger or older, and the LPs stand today as curiosities, but I have just about all of them, so it shouldn't be much of a chore to digitize them.

In fact, it will be a lot of fun.

I have done the first eight thus far, so I am entering into the era where she was going back to the movies--she had appeared in numerous films as a young actress in England, but her musical success in America kind of stopped that part of her career in its tracks until the late 1960s--so that should be a fun era to go back to and listen to with a wide open ear.

By the early 1970s, Clark left Warner Bros. for MGM, and kind of put her career on hold while she helped raise her family.

She still recorded, and, for that matter, still records and performs to this day, even though she is well into her 80s.

But those early, magic years from 1964 to 1971 or so are what I am keying on with what I am doing now, and looking at her music, yes, it was a magic era for this multi-talented performer.

So, maybe I have pricked up your ears and opened up your eyes to Clark, and maybe what I just said will make you, yourself, take a look back at her career.

Let me tell you, her musical catalog is well worth examining, and is well worth the effort, as I am finding out by listening to those albums.

She was certainly a one-of-a-kind performer.

Speak to you again on Monday as I move ahead with this latest musical project that I am on.