As for wearing a mask …
I went to three stores yesterday to do my family’s food shopping, and just about everyone in these stores wore a mask, whether there were still “masking-up” signs in place in these stores or not.
In one of the places I was in, I did see one guy without a mask, but he was well within his rights not to wear a mask, but honestly, everyone else—man, woman and child—of all ages were wearing their masks.
I think it is going to take a few weeks for people to wean themselves off the masks, and once the summer heat really comes, the masks, except in certain circumstances, will pretty much be history for most of us.
And the summer heat is coming, because for the past two nights, we have slept with the air conditioner on in the bedrooms.
It is just too warm in our house, and my allergies can’t take the heat, so the air conditioner goes on.
And it all makes me think of summers past, where, as the old song says, “the living was easy.”
I looked forward to summertime as a kid, because I could finally put away the school books and do what I wanted to do, and I spent several years in day camp, where I really could have fun with my friends.
As I have said countless times, we were a new community way back when—Rochdale Village, South Jamaica, Queens, New York—and I was growing up as the community was growing up.
And there seemed to be a million kids there who were my age, so friends abounded. If you lived there during those years, 1963 to about 1972 or so, you had to have friends, if for no other reason than osmosis.
You lived there, lots of other kids lived there at the same time, so you had friends, friends and more friends, and of course, you had your best friends, the ones who you were closest to.
And I just remember the community back then … we could go to camp during the day, play ball in the park as the day turned to evening, and in between, we got ice cream from Good Humor, with Frank doling it out to lines of kids.
Of course, those good times didn’t last, as the neighborhood faced numerous problems that the late 1960s produced, and I mean, heck, I think when we learned that Frank died was the moment we knew that this Garden of Eden we were living in had turned sour.
But that aside, I also remember the music of those times, and not just the music I have spoken about in various Rants, but music that when I look back on it today, I put into my own personal classification of “Rochdale Music.”
These were songs by mostly black artists that you could hear from one end of the development to the other, songs that weren’t necessarily huge hits, but really stand out in my childhood, songs that came out of those transistor radios we all had and permeated the air as much as the dirt and grime of the urban environment did.
And one of those songs that I remember was “But It’s Alright” by J.J. Jackson.
Born Jerome Louis Jackson in either the Bronx or Brooklyn on April 8, 1941—I have seen both boroughs listed as his birthplace--the singer/songwriter never really had a huge hit on the chart, although he did place three songs on Billboard’s Hot 100, with “But It’s Alright”—a song he co-wrote—as his best seller, reaching No. 22 on the chart in 1966.
It wasn’t even a summer record, per se, reaching the chart in October 1966.
But whenever I think of those summers of my youth, that song pops up loud and clear. It is such an exuberant song, and it really came out of nowhere to be a slightly big hit, as it was originally the B side of the single it was released on, but deejays flipped the record over and it became the singer’s signature song.
And it was a huge hit in New York, and to this day, you hear the song all the time on oldies stations.
And it is also one of the handful of songs that was re-released and made the Billboard chat again, this time right before summer in May 1969, when it hit No, 45 on the Hot 100.
Jackson did not have a long chart career, and it pretty much fizzled after that song. He eventually moved out of New York and settled across the ocean in England. He is still around, by the way.
Anyway, while searching through YouTube one day, not only did I find the song—which I have in my collection, naturally—but I found a video of the song, which was taken from his appearance on the old ABC show “Where the Action Is.”
As you know, I run a Facebook site devoted to that show, so finding the performance of that song on that show was a bonus, but reading up on the video, I found that this might actually be one of the few performances of Jackson that has survived the test of time, so it has some historic value as well as entertainment value.
As was the norm for musical performances on the show, the segment takes place outdoors, at what looks like a dude ranch or some type of venue near the beach.
Jackson is dressed in a suit and tie, which is wrapped around his 285-lbs. girth. Everyone else in the video appears to be in summer attire, but Jackson moves and sashays around the scene with aplomb, hardly breaking a sweat.
The song is lip-synced, but it doesn’t take anything away from the fun of the song, and Jackson and everyone else in the scene look like they had a real good time doing it.
I posted the video on Facebook, and it received a lot of response, so I am going to put it up here, too, and if you haven’t seen it yet, I think you will enjoy it.
The very title of the song makes it very topical, because what we have been through the past year has to make us think that things will turn out OK … “But It’s Alright” kind of hits us in the right way, more than 50 years after the song made its debut.
Enjoy … and perhaps when you hear the tune, it will bring back your own summertime and childhood memories like it does for me.
Have a great weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday.
I went to three stores yesterday to do my family’s food shopping, and just about everyone in these stores wore a mask, whether there were still “masking-up” signs in place in these stores or not.
In one of the places I was in, I did see one guy without a mask, but he was well within his rights not to wear a mask, but honestly, everyone else—man, woman and child—of all ages were wearing their masks.
I think it is going to take a few weeks for people to wean themselves off the masks, and once the summer heat really comes, the masks, except in certain circumstances, will pretty much be history for most of us.
And the summer heat is coming, because for the past two nights, we have slept with the air conditioner on in the bedrooms.
It is just too warm in our house, and my allergies can’t take the heat, so the air conditioner goes on.
And it all makes me think of summers past, where, as the old song says, “the living was easy.”
I looked forward to summertime as a kid, because I could finally put away the school books and do what I wanted to do, and I spent several years in day camp, where I really could have fun with my friends.
As I have said countless times, we were a new community way back when—Rochdale Village, South Jamaica, Queens, New York—and I was growing up as the community was growing up.
And there seemed to be a million kids there who were my age, so friends abounded. If you lived there during those years, 1963 to about 1972 or so, you had to have friends, if for no other reason than osmosis.
You lived there, lots of other kids lived there at the same time, so you had friends, friends and more friends, and of course, you had your best friends, the ones who you were closest to.
And I just remember the community back then … we could go to camp during the day, play ball in the park as the day turned to evening, and in between, we got ice cream from Good Humor, with Frank doling it out to lines of kids.
Of course, those good times didn’t last, as the neighborhood faced numerous problems that the late 1960s produced, and I mean, heck, I think when we learned that Frank died was the moment we knew that this Garden of Eden we were living in had turned sour.
But that aside, I also remember the music of those times, and not just the music I have spoken about in various Rants, but music that when I look back on it today, I put into my own personal classification of “Rochdale Music.”
These were songs by mostly black artists that you could hear from one end of the development to the other, songs that weren’t necessarily huge hits, but really stand out in my childhood, songs that came out of those transistor radios we all had and permeated the air as much as the dirt and grime of the urban environment did.
And one of those songs that I remember was “But It’s Alright” by J.J. Jackson.
Born Jerome Louis Jackson in either the Bronx or Brooklyn on April 8, 1941—I have seen both boroughs listed as his birthplace--the singer/songwriter never really had a huge hit on the chart, although he did place three songs on Billboard’s Hot 100, with “But It’s Alright”—a song he co-wrote—as his best seller, reaching No. 22 on the chart in 1966.
It wasn’t even a summer record, per se, reaching the chart in October 1966.
But whenever I think of those summers of my youth, that song pops up loud and clear. It is such an exuberant song, and it really came out of nowhere to be a slightly big hit, as it was originally the B side of the single it was released on, but deejays flipped the record over and it became the singer’s signature song.
And it was a huge hit in New York, and to this day, you hear the song all the time on oldies stations.
And it is also one of the handful of songs that was re-released and made the Billboard chat again, this time right before summer in May 1969, when it hit No, 45 on the Hot 100.
Jackson did not have a long chart career, and it pretty much fizzled after that song. He eventually moved out of New York and settled across the ocean in England. He is still around, by the way.
Anyway, while searching through YouTube one day, not only did I find the song—which I have in my collection, naturally—but I found a video of the song, which was taken from his appearance on the old ABC show “Where the Action Is.”
As you know, I run a Facebook site devoted to that show, so finding the performance of that song on that show was a bonus, but reading up on the video, I found that this might actually be one of the few performances of Jackson that has survived the test of time, so it has some historic value as well as entertainment value.
As was the norm for musical performances on the show, the segment takes place outdoors, at what looks like a dude ranch or some type of venue near the beach.
Jackson is dressed in a suit and tie, which is wrapped around his 285-lbs. girth. Everyone else in the video appears to be in summer attire, but Jackson moves and sashays around the scene with aplomb, hardly breaking a sweat.
The song is lip-synced, but it doesn’t take anything away from the fun of the song, and Jackson and everyone else in the scene look like they had a real good time doing it.
I posted the video on Facebook, and it received a lot of response, so I am going to put it up here, too, and if you haven’t seen it yet, I think you will enjoy it.
The very title of the song makes it very topical, because what we have been through the past year has to make us think that things will turn out OK … “But It’s Alright” kind of hits us in the right way, more than 50 years after the song made its debut.
Enjoy … and perhaps when you hear the tune, it will bring back your own summertime and childhood memories like it does for me.
Have a great weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday.
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