Time for Livin' - the Association
Making a return after a very crowded summer in which my digital (lack of) expertise meant I wanted to get a few things sorted with the blog. But now I'm a week away from being the Field Marshall of Funk, a singularly inappropriate title as I'm deejaying a one-off sixties disco on Saturday. So I'm back with a week of sixties numbers starting with the Association's "Time for Living".
The Association were a classic sixties neither one thing nor the other band, born of the Californian hippy culture, reflecting it in their music yet absolutely a commercial pop band at the same time. Bizarrely, they were the opening act in the seminal Monterey Pop Festival in the summer of 1967, the event that established the idea of festivals in America, and hosted a stellar line up including the Who, Grateful Dead, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane and the Animals. But this is pure, wonderful uplifting Monday morning, hippy pop.
Right from the initial unnervingly high bass intro and the too, too sensible sounding opening vocal
"I kicked off my shoes and felt the good earth under my feet...." it's slightly off-kilter, here we have someone preaching the hippy ethos like an evangelist and you are slightly uneasy - like what's the catch? - and then, when the relaxing backing vocals kick in on the third line
"I took off my watch, found I had all the time in the world......" you relax too, and feel they're genuine, let's just lie back and enjoy it, and by golly it's worth it and it's time to TURN THE VOLUME UP!
It then ramps up so you even trust them through the insane highspeed rendering of the phrases
"groovinoneverything life is giving
fromnowonI'mtaking ti-ime for li-i-ife"
Then some good advice for those of us living in the non-stop digital world of today:
"Too busy to stop and notice the things that are real,
embarrassed to talk about all things that I feel
it's so strange, they don't notice the world all around me....."
Great sound, great way to start the week like a short cold shower after a warm one, filling you with hope and optimism:
"I lay down all of my hang-ups forever"....if only we could......hell, let's give it a try and play it again.