IN WHICH I subtly learn the obvious art of conflict
Paul Dabuse was the toughest kid in seventh grade. I knew this because I once saw him fight. That was enough to brand him as someone not to be messed with.
It’s a perfect three-minute teaser for a legendary western by the same name, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence.
The song opens with a languid intro on the fiddle, followed by a simple quadruple drum pattern. Then there’s a rise in dramatic tension. A few bars later the voice enters, with a tessitura so distinctive I’d never heard one like it before or since. It sounds halfway between a country vocalist and a pop balladeer. The singer sets the story by painting a scary picture of a villain who terrorizes both men and women with his “straight and fast” shootings. In the next stanza, the singer’s quavering voice softens the music to introduce an unobtrusive female chorus. In one line he describes the hero, a reasonable man who just wants to live in peace with his girl despite the gruesome gunslinger terrorizing them. Rising crescendos in the chorus inject more tension, tattoos on the snare drum imitate gunshots, and the song suddenly ends, ambiguously, cagily, without revealing the plot’s surprise climax.
Chris Montez1Let’s Dance had it right. “Any old dance that you wanna do.” When I was 13 at Holton-Richmond Junior High2School Web Site, attending class in wooden desks with dried-up ink wells, I used to go to the school dances that happened third Friday each month. They were called “mixers,” because that’s what the girls and boys were supposed to do. Mix with adults gaping on. Of course not many of us did. The concept of a sock hop, with minimal supervision and an outta sight disk jockey, was yet to be in Danvers, Massachusetts.