I’m in Pieces, Bits and Pieces

And now, another of those muted, placid, gentle hints from the universe that one might be spinning on the B side of life:

Earl Fowler

One spies it with one’s little eye while visiting a musty-smelling antique shop. The wooden crate containing the LPs on sale for $5 a pop.

Naturally, it’s way at the back through a maze of merchandise consisting mainly of recognizable touchstones from one’s childhood: the acid-flashback lampshades and Royal Doulton china; the heavy amber glass ashtray in the ornate stand that was irresistibly designed for spinning said glass ashtray like a rotating planet when mom and dad weren’t looking; the funky, woven-wood magazine rack that once held unread Reader’s Digests and eagerly perused Eaton’s catalogues bearing discreet, ripped-newspaper bookmarks to the ladies’ undergarment section, and so on and so forth.

(Somebody told me about that last one. It certainly wasn’t the funky, woven-wood magazine rack at our house. And even if it was, it must have been my little brother who slipped in the discreet, ripped-newspaper bookmarks when he was seven. He probably was aiming for the G.I. Joe and Tonka Trucks section but missed. Always was a clumsy little bugger.)

And soudainement, ça y est! Wedged between The Ray Conniff Singers’ tribute to Honey-era Bobby Goldsboro and Try to Remember by The Brothers Four, is the first, and almost certainly the last, album by The Dave Clark Five that one will ever purchase: 1964’s Bits and Pieces.

“Catch us if you can,” lead vocalist Mike Smith had exhorted the screaming schoolgirls in the audience at a taping of The Ed Sullivan Show in the early days of the British Invasion.

Sixty years later, one finally has caught up with the Tottenham ballroom boys on “a monophonic, microgroove recording … playable on monophonic and stereophonic phonographs,” according to the blurb at the bottom of the “high fidelity, 6000 series” pressing by Capitol Records of Canada, Ltd. “Recorded in England. It cannot become obsolete.”

The cover looks like it has weathered a house fire, a basement flood and possibly a dozen raucous sleepovers involving multiple shaky playings on a vintage Symphonic portable record player with a dull needle. But aside from a few requisite scratches sure to add a bit of gritty fibre to Rick Huxley’s harmonica solos, the vinyl itself appears to be in decent shape.

After all, it cannot become obsolete. And as the dopamine rush of an impending impulse purchase washes over one, the simple beat and moronic lyrics are all coming back.

You said you loved me, and you’d always be mine ...

So one is feeling particularly glad all over, all of the time, as one hoves into view, mincing in Biden-like pixie steps, of the sixty-something store owner watching by the nickel-plated cash register at the front of the store. One has a fiver in one hand and a sleeve of bona fide smash hits in the other. Mr. Chekov, take us out of orbit: Warp Factor Two, and hurry!

From such an evident peer, one anticipates a comment about one’s discriminating taste or perhaps a shared memory around seeing Sullivan gladhand the band on a black-and-white Panasonic. A humorous story about listening to a transistor radio under the covers, way past bedtime. An awkward moment at a sock hop. It will make for a nice bit of boomer bonding.

And this is the point at which the owner looks one sympathetically in the eyes and burns seven special words irrevocably into one’s dry and shrivelled soul while the cash register chimes its merry dirge.

“Hey, this was my dad’s favourite band!”