Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of The Dubs performing the classic Could This Be Magic.
CD Review
The Best Of The Dubs, The
Dubs, Rhinos Records, 1991
Sometimes, and less
frequently than you might imagine, a song and a moment meet, meet in the mind’s
memory even many years afterward. I am not, repeat, not referring to such 1960s
seminal songs as Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ In
The Wind or The Times They Are
A-Changin’ which every ARRP-worthy baby-boomer commentator drags out when
they want to cut up old torches about how they went mano y mano with the bad
guys and gave up the best two years of their lives to the revolution back in
the day before heading off to a life of dentistry or academia. No, enough of
that. What I mean is those songs like The Dubs 1950s Could This Be Magic which formed the backdrop for more than one
social setting, one teen social setting and that is all that counted, back in
the day.
Now I do not know the fates
of the individual members of The Dubs but the music business was, and is, a
fast turnover place and so they may have just had their few moments of glory
and then went back to the plumbing business, some office job, or wound up on
some Skid Row, a not infrequent fate for many one-hit wonders. But for that one
moment, for that one almost perfect expression of a song moment, from the
opening drum roll to the crescendo-ing mix of voices to that final dramatic
fade out, The Dubs captured our attention before we headed off to the plumbing
business, some office job, or wound up on Skid Row, a not uncommon fate for
those of that generation who fought and bled in Vietnam or got catch up in
their own personal drug traumas. It was no accident that the director George
Lucas when he put together the mood frame work of American Graffiti included Could
This Be Magic as part of the soundtrack.
So that song formed the
backdrop for fumbling, awkward Peter Paul Markin over in Adamsville,
Massachusetts near the beach as he tried to figure out girls, figure them out
in a hurry, figure them out in a very hurry since he had a date down at that
very beach coming up in about two hours and after having dolled himself up
enough (hair brushed, underarms coated, breathe freshened and re-freshened) he
was fretting, fretting whether his
arranged date (arranged by his corner boy Frankie Larkin, as usual) with Susie
Murphy would product any sparks. Or another time, speaking of sparks, when he,
riding “shotgun” in Frankie’s big old 1959 Dodge as they pulled, girl-less,
into the Adventure Car-Hop Drive-In, looking to finish the busted evening out
with burgers and shakes (and maybe a free look at Lannie, the hot new car-hop)
and he spied her (name a secret , a secret unto death, just in case her descendants
see this) a couple of cars over with her girls, boy-less, and she looked over
and gave him the greatest come hither look of his uneventful young life. Or
better yet, when he was at the freshman mixer, kind of new in town, kind of low
man on the totem pole of the school etched- in- stone pecking order, he was
feeling kind of blue (and, as usual, girl-less, school dance girl-less) holding
up his end of a wallflower wall with head down, Luscious Lucy Lane (that is
what she was called by one and all, including her parents) came over and
ordered, ordered if you can believe this, him to dance that last dance school
dance with her.
And the song came into play
up in forlorn Olde Saco, Maine as well where Josh Breslin, poor, woe begotten
Josh, new to the girl wars, was trying to beat the time of some foolish skee
ball game down at the local arcade in order to win a rabbit’s foot for some
misbegotten twelve year old girl who, off-handedly, called over from the Seal
Rock sea wall that she thought Josh was cute. A couple of years later, veteran
of the girl wars and decidedly more than cute according to local girl lore,
Josh walking into Jimmy Jake’s Dinner (the one on Main Street set aside for
teens not the one on Atlantic Avenue near the beach set aside for blue- haired
ladies’ blue- plate specials and summer fast food-craving touristas) sits at
his stool, his gathering stool, as Sandy Leclerc comes up, gives him a kiss on
the cheek, and puts a quarter into the jukebox to play their song five times
running. Later still, Josh and Debbie Dubois, sitting in the
back seat of Jimmy Leblanc’s double-date 1961 Pontiac at the Olde Saco Drive-In
Theater would “get in the mood” after putting the movie sound speaker back in
its cradle and turning on all rock WMEX.
Finally Betty Becker down in Newport, Rhode Island, well before she met Josh Breslin out in the San Francisco summer of love 1967 night after he had blown in from dust-off Olde Saco in search of, well, just in search of, spun the platter on her record player up in her forlorn teen-age bedroom waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for, hell, what’s his name, to call. And, he, what’s his name, did. Later, when she had filled out, filled out nicely from all reports, especially filled out nicely in a bathing suit, and guys were waiting by the midnight phone for her call, she had new love Tommy Wordsworth III, ask the DJ to play it for them at the annual Newport Yacht Club Junior Dance. Then, then (before the summer of love 1967 turned things around in her head) when she had very good prospects of being asked the big question by Marvin Steele, the heir to the Hanson oil fortune, he had called and told her he had a big question ask her, well, you know what she had ready to play.
Could this be magic, indeed
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