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Mister North has caused me to make a major discovery. How out of it can I be that I would only be finding out about it now? Check out those archives, baby.
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Daryl Hall is sixty-six years old. He's doing an awesome job.
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This is just incredibly generous. I decided to go straight to CEE LO GREEN, because CRAZY makes me crazy with love—don't get me started—no... really... the lyrics drive me completely 'round the bend, let alone that amazing voice—but SMOKEY kept callin' to me the whole time I was lovin' on Cee Lo. So I did that. I did that.
I did that, soakin' in every damn second of it.
I'm here to tell you that Smokey Robinson still blows my skirt up clear over my ears, okay? I can't help it. He's gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous. Inside and out. I don't care if he's had a thousand facelifts and is a hunnert and thirty. I. Love. Him. I know I've talked about it before, but I was there on a night he's going to be remembering on his deathbed. There's not part of a doubt in my mind.
Kool Jazz Festival, 1976, Oakland Stadium. Me and Gayle and some fiftysomething-thousand black people. He was singing a bunch of his new songs from Quiet Storm and everybody was way mellowed out, just having the best time. I don't think he got it. I think he thought we weren't paying attention, but he'd put us all in the zone. We were cruisin'. Bob Dylan didn't call him our greatest living poet for nothing. We were utterly pacified happy humans, all of us. Then came the opening notes of Tracks of My Tears.
Everyone in the entire stadium sang that song with him, from the first word through the last. We weren't five words into it when his face lit up like fireworks on the 4th of July. The stage was arrayed behind second base, and there were two huge screens on either side so everybody could see him in close up, even if they were at the top of the stands. So we got an intimate picture.
He leapt off the stage and ran up to the pitcher's mound. Singing it with us on his knees! The camera guys were all scrambling to get it. I had goosebumps so big they were practically bumping into him. In fact, I think everybody did.
I have been to a lot of fantastic concerts, dudes, big time. I don't think even one of them had that much fellow-feeling, the two white babes not excluded, or that much pure love. Whatever adulterants we may have walked in with were driven clean off us and clean out of the stadium and clean into outer space before the song started. I think the people of the Pleiades saw all that fly past them just before they got smacked in the face with our singing our hearts out to Smokey. In fact, I think I too will be reliving that on my deathbed.
All this by way of giving you just a wisp of an inkling how much feeling attends each second of him for me now.
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