big city, bright lights

As a child, a small child at that, the music I was most drawn to had words in it I could recognize. "Gentle On My Mind" had a door, sleeping bag, couch, river, rocks, and soup in it.

My family originated in South Philly, with my mother and father meeting in the neighborhood there on the transit bus he drove. South Philly was downtown, or rather "Downtown".

My parents had this album. It was the first song in life I remember, and I remember thinking it was written about my grandmother's apartment in the Tasker projects. The lyrics and what they meant to a little kid in the city... The song came out in puffs and belonged to grownups but was totally a fixture of my life. It was like smoke from my grandmother's Tareyton's.


Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty
How can you lose?
The lights are much brighter there
You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares and go


There are movie shows downtown
Maybe you know
Some little places to go to
Where they never close downtown

Downtown where all the lights are bright,
Downtown, waiting for you tonight.


I had some sense of what she felt before I could ever have had any idea of what she meant. Whereas Dave Alvin and Stan Ridgway -- two of the better songwriters of a generation -- were drawn into the craft by Marty Robins' "El Paso" (a record I could never stand), Petula felt closer to my home. She sang from Downtown, and her songs had subways and traffic and neon lights in them. It wasn't invented street cred. She sounded like the girl who took my dad's bus to work every morning. I would imagine her living in an apartment somewhere around Broad and Federal. I think it might have also been tied up with That Girl, the popular TV show of the time, which starred Marlo Thomas as a young (italian-American) woman living on her own in the city.

As I got older and started getting my own apartments and jobs and living my city life, Petula's own rendition of city life was real. Whereas guys like Springsteen etc did the tough guy thing out the wazoo, the only professional urban tough guy who was at all credible was... Dion.



But Dion was an extrovert, the guy we all looked up to in the neighborhood. There was no existential crisis in him. Petula had questions. She asked herself "who am I?", had arguments with a boyfriend who would storm out only to sleep on the subway. And she took her comfort in the life of her city. I got that.

In 1967, Glenn Gould wrote an essay about her for either High Fidelity or Stereo Review. Titled The Search For Petula Clark, the piece was a curious look by Glenn at Petula's hits. Often called satire, I don't think it was. Glenn loved his home city, Toronto. His deep and abiding affection for that city was far from satirical. He was a lonesome, secluded urbandweller, and those lyrics and the beautiful dignity with which she sang them... yeah, I think he felt it.

Below is a wonderful recording of Glenn reading the article for CBC.



The hits of Petula Clark have held up very, very well. Arranger/composer Tony Hatch did a very classy job. And Petula's lack of histrionics gives these wonderful songs a poigniancy that never celebrates itself vis a vis self-congradulatory self-pity. There's blood and bone here. It is not the beach, the desert nor the border. This is the music of apartments, subways, taxicabs, and late night coffeeshops.

I love these songs. Always.