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   1 9 1 C h ap t e r 1 6 The Present Is Prelude The first act recorded at American in January of 1969 was not Elvis Presley, as legend seems to say, but the star of the previous year, Merrilee Rush. Her records had moved from Bell to the AGP label, and this single was her final one with Chips and Tommy Cogbill together due to a personality conflict with Chips. After this Tommy alone would record her. The collaborators had two beautiful songs with which to work this time, both partly the work of Wayne Carson. His and Dan Penn’s song “Everyday Living Days” served as the B-side: “Every day’s a groovy day,” she shouts joyfully, “every day’s a makin’-lovely-love-to-me day.” The chorus was extremely explicit for the time: “Lay it on me gently,” she intones, “but just enough to blow my mind / Take your satin fingers, and walk them up and down my spine.” It was a good song for a free-spirited hippie girl, although its blitheness had nothing to do with the lives of its writers. “I tried to be a hippie, tried to join ’em and couldn’t,” Dan Penn said amusedly, looking back at his bohemian period. “Didn’t like their music, didn’t like their garb. I didn’t like the way the country was changing. Vietnam, I didn’t know nothin’ about all that; I thought we were gonna win the war. . . . The hippies of that day, they’re still the same, they’re still hippies. As far as I’m concerned they are the ruin of this country,” Dan added firmly. And hippie optimism was hardly the province of most at American—“I came up in the school of reality,” said Wayne Carson. So why did they write it? “Because that’s what we do,” Wayne growled dismissively. “Writing is a giant game of Scrabble. You got twenty-six letters of the alphabet, you got three chords, see what you can come up with.” More autobiographical, and more poignant then and now, was the A-side of the single, a moving ballad written by Wayne and Glen Spreen called “Your Loving Eyes Are Blind.” It is another one of the songs that evoke a hall of mirrors; one is not sure if it is the two writers (one a hippie, the other a plain-spoken loner), the two producers, or Merrilee herself who is speaking. The lyrics warn anyone who might fall in love with the speaker (or speakers ), that this is a free spirit who can never really be tamed. “You say you love me, but you don’t know me,” Merrilee wails, and then sorrowfully intones, “You don’t understand my kind.” Wayne Carson remembered working all night on the song and coming up with nothing but the title line; Glen Spreen recalled the two of them throwing the remaining bits back and forth to one another almost immediately before studio time, though it does not sound like a last-minute concoction. On the contrary, Wayne’s typically strong melody frames a finely crafted lyric: “Don’t hang your dreams on me, in hopes that I might be / What you’re looking for / When morning brings the light, the words you say tonight / You might be sorry for.” Tommy Cogbill set up the arrangement with the same drum taps and droning trombone line from “Angel” as the song progresses its mournful , stately way. The record is permeated with a sense of unassailable dignity and self-awareness ; everyone involved is perhaps a little sad that they can never change, but in the long run accepting it. In the end it is about hard choices, both in the path the speakers have chosen and the path that anyone close to them takes in caring about them. Hard choices and the limitations of fate were not often discussed in hippie music, which is why some of the later arrivals (most notably Glen Spreen and Hayward Bishop) felt that the American group never interpreted psychedelia well. But it was not for lack of trying. The first genuinely psychedelic record at American was the slowed-down, Vanilla Fudge–style version of Holland-Dozier-Holland’s “Reach Out” 1 9 2    t h e p r e s e n t i s p r e l u d e that Chips and Tommy had done with Merrilee Rush toward the end of the preceding...

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