I'm embarrassed to say I was wrong about The Spinners.
When I was out running this morning the song “One of a Kind (Love Affair)” ) popped up on my iPod. I have a bunch of Spinners tunes loaded on there; they’re one of those groups I grew up listening to, and one of the groups that gave me a lifelong love of Philly soul. But when I was listening to “One of a Kind (Love Affair)” I immediately had this flashback/ epiphany that somehow, some way, my brain tried to convince me that The Spinners = the summer. My brain tried to tell me that, for some reason, every Spinners song ever released came out during the summer. I don’t know why, but my brain was trying to argue that The Spinners were a summer, and a summer-only, group.
But as we all know, my brain’s wrong quite a bit.
When I got home, I pulled out my handy-dandy “Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits”. Not only was I wrong about “One of a Kind (Love Affair)”, which was a spring release, but of their 6 top 10 hits during the 70s, only ONE was a summer release (that being their only number one song, “Then Came You”). Not only did my brain fail me, but it failed me big time.
Yay for my brain!
One of the things I love about running is that my brain just wanders off on its own. Because I’m just paying attention to what’s in front of me and I’m listening to music, I don’t have a leash on my subconscious. It can go wherever it wants, and it usually goes someplace that I had no idea existed, like trying to make this connection between The Spinners and summer. There’s no logical reason for my brain to try and make the connection; something just sparked between a couple of neurons, I guess, and there it was. Is it because I heard a song like “One of a Kind (Love Affair)” once during a nice summer day? Is there something in the string or horn arrangements that make me think of summer? Does the magisterial work of the great Thom Bell (the producer and arranger behind the song) just transport me to sunshine and warm temperatures?
I don’t know. In fact, with the way my brain works, I’ll probably never know. The one thing I DO know is that despite everything, The Spinners do NOT equal summer, at least not on the charts. In my brain...well, that’s a completely different matter.
*****
Don't know what song I'm babbling about? Here 'tis!
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