First, Last, Everything

Ah, yes, the annual Thanksgiving eve get-together with the city-bound.

I got the e-mail this morning, inviting me for what sounded like the typical Italian Christmas Eve meal - all kinds of seafood- and since it also promised, "reds, whites and a bubbly," I RSVP'd yes indeed.

The evening began with music from a Buffalo Springfield box set while we marshaled our forces and decided how to best attack preparing this meal.

My charming host began with the most time-specific wine choice for the next few weeks, a Georges Duboeuf beaujolias nouveau to celebrate the harvest.

That got us through the Stephen Stills covers of Neil Young songs, into the Graham Beck Brut Rose and through the shrimp cocktail, lobster tails, crab legs and basmati rice.

My charming hostess told me how she'd seen a blast from the past today: the Thanksgiving episode of the "Beverly Hillbillies" from 1963.

They ate on the pool table, FYI, she said.

It was four hours in when we retired to the living room to continue sipping and discuss life that I made the mistake of yawning.

"Don't you dare," my hostess instructed firmly. "Ordinarily, you'd just be going to Balliceaux now."

She did have a point. It was then that the host decided to put on "The Velvet Underground and Nico," the banana album, saying that he wanted to play a song for me.

The grand irony was that I'd never heard the album start to finish, so even after he'd played "Femme Fatale" for me, I insisted on hearing the rest of it.

Interestingly enough, my hostess had never heard it, either, but then she's a fan of '40s and '50s music, so there are a lot of '60s and '70s bands she doesn't know.

But after a few songs, and she did admit that Nico must have sounded like a revolutionary vocalist for the time (1967), she rolled her eyes at me as I rhapsodized about finally hearing this piece of musical history.

You have to remember, I reminded her, this band and this unique sound inspired legions of people to start bands.

And she, out of step with much past 1979, said, "And now they just sound like everybody else!"

Talk about nailing it on the head, but what an evolution that is.

When "Banana" finished, my hostess requested something from the disco era and the host obliged with "Saturday Night Fever."

Overplayed? Yes, to death. Listened to much recently? Nope, definitely not. Evocative of a very young period? Without doubt.

The host was not the disco fan we were, but totally got into it when "Tragedy" came on and picked up a nearby kazoo (noteworthy in and of itself) and played kazoo accompaniment for the rest of the song. And pretty damn well, too.

We challenged him to reach out to that other side of our impressionable young selves and he responded admirably with Joni Mitchell's "Hits" (as opposed to "Misses"), starting with a song from "Court and Spark," a high point for both her poetic songwriting about youth and the perfection of her voice.

I was a free man in Paris
I felt unfettered and alive
Nobody was calling me up for favors
No one's future to decide
You know I'd go back there tomorrow
But for the work I've taken on
Stoking the starmaker machine
Behind the popular song

"Stoking the starmaker machine" may be one the of the most well-written musical phrases of 1974.

Talking about "Court and Spark" reminded my hostess that on the "Beverly Hillbillies" episode she'd just seen, Elly Mae had been given lessons of courting and sparking.

Coincidence? We didn't dwell on it.

Not sure what possible musical direction we could go in with our Lemarca Prosecco, in a masterful stroke, our host chose "Barry White's Greatest Hits," a record so worthy I also own it.

A record so satisfyingly danceable that two of us were soon dancing on the couch, at least until the host grabbed his woman and danced with her on the floor.

The other of us continued her couch dancing.

When they finished, he chided her for not wanting to dance more with him. She challenged that she didn't know how to dance.

If you're old enough to have danced to Barry White the first time, you can dance. Hell, if you can do it, you can dance.

Never tell a man who's said out loud that any night he sees you is a special night that you don't want to dance with him.

Remember Barry's advice, my dear? "I'll Do anything You Want Me To."

Second only to "Let the Music Play."