"That was what we medical professionals call a lull"

THE RAYS
“Elevator Operator”
A crash was heard in '58 . . . Energetic, paripatetic, a sheer breathless drop to Macy's basement. The Rays are famous for "Silhouettes," one of the great doo wop delights — and, if you believe John Lennon, a distant inspiration for the Beatles' "No Reply"! But this is vocal-group comedy from the stratosphere, the greatest record the Coasters never made. Poached from a '70s UK comp called Jukebox at Eric's.

BORUK
“To Know Him is to Love Him”
An early '70s outsider with a home-taping shtick: well-known pop songs play obliviously on a Fisher Price picnic-player somewhere to the rear while the artist emits his world-poetic vapors so close to the Panasonic microphone you can smell his schizo pheromones. In a two-minute helping, Boruk can take you away — to a weirdo loser's stain-ridden suburban living room; over the course of an album (see here for the proof) he loses his kiwi tang and becomes just another banana.

Take a whiff (Teddy Bears in italics):

To know know know him is to love love love him
And I do (and I do and I, and I do and I do and I do)

"To know him — is to luuuuv him. Knowledge is the fear of Gahhhd. Knowledge is a mental picture, corresponding to the actual thing. Knowledge is limited by a peculiar . . . spatial-temporal . . . huuuman perspective. Knowledge is behavioral control. What’s it to you?"

Whyyyyyy —

"Adam knew Eve, and begat man John and the family king, as Peter found a celibate church, the miracle of TV’s mirror. Dad’s old-fashioned, Judeo-Christian, Greco-Romahn, conscious Skinnerism. Root, radical, nightmare seer. Truth, science, feeling, dear. And it is so inscribed in the book of the Teddy Bears’ gold disc. To know know know him, amehhhn, is to love, love, love him, agehhhhn. And I do — and I do. There you fly, is away.

Uh-piss-tuh-molla-gee."

And I do and I — and I do and I — and I do and I . . .

CAT POWER
“Paths of Victory”
Not a recent find but a long-standing haunter. Not the best version of the timeless-seeming Dylan anthem (which could be either a parody of high-stepping, flag-waving Independence Day ditties or the real thing), but it can stand, or slouch, beside any other on offer. Mainly it will not let me go because in Power's haggard, past-hope, seen-everything, let's-tell-this-lie-one-more-time rendition, it is the perfect end music to the Henry Fonda documentary that runs continually in my head.

"Aw, my visions never come true"

Along about a year ago (was it?!?!) I troubled to record for you a vision that came to me on a flaming pie: that "The Sopranos" would end its last episode with Tony dying in Carmela's arms and that "Poor Side of Town" would be the last song. Well, David Chase's therapist was evidently on another track altogether because the last song was, as you may know, Journey's "Don't Stop Believing." And no one was killed — or at any rate, no one was shown being killed.

I don't know how viewers are taking it back home in flyoverland, but in New York the finale has been slammed as at best a letdown, and at worst a disgrace. I.e., not enough whackin' goin' on. The Post is all pissy, fitting for the bathroom sheet it is, with its voice-of-the-blue-to-white-collar-working-stiff-who-just-wants-some-good-wholesome-blood-guts-star-fucking-cop-sucking-moral-high-horsing-NYU student-suicide-picturing get-off material for the morning commute. The other prints fall in line with the Post verdict that "The Sopranos" let its fans down.

What we as individual "Sopranos" watchers may have been expecting from the finale is one thing; but what were we all wanting? In a word, massacre. We didn't just want to see Phil Leotardo shot, and hear his head crushed as his grandchildren giggled and a schoolboy vomited — though that wasn't bad. We wanted to see Tony get gunned, at the very least — no, not just gunned, shredded by AK-47, stabbed by Bowie, beheaded: what else befits the large tragic hero? We wanted to see A.J. succeed in killing himself, preferably in some gruesome way. Wanted to see Meadow get caught in the crossfire, that lustrous Italian-American skin scarred and split by her father's burning metal. We wanted to see Carmela go down in a blaze of bullets, standing, staggering, falling by her man as they held the Soprano fort one last time against alla you lousy bastids. We wanted, in the manner of catharsis-seeking, blood-drinking audiences from the Greeks till now, to see a panorama of gore; a tapestry of issues, ideas, and emotions spattered in body matter; all human complexities, irresolvable agonies, and undramatic non-endings blown to a more or less agreeable, forgettable eternity.

Well, we wanted Bonnie and Clyde. And David Chase, perverse, analysis-seeking prick, wouldn't give it.

What did he give? He gave an ending that I may not remember on my deathbed with utter clarity, but which I don't believe I'll forget in its whole strokes. It was too tense, the sadness too active, the inevitability too impossible. Each piece of the final cell — family members, man at the bar, young couple in the booth, two teenage boys swinging in at the very end — entered the nucleus of the show's last minute like an active particle, each just so random, unknowing, alive. Once the particles began to revolve and bounce and converge, once the nucleus heated and the scene pulsed with THIS IS IT, you knew you weren't going to see the moment of impact. You knew the thing would end in darkness and dissatisfaction and that the whole would stick somewhere in the throat, that it would not go down blood-easy.

And it was too ordinary to be easy: it had the pure dumb tension of the ordinary. The conversation was mundane (do you remember a word that was exchanged?), the business with the parallel parking was flinty and irritating as, well, hubcap on asphalt, and even the use of — yep — that last, last song contributed to a sense of No, this can't be it, this can't be all, don't let this be the end! Where is the tapestry, the matter, the torn bodies of the amphitheatre?

Ah, Journey, hmm, well — interesting choice. The lyrics slot right in (they are the credo of the family, the show's version of the deteriorating mob — of America?), but you weren't listening to the lyrics any more than you were absorbing the subtleties and felicities of the humdrum, moment-filling dialogue. "Don't Stop Believing" is shit, and it is important to make that distinction even while admitting that the record is a great one — that it has hooks the size of skyscrapers, that there is glamour and thrill, allness and utterness and a great swipe of the absolute to every shit note of it. "Poor Side of Town," whatever your blogger's preference, would have been, by comparison, a purely literary choice. Redolent of Sinatra, velour anterooms in Copa-styled nightspots, a Pinot Grigio of sentiment. The same old Mob; and romance, all romance. But Journey had something I think worked better, and was certainly more unexpected, less easy to snatch: drama. Drama is now. Sentiment is then: "Poor Side of Town" is something that has already happened. It is the thin, impeccable taste of wine, a memory. "Don't Stop Believing," in all its glitter and shit and fat frenzy, happens, each time it plays, right this second.

So did the last minute we will ever see of "The Sopranos." Whatever it was or failed to be, it was a hot, hurtful minute of television that was happening right this second. Maybe I'm only working backward to build a notion in my head, but I don't think Tony, Carmela, Meadow or A.J. were ever as real, as fleshly, as near to life and death as they were in that last minute.

Well done. Arrivaderci, Sopranos. Now get in your graves.