there’s a trade that’s made when you’re a person living today - you have access to the entirety of human history and exist in a world where collective consciousness is essentially real, at your fingertips, in your pocket buzzing annoying sounds into your chest giving you a panic attack when you’re biking in traffic - but you live in a world that has largely been robbed of Real Magic, maybe i mean Innocence, even.
as a child i would often feel very alone, like i was the only person in the world at times, and i was often left to my own devices—i was a latchkey kid early on, and would get up at dawn when my mother and father’d leave for work to watch cartoons and infomercials and nintendo cheat-code shows that were largely comprised of VERY LOUD COMMERCIALS, but more often than not i would find myself in the street, wandering around other people’s backyards and alleys, sneaking into the old st. bernard’s building to find the darkest corner of the ancient boiler room and sit in the dark, freaking myself out until my power rangers wristwatch indicated it was the right time to intercept the old italian dude who would drop off the soft pretzels that’d be sold in the classroom at recess, hauling them off the back of the box truck in dim ceiling incandescence, long shadows cast in the cavernous body of the beast, making the rows of racks seem endless, the smell of fresh dough’s heat meeting salt billowing over the schoolyard from the basement loading dock hand-in-hand with the crackle of oldies radio static. i would wait, eagerly, to press a quarter or two in the hand of whatever older kid had been delegated the task of breaking apart these beautiful pieces of hard bread and stuffing them into nylon bags to be slung around the door of each classroom and sit silently on the back steps of the church, across from where the pretzel man would stack his wares, bathing in good smells and tastes, having the melody from the radio impress itself into my mind, filed away to be forgotten until many years later, aka now.
i can distinctly remember hearing “keep searchin’” on WOGL one of these mornings and being captivated by del shannon’s range, confused about precisely how many singers were present on the recording, trying to understand the way the drummer was coming across, the beat peppered with heavily psychedelic fills but delivered with session precision, the organ, all sounds i was vaguely familiar with at this age from living with a mother and aunt obsessed with the doors, not able to perceive quite yet that all music made pre-your birth did not in fact happen simultaneously, and just like that, it was over, an ad for DUNPHY FORD PRE OWNED MOTORS came on, the rolling door on the truck slammed, the motor kicked on and i did not again hear any version of this song until two days ago, when its rediscovery caused me to have to sit down and parse my own brain incredibly hard until i could figure out where i knew it from.
del shannon was an incredible songwriter, a gifted guitarist with a range that put most of his peers—male and female—to shame, whose originals were written crock-pot slow with the sharp mind of a professional composer, laced the whole way through with fistfuls of unpredictable, shattering hooks, garnished with heavy musitron stylings and the aforementioned marksman-level breaks, served with the most straight-up bitter and acerbic lyrics of the era; someone carrying around a deep amount of hurt, capable of covering soul and c&w without blinking an eye, in fact often stealing the spotlight from the originals (“under my thumb,” “black is black.”) but of course, it’s almost redundant for me to state all this—before his suicide in 1990, it was rumored that shannon would be roy orbison’s replacement in the traveling wilburys, and ya don’t get praise higher than that.
my point is that despite being arguably the most lean, straight-forward, egoless and earnest pop songwriter of his generation, del shannon was still a victim of the modern age, a juggernaut straddling two eras of pop music ultimately brushed aside by the “british invasion” to be stuffed in the dollar bin, struggling to make a buck off his music in england, at every turn being fucked by the industry and, despite the adoration of his musical peers, largely being neglected by audiences after the middle 60s. shannon’s career took a nosedive because of his drinking, which was brought on by his career taking a nosedive, which brought on more drinking, which crashed the plane into the mountain and let it drag along the valley floor, and when he killed himself in ‘90 he was probably six months away from being on top of the world again—but ya know what they say, the night’s always darkest… and even if you can survive being treated like a commodity, and even if you can defy that to write “runaway” and “keep searchin’,” arguably two of the best american pop songs ever, even if you can survive being in “it’s trad, dad!” for a pittance, even if roy orbison probably bequeathed his wig collection to you on his death, you can’t escape the sound of your own thoughts, the weight of your own weird guilt, and if there’s one single thing that you take from this lengthy ramble, it should be that what set del shannon apart from everyone else was how earnest his words, his singing truly was—he meant it, even when he sang total mouseketeer pap he fucking meant it and the world tore this dude apart so hard, made him feel so worthless that he never quite recovered. Real Magic and Innocence.
