0 Joey Dee & the Starliters, "Peppermint Twist - Part I" (1961)

Dec. 4, 1961, #1 (3 wks.)
(listen)

When I say that "Peppermint Twist" by Joey Dee & the Starliters (both parts, or either) is my favorite Twist song, it doesn't mean I necessarily endorse music muscled up the charts by organized crime, nor music that today may be heard streaming at 9 a.m. on a weekday at an Albertson's, where I happened to hear this while trying to figure out how to write it up. Serendipity, man. Yet if being in the oldies mix at a grocery store by definition ought to tell me it has been vastly overexposed by now, it doesn't mean I like it any less. Oh no. I love the way it enters at full steam, taped live, mid-workup, already in full possession of its soft, irresistible groove. It's music that can play for hours—maybe did play for hours, if anyone possibly remembers the scene at the Peppermint Lounge in those halcyon times. "Bop shoo-op, a bop bop shoo-op," go the backup singers. "Well meet me baby down at 45th Street," says the singer (that's the Peppermint Lounge!). "Bop shoo-op, a bop bop shoo-op," go the backup singers. So much to love here: a nice mellow sax, an impossibly spry and nimble guitar break, with clapping along, and the way the frontmen jump in unison on the video I'm pointing to. (I'm less comfortable with the proportionality of Joey Dee's head size in that video, however.) How long does it go? Looks like 2:03 for the hit, another 1:50 for the b-side flip "Part II." Impressively economical. But you'll want to let it go 20 minutes at least, so figure on playing, oh say, at least eight times.

Detail: Joey Dee & the Starliters, "Peppermint Twist - Part I" (1961)

0 The Man in the High Castle (1961)

Philip K. Dick's breakthrough novel, his only Hugo Award winner, feels in many ways barely like science fiction at all. In fact, it is widely considered a landmark in another genre entirely, the alternate history. The concept is butt simple: Japan and Germany won World War II, and carved up the United States much like Germany was carved up in our present time stream (it is likely symptomatic of Dick's sway that I make reference to a specific "time stream"). Japan and Germany are quite a bit like the US and USSR, with relations having turned chilly between the wartime allies and a cold war setting in. Well, that's about it. The Japanese are very wise, the Germans are very evil, and a shattered America is a place of lost dreams and ennui. One suspects massive opiate addictions. The action, such as it is, is set in San Francisco, under Japanese occupation and control. The characters are largely listless and accepting of the world as it is, though numerous narrative strands show some of them attempting to face down tides of history (or maybe that needs scare quotes: "history"). The principals organize their lives and decisions by consulting the I Ching. A bestselling book everyone seems to be reading or at least aware of, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, is a speculative fiction in which Japan and Germany lost World War II. That plot point is a little too cute for my taste, but again, Dick has a way of pushing past the obvious, here traveling into a kind of proto-string-theory vision of a multiverse with infinite parallel universes. There is a method for traveling between realities that some of the characters have stumbled on, including quite possibly the author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy aka the man in the high castle, which is located in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Cheyenne is also an important place, a capital city, in at least one other Dick novel, Now Wait for Last Year. Hard to fathom the fascination—maybe because it's inland, with further protections, necessary in times of great conflict, afforded it by the surrounding mountains. I'm also hard put to say exactly why The Man in the High Castle works so well. It's thoroughly conceived and imagined and for the most part resists the impulse to clonk one over the head with its obvious points. Nonetheless, somehow, I always find myself righteously clonked by this little beauty.

In case it's not at the library.

Detail: The Man in the High Castle (1961)