Thursday, November 17, 2016

Lionel Richie

Artist: Lionel Richie
LP: 7" single
Song: "My Love" 
[ listen ]

"You've been my friend and you've been my lover, oh lawd. Honey, you're everything I need. You've made my love so strong, now I know where I belong. Oh girl, you'll never have to worry. Oh baby, any more, any more." Oh, lawd—I should have been an early '80s pop ballad lyricist! This shit is easy, as long as your public isn't too discerning. And as we can see here, they were not. I could have been famous. Just thinking about it blows my mind. All the time. Did you know that Lionel Richie scored 13 consecutive top ten hits between 1981 and 1987? "My Love" was the 4th one, peaking at #5 in 1983. I found this single at River Street Beat Shop in downtown Troy, NY.

Downtown Troy is a wonderful, exciting place. It's basically a large grid of mid-sized 19th century structures on lovely tree-lined streets. It doesn't seem to have had its charm slit open and gutted to make way for huge crappy cement things the way so many other downtowns in upstate New York did in the 1960s, '70s and '80s—before people finally stepped back to take at look at what they were destroying and said, "Hey, this is actually kinda' neat. Let's make it a landmark." I even had a French dip dinner with au jus in a bar that used to be frequented by gangster Legs Diamond—or, as I like to call him, ole' Diamond Legs. The man was notoriously hard to kill.

[ River Street Beat Shop — Troy, NY ]

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