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Reset Forty-Nine, Day Fifty
Jul. 13th, 2023 08:38 amIt looks like I can't get past midnight anymore. I droop and yawn and have to lie down. Wednesday I had a couple of failed attempts at sleeping earlier in the afternoon and evening, and I don't remember exactly when I finally went to bed and actually slept, but it was late evening, and than I mostly slept or bed-rotted until abut five o'clock this morning. Two weeks into July the darkness already lingers noticeably later in the morning, outdoors. Inside my head the darkness just sticks around indefinitely. I still can't think, three hours later. The lights are still out in there.
Instead of thinking I'm watching YouTube videos. Something did click inside my darkened brain, though, when I remembered this guy and searched for his records. Sam Fletcher was a splendid singer, but had a brief career and never made it onto the national charts. He had some popularity in Los Angeles, where he sang in cabarets and opened for better-known acts at concerts, and even got some airplay on a few radio stations.
But the first time I heard him it was from the door of a bar on Sixth Street downtown, where his 1964 version of the Broadway show tune "I Believe In You" was playing on the jukebox. My friends and I, too young to enter bars, stood listening outside, and when someone came out one of us asked him who was signing on the record, and he obligingly went back in and checked. I think it was that afternoon we went to the downtown branch of Wallach's Music City, a record store that had listening booths, and listened to Fletcher's first album. I ended up buying a copy of the album at some point, and listened to it frequently. A couple of decades later I bought a CD version, but by that time Sam Fletcher was dead, having died at 55, still relatively unknown. Only three albums were released in his lifetime, one of them a collection of singles.
My favorite track of his is this recording of Duke Ellington's 1933 song "Sophisticated Lady." The song is now 90 years old, and the recording almost 60, but for me they both hold up very well. Heh. I wish I'd held up as well as they have.
Instead of thinking I'm watching YouTube videos. Something did click inside my darkened brain, though, when I remembered this guy and searched for his records. Sam Fletcher was a splendid singer, but had a brief career and never made it onto the national charts. He had some popularity in Los Angeles, where he sang in cabarets and opened for better-known acts at concerts, and even got some airplay on a few radio stations.
But the first time I heard him it was from the door of a bar on Sixth Street downtown, where his 1964 version of the Broadway show tune "I Believe In You" was playing on the jukebox. My friends and I, too young to enter bars, stood listening outside, and when someone came out one of us asked him who was signing on the record, and he obligingly went back in and checked. I think it was that afternoon we went to the downtown branch of Wallach's Music City, a record store that had listening booths, and listened to Fletcher's first album. I ended up buying a copy of the album at some point, and listened to it frequently. A couple of decades later I bought a CD version, but by that time Sam Fletcher was dead, having died at 55, still relatively unknown. Only three albums were released in his lifetime, one of them a collection of singles.
My favorite track of his is this recording of Duke Ellington's 1933 song "Sophisticated Lady." The song is now 90 years old, and the recording almost 60, but for me they both hold up very well. Heh. I wish I'd held up as well as they have.
