This past Saturday, as I was slurping down my first cup of coffee and looking at the rain coming down outside, I thought of the song lyric “Rainy Days and Mondays always get me down,” only I substituted Saturdays for Mondays.
A rainy Saturday in summer is never good for business in Buzzy’s Country Store nor in any seasonal business. There are only a dozen or so Saturdays from June to August and your going-in hope is that the rain picks one of the other 6 days of the week to make an appearance.
My first impulse was to co-opt the lyrics to Rainy Days and Mondays and rewrite them to reflect my business-based dismay. For example, I had substituted “Nothing seems to sell” for “Nothing seems to fit.” However, I gave up on it because the rain kept falling and I kept getting more depressed as I played with the lyrics to an already very depressing song.
Instead, it sent me to the old Google machine to learn about the song that I knew as a Carpenters’ hit record. I learned that it was written by Paul Williams and Roger Nichols. (We’ve Only Just Begun was their first hit record written originally for a T-V bank commercial but later recorded by the Carpenters.)
What really surprised me, in a synchronicity kind of way, was learning that the session musicians who played on Rainy Days were a group known as The Wrecking Crew of which Glen Campbell was a guitarist. (Netflix has a documentary on the Wrecking Crew that is worth checking out if you get a chance to do so.)
Folks in Buzzy’s Country Store were just talking about Glen’s passing away and the fact that he was a well respected session musician long before he became a successful solo artist. (Click here for more info.)
My very first, serious girl friend’s birthday is today and yes, she was and is always gentle on my mind.