When Mitch Cohen and Mickey Devlin performed their seminal hit "A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow" on Lee Aikman's Folk Hour on CBS on August 23, 1966, my mother and father were sitting at their respective houses hearing a song that--unbeknownst to them--would soon lead them to their own precious little pot of gold. My mother wasn't a huge fan of folk music, but she liked the more pop outings of Ian & Sylvia almost as much as she did Paul & Paula, so she'd tune in just in case anyone was singing a catchy little ditty. My father abhored folk music,* but he tuned in because his blue-eyed soul band's keyboard player Andy Mobandy had just returned from a trip to San Francisco, where he'd heard a punk rock group he loved, the Golliwogs, and he heard that three members** of the Golliwogs would be playing on the show with a black guy named Jimi who--though he had actually played soul music and was starting to incorporate some weird San Francisco-rock music--looked like a folk singer (or, at least, looked like he had Bob Dylan's hair do), and Andy had encouraged all his bandmates to check out the show.
My dad watched the entire show, and to his consternation, Jimi & the Golliwogs never performed.*** He and his buddies were talking about the show the next day at school, and my mom overheard them. She told them that she had watched Lee Aikman's Folk Hour too, and that she thought the song was sweet. My dad and his friends were aghast. They thought the song was garbage. Knights? Maidens? Fairy Tales? Kiddie music! Where was the groove? Where was the soul? Where was the truth? The honesty? The throb? The pulse?
My mother held out her hand, and she asked my father (who was the most outspoken of the group) that if he took her hand with his, and he felt the underside of her wrist, what he would find. My father, looking around to make sure he was heard, said, "The pathway to your heart, o princess." His friends laughed. He did, too. He started to grab her hand, and she pulled it back.
She told him, "No, what you would find would be what you were looking for in that music last night: a pulse." His friends oohed and chortled. My mother extended her arm again, but this time, she kept it closer to her. She then addressed all of them.
"But you'll never find it, you'll never hear it, you'll never notice it if you're too busy baying like simple-minded sheep. To truly catch the pulse of something live, you must focus, turn on, tune in, and listen for it." She then pressed the first two fingers of her left hand against her right wrist and closed her eyes. "You must be attentive. Only then can you hear it. Only then can you feel it."
She paused, three seconds, and she opened her eyes. "There. I know my pulse. I know it's there. I've felt it. I know it. Now," she then looked at my dad, "let me feel yours." She grabbed his right arm and pressed her fingers to his wrist. She closed her eyes. She, he, his friends were silent. Three seconds. Five seconds. Six seconds.
"There it is," she said, and she dropped his wrist. "I wasn't sure at first because I was listening for my pulse, but I didn't find it. I did, however, find one that beat much more rapidly than mine. It was different, but it was still there. I just had to stop listening for something in particular so that I could hear what was already there to begin with." She took a step or two away down the hall, and then turned her head and said, "Know what I mean?"
Two weeks later, my dad and my mom went on their first date. Three years later, they eloped. Two years after that wedding date, they named their first born after their friend who, for all unintentional purposes, introduced them to one another as man and wife. The day my mother came home from the hospital, she gave my father a cross-stitched picture she'd been working on for weeks, a picture that read, "Pulse Of a Pot of Gold" (those emboldened letters were each capitalized in extra-large stitches at the beginnings of the three lines). The picture, framed, is still at my parents' house, above portraits of me, my brother, and the family dog.
Mitch's and Mickey's pot of gold tarnished, though, only eight short years after their debut album Meet Mitch and Mickey. Mitch struck out--in both senses of that phrase--solo, releasing three critically-panned albums in a row, each more commercially unsuccessful than the previous one. The albums Cry for Help, Songs from a Dark Place, and Calling It Quits were each self-indulgent, insular, stark, gloomy, and paranoid. Both lyrically and musically, each album deliberately contradicted the bright and hopeful tone of the Mitch and Mickey records. Gone were the major-chord melodies and the lush romanticism and the optimistic outlook and the righteous yearning, all to be replaced with doom-laden tracks full of minor-chords, single-string strumming, droning bass notes, and repetitive singing**** about topics such as murder, suicide, hatred, self-loathing, and the yearning for a drink of water. Even after the atypical, non-conventional pop-rock music of the Velvet Underground and the Plastic Ono Band, Mitch Cohen's three mid-seventies' albums struck a nerve with audiences, and the audiences didn't like their nerves struck. After three such strikes, Mitch Cohen struck out.
In 1976, after hearing of the success his pop-music contemporaries Brian Wilson and Roky Erickson had had with institutionalism,***** Mitch Cohen decided to admit himself to an asylum. He stayed there for over twenty-five years. Albums produced: none. Songs written: none. Chart success: none. Critical re-evaluation of his canon of recorded music: none. Egg-salad sandwiches eaten: over 28,000. Cohen did write poetry, though, sometimes thousands of lines per day. Unfortunately, Cohen wasn't allowed to use a typical writing utensil******, so his only writing recourse was a crayon, and his only tablet his hand*******, so Cohen's entire artistic output from this period has since been scrubbed down the sink.
It's all a wash anyway. In 2003, Cohen was released from the asylum******** in order to participate in the "Ode to Irving" tribute show.********* At the live show in the Town Hall, Mitch performed with Mickey for the first time in almost thirty years. They sang "When You're Next to Me," "Killington Hill,********** "One More Time***********," "The Ballad of Bobby and June," and, their closer, "The Kiss at the End of the Rainbow." That last song was the showstopper, bringing forth vocal and emotional nuances in both Mitch and Mickey that were absent in the original recorded version (as well as the version on Lee Atkinson's Folk Hour).
After that highly-regarded performance, Mitch and Mickey were rushed into the studio the next day by once-defunct (but now publicly-traded) record company Folktone Records to record the song again, in hopes of capitalizing on the success of the "Ode to Irving" show. In fact, the duo recorded several tracks--none new--and Folktone hoped to convince the two to record an entire album's worth, and Cohen agreed, but he told the executives that he left his material in his room at the institution. He then hastily returned to the asylum. He has yet to re-emerge.
This re-recording of "A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow," however, did emerge, and it sold substantially well online and received limited amounts of airplay.************ Of course, this recording doesn't have the visual--from the Irving show--of Mickey's hope and heartbreak, which truly imparts how important dreams and fantasy are to those of us whose lives have carried more disappointments than they should, but Mickey's vocals are sweet yet forlorn enough for us to imagine the loss she's lived with and the brighter day she hopes may someday yet arrive. Mitch's vocals on the record? Steady. They're the pulse that allows Mickey to invest herself attentively in the song. His rhythmic throb allows her to coo and frill. She can sing upfront because he's coming at her from behind, and they climax together.
With an autoharp.
NOTES
**The fourth member, John Fogerty, had just been drafted, and so he immediately signed up with the Air Guard, and he was away on basic training at the time.
***Concert promoter Bill Graham landed Jimi and the Golliwogs the gig, but Bill forgot to book the flight.
****How repetitive? Mitch Cohen's last solo album contains a song called, "Why?" in which the sole lyric is the word why chanted in monotone over an out-of-tune, singularly plucked E-string. No steady rhythm is found in that song, and it drones on for seven minutes.
*****Mitch thought Institutionalism a form of music or art, like Psychedelica or Cubism.
******Quite possibly the inspiration behind this institutional dictum was Cohen's song from Songs from a Dark Place, "A Hard Pencil Lead's Gonna Fall Right in Mary's Eye (so Mary Won't Be Able to Weep No More)."
*******Roky Erickson once visited Mitch in the asylum, and Erickson convinced Mitch that the trees were actually aliens who were able to watch people from the outside (as trees) and from the inside (as paper). It took a decade to convince Mitch that Erickson's belief was fallible.
********He was never actully incarcerated there. He stayed--the entire twenty-six-plus years--voluntarily.
*********Irving Steinbloom was an influential folk-music producer.
**********"Killington Hill" is a song about rape, murder, and naps, and is the only early sign of Cohen's future musical path.
***********Daft Punk would later cover--and strikingly alter--Mitch & Mickey's "One More Time."
************Folktone Records had more success with this new version of "A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow" because of the mp3 format. The CD copies of the "Ode to Irving" album sold fewer than one-hundred copies--primarily because word spread that one would have to punch a hole in the middle of the Folktone CD for it to play on many--but not all--CD players. The CD is now a collector's item on eBay, and it has garnered bids of over ten-thousand dollars.
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