Let the sun turn into earth
and earth all turn to ice;
the seasons stop right in their tracks
and day turn into night.
I will be untouchable,
I will feel no pain.
’Cause I’ve had you,
I’ve had you.
Do you see that star?
Way up there is where I place you.
We have been so far.
Way up there is where you take me.
Today is the 82nd anniversary of the birth of the late, great British pop/soul vocalist Dusty Springfield (1939-1999).
Dusty’s been in the news lately as a compilation album, Dusty Springfield: The Complete Atlantic Singles 1968-1971, has topped various charts for both reissued material and R&B/soul music, and garnered widespread and positive praise.
My interest in and admiration for Dusty is well documented here at The Wild Reed, most notably in Soul Deep, one of my very first posts.
Other previous posts worth investigating, especially if you’re new to Dusty, are Dusty Springfield: Queer Icon, which features an excerpt from Laurence Cole’s book, Dusty Springfield: In the Middle of Nowhere; Celebrating Dusty (2017), which features an excerpt from Patricia Juliana Smith’s insightful article on Dusty’s “camp masquerades”; Celebrating Dusty (2013), which features excerpts from Annie J. Randall’s book, Dusty!: Queen of the Postmods; Remembering Dusty, my 2009 tribute to Dusty on the tenth anniversary of her death; and Remembering Dusty, 20 Years On, my 2019 tribute on the twentieth anniversary of her death.
And, of course, off-site there’s my website dedicated to Dusty, Woman of Repute (currently only accessible through the Internet archive service, The Way Back Machine).
My website’s name is derived from Dusty’s 1990 album Reputation, and as I explain in Soul Deep, it was this album that introduced me not only to Dusty’s music but also to her life and journey – much of which resonated deeply with me. Indeed, my identification with aspects of Dusty’s journey played an important role in my coming out as a gay man.
Above: Dusty, amidst the flowing streams, standing stones and picturesque Celtic ruins of County Clare and the Galway coast for the making of the music video for “Roll Away,” a track from her last album, 1995’s A Very Fine Love. The liner notes of the 2016 2-disc expanded collector’s edition of A Very Fine Love include my reflections on this beautiful song, reflections which are also shared in the previous Wild Reed post, Time and the River.
In honor of today’s 82nd anniversary of Dusty’s birth, I share “Don’t Forget About Me,”* a track featured on The Complete Atlantic Singles and first released on Dusty’s landmark 1969 album, Dusty in Memphis. It’s followed by NPR’s Oliver Wang’s review of Dusty Springfield: The Complete Atlantic Recordings 1968-1971.
______________________
In 1968, Dusty Springfield – then an established pop star in the U.K. – flew across the pond to conquer the U.S. by signing what was meant to be a long-term deal with Atlantic Records. The label sent Springfield down to American Sound Studio in Memphis, Tenn., hoping to impart some of the Southern soul magic that had worked so well for Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin. Those sessions are now collected in the new anthology Dusty Springfield: The Complete Atlantic Singles 1968-1971.
One of the first songs Springfield recorded at American Sound Studio – “Son of a Preacher Man” – had literally been written for Franklin. But when the daughter of a preacher man initially passed on it for being a bit too on the nose, it went to Springfield instead, becoming one of the defining songs of her career. It cemented her reputation as a so-called blue-eyed soul singer, a rather awkward industry euphemism for “white artists recording black music” – never mind that Springfield’s eyes were actually brown.
Atlantic followed with a more scattershot approach to her recordings. Sure, there were naked attempts at reproducing the same soulful vibe as “Son of a Preacher Man,” like the laid-back “Willie and Laura Mae Jones.” But the label also kept Springfield in the same crossover pop lane she’d paved in the U.K., with the familiarity of “In the Land of Make Believe.” There were also a few funky dance tracks, such as “Haunted,” that never quite caught the right groove.
To be clear, Springfield had her share of gems with Atlantic as well. One of the last sides she recorded for the label, the bluesy ballad “I Believe in You,” was released as a stand-alone single late in the fall of 1971.
Springfield begged out of her contract soon after, but even if the Atlantic years didn’t create the kind of chart-topping success either party wanted, it wasn’t a footnote. Not only did it yield her most acclaimed album, Dusty in Memphis, but Springfield would enjoy a prolific career up until her death in 1999. Along the way, her American sojourn also set a marker that generations of British singers have sought to follow since. Springfield managed to do all this with understatement, not by belting her way to the top, but with the coolest of croons.
Although it wasn’t widely known at the time, “Don't Forget About Me” had already been recorded by Dusty in a London studio a year before she cut the track with Jerry Wexler for the Memphis album. The two versions differ considerably, not only in arrangement and production, but also in Dusty’s vocal styling. On the Memphis cut, Dusty’s sweet, husky vocals hover over the notes, swooping down for the harsher refrain surrounded by horns, funky guitars and, of course, the Sweet Inspirations. The arrangements and production is more polished than the British recording and is overall more exciting. The song had previously been recorded by Barbara Lewis and P J Proby but never sounded like this.
As I have followed the Derek Chauvin trial, I have watched as the Minneapolis Police Department has distanced themselves from their former colleague and sought to make him a “bad apple” as opposed to indicative of what the system was created to do. And now Daunte Wright has been murdered by Brooklyn Center police. And before George Floyd and Daunte Wright there was Philando Castile and Jamar Clark and hundreds more.
My friends, this is not a case of bad apples. This is a system whose point and purpose is to protect white supremacy and extractive capitalism. It isn’t just the Minneapolis Police Department or the Brooklyn Center Police Department or the Saint Anthony Police Department . . . it is rooted in the reality that police departments are the children of slave patrols and union-busting private squads run by industrialists.
We have to find a different way to dream about public safety. We have to find a way to move monies away from people with guns and into housing and water and food and jobs and abundant life instead of violence and death. As a Christian pastor, I want to offer my testimony that I dream of a world where the police have been abolished and I pledge to create the conditions for that to become a reality. #BlackLivesAreSacred
In the three weeks of Chauvin’s trial, the former officer’s defenders have noted that there was fentanyl in George Floyd’s blood, and suggested he expired not because of the knee on his neck but because he abused opioids. After Daunte Wright’s death yesterday, those defending the police officer who shot him argued that Wright had brought the deadly outcome on himself by resisting arrest.
But here’s the thing: Mr. Floyd and Mr. Wright are not on trial. Whether they abused drugs, or passed bad bills, or did something that warranted arrest, or did all of those things or none of them simply does not matter. They are not on trial.
What is on trial is the fundamental American principle of equality before the law. Our law enforcement officers are supposed to use the force of the state to deliver suspected lawbreakers to our criminal justice system. And yet, in both of these cases – and so many others in which a Black person has died at the hands of police – the officers apparently killed suspected offenders instead of delivering them to the legal system guaranteed under our Constitution. Individual police officers appear to have taken the law into their own hands and become judge, jury, and executioner.
Either Floyd and Wright had the right to due legal process, or police officers could condemn them to death without the due process of the law. If the former, it is imperative to defend the principle of equality before the law against those who would undermine that principle. If the latter, Floyd and Wright are not equal to white Americans, and we need to revisit exactly what sort of government we have.
The sheer incompetency of the police officer in the Daunte Wright situation should have everyone angry.
The weight of a loaded gun is usually around five pounds while a Taser is less than a pound. It is also required that an officer’s gun and Taser be carried on separate sides from each other. There are zero excuses that can be brought to defend the officer. The biggest shame is that Daunte Wright died, the second biggest shame is that the officer will most likely only be charged with manslaughter, if that.
Those who are supporting the officer’s side in this case and those choosing to not speak out are showing how biased they really are. Those who cannot call out injustice when it is so clearly presented cannot claim to seek justice.
Those who support the police and those who do not, need to come together to demand changes to police training starting with mandatory bachelor’s degrees for all new officers and intense stress and situational training for all officers taking place every couple of years.
This case is not about Daunte attempting to get in the car and flee; it is not about any warrant for his arrest. It is solely about a police officer being so poorly trained and so incompetent that a Child of God lost his life.
Daunte Wright’s son is not much older than mine. . . . They kinda look alike too. . . . I cannot imagine being taken from my son. I cannot imagine the pain Daunte’s family feels right now. I cannot understand how Black children “accidentally” get murdered by police at a rate exponentially higher than anyone else.
It feels like May 26, 2020 all over again. In these moments of injustice and uprising, I can lean only on our ancestors’ wisdom. MLK words are with me tonight as they were last May.
“I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? . . . It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.”
Man, it just never ends. Even as another cop pointlessly kills another black guy in Minneapolis – this time for having air fresheners in his car, reportedly accidentally mistaking a gun for a taser – harrowing video has surfaced showing a pair of yahoo, frantic, racist, inept small-town cops in Windsor, Virginia stopping, tasing, harassing, pulling guns on and otherwise terrorizing a black and Latino lieutenant in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, in uniform yet, for . . . NOTHING.
The police bodycam footage from December – yes, it took four months for anyone to notice, and only after the video went viral, because duh, America, racist police, so nu? – shows model victim, except for the black and Latino part, 2nd Lieut. Caron Nazario getting pulled over by fat white bozo cop Joe Gutierrez and his young punk partner Daniel Crocker for the crime of pulling into a brightly lit gas station before stopping, having tinted windows on his new SUV, and not having tags displayed on the back except actually he did, with a temporary dealer plate plainly visible in the video, which makes it kinda a mystery why clueless itchy-fingered redneck cops in Virginia would pull over a black dude in a nice new SUV: “In the car: professional soldier. Outside the car: ragebeast with a GED, a few months of half-assed training, and a gun.”
At first, Nazario is calmly curious, chewing gum and repeatedly asking, "What’s going on?" Evidently because he wasn’t acting suitably intimidated, Gutierrez goes ballistic, whipping out his gun and hysterically screaming at the scary black guy in uniform – Stars and Stripes infuriatingly visible on his sleeve – both to “Get out of the car!!” and “Keep your hands outside the window!!” as he tells Nazario, “What’s going on is you’re fixing to ride the lightning, son,” understandably referencing . . . the electric chair.
Things escalate quickly. Crocker keeps his gun on Navario as Gutierrez yells, rages, snarls at Navario, “You received an order – obey it!”, pepper-sprays him in the face, yanks him from the car, kicks him to the ground, and handcuffs him. Navario grows ever more distraught: “Why am I being treated like this? . . . I’m serving my country and this is how I’m treated? . . . This is fucked up, this is fucked up.” Once he’s cuffed, the cops search his car and find . . . nothing, except Nazario’s dog suffering from the pepper-spray. Cue classic, shameless, oh-shit-what-did-we-do bullying that passes for cop remorse as Gutierrez threatens Nazario with repercussions if he complains about being brutalized.
After higher-ups viewed the footage, Gutierrez was fired; Crocker remains on the force. In early April, Nazario sued both officers, seeking $1 million for violating his rights through excessive force and unlawful search and seizure, part of what his attorney Jonathan Adler calls “a disgusting nationwide trend of (police) who, believing they can operate with complete impunity, engage (in) racially biased, dangerous, and sometimes deadly abuses of authority.” Like many before him, he cites the need “to stop this conduct . . . to hold these officers accountable.” Others fiercely argue we must “revolutionize police accountability” so that ordinary people of color don’t have to live in terror of racist, ill-trained, “hair-trigger” police whose violence is “fucking outrageous.”
Also fucking outrageous: It’s been 75 years since another infamous attack on a black soldier; 50 years since Marvin Gaye asked what’s goin’ on; a year since George Floyd cried he couldn’t breathe. “This is racism," wrote Julian Castro. “It’s about domination and humiliation of a black man because he asked questions and ‘didnt comply.’” And still and all, it continues.
Okay, so I’m way behind in documenting the events of last year – a year significant for being a pandemic year, among other things. Here today at least are the images that comprise the latest installment of The Wild Reed’s “Out and About” series.
Over the course of the following days and weeks (hopefully not months!) I’ll add commentary and descriptions. Until then, enjoy these images of my experience of the summer of 2020 in Minnesota, USA.
I established The Wild Reed in 2006 as a sign of solidarity with all who are dedicated to living lives of integrity – though, in particular, with gay people seeking to be true to both the gift of their sexuality and their Catholic faith. The Wild Reed's original by-line read, “Thoughts and reflections from a progressive, gay, Catholic perspective.” As you can see, it reads differently now. This is because my journey has, in many ways, taken me beyond, or perhaps better still, deeper into the realities that the words “progressive,” “gay,” and “Catholic” seek to describe.
Even though reeds can symbolize frailty, they may also represent the strength found in flexibility. Popular wisdom says that the green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm. Tall green reeds are associated with water, fertility, abundance, wealth, and rebirth. The sound of a reed pipe is often considered the voice of a soul pining for God or a lost love.
On September 24, 2012,Michael BaylyofCatholics for Marriage Equality MNwas interviewed by Suzanne Linton of Our World Today about same-sex relationships and why Catholics can vote 'no' on the proposed Minnesota anti-marriage equality amendment.
"I believe your blog to be of utmost importance for all people regardless of their orientation. . . . Thank you for your blog and the care and dedication that you give in bringing the TRUTH to everyone."– William
"Michael, if there is ever a moment in your day or in your life when you feel low and despondent and wonder whether what you are doing is anything worthwhile, think of this: thanks to your writing on the internet, a young man miles away is now willing to embrace life completely and use his talents and passions unashamedly to celebrate God and his creation. Any success I face in the future and any lives I touch would have been made possible thanks to you and your honesty and wisdom."– AB
"Since I discovered your blog I have felt so much more encouraged and inspired knowing that I'm not the only gay guy in the Catholic Church trying to balance my Faith and my sexuality. Continue being a beacon of hope and a guide to the future within our Church!"– Phillip
"Your posts about Catholic issues are always informative and well researched, and I especially appreciate your photography and the personal posts about your own experience. I'm very glad I found your blog and that I've had the chance to get to know you."– Crystal
"Thank you for taking the time to create this fantastic blog. It is so inspiring!"– George
"I cannot claim to be an expert on Catholic blogs, but from what I've seen, The Wild Reed ranks among the very best."– Kevin
"Reading your blog leaves me with the consolation of knowing that the words Catholic, gay and progressive are not mutually exclusive.."– Patrick
"I grieve for the Roman institution’s betrayal of God’s invitation to change. I fear that somewhere in the midst of this denial is a great sin that rests on the shoulders of those who lead and those who passively follow. But knowing that there are voices, voices of the prophets out there gives me hope. Please keep up the good work."– Peter
"I ran across your blog the other day looking for something else. I stopped to look at it and then bookmarked it because you have written some excellent articles that I want to read. I find your writing to be insightful and interesting and I'm looking forward to reading more of it. Keep up the good work. We really, really need sane people with a voice these days."– Jane Gael
"Michael, your site is like water in the desert."– Jayden
