July 7 2010: Herman's Hermits - No Milk Today

Herman’s Hermits - No Milk Today: youtube.com/watch?v=ClQepFF-Sr0

As far as I can tell, this is the song that began my love affair with pop music.

I used to listen to a lot of tapes when I was a kid. Fresh Prince, Metallica, Joey Lawrence, Johnny Rivers, The Tragically Hip, Public Enemy. I’d bring them to my babysitters house and listen to them on her stereo in the living room, headphones. I’d turn them up real loud. The living room was dark and no one ever came in, it had all the best furniture in the house so people usually didn’t spend much time in there. It was cool and safe. I would even hide behind the couch in the corner, the headphone wire giving me away as it stretched across the wall.

This song I listened to the most. I had a Herman’s Hermits tape that I would listen to obsessively. I think part of the appeal was the name; the “Herm--s Herm--s” absurd repetition spoke to my simple young quiet body. I’m pretty sure this song was the fourth song on Side B, and I would actually sit through all of Side A and whatever came before it on Side B just to prolong my anticipation of that bright and surprising intro. And I would rewind the song and listen to it over and over again. I remember sitting in my babysitters kitchen one day with a walkman, listening to it and studying the album artwork (a lot of yellow and a stuffy picture of young men in a field, though I could have created that memory) as my Mother and babysitter gossiped and I was ready to leave, wearing my shoes and coat, but they kept talking and I didn’t care because that song just played on repeat.

I’m not sure what captured me about this song. I could (and will, to a degree) dissect it and find reasons, make excuses, but I’ll never find what it was and still is that holds me. I find the greatest pieces of art, for me, are those that I love most and don’t know why. I still don’t know what it is about Radiohead’s Kid A that makes me shake. I don’t know why I’m so terrified of Jean Cocteau’s portraits of Luisa Casati. These things appeal to all my senses to a high degree, so much so that I stop thinking, moving. I stop. My body continues to feel but everything stops. I get excited and scared and I laugh at the absurdity of everything and I stop. I have to consciously move away from these things or else they would consume me.

On listening to this song now I still feel like I could listen to it on repeat and not tire of it and how many pop songs achieve that? I read Nina Simone say once that pop music almost drove her insane because she would perform a string of shows, go to her hotel and toss in her bed all night because her mind couldn’t rest from the songs that still played in her head. I’ve experienced this form of mania before. I once drove, alone, through a massive snow storm in Quebec. I didn’t have much to listen to on hand so I had been listening to The Basement Tapes by Bob Dylan and The Band on a crappy, somewhat warped old tape my Dad had made decades ago. I had been driving for about 14 hours before I decided to pull into a gas station and rest (it was, luckily, 1 degree out, which meant I was just beating the freezing point) but as I sat upright with a sleeping bag hugging my body all I could hear, over and over in my head were the lines “This wheel’s on fire / Running down the road / So go and tell my next of kin / This wheel shall explode.” Over and over again. Warped and madness. It were dark hours as I held my eyes tight closed and tried to focus on the din of the highway but every quiet moment my mind found lead right back to those lines. There is a brilliant repetition in No Milk Today that achieves this madness in one listen.

Maybe pop music is a form of madness.

And I can still listen to this song and love it like I did.