research: choosing scrapbook anchor songs, book three sixties trilogy

Each scrapbook in COUNTDOWN and REVOLUTION is anchored by a song from that period that helps the reader "hear" that particular time-and-place, and sink deeper into the story. Book 3 will be the same.

I don't have scrapbooks done yet, but I'm keeping a hold file of possible photos on Pinterest, as well as a board with song possibilities (well.. two... maybe three.. I need to consolidate, now that I better understand what I'm doing).

Many of the songs I'm gathering will be mentioned in the narrative, but seven (or so) will be anchors for the scrapbooks of photos, newspaper clippings, and other ephemera that will help tell the story of 1969, and indeed the late sixties, as we're going to have to skip from 1964's REVOLUTION to 1969.

We'll need to secure permission and pay for the right to use these songs in their entirety if we so choose. I've only used one or two entirely -- "Dancing in the Street" and "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around" (public domain) in REVOLUTION, but we want to use as much as we want of these anchor songs, as we design scrapbooks, and not worry about fair use -- we'll have permission.

I'll cover much of the five-year gap between REVOLUTION and BOOK THREE in scrapbooks. So the songs are important -- they have to carry us through. Often I use a song that denotes the opposite of what you see in the scrapbooks so I can give you that Unity of Opposites, so you can think about what you're seeing, and about that particular piece of the story. I juxtapose Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" over the early days of the Vietnam War (before there was much protest) in the final scrapbook in REVOLUTION, for instance.

The scrapbooks are a visual storytelling device and serve as a look at what's going on in the "outside" world while the story I write gives us the "inside" story, or the narrative arc of the book, of these characters and their hopes and dreams and very human failings.

Since I don't know them very well yet, I'm working on the scrapbooks. This usually goes back and forth as the book takes shape -- some scrapbook, some narrative. But right now, I'm just empty on the narrative, so the scrapbooks are getting heavy attention.

Here are some possibilities for starting Book 3. Let's see if one of these actually makes the cut. It will have to work against photos and ephemera that span 1965-1968, which includes death (Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bobby Kennedy, Vietnam), the birth of the counter-culture, war protests, and the rise of some amazing rock-and-roll.

1.  Richie Havens at Woodstock singing "Freedom/Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child"..."a long way from home." I can see this as a way to begin Book 3. But it may be too close to REVOLUTION'S beginning. Just gathering right now.

2. Jefferson Airplane, "Don't You Want Somebody to Love" from Woodstock. "When the truth is found/ To be lies/ And all the joy/ Within you dies/ Don't you want somebody to love?/ Don't you need somebody to love?/ Wouldn't you love somebody to love?/ You better find somebody to love."

I love this. I really wanted to use "White Rabbit" as a possibility, but the lyrics are too tightly focused on that hookah smoking caterpillar, and might be confusing instead of enhancing.

3. Randy Newman, 1968: "Broken windows and empty hallways/ A pale dead moon in the sky streaked with gray/ Human kindness is overflowing/ And I think it's going to rain today.... / Lonely, lonely/ Tin can at my feet/ Think I'll kick it down the street/ That's the way to treat a friend."

This is hands-down my favorite. It holds so much possibility. The song meant a lot to me in the mid-'70s when I was alone with two kids and hoping for some human kindness. Joe Cocker's version is the one I heard in the '70s. I sat in a parking lot and cried. So I worry that I'm attached to it for reasons that won't serve the story.

Those are my top picks to begin Book 3. I loved and discarded for various reasons (although they could show up as anchors for different scrapbooks) Steppenwolf's "Born To Be Wild," The Rascals' "Get Together," The Isley Brothers' "It's Your Thing," The Fifth Dimension's "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In," and Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth."

I'm open to suggestions.... ?

I want funk and R&B and rock-and-roll and more, but I'll stop here today. Not bad for a day's work. Along with the epiphany I had while listening to Mark Rylance read a page of the new novel THE WAKE -- which as I wrote earlier, has given me energy to begin the narrative again with a different character -- I think I can go find some supper (Jim is gigging) and welcome the weekend.

Hope you are still awake!