All of This and Nothing: Get It On

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

This week's song is not from the 1960s. It might sound that way, but it's actually a 2008 song by an Australian band, The Chevelles.

This is Get It On.

It was the lead single from a record designed to launch them in the US, Barbarella Girl God - they leaned into the '60s thing, I think, at least somewhat - and that record has a bunch of other good songs, too. She's Not Around, C'mon Everybody, and Every Moment I particularly like.

I don't think the launch "took" the way everybody hoped, which is why I'm classifying this as one of my Obscure songs this year. But a good song is a good song, and ones you haven't heard before are wonderful, so, if this one is new to you, you're welcome.

It sounds to me like yet another "rock band on the road" song, with verses loosely about specific US West Coast cities - no details, just the "here's what's next" of a band on the road in a blur of shows and highways:

Well, I'm seein' things in the highway lights
Twenty-four cities
I don't see the sights
Too far from home
Forgot my own life

And those kind of songs are fun. For those of us who don't go on tour with a rock band - which is the vast majority of us - they encapsulate the great parts of that life (excitement, cool music, novelty, moving on quickly) and avoid the less-pleasant bits (living in a van with 2-5 people you used to like, long hours on the road, eating whatever's available on those highways, etc.).

This is a good one; it gives the feel of that road rolling on, with something new around every corner. The feeling that you might as well Get It On.

Quote of the Hour: What Doesn't Change

I like to think about things that have always been the same, from remote human history up to and including now. People's heads have always been about as hard as they are today and have hurt about the same amount when they bumped together. Horses have always shaken flies off themselves, whether waiting to pull Pharoah's chariots or standing at a kiddie ride at a county fair. Meat cooking on a fire has smelled delicious in exactly the same way forever.

 - Ian Frazier, Paradise Bronx, p.24

Quote of the Hour: Can He Handle It?

As the bus sailed away with Harry safely on the top deck, she held Candy up so she could wave goodbye to him. He wasn't stupid, he was never going to stop asking questions. Perhaps she should tell him the truth about everything. Truth was such a novel ideal to Crystal that she found herself still staring after the bus had disappeared up the road.

 - Kate Atkinson, Big Sky, p.315

Quote of the Hour: Explaining the Unexplainable

I have never wanted to write about my drawings, and I still don't want to, but it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to do it now, when everybody is busy with something else, and get it over quietly.

 - James Thurber, "The Lady on the Bookcase," p.657-58 in Writings & Drawings

Quote of the Hour: Stout Denial

He eyed her apprehensively, like some rat of the underworld cornered by G-men. Painful experience had taught him that visits from Connie meant trouble, and he braced himself, as always, to meet with stout denial whatever charge she might be about to hurl at him. He was a great believer in stout denial and was very good at it.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Pigs Have Wings, pp.10-11

Quote of the Hour: American Cuisine

Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking out of the sides, preferably a little wilted.

 - Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye, p.693 in Later Novels & Other Writings

Quote of the Hour: If They Call It Tourist Season, How Come We Can't...

It is a long abandoned belief that tourism, like competitive athletics, makes for international friendship. The three most hated peoples in the world - Germans, Americans and British - are the keenest sight-seers. There are very few English villagers who have seen an Egyptian; very few Egyptian villagers who had not seen an Englishman; the result is that the English generally are well disposed toward Egypt, while the Egyptians detest us. Sympathy for foreigners varies directly with their remoteness.

 - Evelyn Waugh, Robbery Under Law, p.722 in Waugh Abroad

Quote of the Hour: Decisiveness

It is one of the great advantages of being a tycoon that your life trains you to take decisions at the drop of the hat. Where lesser men scratch their heads and twiddle their fingers, the tycoon acts.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Spring Fever, p.15

Quote of the Hour: The Unsleeping Eye

I seem to remember I went to a cinema that night. Or it might have been a casino. The cinemas blur in my mind, and so do the casinos. The only safe thing to say is that I didn't go to my solitary, expensively riverside home. I wasn't sleeping anymore. If you didn't sleep in it, what else is a home for?

 - D.G. Compton, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, p.47

Quote of the Hour: Fans are Slans

Of course, there was a kind of fandom, and I knew them, but they were all real weird freaks, and they were unpalatable to me because they did not read the great literature. There wasn't anybody that read both. You could either be in with a group of freaks who read Heinlein and Padgett and van Vogt and nothing else, or you could be in with the people who read Dos Passos, Melville, and Proust. But you could never get the two together. And I chose the company of those who were reading the great literature because I liked them better as people. The early fans, they were trolls and wackos. Being stuck with then would have been like the first part of Dante's Divine Comedy, I mean, up to your ass in shit. They really were terribly ignorant, weird people.

 - Philip K. Dick, Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods! edited by Richard Wolinsky, p.140

Quote of the Hour: Understanding Pigeons

People who do not understand pigeons - and pigeons can be understood only when you understand that there is nothing to understand about them - should not go around describing pigeons or the effect of pigeons. Pigeons come closer to a zero of impingement than any other birds. Hens embarrass me the way my old Aunt Hattie used to when I was twelve and she still insisted I wasn't big enough to bathe myself; owls disturb me; if I am with an eagle I always pretend that I am not with an eagle; and so on down to swallows at twilight who scare the hell out of me. But pigeons have absolutely no effect on me. They have absolutely no effect on anybody. The couldn't even startle a child. This is why they are selected from among all birds to be let loose, with colored ribbons attached to them, at band concerts, library dedications, and christenings of new dirigibles. If any body let loose a lot of owls on such an occasion there would be rioting and cat-calls and whistling and fainting spells and throwing of chairs and the Lord only knows what else.

 - James Thurber, "There's an Owl in My Room," pp.216-217 in Writings and Drawings

Quote of the Hour: Theory of Lies

"It's a funny thing - I suppose you've noticed it - the people who lie the most are nearly always the clumsiest at it, and they're easier to fool with lies than most people, too. You'd think they'd be on the look-out for lies, but they seem to be the very ones that will believe almost anything at all."

 - Gilbert Wynant in Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man, p.861 in Complete Novels 

Quote of the Hour: Five Aunts

On the cue 'five aunts" I had given at the knees a trifle, for the thought of being confronted with such a solid gaggle of aunts, even if those of another, was an unnerving one. Reminding myself that in this life it is not aunts that matter but the courage which one brings to them, I pulled myself together.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, The Mating Season, p.10

Quote of the Hour: Los Angeles Dining, 1949

I ate dinner at a place near Thousand Oaks. Bad but quick. Feed 'em and throw 'em out. Lots of business. We can't bother with you sitting over your second cup of coffee, mister. You're using money space. See those people over there behind the rope? They want to eat. Anyway they think they have to. God knows why they want to eat here. They could do better home out of a can. They're just restless. Like you. They have to get the car out and go somewhere. Sucker-bait for the racketeers that have taken over the restaurants. Here we go again. You're not human tonight, Marlowe.

 - Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister, p.268 in Later Novels & Other Writings

Quote of the Hour: Exclusive News!

The real work of the propaganda department was done through unofficial channels. To the horde of competing journalists the government communiqués were of negligible importance. They were transmitted instantly in full by Reuter's [sic] and the other agencies and gave no material for the special news which the editors were demanding. This had to be procured by other means; it had to be jealously guarded from rivals. It could not be investigated for fear of attracting their attention. An exclusive lie was more valuable than a truth which was shared with others.

 - Evelyn Waugh, Waugh in Abyssinia, pp.652 in Waugh Abroad