Any Day Now. Chuck Jackson. 1962. Wand.

 Is there anything sexier than a masculine baritone unafraid to reveal his vulnerability by the sweetly sung admission that he’s lost absolutely everything? It’s an experience tantamount to having a crush whisper secrecies into your ear; it’s not only intimate, but under the right circumstances, flirtatious, too. Chuck Jackson is a marvelously expressive singer, similar in tone to Levi Stubbs, and, although Jackson was clearly working within a recording studio dynamic not shared by the Motown model, both that label and Wand were looking to capture the same middle class AM radio listenership dollars. What’s remarkable about Jackson’s recording of Any Day Now—and, to a lesser extent, Elvis’ recording, released seven years later—is how both versions adhere to oddball, outdated pop arrangements that nevertheless manage to land just this side of irresistible kitsch. For middle class listeners like myself who grew up venerating the post-modern impulse in pop culture, kitsch travels across time, like bug spray or ideology, remarkably well. It brings with it the aesthetic and social and political detritus of its day, daring the contemporary listener to refute the integrity of his own tastes and knowingly embrace material that is beneath him. Ironically, it is the spirit of in-built rebellion itself. Any Day Now performs a cunning, Darwinian feat. By attaching itself to a primal R&B vocal that reaches genuine emotional depth—the opposite of kitsch—the throwaway backing track survives into eras it may not have otherwise lived to see. Music supervisor Linda Cohen, for example, curated the track for the final credits sequence of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film adaptation of the Pynchon novel Inherent Vice (2014). The wily realized cohesion of Any Day Now’s R&B and kitsch elements illuminates the reply to the query posed at the top of the page: playfulness in upending pop conventions like loss and heartbreak, Chuck Jackson successfully argues, is the sexiest masculine quality of them all. From the 3 disc 2008 Rhino Records compilation Magic Moments: The Definitive Burt Bacharach Collection

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