The Clapping Song. Shirley Ellis. 1965. Congress.

 We walked back from Ocean Beach on a late afternoon, Friday. The sky was overcast, as if the teeming void held by the Pacific had emptied itself into the space behind our atmosphere. Walking through Golden Gate Park, I couldn’t shake the sense of isolation imposed upon us by our recent visit to the sublime; we were silent on our return to Haight-Ashbury, largely an echo of the immense density of silence that is a hallmark of the natural world, and, which, at a certain geographical point inside those oceanic waters, can literally crush you. The core of silence I was carrying with me—the same one everyone carries, at all times—began to expand within the confines of my skull. Its expansion is potentially toxic, if only because it’s fueled by heat from what the mind tells it to believe. Brain chemistry, though more powerful than cognizance, can sometimes be redirected by the mere whims of consciousness. 

The mood of alienation began shrinking once we caught a taxi outside the Haight for the ride back to SoMa. We were talking about the possibility of seeing our new acquaintance Johnny, the presumptive vineyard heir we’d met earlier that week, at the Lone Star Saloon, where we were now en route for happy hour. He was a handsome stranger in his mid thirties, maybe, mustached and self possessed, an adept of privilege with a gift for sociability that fueled our first meeting on the Saturday we’d arrived in San Francisco. That day, when I asked Johnny if the homeless punks outside the entrance to Golden Gate Park still sold weed—when not marketing their homemade mixtapes near the Amoeba record store entrance—he produced a neatly rolled joint from his breast pocket, and we went out to the bar’s back patio to smoke it. A couple of hours later, the three of us were in a cab riding into the Castro, but, because of our mixed, copious intake of weed and alcohol, combined with the afternoon’s airline fatigue, we only made it through one more pint. The happy hour crowd Friday night at the Lone Star was heavier than I’d imagined, a collective convivial mood running through patrons like a current. A major component of that collective mood was the beginning of the weekend, but, more than that, what was palpable to me, what’s palpable about visiting any of the great, liberal world cities, is the unmistakable hum of human unity coalescing around a shared value of personal freedom, unencumbered by ideology. You don’t fly into these cities carrying the expectation of Western ideals, but their piety, once you’ve commingled with natives, hits like a narcotic. Walking in San Francisco or Amsterdam, I feel high, more receptive to feelings of happiness…anywhere else, and I’m prone to an indulgence of gloom, the depression that often springs from the lips that whisper inside of the mind. Maybe two or three beers into that Friday early evening happy hour, a spontaneous public demonstration of the effect of such a happiness broke out as I was staring at a poster billed to announce the date of a forthcoming Bob Mould DJ event. “3-6-9! The goose drank wine; the monkey chewed tobacco on the street car line!” The biggest surprise was not that this song was played that night, but that as the lyric flowed, patrons joined in singing it, as if having awaited their cue. It was a transcendent cultural experience, like one of Cartier-Bresson’s perfect moments. The Clapping Song’s vocalist, Shirley Ellis, integrates pop sophistication into what is essentially a children’s record, with a delivery that does not condescend but instead finds an audience whose readiness for pop excellence comes without a restrictive sense of play. You won’t mistake The Clapping Song for a cut from any of the recognized genres but it has the dynamic reach of the best of the Mariah Carey or Ramones songbooks. The songwriter, Lincoln Chase, combines a verse penned by Milton Brown for the song Little Rubber Dolly by The Light Crust Doughboys (1939) with instructions for a virtuoso clapping gymnastics for two, along with the introductory verse so dazzlingly surreal Tom Waits reworked an entire song after it. Happiness is a spontaneous, organic human quality whose jolting power can only be felt outside of the algorithmic process; social media can only contain its simulacra. It remains to be seen what shape our cerebral phenomena will take in the coming usurpation of human ordered reality by the binary code. One chilling prophesy, from the ever pleasantly anxious imagination of Lou Reed, suggests a shadowed future of terror and protracted inertia: “And save for a scream, there’s much like a song to be heard in the wind that blows by the sea. Like the wind, here come the waves….”