The band The Specials are a big deal to me, their record from 1978 or thereabouts produced by Elvis Costello, never got old. I played with Elvis Costello one time in New York while backing up Ron Sexmith, and it was nice to meet him, but some time later I realized instead of nice to meet you, I should have said “Dude! You produced the Specials!” It’s easy to know later what you should have said earlier. I started playing Too Much, Much Too Young on the piano today, which led me down a Specials Youtube wormhole which in turn led me looking up the correct lyrics to Monkey Man, only to find out it wasn’t their own song but a cover. I was unsure what the lyrics meant and looked it up. I’m even more confused now, but it was interesting finding out Toots of Toots and the Maytals wrote it. I saw him perform at the Bamboo a lifetime ago. Naturally everyone waited to hear Pressure Drop. I looked it up too, what does it mean? Turns out it was Toots’s take on karma. He believed assholes would suffer for assholiness and therefore the pressure would drop on them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"