You Go Canoeing To Aintry With Burt, You Take Your Chances

I stumbled across Deliverance the other night and stopped.

After a grueling day under the flourescent lights of an office, a commute from hell, and the rawness of a dark winter’s day in early January, does anything goose the spirits like a river trip to Aintry, hillbillies, and Ned Beatty getting sodomized?

I checked out before the mountain man lovin’, but I did watch the early part of the movie.

I barely remember the hulabaloo surrounding the movie when it came out in the ’70s. I do recall it airing on television as ABC’s Friday Night Movie and the previews issuing one of those omnous voiceovers warning that the following feature was “of a mature nature.”

I didn’t see it then.

I actually didn’t see Deliverance until college, fifteen or so years after the acclaimed movie was in theaters.

Several housemates and I were hanging out one weeknight, watching our school’s basketball team on television. The game ended and, like the other night, we stumbled across Deliverance on cable.

I think that I knew nothing about the movie, but it had a strange vibe that drew me in.

I had no idea where the flick was headed, but I knew within the first few moments of his character’s introduction that following Burt Reynolds into the sticks was asking to be made an example of by natural selection.

We all have a buddy or acquaintence who will constantly be willing to test the bounds of good sense, legal statutes, rational thought, and/or physics, but, if Burt Reynolds invites you to ride the rapids for some weekend thrills in the mountains, there is no excuse for not caveating the @#$% out of the emptor.

It wasn’t more than fifteen minutes into the movie and we had already met the hillbillies and had the bluegrass jam of Dueling Banjos between Ronny Cox’ character and Banjo Boy.

Growing up in a small, Midwestern town, we had our share of rural types, but the hill people in Deliverance were unsettling.

I don’t think any of us moved for two hours as we sat in the dark and watched the movie. We’d gone from boisterous during the basketball game to – for the most part – quietly engrossed by the palpable sense of dread and wondering what would go wrong for our intrepid quartet next.

(maybe Burt Reynolds will open a chain of Deliverance-themed water parks and call it Burt Reynold’s River Ride Through Hell)

And I do still remember jumping a bit at the end when that pale, lifeless hand popped up to the surface of that eerie lake.

Dueling Banjos is well-known, but I seem to remember some trippy, electronic music during one part of the movie that made things super-surreal.

In the real world, I was four when Deliverance was released in July, 1972, so there wasn’t a lot of music I was hearing – mostly in the car from the radio or the random times the parents might put on an album.

But there are a lot of songs that I do recognize from the Billboard Hot 100 from that July in ’72 – a few from then, most from hearing them in the years since…

Looking Glass – Brandy (You’re A Fine Girl)
from Have A Nice Decade: The ’70s Pop Culture Box

I seem to recall Looking Glass’ one major hit from that time and, apparently, they had another lesser hit called Jimmy Loves Mary-Anne which, if I have heard, I’m unaware.

But Brandy is perfect, a song that is always welcome when it pops up on the iPod’s shuffle (or in the supermarket, for that matter). It seems that it would be ripe to be covered, but, then again, perhaps its nautical themes and tale of those residing at a port in a harbor town wouldn’t resonate with today’s pop audience.

The Hollies – Long Cool Woman (In A Black Dress)
from Big Hits Of The ’70s

I can’t really say that I know much of The Hollies’ catalog aside from a handful of singles, but I’ve always quite liked Long Cool Woman (In A Black Dress). It’s certainly more muscular than the other hits by the band with which I’m familiar.

The 5th Dimension – (Last Night) I Didn’t Get To Sleep At All
from Up, Up and Away: The Definitive Collection

I do very much remember hearing (Last Night) I Didn’t Get To Sleep At All on the car radio as a four-year old in ’72. I think that I was even aware that The 5th Dimension had also sang Up, Up And Away which I loved and seem to recall hearing on Sesame Street.

I also remember being quite captivated by (Last Night) I Didn’t Get To Sleep At All as a kid, even though I had no frame of reference for the angst-riddled insomnia of the song. Instead, I’ve no doubt that the gorgeous melody and dramatic vocal was the hook.

And singer Marilyn McCoo, a natural beauty if there ever was one, would become familiar to me from her television series with husband Billy Davis, Jr. and, in the ’80s, as a host on Solid Gold.

The Eagles – Take It Easy
from Their Greatest Hits

Though I’m not as opposed to The Eagles as The Dude was in The Big Lebowski – in which his abiding hatred of the group gets him tossed from a cab – I’ve never been much of a fan, either. Maybe it was the overkill of hearing their music so much on radio as a kid.

Over the years, I’ve slowly softened my resistance to their music and find myself far less inclined to change channels or skip forward when I hear them. And, there is something about the carefree vibe of Take It Easy that is hard to resist.