DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (3)
By:
April 11, 2025
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… late-breaking obsessions, avoided discoveries, and devotions delayed! Series edited by Adam McGovern.
Bobby Caldwell’s gone now, but he’ll be forever singing “What You Won’t Do for Love” on YouTube. In the original music video, from way back before videos were even a thing, he lip-synchs with great passion in a fedora and abruptly truncated tie. In concert videos, as the decades go by he’s still singing his big hit on stage in Japan and Brazil, at the Java Jazz Festival and the Soul Train Awards.
“What You Won’t Do for Love” has just the right blend of tight and loose in the rhythm section, on which are stacked louche horns, advanced harmonies, and a soulful vocal performance that still has people in the endless reaction videos (more YouTube afterlife for Bobby Caldwell) pretending to be all shocked that this dude is white. Flavors of Earth, Wind & Fire and Steely Dan; nice balance between soft rock and jazzy soul; notes of Silk Degrees and Winelight in the finish.
I kept my liking of the song to myself when it came out in 1978 because it was the kind of song that a certain kind of guy would be into. This guy would be likely to wing-part his hair in the middle (if he was white) or relax it (if he was black), and to favor a then-emerging silhouette my brother Sal described as “balloons on your legs, pencils on your feet.” This guy would ostentatiously appreciate the finer things: smoother grooves, classier malt liquor, Thai Stick, Trans Ams, square-cut knit ties, snappy hats, better dance moves. And, like a nation maintaining a foreign policy, he would practice and periodically upgrade a go-to Line that he used to secure the magic sevens of women he met at parties and bars and Bobby Caldwell shows.
I took this kind of guy’s flagrantly self-perfecting, nightmarishly public quest for cooler stuff and ever more refined taste as annihilating commentary on my infinite imperfections and skin-crawling horror of exposure. I wore flannel shirts over pocket T-shirts and just wanted to get to eighteen in one piece and call a do-over on life somewhere far away from the South Side of Chicago, where I happened to be growing up. I would rather have been trapped on the Nostromo with the alien in Alien than ask anyone to notice me or call attention to myself in any way.
This was before I called that do-over in college, managed even without benefit of a Line to meet a woman there who thought it would be okay to marry me, raised daughters with her, officiated at the wedding of our older daughter, turned sixty. “What You Won’t Do for Love” is a good song, and it reminds me of days gone by. When in the course of human events they play it at a wedding reception or reunion or some other suitable occasion, I will probably ask my wife to dance with me, and she may well say yes.
DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Adam McGovern | Mandy Keifetz on FAITH | Heather Quinlan on THE GRATEFUL DEAD | Carlo Rotella on SMOOTHER GROOVES | Art Wallace on MICHIGAN | Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons on TAYLOR SWIFT | Josh Glenn on ART | James Scott Maloy on BE-BOP DELUXE | Jake Zucker on LIGHT SLEEPER | Gabriela Pedranti on THE BIG BANG THEORY | Adam McGovern on DOGS | Tana Sirois on COLLABORATIVE EVOLUTION | Rani Som on LED ZEP | Holly Interlandi on HOT SAUCE | Jeff Lewonczyk on TWIN PEAKS | Nikhil Singh on PRE-TEEN DAVID LYNCH PROBLEMS | Christopher Rashee Stevenson on O’NEILL & THE SEA | Fran Pado on SHARKS | Juan Recondo on BEN GRIMM’S INNER LIFE | Miranda Mellis on KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD | Mimi Lipson on SOBRIETY | William Nericcio on ELYSIUM | Crockett Doob on SLEATER-KINNEY | Marlon Stern Lopez on PAT THE BUNNY | …and more!
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!