{"id":2832,"date":"2013-05-10T00:52:51","date_gmt":"2013-05-10T00:52:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=2832"},"modified":"2013-05-10T00:52:51","modified_gmt":"2013-05-10T00:52:51","slug":"friday-evening-videos-willin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2013\/05\/10\/friday-evening-videos-willin\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday Evening Videos: &#8220;Willin'&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So, this song popped into my head a couple days ago, as these things do from time to time, and it hasn&#8217;t left yet. After having a fairly amusing conversation about it with my friend Anastasia, I thought maybe I&#8217;d share it with all you fine people, too. You can thank me later.<\/p>\n<p>The song is called &#8220;Willin&#8217;,&#8221; and I was frankly amazed that Anastasia &#8212; or anyone else in my circle of friends &#8212; actually knew it, as I&#8217;ve always thought of it as somewhat obscure. It was originally recorded by the band Little Feat, and I like <a href=\"http:\/\/youtu.be\/iguLpoV0SXc\">their version<\/a> fine, but it is Linda Ronstadt&#8217;s 1974 cover that&#8217;s been on a continuous loop in my brain this week. Probably because her version was my first exposure to it. I&#8217;ll talk about that in a moment, but first&#8230; the song:<\/p>\n<p><iframe width=\"725\" height=\"544\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ZRqHWDys5qE?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I first encountered &#8220;Willin'&#8221; in a fairly unlikely context: you can hear about 10 seconds of it in one scene of James Cameron&#8217;s film <em>The Abyss<\/em>. If you don&#8217;t know that one, much of the story takes place inside an experimental underwater oil-drilling platform on the bottom of the ocean. In the scene in question, the rig is being towed to a new location, and as the camera zooms in on the cockpit of the &#8220;tug sub,&#8221; the overalls-wearing pilot is singing along to this tune &#8212; coming from a boombox duct-taped above her seat &#8212; at the top of her lungs. Specifically, the line about driving every kind of rig that&#8217;s ever been made. It&#8217;s a cute gag &#8212; what&#8217;s a sub, after all, but another kind of rig? &#8212; that serves to illustrate the earthy, blue-collar, average-jane-and-joe aspect of the movie&#8217;s characters. They&#8217;re roughnecks and truck drivers, despite their science-fictiony surroundings.<\/p>\n<p>Well, that brief snippet of incidental music was enough to pique my curiosity. It took me a long time to identify the song and track it down, and when I heard it all the way through for the first time, I loved it. But I also thought it was kind of weird. After all, here was a woman signing longingly about another woman, that beautiful girl back in Dallas&#8230; The song made a lot more sense when I learned it had been written for a man. Of course, this was in the early &#8217;90s, before I developed a taste for Melissa Etheridge and Joan Jett, and got used to the idea of women singing love songs about women.<\/p>\n<p>MTV-style music videos were still several years in the future when Linda Ronstadt recorded &#8220;Willin&#8217;,&#8221; so all the clips I found of it were concert recordings. But that&#8217;s fine, considering her skill with live performance. This particular one was made at the New Victoria Theatre in London, in November 1976, when Ronstadt was in her heyday as a rock-and-roll artist. She was also (I think) incredibly sexy at the time. The look on her face when she first says &#8220;willin'&#8221; about 20 seconds in&#8230; well, it does happy things for me.<\/p>\n<p>I remember I used to have a poster of her that I won at a county fair midway game. This would&#8217;ve been in the mid &#8217;80s, by which time Linda was moving past her rocker persona and starting to explore traditional songbook pop, so I&#8217;ve long suspected the carnie was trying to move some very old stock. Regardless, I had no idea then of who she was&#8230; but I hung the poster anyway because I liked her looks. I recall she was wearing a lot of bangles and a button-down shirt in the picture, and generally looked very soft and feminine in the way that 1970s &#8220;rocker chicks&#8221; had, and which went away in the more harshly-styled &#8217;80s. (I&#8217;ll be honest, even though I tend to rhapsodize a great deal about the &#8217;80s &#8212; the decade in which I was a teenager &#8212; I generally think women&#8217;s looks were sexier in the the &#8217;70s.)<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m just rambling at this point, so I&#8217;ll leave you with the song and bid you all a good weekend. I&#8217;m going to head home now. And when I get there, I think maybe I&#8217;ll fire up my old turntable and listen to some vintage Linda Ronstadt LPs&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So, this song popped into my head a couple days ago, as these things do from time to time, and it hasn&#8217;t left yet. After having a fairly amusing conversation about it with my friend Anastasia, I thought maybe I&#8217;d share it with all you fine people, too. You can thank me later. The song [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-friday-evening-videos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2832\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}