Vanilla Fudge
In addition to being the best cover band I ever heard, Vanilla Fudge is one of the best 0ne-album bands ever.
Several good versions of every song on the album are now on You Tube, and they still perform live. Many people are hearing them for the first time, but for people my age, Vanilla Fudge is not coming back because it never went away.
In November, 1966. I got dumped by a rich Jewish American Princess (JAP) from Scarsdale, NY, a wealthy suburb north of New York City, after going out on dates with her for six months. She didn’t like or care about me. She just needed to be certain someone would take her on a date each week.
I was lower than low, wondering what was wrong with me, why I always got dumped. “Wrong with me?” I say now in hindsight. ”All this rich bitch had was good looks, good taste in clothes, and her father’s credit cards to buy them.”
I kept taking her on dates, and paying for everything, for six months, because I had no self-esteem. Then, SHE dumped ME.
Then Vanilla Fudge came out,and swept my generation.
One night, listening to the album with friends, I had the strongest reaction to a song I ever did before or since. I started hallucinating, seeing pictures of her like a slide show. I screamed “Turn it off!” and someone did.
This is an un-spiritual. It describes nearly all my experience with wmen in high school, college, and long periods since then It brings me closer to despair.
I did not live happily ever after, but I could stop feeling bad about myself because I was still a virgin.
Forty-some years after that big one-night stand, I can say that what I wrote the morning after is true: You remember the first one long after you’ve forgotten the last one.
And, even though I’m lonely sometimes, as everyone is, and feel bad about it sometimes, as everybody does, I think life is about as beautiful as it looked to me the day I wrote those words.
This is Vanlla Fudge’s interpretation of a traditional spiritual from the Southern church. Spirituals always briing me closer to God
