Townsman dbuskirk was overheard reporting the following find from the depths of Rock Town Hall's Research & Development department!

Mundy, Mundy...

Marc Mundy, "How Can I Marry This Language"

I can't remember the last time a song has captured me like this but it reminds me of that ultimate hopeless teenage obsession I had with "My Sharona". It just broke and neither my local drugstore, The Ames, nor The K-Mart (my three record outlets in the summer of 1979) had it in stock, so I was stuck waiting by WCAU-FM so I could hear it once an hour.

This went on for a few weeks until my parents finally had to drive to the mall to get something and I could finally buy the single, with the foxy Sharona in the wife-beater picture sleeve and the faux Beatles label.

But I digress. The song I can't stop listening to currently is by obscuro, private press rocker Marc Mundy, "How Can I Marry This Language". Born in a showbiz family, raised in Cyprus, and brought up on Mediterranean radio that featured sounds from Istanbul, Cairo, and Tel Aviv, Mundy ended up in Greenwich Village in the late '60s. He married a Turkish looker and in 1970 recorded his only album, with his wife on backing vocals and an unknown cast of her Turkish cronies on
back-up.

Although one has to get accustomed to a accent that sounds dangerously close to Borat, this song has been short-circuiting its way into my idle thoughts almost hourly for weeks. It's that chorus, where he breaks into a wordless vocal that seems to approximate some ancient folk melody, that just kills me everytime.

Not that everything around it isn't fantastic, that crazy stuttering Moon-like drumming, the stop-start rhythms with the kissing sound, the lyrics about asking for a woman's hand in a foreign language, and the fact that it is one of those "3-minute zingers" (2:57 actually) recently talked about on some uptown blog, it all has me smitten like a schoolboy.

I'm like everyone here, I love the rock and roll of this era, but why listen to yet another Beatle-ish/Kinks approximation when I can listen to a song as confounding as this?