The instant I saw this week's word, my brain took a time travel trip and said, "Listen To The Warm" by Rod McKuen
"It doesn't matter who you love, or how you love, but that you love"
--Rod McKuen
Suddenly there I was in Northern California with a hippie brother in law and his friends camping out on the floors of our terribly middle class tract home and cooking their macrobiotic recipes in our kitchen while strange smells wafted from the smoke drifting in from the patio. They eventually finished hitch hiking their way to San Francisco where there just happens to be a street by the name of Stanyan.
Over the next few years, you couldn't go anywhere without seeing Rod McKuen's name on a book, on a record, being interviewed on TV, translating the work of Jaques Brell and having his songs sung by everyone from Glenn Yarborough to Frank Sinatra. I loved the poetry and the music and that mellow voice describing all sorts of intimacies among the shadows of blowing draperies across tumbled sheets of a well used bed. Romantics all over the world became more than a little overheated to the sound and words of Rod McKuen.
Imagine my surprise more than four decades later to find that Mr. McKuen is still writing, still performing, still traveling, and still rattling more than a few cages. What's more he has web pages and a bibliography which you can access through the link on his name above. As an alternative, you can just sit back and listen to the warm with a story about "A Cat Named Sloopy".
or "Jean" The Oscar nominated song written and performed by Rod McKuen for the film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
And last, the McKuen English lyrics to a beautiful Jaques Brel song
sung by Julio Iglesias - if you go away - ne me quitte pas
