Purple Collection 3 (Fortune)

Posessed of the saddest ever of all guitar riffs, this is perhaps the most beautiful song on the Purple Collection (if not the whole of recorded sound). I especially get chills at the part at the end when Lawrence says, "I need you!" and a girl's voice comes in very faintly with a countermelody that lasts throughout the verse. So, so sublime. Just beyond all rational reason. Maurice Deebank is my Hendrix.A fortuitous iPod shuffle has caused this to be associated in my memory with late night drives to my parents' house. There is a long stretch of Highway 59 between Sallisaw and Stilwell where there is absolutely nothing but trees and,in the summer, the drone of 10 trillion crickets. This song came on one night as I was driving over Mt Eldon, where the grade has so sudden a drop that your car is pointed almost straight down and you can see (if the moon is bright) for miles and miles. On a different night, a white owl swooped in front of my headlights on that same strecth of 59. I'll never forget it rearing blazing up out of the dark, all eyes.So, believe it or not, this most British of songs evokes the hilly Western Oklahoma landscape more than any other in my miswired brain.