I’ve long been under the impression that I’m not supposed to like The Sound of Music, the last album credited to the dB’s during their original run. (Reunions happen.) In the canon of cool, the first dB’s album justly holds an honored place with every subsequent effort a dissipating echo. Certainly declaring allegiance to one of the albums recorded after band co-founder and stellar pop songwriter Chris Stamey is highly suspect. And yet the record that has the strongest nostalgic pull for me is not the masterful Stands for Decibels. It is indeed that final album. It is The Sound of Music.

Don’t get me wrong. Stands for Decibels is by far the better album, the sort of true pop gem that belongs in any self-respecting music fan’s collection. The Sound of Music is, as these things often go, the album that served as my clearest introduction to the band. The college radio station where I landed in the late nineteen-eighties had a couple different releases from the dB’s, but it didn’t have that exemplary debut. As I recall, it was fairly hard to come by at the time, but it was probably more of a case of any original version the station might have had having long since slipped out the door in some bad kid’s book bag. I’m not sure exactly why I gravitated to The Sound of Music, but that was the release I found myself going back to repeatedly, exploring every one of the songs nestled in those grooves. It was the type of album that engendered the most enduring gratitude in me as a deejay, in that it was terrific no matter where the needle was dropped.

So for today, I’m just going to drop the needle. I have no story to convey about “Working for Somebody Else.” There’s no momentous experience in the listening and no particular time when I related to it deeply, setting my life’s course on a different past. It’s just good.

Listen or download –> The dB’s, “Working for Somebody Else”

(Disclaimer: Okay, I think The Sound of Music is out of print as a physical item that can be ordered and then purchased from your favorite local, independently-owned record store. It’s probably not all that easy to find a used copy either. It does seem to be available digitally, but we all know how suspect that process is in terms of seeing to it that the artists and songwriters get paid properly. So by posting this and sharing it, I intend to cause no fiscal harm to anyone. Well, maybe Amazon, but we’re all rooting against them this week, right? Anyway. I will gladly remove the song from this little corner of the interweb if asked to do so by someone with due authority to make such a request.)