Mark Anthony Neal

Critical Noir

Chasing Down a Memory

Posted 07/09/2007 at 12:32 PM | 2 comment/s

So this story begins in August of 1983, just weeks before I would leave the Boogie-Down for my first year of college. At the time, I was a big fan of Pop-Top-40 from the 1960s and 1970s - less an issue about an identity in flux, and more so just a need to hear the music that made the world I inhabited as a 17-year-old, nappy-headed negro from the South Bronx. My station of choice was WCBS-FM, which was still an oldies station at the time. One of my favorite programs on the station was their weekend countdown of the Top-20 charts in New York City during the late 1960s and 1970s. It was one of those countdown shows, highlighting the Top-20 from August of 1969, that was of particular interest to me. As a child, 1969 always held a special place in my heart, largely because of the Apollo 11 moon landing (I was a science nerd as a child, in many ways still a nerd) and the New York Mets, who improbably won the World Series that year. It was also the year (in August specifically) that Jr. Walker's "What Does in Take? (To Win Your Love)" hit the charts. As I recalled in What the Music Said nearly a decade ago, "What Does it Take?" connects me to my earliest memory of sharing music with my father. So as I sat there in August of 1983, listening to WCBS, I did so largely out of the expectation of hearing "What Does It Take?" (remember this is way before the digital revolution made back catalogues as readily accessible as they are now).

It was while sitting there that I heard a song which began, "when I die, I hope to be/a better man than you thought I could be." I never heard the name of the song or the artist that sang it, but damn if the song and that lyric didn't stay in my head for another 10 years. By that time I was in graduate school at the University of Buffalo, I heard the song in passing and again failed to hear what the song title was.

Okay, so we fast forward to last month and I'm in the Chicago area for a gig at the National Association of Women's Studies and about to have dinner with my friend and colleague Richard Iton, who is a straight up audiophile (to the point of addiction I might add). We're sitting in his car, and damn if I don't hear coming from his stereo, "When I die, I hope I'll be, the kind of man that you thought I could be."

The group is a multiracial group from Ontario called Motherlode and they had a top-20 hit during the summer of 1969 called "When I Die." Richard knew of the group because he's a native of Toronto, but his immediate reason for having a copy of the song in his car, was a recent post at OkayPlayer about J-Dilla's use of Motherlode's music on Donuts. "When I Die" is sampled on Donuts' "Intro." Given Detroit's proximity to Ontario, it not surprising that J-Dilla would have been familiar with Motherlode and it also explains, given the same issues with proximity, why I heard the song on a Buffalo radio station in the early 1990s.

Needless to say, I finally tracked down the song and once again, we can thank hip-hop for putting the pieces together.