Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of The Dubs performing the classic Could This Be Magic.
CD Review
The Best Of The Dubs, The Dubs, Rhinos Records, 1991
Sometimes, and less frequently than you might imagine, a song and a moment meet, meet in the mind’s memory even many years afterward. I am not, repeat, not referring to such 1960s seminal songs as Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind or The Times They Are A-Changin’ which every ARRP-worthy baby-boomer commentator drags out when they want to cut up old torches about how they went mano y mano with the bad guys and gave up the best two years of their lives to the revolution back in the day before heading off to a life of dentistry or academia. No, enough of that. What I mean is those songs like The Dubs 1950s Could This Be Magic which formed the backdrop for more than one social setting, one teen social setting and that is all that counted, back in the day.
Now I do not know the fates of the individual members of The Dubs but the music business was, and is, a fast turnover place and so they may have just had their few moments of glory and then went back to the plumbing business, some office job, or wound up on some Skid Row, a not infrequent fate for many one-hit wonders. But for that one moment, for that one almost perfect expression of a song moment, from the opening drum roll to the crescendo-ing mix of voices to that final dramatic fade out, The Dubs captured our attention before we headed off to the plumbing business, some office job, or wound up on Skid Row, a not uncommon fate for those of that generation who fought and bled in Vietnam or got catch up in their own personal drug traumas. It was no accident that the director George Lucas when he put together the mood frame work of American Graffiti included Could This Be Magic as part of the soundtrack.
So that song formed the backdrop for fumbling, awkward Peter Paul Markin over in Adamsville, Massachusetts near the beach as he tried to figure out girls, figure them out in a hurry, figure them out in a very hurry since he had a date down at that very beach coming up in about two hours and after having dolled himself up enough (hair brushed, underarms coated, breathe freshened and re-freshened) he was fretting, fretting whether his arranged date (arranged by his corner boy Frankie Larkin, as usual) with Susie Murphy would product any sparks. Or another time, speaking of sparks, when he, riding “shotgun” in Frankie’s big old 1959 Dodge as they pulled, girl-less, into the Adventure Car-Hop Drive-In, looking to finish the busted evening out with burgers and shakes (and maybe a free look at Lannie, the hot new car-hop) and he spied her (name a secret , a secret unto death, just in case her descendants see this) a couple of cars over with her girls, boy-less, and she looked over and gave him the greatest come hither look of his uneventful young life. Or better yet, when he was at the freshman mixer, kind of new in town, kind of low man on the totem pole of the school etched- in- stone pecking order, he was feeling kind of blue (and, as usual, girl-less, school dance girl-less) holding up his end of a wallflower wall with head down, Luscious Lucy Lane (that is what she was called by one and all, including her parents) came over and ordered, ordered if you can believe this, him to dance that last dance school dance with her.
And the song came into play up in forlorn Olde Saco, Maine as well where Josh Breslin, poor, woe begotten Josh, new to the girl wars, was trying to beat the time of some foolish skee ball game down at the local arcade in order to win a rabbit’s foot for some misbegotten twelve year old girl who, off-handedly, called over from the Seal Rock sea wall that she thought Josh was cute. A couple of years later, veteran of the girl wars and decidedly more than cute according to local girl lore, Josh walking into Jimmy Jake’s Dinner (the one on Main Street set aside for teens not the one on Atlantic Avenue near the beach set aside for blue- haired ladies’ blue- plate specials and summer fast food-craving touristas) sits at his stool, his gathering stool, as Sandy Leclerc comes up, gives him a kiss on the cheek, and puts a quarter into the jukebox to play their song five times running. Later still, Josh and Debbie Dubois, sitting in the back seat of Jimmy Leblanc’s double-date 1961 Pontiac at the Olde Saco Drive-In Theater would “get in the mood” after putting the movie sound speaker back in its cradle and turning on all rock WMEX.
Finally Betty Becker down in Newport, Rhode Island, well before she met Josh Breslin out in the San Francisco summer of love 1967 night after he had blown in from dust-off Olde Saco in search of, well, just in search of, spun the platter on her record player up in her forlorn teen-age bedroom waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for, hell, what’s his name, to call. And, he, what’s his name, did. Later, when she had filled out, filled out nicely from all reports, especially filled out nicely in a bathing suit, and guys were waiting by the midnight phone for her call, she had new love Tommy Wordsworth III, ask the DJ to play it for them at the annual Newport Yacht Club Junior Dance. Then, then (before the summer of love 1967 turned things around in her head) when she had very good prospects of being asked the big question by Marvin Steele, the heir to the Hanson oil fortune, he had called and told her he had a big question ask her, well, you know what she had ready to play.
Could this be magic, indeed
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