Because All You Need is Love . . . Not

Last updated on: January 24, 2017 at 7:19 pm by Webster Bull

Because All You Need is Love . . . Not 2017-01-24T19:19:26-05:00 Webster Bull

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Watching the Red Sox try to hang on in their series against the Angels, I come up against a Blackberry ad using “All You Need is Love” as theme music. Love? I wonder. No, not all you need.

But “My Generation,” same as The Who’s, has been humming songs like this since the 1960s. They tell us, and we believe, don’t we, that we need nothing but someone to love us, or, same difference, “Somebody to Love,” the first big hit for Jefferson Airplane.

Why exactly did Crosby, Stills, and Nash tell us to “Carry On,” the first track on this album? Because “love is coming,” of course. “Love is coming to us all.”

Janis Joplin’s only #1 hit was “Me and Bobby McGee,” Kris Kristofferson’s bluesy ballad of romantic love. Kristofferson was Joplin’s “lover,” but how much good did that do her? Hey, but maybe “Feelin’ good is good enough for me.”

The Doors’ 1967 super hit was “Light My Fire,” about the hottest sort of love, baby. Which didn’t do a lot of good for Jim Morrison, now, did it?

Is it any surprise that the biggest, longest-lasting hit of the 1960s was “(Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”? Well, not really, no.

Somehow, I end up at 1st Corinthians 13, which must be the Biblical text used most often in weddings since the 1960s. “The greatest of these is love?” Sure thing. But does anyone ever give a thought at any of those profoundly romantic moments about the two cardinal virtues that come first?

Sox lose . . . What’s a good Catholic boy to do? . . . Root for the Angels, of course.

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