▶︎ Baby (You've Got What It Takes)

Listen again to Baby (You've Got What It Takes), that bouncy, light-hearted duet by Brook Benton and Dinah Washington (1960).

At 2:03 Brook launches into the verse, and so does Dinah. She quickly pushes him aside with, "You're in my spot again, honey" and takes over. Brook throws in, "I like your spot!" and they recover enough to finish the song. Dinah gets in one more swipe at 2:17, though, when she prompts, "Now it's you..."

For me, it's another case of having missed a detail in a song I'd listened to often over the decades. I found out about it only after I read Robert Pruter's notes to the reissue of The Two Of Us, the album that included four Washington-Benton duets, including the hits Baby (You've Got What It Takes) and its follow-up, A Rockin' Good Way (To Mess Around And Fall In Love).

I've always thought the appeal of the duets was down to the fact that they obviously liked each other so much. It's disillusioning to find that the album was rounded off with some solo songs because in the end they couldn't be persuaded to put up with each other long enough to complete a whole album of duets.

The two hit duets (#5 and #7 Billboard) are full of good-humored asides and banter between these two great, great singers, and the goof-up in Baby (You've Got What It Takes) lasts only 4 seconds, so somehow the detail just passed me by.

As Pruter tells it, Brook Benton was annoyed that producer Clyde Otis released the take with the gaff in it (he thought it was cute, and the record sold anyway). Not only that, but Brook had to be restrained by Ray Charles in a nightclub when he took umbrage at a crack Dinah made onstage about his work on the duets.

Enough! I'm sticking with the CD and its bonus tracks, revelling in the delicious arrangements of Belford Hendricks and the flawless production by Clyde Otis, not to mention the smooth and warm singing of Benton and Washington. Perfect, really.

▶︎ Attention all personnel...

David Long, at his M*A*S*H fansite Best Care Anywhere, has not only identified the actors who did the PA announcements in M*A*S*H (Sal Viscuso and Todd Susman) but he's actually on the way to transcribing every announcement and listing them, episode by episode.

Attention all personnel. By order of Major Frank Burns, lights out in ten minutes sharp. Anyone not in their own beds at that time will have to spend the night wherever they are.

This kind of obsessive fandom you just have to admire.

The site's front page is at BestCareAnywhere.net.

▶︎ It's Always a Good Idea to Attach the Head Set (1921)

Over at Allan Holtz's comic strip blog, the excellent (but mischievously named) Stripper's Guide, there are three panels of Today's Hook-up from the early 1920s . This was a daily cartoon by J.C. Henderson that sent up the new craze for radio.

The radio aficionadoes in Today's Hook-up are obsessed with pulling in that signal (hard work at times, apparently) and checking those program guides, to the point of neglecting everything else.

You can't help being reminded of the Internet, especially when it was just taking off and people were struggling with setting up their new computers and connections and, yes, getting a bit obsessed in the process.

There's a frustrated listener in the first panel who has 'worked and worked for over an hour' and 'didn't get a thing'. He's forgotten the classic first step of any tech support protocol: First and foremost, check to make sure all cables and cords are plugged in and firmly seated.

Or, as the caption says, It's Always A Good Idea To Attach The Head Set.

▶︎ The sounds of not listening properly

I bought Simon and Garfunkel's album Bookends when it came out in 1968. I nearly wore out the vinyl on my copy over the summer of '68-'69.

But it wasn't until I listened to it on my mp3 player this afternoon that I heard, sampled in the background of Save The Life of My Child, the opening vocal from their 1965 hit The Sounds of Silence: Hello darkness my old friend/ I've come to talk with you again. It's at 1.20-1.26, during that spaced-out instrumental break.

I know I'm a poor listener, but I can't believe it took me nearly forty years to notice it.