Local Motion

No to be too much of diarist, but I've had a weekend that demands recuperation. Little Eva's 1962 offering, "The Loco-motion," does the trick. My first clear memory of the song (it seems to be one of those tunes with which we have an inborn familiarity) was from a mildly traumatic jazz and tap class that I attended for a few months in a church basement aged eight (at a shlubby friend's behest). We shuffle-ball-changed a lot, and we had these awkward solos, the sort where all of the girls gather in a corner and each get a chance to leap/free dance across the floor. Sometimes the teacher would ask us to "vamp" or "model-walk." Sometimes we would practice bonafide choreographed numbers, one, a precious tap dance to Elvis's "Teddy Bear," and the other, a sort of conga-line set to "The Loco-motion." The teacher had a dickens of a time choosing which version, Little Eva or Kylie Minogue, we would ultimately perform alongside; so we rehearsed with both. I skipped that performance and never returned to the class—partially because the instructor had asked that we wear "Christmas sweatshirts" on stage and partially because I had a "date" with Niel Bartlett that night.

Ever since, I had a not pleasant or unpleasant, relatively peripheral relationship with the song, though I was pretty interested in the paternalistic story of her "discovery" by domestic employer, Carole King. Only recently have I begun to hear it unfettered by it's own "oldie-ness," it's childhood jazz and tap class appeal. "The Loco-motion" is loose and soulful and and reservedly optimistic, urging the listener to chug forward, to simply accept the natural tilt of things, claiming "I know you'll get to like it if you give it a chance now." It's a bit of a quarter-life anthem. Here, an abreviated version from a 1963 appearance on Shindig—