Hi, We're The Miracles

 Some years ago, and dating it from his book, Music, it must have been in 2009, I went to see August Kleinzahler at the LRB Bookshop, there in uptown Holborn, Baby. Not many poetry readings were quite as memorable before or since. I had the sheer nerve to present the maestro with my latest little book. I'd taken it to give to somebody else if I saw them there. Roddy Lumsden, actually, but it turned out Roddy was in the bar next door unaware that August was reading only those few yards away. Jeez, when your luck's out, it all turns to a pile of chalk. I'll bet you my last cent to your bottom dollar that my paltry poems when flying out that airplane window, if it got that far but maybe I gave it away, as I usually do, whereas I gave him hard cash for his book which was what he had come for. I guess Roddy wouldn't have wanted those poems any more than he did.

Not many poets can spin round at the start of a reading and not look like some kinda goofball, but, hell, Mrs. Kleinzahler's boy could, and did, and he somehow gotten away with it. And then he said, Hi, I'm Archie Bell & the Drells. Sure, you need to know who they were before that means as much as a handful of chorizos but, boy, I gotta tell ya, it worked for me.

Which is all by way of introduction to Hi, We're The Miracles, the first of the five early Motown albums contained in The Sounds of Detroit which turns out to be two discs, not five. That's how compact compact discs are compared to LP's but I'm sure generations junior to me would find that laughable when they know that all the pop music ever made now takes up no space whatsoever on a megaverse of downloads. 

Hi, We're The Miracles is sensational, it's doo-wop, its to Tamla Motown what ska was to reggae, what the blues was to rock and it's gorgeous. The Good Lord only knows what treasure is waiting for me on Meet the Supremes.