What did Richard and Karen sing?
Every Sha-la-la-la every Wo-o-o-o still shines…Every shing-a-ling that they’re starting to sing, so fine..
Those old melodies sound so good to me as they melt the years away
Just like before. It’s yesterday once more.
It’s “Yesterday Once More”? Yeah, they had no idea.
By that I mean it is…in fact… yesterday… once more… but, wo-o-o-oe… (note the spelling) and therefore not in the way that the Carpenters, George Lucas (American Graffiti), Gary Marshall (Happy Days) and Robert Stigwood (Grease) imagined.
More like the way John of Patmos envisioned.
+
In the book of Revelation, John gives us, in 3D and HD, a cinematic rendition of yet another terrestrial conflict and blissful resolution—but he was not the author or even director of this latest revival of the classic Story. He was just the distributor.
With a script written by the Father and directed by the Son, it was/is Jesus himself whose target demographic was not everybody, but “his servants.” He wanted them to know what was happening off-camera, so to speak, behind the scenes as the actors were trying to rewrite and revise the action and conclusion.
Jesus wanted his people to know that, while he was allowing some improvisation for a while, the outcome was sure—which would allow them to identify what was important to know what was a red herring.
Subtly, he reminded them of the original productions and first sequels: how God mastered the chaos in creation and then defeated Pharaoh in Egypt…so that now, in the latest revival starring Caesar in the role of Pharaoh as pretender to God’s throne, in knowing what must happen soon (but not so soon as to preclude some mischief and suffering), they would be prepared to endure and overcome, singing as they went.
Revelation became a classic for a whole generation. And now, yet once again in our own day, “The End Continues,” as Marti DiBergi puts it: indeed, as in that mocumentary, the old players are once again in place: the Dragon, the Beast, the False Prophet/s, the elect who are compromised and led astray, the restless earth and the prayers of the saints.
Indeed, it is Yesterday. Once. More.
As we join John to watch the scene unfold, we hear what could fairly be called a soundtrack, though not in the background. No less than twenty-eight times in 22 chapters we hear songs or scraps of songs. Their purpose? To fence in the unholy Trinity and its converts and minions until, in the near future, the earth itself is calmed and all is at rest (at least until the next time the Dragon escapes and finds a Beast to do his destructive bidding, and false prophets to grease the skids; but in fact the Beast is always on the loose somewhere, as in a game of whack-a-mole, until the Mole is whacked for good). As such, the soundtrack we hear in Revelation is quite unlike torch songs for an imagined or cherry-picked past.
+
Yesterday Once More, the Carpenters’ biggest hit, came out in May of 1973. Where were you in 1973? What was happening in the world? Or in your world?
My memories of that time are vivid. I could tell you stories about that summer’s stuff and ephemeral nonsense. What I remember most, though, were moments of pure gravitas: when, with others on break, I raced into the commons there to find off-shift folk who had gathered for the day around a small b/w TV with a coat hanger for an antennae, to watch a fuzzy Sam Ervin, a snowy Howard Baker, a young Fred Thompson and others conduct the Watergate hearings. I do not think I am making it up when I say (though I could be as I have seen the clip so many times) that in late June, I do believe I actually saw John Dean testify that he had told Mr. Nixon, “There is a cancer growing on the presidency.”
It’s yesterday once more.
American Graffiti cruised into theaters in August of 1973. Together with It’s Yesterday Once More, George Lucas’ ode to chrome, horsepower and the “coming of age” reversals that will soon overtake its principals, the movie is credited with launching a nostalgia craze that many turned to for so much brain floss. Or a kind of national mikveh. We didn’t want to come of age in the decade just past!
In fact, crucially, the movie was set only 10 years before its actual (in real time) release date; the soundtrack Sha-la-la-la’d our memories of a “simpler” time when, before Vietnam and assassinations and Nixon, we could consider the possibility that the Pharaohs were not so much a gang as, really, “just-need-some-love” low-wattage bullies whose mom’s didn’t breast feed them (see also: the Fonz).
Wouldn’t it be nice, we might have sighed, if the crisis du jour was that the Wolfman’s popsicles were melting? And, that the only real drama was Bob Falfa and his stealthy black ’57 Chevy looking for John Milner and his yellow Deuce Coup?
Parable Alert! Falfa drives the prototypical, essential “American” muscle car, emblematic of free enterprise and four-barrel carburetors; and it was “pulling ahead” of the Ford but could not hold the line (that is why it lost control, crashed and burned)—at every point this scene seems commentary. At least to my eye. And begs the question of soundtrack.
The soundtrack of American Graffiti comprised the very songs the Carpenters’ lamented. The same kinds of songs that we heard on Happy Days, which in many markets came on right after the evening news. In the former we reviewed the grim index of things of which Richie, Potsy and the rest had no notion, as they could still find their thrill on Blueberry Hill and nobody knew from RFK and MLK, of riots and Watts and fires and the national guard invading the cities and suppressing protests. No mention of Selma or forced segregation because we needed reminding that we may have appeared to be bad guys, but really, we were good guys, if you looked at the reels with the right set of glasses. And if you didn’t look at My Lai or Kent State.
By the time we danced at Rydell High, the bad guys were really good guys and the good guys… were really wussies. The Scorpions, the T’birds—even the Pink Ladies—were not really gangs (just as the Fonz was not what we used to call a hood, but the kind of mannerly gang member who was always welcome for supper).
With the help of nostalgia and its sound track, our view of reality gradually grew as blurred as the screen during one of those 3-D horror movies of the 50’s. You remember: how you had to put on special glasses to clarify what, without them, the naked eye processed as overlapping colors and shapes. With them, the colors and spacings found their proper arrangement so that you could identify who was the good guy, who was the monster, and where the real action was.
Of late it seems to me that we have been, at best, without clarifying lenses and by now are really confused—like those folk in Revelation who do not have faith enough to see that there is an essential conflict between the current Empire and the gospel.
It’s yesterday once more.
But worse, today, because if some people are not wearing their glasses at all, other people are wearing the wrong glasses. Not the corrective lenses John (and the rest of the NT) provides, but revisionist lenses, which prevent people from seeing how Caesar is exalting his own throne, gilding his borrowed precincts, not counting the cost.
He has deployed troops against his own people, some of them veterans; he has occupied the cities, or is about to: He has hamstrung a confused Third Estate economically; he has worked against the freedom of the Fourth Estate with gaslight, playground ridicule and expulsion. He has changed the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War and promises soon that Chicago will know what it means for us to have a Department of War. He is drawing harsh racial lines. He is shooting first, asking questions later. There have been political assassinations and attempted assassinations by both sides against the other. There are false prophets. There are CINO’s who would eviscerate or abandon the gospel of peace Jesus preached. There are AINO’s who would set aside the Constitution and the Founders and make their own laws for what will become their own nation. Praying I am wrong, I foresee: martial law, postponed elections, an “emergency extension” of the president’s tenure and a puppet Supreme Court to rubberstamp it all. Forget the philandering, the business fraud, the enriching himself by means of the office, the mafioso style of influence-peddling, the egregious waste of money on his golf outings. Forget the mayor with the bleeding hair getting the Medal of Freedom. No doubt another will be awarded posthumously. The wealthy are prospering, the poor are languishing—and are vilified. Are we ready for indentured servitude?
It's yesterday once more.
So where can we find the right kind of glasses? With Corrective Lenses? That will show us, for another example, that God intends to destroy those who destroy the earth (Revelation 11:18). Reading the text gives us the prescription that will allow us to make out who the real Beast is, as well as his False Prophets and toadies.
And if we look, we will also hear.
A soundtrack. Real Oldies! Praise. Defiant Doxology.
What John sees is clear—the Dragon, the Beast, the False Prophet, the stakes, the elect who have been led astray—and what he hears is also clear: praise to fence in the bad guys, to interrupt and finally finish their mischief and evil.
With the help of Jesus, angels and elders, John looks straight into the abyss that is driving others to hopelessness, or nostalgic revision, or abdication, and he hears…doxology. Clarifying and defiant praise..
He names the idols and calls out our idolatries all the while hearing “Hallelujah” to the one true God.
In chapters four and five—the heavenly host sing praise to God before the first rider ever rides: Holy, Holy, Holy God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!
In chapter fifteen, we hear again the song of Miriam and Moses, after Pharaoh’s soldiers were drowned in the sea. In chapter nineteen, after the Dragon and Beast and False Prophet are defeated, there is the voice of a great multitude, the sound of all the oceans, like the sound of many thunderpeals… Hallelujah! For the Lord our God Almighty reigns!
Twenty-eight times in Revelation there are songs and scraps of songs—for example in chapter eleven, just after the angel blows the seventh trumpet, loud voices in heaven say, The kingdom of the world, has become, the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever.
Now that is an oldie, y’all, and as contemporary as it can be, and the soundtrack for tomorrow.
How did Richard and Karen sing it?
All my best memories come back clearly to me, some can even make me cry.
Yes, and give me chill bumps besides. Because the songs are not just our best memories, but our best hopes.
Just like before…and just like it will be in times to come and anytime a Beast claims the earth as his or her own. And when that happens, it will be yesterday once more. Again,
And time then, as it always is, to Sing! Sing! Sing!