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Playa del Rey and Venice Beach, California
7:05 p.m.: Seated at a fine restaurant. Intelligent, attractive, interesting and sometimes flammable man on one side of the table. Me across.
Trout with almonds. Carrot soup. Half a bottle of chardonnay. Mountain elk.
Dessert: the one on the cover of a magazine that made me want to dip my finger onto the page and come away with a drip of chocolate. The photo that led us here.
The Persuasions have lasted for over forty years as a recording group. But they experienced their golden era in the early Seventies, fostered by Frank Zappa. Zappa’s Straight label released the first Persuasions recording in 1970. As the story goes, Zappa was introduced to them by David Dashev, the band’s manager, over the phone. Despite the tinny audio of telephonics, Zappa was hooked. Long a lover of early doo-wop, he flew the group out to Los Angeles, set up a concert and recorded it. The rest is history, sort of. The Persuasions never became the household name that the Temptations did, that Smoky Robinson and the Miracles did, that Zappa himself is, despite years of touring and recording a song that was included in Steven Spielberg’s movie, “E.T.”
You don’t come of age in any measurable amount of time. Some people find they’re still passing through teenage well into their midlife crisis. Some find they never knew what teenage was to begin with.
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