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Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth by Zach Schonfeld
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Blue Moves
Matthew Restall
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Restall, Matthew, 1964- author.
Title: Blue moves / Matthew Restall.
Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Series: 33 1/3 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019050910 | ISBN 9781501355424 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501355431 (epub) | ISBN 9781501355448 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: John, Elton. Blue moves. | John, Elton–Criticism and interpretation. | Popular music–1971-1980–History and criticism.
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019050910
ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-5542-4
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to my mother, for sharing classical music to my father, for sharing jazz and to both, for letting me be a pop kid and in memory of gus dudgeon (1942–2002)
roger pope (1947–2013) paul buckmaster (1946–2017)
james newton howard (1951–2018) daryl dragon (1942–2019)
Track Listing
Side One
Your Starter for . . . (1′22″)
Tonight (7′52″)
One Horse Town (5′56″)
Chameleon (5′27″)
Side Two
Boogie Pilgrim (6′03″)
Cage the Songbird (3′25″)
Crazy Water (5′42″)
Shoulder Holster (5′08″)
Side Three
Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word (3′47″)
Out of the Blue (6′14″)
Between Seventeen and Twenty (5′17″)
The Wide-Eyed and Laughing (3′27″)
Someone’s Final Song (4′10″)
Side Four
Where’s the Shoorah? (4′09″)
If There’s a God in Heaven (What’s He Waiting For?) (4′25″)
Idol (4′08″)
Theme from a Non-Existent TV Series (1′19″)
Bite Your Lip (Get Up and Dance!) (6′41″)
1
A Dumb but Gorgeous One-Night Stand
Blue Moves is an Elton John album. It is not his best. It is also very far from being the best selling of his thirtyfive studio LPs. While everyone has heard of Elton John—he is the best-selling male recording artist of all time—few are familiar with this 1976 double album. Blue Moves is a record that does not seem to stand out, at best a footnote marking the end of the singer’s unprecedented run of seven US #1 LPs, ushering in decades of mediocre product redeemed only by a Disney soundtrack and a retread of an old song in honor of a departed princess. So why write a book about it? Why not write about Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, which outsold Blue Moves by a factor of ten, and which to this day is John’s most critically acclaimed album? Why Blue instead of Yellow? I cannot answer that question without diverting you into my personal experience. For music is intrinsically personal. Like the proverbial tree that falls in the forest, without a listener—someone to lower a needle or pull a disc off a shelf or click a playlist or choose not to switch channels, and
then, to have a personal response, to experience a flood of emotional associations—a piece of music does not exist. While true of all music, it seems particularly true of pop/ rock. The personal experience of mine that resulted in this book was an utterly mundane moment, revealed only in retrospect to be one of those numerous little “time-stopping exclamation points that punctuate all our lives.”1 But the moment planted a seed of a steadily growing mystery that I felt compelled to solve.
I was digging through a box of old cassettes, looking for a jazz mixtape that my father had made me when I was a schoolboy in England; he was turning eighty, and I had an idea to reciprocate, decades later, in some grand way. I found it beside other old mixtapes, one titled Eltonian (for some long-lost reason), and beneath that, a stash of Elton John cassettes. Some were store bought, others pirate copies bought on the streets of Caracas or Jakarta (I had a peripatetic upbringing), others custom created. They stretched from Empty Sky, John’s debut album, released in 1969 in the UK only, and without success, to Leather Jackets, his dismal 1986 release, often cited as the lowest quality and sales point of his career.
The time capsule ended there. I suspected none of the tapes had been played since 1986. In between relative failures Empty Sky and Leather Jackets were albums that were massive hits, like Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and lifetime favorites of mine, like Madman Across the Water, that I had long since duplicated on vinyl and CD. But others I had forgotten, and in a couple of cases—the 35-minute train wreck that is Victim of Love (1979)—so had the rest of the world. And then at the
A DUMB BUT GORGEOUS ONE-NIGHT STAND
bottom of the stack lay my original store-bought cassette of Blue Moves.
I picked up the cassette box, removed the tape, turned it over in my hands, read the track listing—and stepped into a time machine. I had overplayed this tape all through my teens. It was a witness to my youth. If it could talk, it could tell tales. Which of course it can, but—and here’s the best part—only I can understand them. Like the connection between a person and their conception of God, the tie that develops over the years between a piece of music and a listener is profoundly personal.
But this book is not about tales of my youth; it is not a memoir, at least not of that ilk. There was more to my reaction that day than the predictable prompting of nostalgic recollections. Although I had not played this tape since 1986, I had listened to Blue Moves on vinyl and in digital form over the decades, with a few tracks migrating onto mixtapes and playlists. The album has had an afterlife in my own life, as well as in the larger world of pop history. All along, there was something that intrigued me—bothered me, really—about the LP’s fate. By trade I am a historian, trained to view texts from the past as ingredients to be mixed with other carefully selected ingredients and then served up as a coherent dish, a story spiced with analysis and argumentation. And viewed as an historical source, as an ingredient in a larger story of some kind, Blue Moves always struck me as a conundrum.
Upon its release in October 1976, the LP shot up the charts. Its lead single, “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word,” was soon all over the radio. The previous summer, John’s duet with Kiki Dee, “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart,” had
been #1 for weeks on both sides of the Atlantic. Just when it seemed his core canon of hits must be complete, another came along. In the first half of the ’70s, Elton sold more records than the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, and the ex-Beatles did in that entire decade—combined. The quirky, pudgy, piano-playing prodigy from Pinner (a London suburb you’d be forgiven for never having heard of) was the biggest pop star in the world. In 1975 alone, the public had paid more than $60 million for Elton John recordings and concert tickets, making him the highest earner in music history. Elton was “solely responsible for 2 percent of global record sales,” as one biographer put it. “Put simply, one in every fifty albums sold in the world that year was an Elton John record.” In the words of another, “He was not only a musical legend; he was an industry unto himself.”2 For six years, it had seemed as if he could do no wrong, and now he was moving into a seventh year in the stratosphere.
But then came the reviews of Blue Moves. They ranged from mixed to murderous. John Tobler wrote in ZigZag that it was “absolutely essential listening” and Mick Brown of Sounds concluded it was “a disappointment in some areas; a triumph in others,” but Robert Christgau gave the LP a C in the Village Voice, calling it “impossibly weepy and excessive.” Christgau echoed the verdict of his wife, who asked him as the record played, “What is this tripe?” Ariel Swartley was unflinching in her condemnation of Blue Moves as “one of the most desperately pretentious albums around . . . the musical equivalent of a dumb but gorgeous one-night stand”; her review in Rolling Stone would be quoted for years as having accurately predicted the album’s career-stopping
A DUMB BUT GORGEOUS ONE-NIGHT STAND
impact. “It sounds like it’s time for John to take a rest,” she concluded. Decades later, biographers and critics would echo her with remarks like “the release of the Blue Moves album was the end of an era for Elton,” stating that the double LP was “a career-freezing mess.”3
Elton John would spend so much of the ’80s and to some extent the ’90s as a critics’ punching bag, a pop artist decidedly on the wrong side of the cool/uncool divide built and policed by music writers, that it is easy to forget how favored he was by them in the early ’70s. It is almost impossible to be cool and commercial at the same time, to be popular and be a darling of the critics; but for a few glorious years, he managed it. Until Blue Moves, the album that seemed to bring that rare run to a halt. Chart disappointment followed negative press, as the album stalled at #3 in both the United Kingdom and the United States, with that lead single peaking at #3 in Canada, lower elsewhere. A couple of follow-up singles released in 1977 did poorly. Elton announced his retirement. He stopped touring. His run at the top was over. Rock music had moved on.
And yet #3 is not a bad place to be. Even better to hit that spot in both the major English-speaking markets, as well as entering the Top 12 in ten additional countries. Such numbers reflect sales, and the LP would before long move over three million copies worldwide. So the notion that it was a failure so catastrophic as to terminate Elton John’s career—breaking up his legendary songwriting partnership with lyricist Bernie Taupin, forcing him into retirement, condemning him to decades of critical abuse, necessitating a series of challenging comebacks—didn’t quite make sense. There had to be more to the story.
Similarly, while there was no shortage of claims by critics—from the closing years of the ’70s through the ’80s—that John was a has-been, there was also abundant evidence that he was still around. Amid the bad publicity, canceled tours, stalled or ill-received album projects, failed singles, and tabloid cruelty, the hits never stopped coming. After all, how many retirements and comebacks add up to rendering both concepts redundant? “I’m Still Standing” indeed.4 Full redemption would come too, to a spectacular degree: post-rehab, Elton became famous again, his infamy receding; in the ’90s, he recovered personally, publicly, and professionally. But by then, Blue Moves was long forgotten. The early peak was seen as 1973’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road or 1975’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. Blue Moves was buried at the beginning of the bad years. Biographers and critics wondered whether Blue Moves actually caused the end of the John/Taupin golden age, or if it was simply collateral damage from the partnership’s explosive ending.
Either way, little light was shed on the years immediately following the album’s release. Writers tended to breeze through the late ’70s as being less interesting than John’s meteoric stardom of the early ’70s; his cocaine-fueled comebacks and tabloid-covered tumbles of the ’80s; his elevation to the knighthood and rock royalty in the ’90s; and the septuagenarian’s colossal three-year Farewell Yellow Brick Road world tour. As with the real Queen of England, even nonfans marvel not only that Elizabeth and Elton are still going, but that they are doing so with apparent ease and elegance.
A DUMB BUT GORGEOUS ONE-NIGHT STAND
If we pan back to take in Elton John’s entire half-century career, Blue Moves and its story seem to fade into a flurry of superlatives. He is the third best-selling recording artist, all categories combined, after the Beatles and Madonna, with total sales somewhere north of 350 million. If we add soundtracks, compilations, hits collections, and live albums to his thirty-five studio albums, the tally is over eighty-five— and counting. The campily titled hits package Diamonds (2017) is his fortieth album of any kind to enter the Top 40. Meanwhile, John put a single in the US Billboard Hot 100 every year from 1971 through to 2000 (another all-time record)—breezing right through those supposedly careerdead years after Blue Moves. The best-selling single of all time, selling 33 million copies (again, and counting) is his, released two decades after his early ’70s peak period (although its original version was from 1973; I am talking about “Candle in the Wind,” of course). His list of awards reads like a list of all the awards it is possible for an acclaimed musician to win: five Grammys (from thirty-four nominations), five Brit Awards, a Golden Globe, a Tony, and an Oscar. Since 1998, he has been Sir Elton John.
Then there is Blue Moves itself. There would be no conundrum if the album was simply not very good. But here’s the thing: it is a four-sided masterpiece. It is as fantastic as Captain Fantastic and as colorful as Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. It rivetingly combines the three elements—piano-playing troubadour, full orchestra, and rock band—with which John and his collaborators redirected the evolution of popular music. The LP was a peak point, not an end point. If not his
best (if not the peak), it comes close. At the very least, it is among his most intriguing and illustrative albums, one that helps to explain both his explosive career before the LP’s release in 1976 and his bumpy yet ultimately stratospheric career after it. In other words, it is his pivotal album, the one upon which his creative life turned.
Such praise for the album is hardly objective appraisal. But what if we circle around my taste (one of this book’s leitmotifs is the whimsy of taste, the mimetic way in which consumers flock to embrace or abandon an artist), and dispassionately analyze the album’s musical style and lyrical tone? We find that on the four black vinyl sides of Blue Moves, John, his band, and the legendary producer Gus Dudgeon created an eighteen-song set that in various ways articulated the pop-cultural moment into which it was launched—and fizzled. The pianist-singer gave full musical expression to the emotional life of lyricist Taupin, more so than on any other album; and he was able to be himself, or rather, himselves— both Reginald Kenneth Dwight and Elton Hercules John.
In interviews, the album’s creators seemed conscious of pieces of the story but unaware how all its elements tied together. “I just love it!” John would declare, or he would call it “one of my favorites,” a sentiment echoed by Taupin.5 Dudgeon insisted he had wanted to edit it down to a single album, yet, like its writers and musicians, he was proud of what was created, dismayed by its initial poor reception, and delighted—yet bemused—by its afterlife. No member of the Blue Moves creative team clearly explained why the album fared as it did. Their perspectives only deepened the conundrum.
So the album’s history remained a mystery that followed me for decades. A simple “why?” is often the nagging demand that impels someone to write a book. In this case: Why did a successful album fail? The question so intrigued me, from the moment I held that rediscovered cassette tape, that I decided to try to solve it—even though I’d not planned to write about the album or Elton John or indeed pop music at all. My goal is not just to argue that Blue Moves deserves to be heard, but to explain why it has not been heard enough. More than that, I explore the afterlife it has gradually come to enjoy, leading to a satisfying inversion of the “why?” question above: Why did a failed album succeed?
The eighteen tracks of Blue Moves are discussed in modest detail in the middle chapters. But I am more concerned with the album’s story, presented not as a musicological study, but as pop history. My primary purpose is to solve the album’s puzzle, rather than bang on about how much I love the record. That said, whether John is to your liking or not, I urge you to nudge your taste aside and give the album a listen (and not “just on those crappy little speakers built into your computer,” to borrow from Jonathan Lethem’s opening exhortation to his Fear of Music). If Elton is simply too uncool for you, then please consider (to borrow from another contributor to this series) scaling “the haughty fortifications of sarcastic conditioning that pose as critical wit” and playing Blue Moves. And play it loud.6
No one factor explains this album’s fate; the solution lies in the intersection of multiple factors. Explored below is the significance of events like the first appearance on British television of the Sex Pistols—inspiring “The Filth and the
Fury” newspaper headline that helped make the interview a milestone in music history. Blue Moves had been out just weeks. In the ensuing months, punk captured the limelight, first in the United Kingdom, then the United States. Punk’s violent insertion of class issues into pop music, combined with its insistence that attitude trumped talent, instantly turned into dinosaurs the likes of Elton John—the ultimate millionaire virtuoso pop star of the day. Thus right as Blue Moves emerged, the larger popular culture of the album era shifted dramatically, leaving the LP to be “trampled to invisibility by the punk rock horde” (as one critic later put it).7
Starting in 1977, the megastar recording artists who had ruled the decade struggled to catch the wave of change and not get sucked under turbulent waters. One of the failed singles from Blue Moves—“Crazy Water”—now seems like a metaphor for the moment. John picked a poor time to change boats: by 1976, he, Taupin, and Dudgeon were finally free from contractual obligations to release an album on Rocket Records, the label they had founded in 1973. But they made a pricey double that was inevitably compared to their previous double. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was one of the most successful albums of all time; combined with the hit records and concerts that followed, it created impossibly high expectations. Meanwhile, John’s previous label deflected commercial attention away from Blue Moves with a stream of back-catalog releases.
There were other factors. The lyrics Taupin delivered for the album’s recording sessions articulated his struggle with a failing marriage. The same relationship that had produced
A DUMB BUT GORGEOUS ONE-NIGHT STAND
“Tiny Dancer,” “Harmony,” and the other love songs that were treasured by fans now inspired songs of heartbreak— to the unhappy surprise of critics. Then two weeks before the release of Blue Moves, a cover interview with John appeared in Rolling Stone, in which he claimed “everybody’s bisexual”—himself included. In the United States, the negative press, public record burnings, and radio station bans did permanent damage to John’s popularity—just as similar revelations would irreversibly harm the images of Freddie Mercury, Boy George, George Michael, and others. Homophobia threatened to sink the new album. Meanwhile, John’s riveting concert performances, an annual average of over eighty, often to record-breaking audiences, had fueled his international Rocket Man stardom. But in 1976 and 1977, he made repeated retirement announcements. His concert average fell to just six a year. His career appeared to have collapsed.
It had not, of course. The circumstances of an album’s making, the story of its youth and death and resurrection, combine to reveal something bigger than the album itself. In the case of Blue Moves, the album’s conundrum—how it was a success that failed, and yet also a failure that succeeded— acts as a window onto the dynamic interaction between pop music and popular culture in the great album era of the late twentieth century. Eventually, the circumstances and contexts that troubled Blue Moves in its early years receded and faded. The album persisted; it survives still. The thread connecting 1976 to the present was not broken by the late ’70s after all.
2
Just as Good
It was a stroke of bad luck that first brought me Blue Moves. By the autumn of 1977 I had saved up enough pocket money to buy a couple of new albums. I turned thirteen that year, and moved to a new school, where I lived in a dorm room with five other boys. There was no question of having a record player; my only option was a portable radio cassette player, which I kept in a locked wooden box, with a few dozen cassettes, under my bed.
That autumn I listened avidly to the weekly UK charts as they were read out on the radio, pondering what to buy when I could next afford a new cassette, enjoying the prolonged aural window-shopping. I could also hear the thumps and wails of ’70s pop and rock wafting down the corridor to my dorm room from the rooms of the older boys. When the Top 20 singles chart was played every Sunday night, I taperecorded parts of it, creating my own versions of the hit parade as it evolved from week to week. The only stations we could receive were BBC Radio 1 and—barely—Radio Luxembourg, which broadcast from a ship in the North Sea in order to
avoid stringent British broadcasting laws. We reveled in its illegality, while breaking school rules listening to it at night on mono earbuds—a double frisson of lawbreaking.
Elvis Presley had died that August, so the airwaves were full of his old songs. But the compilations of his hits that cluttered up the album charts held little appeal. Already familiar, the songs soon felt even older. Big albums from America—like Hotel California and Rumours—had invaded the charts earlier in the year. But I had managed to tape those from other people’s records over the summer. I loved the latest albums by ABBA and ELO—Arrival and New World Record—but I had those too. No, as the fall wore on, I decided I needed at least one cool new album. Musical coolness was an elusive entity in the Lord-of-the-Flies world of English schoolboys. But I was pretty sure that In the City, by the Jam, would do the trick. I planned to buy it the next time I went home for the weekend.
I’d save enough for a second new album, and that would be one I could play around the house, without enduring the comments, subtle but derisive, that the Jam would incite. My mother was a fierce devotee of classical music, kind enough to tolerate Queen and Bowie in small doses, and even to humor my contention that Electric Light Orchestra albums were a sort of classical music. So not wishing to squander her indulgence, I resolved to buy a Greatest Hits, Volume II album that had just come out. It was by an English singer inescapable in the England of the mid-’70s, constantly on television, in the newspapers, played on the radio, his songs drifting from the windows of pubs, homes, and passing cars. My mother liked the fact that he was a piano player (if not exactly a
pianist). I had some of his albums and had often played them in my mother’s small house without much objection. Finally, the cover to this Greatest Hits album depicted the singer at bat, playing cricket—hardly a countercultural statement. So it was decided: Elton John it would be.
The weekend came, I was picked up from school on Saturday morning, and my mother drove me into the local market town. Picturesque buildings centuries old lined both sides of a single crooked shopping street, peppered with ancient pubs (one turned into an Indian restaurant), with separate shops for the butcher, fishmonger, and grocer. An off-license (liquor store) was adjacent to a fish ’n’ chip shop near the bus stop, a trifecta that my mother’s elderly friends in town insisted attracted undesirables (the kind who listened to the Jam, I mused).
The town was not an obvious place to buy records (and, indeed, today it is impossible to buy music in such towns). But on this particular high street, in the ’70s, a pair of old shops had been turned into a single store selling electronics and appliances. The business was owned by a family with the unsettling name of Grimrod. “Mr. G. Senior” did a brisk business selling toasters and electric kettles to old ladies in one half of the store, and “Mr. G. Junior” peddled washing machines and stereo equipment in the other. Mr. G. Senior was kindly. Mr. G. Junior was intimidatingly intolerant of very young customers. But he also sold tapes and records. For miles around, he was the only pusher of the drug I craved.
That Saturday, while Mr. G. Junior talked an elderly customer into buying a washing machine one size too big for his needs, I browsed the cassettes, picking them up and
turning them over in my hands like jewels. When Mr. G. barked, “What are you looking for, son?” I asked for the Jam. He said he didn’t stock music for “yobboes” (hoodlums)—a line likely delivered for the benefit of the elderly customer, as I knew Mr. G. stocked whatever sold, including the album right in front of me on the shelves, the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks, which had come out since I had begun planning my new purchases earlier in the fall (it was possibly #1 that very week).
In fact, there were lots of new albums out, and I wanted them all. It was agonizing. The Sex Pistols were a little too cool (older boys claimed a monopoly on them). But Queen and ELO had put out new albums, both in the same week. News of the World had been preceded a few weeks earlier by an irresistible lead single, “We Are the Champions/ We Will Rock You.” I had to have the album. But the ELO album, Out of the Blue, was a double. I had heard its distinctive combination of orchestral pop and recycled rock ’n’ roll booming from older boys’ rooms at school; it sounded amazing. My tastes were promiscuous enough that I was tempted by the new Rod Stewart album, by the latest from the Stranglers and from AC/DC, as well as a new Roxy Music Greatest Hits collection and a brand-new Donna Summer LP. But most tempting of all was the new David Bowie album. As recently as January of the same year, Bowie had put out Low. I had played the first side so much that I’d worn the tape down and had to record it again (it would be a year or two before I came to appreciate the dark instrumental collaborations with Brian Eno that made up the second side). Now here was “Heroes,” its sequel. How did Bowie do it? I grasped the black
plastic case and stared at the black-and-white image on the cover. Forget the Jam; “Heroes” would be mine.
However, the other album I purchased that day is the reason why I remember that Saturday at all; after all, my teenage years were dotted with forgettable and forgotten musicbuying moments. By purchase, theft, and piracy (mostly the last), I would soon acquire the albums just mentioned, and more, from the 1977 charts—Status Quo, Santana, JeanMichel Jarre, Graham Parker, Ian Dury, the Boomtown Rats, that Pistols album, and eventually the Jam. They would fill my head for years, be forgotten and rediscovered, be bought again on CD or vinyl or downloaded. But the other cassette I bought that day would be owned for less than an hour.
Browsing Mr. G. Junior’s rack of tapes I soon found the Greatest Hits, Volume II, that I had planned to buy. I thought Elton looked a little silly on the cover, dressed in whites, but wearing a red cap, with pink sneakers, and at night. Still, I knew my mother would tolerate the music, especially if I skipped the first track (“The Bitch Is Back”) and mostly played the next half-dozen hits that followed (from “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” to “Philadelphia Freedom”). The box and tape were also yellow, to match my cassette copy of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (see Figure 1).
Purchased and slotted into the in-dash deck the minute we began the drive home, it sounded awful. As if Elton’s band were playing underwater and he was drowning while trying to sing. I’d suggested to my mother that we skip the first track, “if you don’t like it.” The car’s cassette deck had a track-skipping fast-forward feature, so on we went. “Lucy” sounded just as terrible. The problem wasn’t the music; we
Figure 1 Old Tapes: The plastic cassette box for Blue Moves was black and the tape casing was white (this, my original 1977 copy, is worn to threads and no longer playable). In contrast, the plastic box and the tape for Greatest Hits Volume II is yellow, to match Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Photograph by the author.
had been sold a dud copy of the album. Reluctantly my mother turned the car around.
“Sounds fine to me,” said Mr. G. Junior. I stood silent, miserable. But my mother wanted to make this quick, so she
brought in Mr. G. Senior. “Give the lad another copy!” he told his son. The problem was there was no other copy in stock. “Here,” said Junior, “have this instead. It costs more. It’s a double album. But I’ll give it to you for the same price.”
He handed me a black cassette case. I was instantly suspicious. The case was scratched, which gave it the feel of being used (which it probably was, returned by a customer not because the tape was a dud copy, but because the album itself was seen as a dud). The spine read Elton John—Blue Moves. The cover appeared to be an oil painting of people lying around on a lawn, but rendered in shades of blue. Elton was nowhere to be seen. Silly or not, his presence would have been reassuring. I’d heard of this album; it had come out a year earlier, and jumped straight into the Top 10. But it did not reach #1, unlike most of his previous albums. And by now it was long gone from the charts. Only one single had been a hit, “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word,” and it was included on the Greatest Hits album I had been forced to return. It was the only song I already knew.
I sighed, my misery deepening. So many albums I wanted. This one, which had not even for one minute been on my wish list all autumn, was now in my reluctant hand.
“No need to be glum,” said Mr. G. Junior. “This one’s just as good.”
