The Rainbow is Black

The Dells — "I Can Sing a Rainbow/Love Is Blue" (1969)

There are some singles that I will always pick up whenever I find them cheap “in the wild,” even though I already own them.

I am, for instance, constitutionally incapable of leaving a clean copy of The Who’s “I Can See For Miles” in the bin; it’s a stunning performance by one of my all-time favorite bands that sounds best in its 45 rpm mix, and I’m always looking to find a copy that sounds just a little bit better than the best one I already have.

Lou Christie’s bonkers “If My Car Could Only Talk” and The Four Tops’ majestic cover of “Walk Away Renee” are two other 45s I can never pass up. They’re not rare enough to be really collectable, but they’re just obscure enough that many music-loving pals of mine to have gone their entire lives without having actually heard them — and after I give said pals a belated introduction to their mind-blowing delights, it’s always nice to be able to send them home with a copy of their own.

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“I Can Sing a Rainbow/Love Is Blue” is another mind-blower that I’ll always scoop up whenever I see it. Though it was a fairly major hit back in 1969 for Chicago soul quintet The Dells, the song hasn’t enjoyed the oldies radio staying power of their singles “Oh What a Night,” “Stay in My Corner” or “The Love We Had (Stays on My Mind)”. Even having spent my teens and most of my twenties in Chicago, where I was an avid listener of “dusty radio” AM station WGCI, I somehow never heard “I Can Sing a Rainbow/Love Is Blue” until it nearly caused me to drive off the road one Los Angeles evening in 1995.

I still remember the occasion vividly: My then-girlfriend and I were on our way to dinner in West L.A.; I was avoiding the inevitable jam-up at the intersection of Wilshire and La Cienega by cutting through the side streets over by La Cienega Park, when my car radio suddenly emitted several voices softly intoning a song I hadn’t thought about since I’d sang it in my second grade music class. “Red and yellow and pink and green, purple and orange and blue…”

“Ugh, what the fuck?,” I muttered to myself. “Somebody actually did a soul cover of ‘I Can Sing a Rainbow’?” The thought had barely formed in my brain when the music abruptly shifted into the French easy listening standard “Love Is Blue”; only, there was nothing easy at all about this particular English-language rendition. The man singing it clearly wasn’t just battling some deep, deep pain — he was practically kickboxing it, and every verbal punch of his weathered baritone was answered in kind by an equally fierce blast of orchestration. Underlying it all was a fabulously funky bass that only went where you’d expect it to about half the time.

I was so distracted by the sheer intensity of the record that I bumped the curb hard while turning right onto Gregory Way, much to my girlfriend’s displeasure. I pulled over into a parking space so I could follow the whole jaw-dropping thing to its conclusion without distraction, and hopefully also learn who was singing it. Alas, the station went straight to a commercial, so we continued on, unenlightened, to our chosen restaurant destination.

I searched high and low for the song over the next couple of years, but no one ever seemed to know what it was from my description. And though I was familiar enough with the three aforementioned Dells hits, I somehow didn’t put it together that this was their work. (Though this wasn’t the pre-internet era, it was far more difficult to look up songs on the internet back then than it is today.) It wasn’t until around 1998, when my stepmother was trying to clear out some of her closets while I was visiting her and my dad in NYC, that I finally found what I was looking for.

“Would you have any interest in taking a look at my records, and seeing if you want to take any of them home with you?” Fran had asked me. Well, twist my arm… and though some of the stuff in her small vinyl collection was pretty much what I’d expect to find on the shelf of a Jewish New Yorker born in the 1940s (Bob Dylan, Carole King, Leonard Cohen, Simon & Garfunkel), I was pleasantly surprised to find that Fran had also been really interested in funk and soul music at one point in her life. The first Osibisa LP? She had it. The Last Poets’ epochal self-titled debut? She had that one, too. And then there were several Dells LPs, including one called Love Is Blue. Could the title track be the song I’d long been searching for? It could, indeed!

The fact is, I should have known “I Can Sing a Rainbow/Love Is Blue” was The Dells all along; that it didn’t even occur to me – or to the friends and record store people I’d asked about it –speaks to how woefully undervalued the group was for so many years. (Ditto for the brilliant instrumental arrangements Charles Stepney created for so many releases on Cadet Records.) These days, it would be easy enough for me to pick Marvin Junior’s powerful baritone out of a random track, or to identify a Charles Stepney arrangement on a song I had never heard before. But back in the ‘90s, neither the Dells nor Stepney were as widely known or appreciated as they should have been, least of all by me.

Though they were a quintet, The Dells were kind of the Cook County, IL counterpart of The Four Tops — a fabulously long-running R&B act who pre-dated the doo-wop era yet still managed to score a massive string of hits in the ‘60s and ‘70s (and even beyond), and whose vocal blends and lyrical concerns were considerably more “grown folks” in nature than those of most of their chart contemporaries. Unfortunately, while The Dells launched single after single into the upper reaches of the R&B charts, only four of their hits ever made it into the pop Top 20, probably because Cadet couldn’t provide anywhere near the kind of crossover promotional muscle that Motown was able to put behind their Four Tops releases.

As powerful as “I Can Sing a Rainbow/Love Is Blue” was, the single only reached #22 on the Billboard Hot 100, even as it cruised to the #5 spot on the R&B charts. And like so many great songs that failed to make the Top 20, it was all but forgotten by oldies radio programmers and thus all but wiped from the collective memory of there listeners. If it hadn’t been for a fluke radio broadcast and an unexpected trawl through my stepmother’s records, it might have been many more years before I had the song in my collection.

The gift of that Dells album is just one of the many Fran-related things that I have to be thankful for. During the 32 years she was married to my dad, she was always extremely generous and loving to me and my sister, and we absolutely adored her in return. Fran passed away last week at the age of 78, following battles with various cancers that lasted the better part of 30 years; as fierce as Marvin Junior’s vocal is on “I Can Sing a Rainbow/Love Is Blue,” it pales in comparison to Fran’s will to live. Her full New York Times obituary — which includes some details from her incredible life — can be found here.

Last Friday, I gave a eulogy at Fran’s memorial service, and finished with the following story:

The night Fran passed away, I turned out my bedroom light before getting into bed and was immediately surprised - as were my cats - to see a small but sparkly light darting around the room. A firefly had somehow gotten into my apartment, which wasn’t unusual considering that I live in a rural area, though I hadn’t actually seen any  other fireflies this spring. I don’t pretend to know what, if anything, happens to us after death, and I certainly wouldn’t suggest that this firefly was a manifestation of Fran’s spirit. And yet, it totally reminded me of her – so tiny and luminous and busy and unpredictable and fully energized and engaged. And I felt so comforted on that sad evening by its whimsical flight, because it made me remember how lucky I was to have experienced her joyful light for over three decades.

“I Can Sing a Rainbow/Love Is Blue” will always remind me of Fran, as well — especially of how full of surprises she always was. I mean, what were the odds that she had the ‘60s soul song I’d been searching for for years tucked away on the top shelf of one of her hall closets?

As sad as the song is, and as sad as we are to have lost her, “I Can Sing a Rainbow/Love Is Blue” will always be a wonderful signifier to me of the magic that she brought to our lives. Thank you for everything, dear Franchovy. Our world is considerably more grey since you went away.

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