You Can't Live In This World All By Yourself

The Van Dykes - "No Man Is An Island" (1965)

This past week was a difficult one for me. Aside from having to juggle a ton of rapidly shifting deadlines, several of my days revolved around helping someone very close to me through the lead-up to and aftermath of a pretty intense surgical procedure. She’s now thankfully on the mend, but by the time Friday afternoon rolled around, I was physically exhausted and emotionally drained. So I did what I usually do when I need a quick pick-me-up: I headed over to the nearest record store.

Even during the darkest times of my adult life (which this past week unfortunately triggered some flashbacks to), I’ve always managed to find solace in the vinyl bins. I don’t even have to necessarily find something I want, because just the process of flipping through old albums or singles for an hour or so feels remarkably meditative and healing to me. That said, I almost always find something good at Rocket Number Nine in Kingston, NY — which is where I found myself on Friday afternoon — especially when my friend David is working behind the counter.

They don’t give Nobel Prizes to record store employees, but if they did I’d nominate David. Not only can he hold his own pretty well on just about any musical topic imaginable, but he’s incredibly friendly (which is definitely not your stereotypical record store clerk behavior) and always directs me to something in the store that I might have missed or might not know about. “Hey Dan, we’ve got a box of unsorted 45s in the back, mostly soul stuff” he told me yesterday. “I can bring it out if you wanna dig through it.” Twist my fuckin’ arm, man…

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An hour later, I left the store in a significantly better mood with a bag of 30 singles tucked under my arm, including two that I’d been looking for for ages: Billy Butler’s “I Can’t Work No Longer” and “No Man Is An Island” by The Van Dykes. I’ve known the Butler song since back in the early nineties, when I would occasionally hear it on Chicago’s WGCI (aka “Dusty Radio 1390”), but I didn’t discover the Van Dykes side until fairly late in my soul music education.

It was March 2005, and I’d just bought a new Honda Element, which came with a free trial XM Radio subscription for the first month. I wasn’t sure that an XM subscription was something I really needed, since (wonder of technological wonders) my new vehicle came with a jack that would actually allow me to plug my iPod directly into the car stereo, but I thought I might was well give it a try — and between the MLB spring training game broadcasts and XM’s sixties soul channel (which was called Soul Street, if I remember correctly), I was hooked in less than a week.

Back in those halcyon days before Sirius and XM merged and their various “oldies” station playlists were narrowed down to the usual parade of overexposed hits, Soul Street turned me on to a number of amazing songs and artists that I’d somehow missed out on. But the one that really knocked me on my ass was “No Man Is An Island,” a song which literally made me pull off to the side of the road the first time I heard it, so I could give it my full attention. (Thankfully, I was just taking an empty side street back from my dry cleaner’s at the time, so no one got hurt when I veered to the curb.)

A sweet soul ballad bearing a heavy Impressions influence, “No Man Is An Island” has the hushed feel of a hymn, and the simple, sermon-like nature of its lyrics — and the fact that there’s a John Donne poem of the same name dating back to 1624 — made me think that the song must have already been around for hundreds of years before the Van Dykes got around to recording it. However, it was actually written by Van Dykes lead vocalist Rondallis Tandy, not long before his Forth Worth, Texas-based vocal group recorded it for the local Hue-CSP label in 1965. Mala Records picked up the song and re-released it in December ‘65, and the single gradually became a minor national hit, reaching #94 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #28 on the R&B chart in April 1966.

“No Man Is An Island” places much higher on my personal countdown of soul ballads, however. The muted instrumental backing (by organ-guitar-drums trio The Rays) serves as the perfect pedestal for Tandy’s heart-stopping falsetto vocal, which is both stunning in its technical excellence and almost shocking in its naked vulnerability as he pleads for empathy, understanding and cooperation among human beings.

No man is an island

No man stands alone

Treat each man as your brother

And remember

Each man’s dream is your own

This is a song I’ve returned to time and time again over the years, especially in moments of despair and doubt, both for the comfort that the music brings me and to pray that at least some folks in our increasingly fractured world still hold similar sentiments.

The great paradox of the Internet Age is that we’ve become increasingly connected technologically while also becoming increasingly disconnected from the people and the world around us, a development which (I believe) has profoundly diluted our sense of community — local, national, global, etc. — and helped perpetuate the vile notion that we as individuals no longer have any real responsibility to each other, to our society, or to the planet that we live on.

I could easily go off on a much longer lament-slash-rant on this topic, but I’ll spare you. In any case, this past week has once again reminded me of the profound truths inherent in “No Man Is An Island”. There was so much stuff going on that the kindness of others made so much easier to deal with; but beyond that, the events of the week also got me reflecting on a supremely dark period of my life from a couple of years ago, and saying a prayer of thanks to the many wonderful folks whose love and generosity helped me get to the much happier place where I currently exist. And on a more meta level, there’s nothing quite like digging “No Man Is An Island” out of a box of dusty 45s that a friend put in your hands to reinforce that you’re not alone in this world.

You can’t live in this world all by yourself

No, no, no, you can’t live alone

And just as sure as you try to make it by yourself

You’re going to wake up and find you’re going to need somebody else

Have a great Sunday. Please remember to take good care of each other and this world that we call home.

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