R-E-S-P-E-C-T

I’m one of those weird people that can remember numbers. Phone numbers, dates, dollar amounts…you name it and I can probably recall it pretty accurately. When I looked at today’s date, I remembered that this was the day back in 1967 that Aretha Franklin released her most notable hit “Respect.”

No, I wasn’t alive back then – get real – I’m not that old! I remember
because this date was a test question on one of my Jazz History finals
back in college. I recall learning this particular piece of data at
about 2am the night before the final. Several of my classmates and I
had gathered in the front foyer of my dorm at Millikin University to
pull an all-nighter for a fun, but intense class required by all music
majors called Jazz History I & II. I recall that we spent (wasted)
about 20 minutes discussing the lyrics of this song after we played
through it one time on our class cassette tapes (no I’m not dating
myself here – CDs were around then, but our professor distributed all
audio on cassettes). I don’t know why we even played through it
because we all knew the song. I mean, who DOESN’T know how to sing
“R-E-S-P-E-C-T, Find out what it means to me…” It’s the rest of the
song that is perplexing.

After the audio reminder, we got into a discussion about what Aretha
was saying. No, not a philosophical discussion…more like “what did
she say …is that a real word?” kind of discussion. We never really
confirmed the true lyrics and, at the time, Google had not been
invented so we eventually got back on task and worked our way into the
70’s and 80’s before calling it a “night”. (Athough, truthfully, I
probably went to bed right after that because I lived through the 70’s
and 80’s so there’s not much for me to learn there that I didn’t
already know.)

So here it is, April 29th, 2006 and I have “sock it to me, sock it
to me, sock it to me, sock it to me” running through my head. This
time around I consulted Google to see just what Aretha has been saying
all these years. I posted the words in the music section: Respect

So now that I know, what the heck does “Take care, TCB” mean? Anybody?