"Everyone felt like the daylight could follow you into the room/Man, you could sure make me laugh like hell/I thought I'd be seeing you soon/Cause people they come and they go/Some of them stay in your mind/Everyone knows when you lose one/Cause a good man is hard to find," are all the words needed for the entirety of "Cuz A Good Man's Hard To Find," a song sung here by Long Beach band, The Fling, which lasts less than two minutes. It's this short piece of music, concluding this latest collection recorded during the group's most recent visit to Rock Island, which reverberates soundly throughout many of their new songs.
It's a preoccupation, you might say, with the quality of human beings. It's as if they've taken an eye and put it toward figuring out what others lack and what they themselves lack, because really, one question cannot be answered without the other being asked. There is so much interconnectivity that it's a silly little thought to separate them out rather then balancing them right on the top of one another and seeing how they fall. There's a tendency to see the shortcomings most clearly. There's an urge to just spew the comment, "Most people are dumb and a lot of them are mean too." It's harsh, but it hits us in the likeliest places and it gets to us often, that we're out here swimming with a bunch of run-off and garbage.
Everything slinks down to the bed of the lowest common denominator and that's just the start of it. It's mudded up and trampled down there, the smell of months of the same sheets and cold sweats. It's the dogpiles that the band sings about and it's finding out who the bottom feeders are, as they do elsewhere. It's sniffing out those who need to be avoided, only to find those that should be pulled tightly. Those are the people that are so hard to find and it's the reason that characters in the band's songs settle for living with wicked people when they have to. They stick it out with those wicked people and they suck it up, waiting to see if that's all they're going to get, if that's all that the fates have set aside for them.