If this record was a perfume, it would probably be something like Jean desPrez’ Bal a Versailles (for the newcomers, when we link out to any perfume in this newsletter, it is to a place where you can snag a sample), a feral, room-dominating animalic rose that also made its big debut in 1962 and had far more confidence and bluster than it had any right to. I recommend clicking play while you read the rest. Anyways, here’s her original recording of “Happy Days are Here Again,” in honor of the fact that The Dry Down is, at least for now, here again. Has any twenty year old ever been so secure? Listening to it makes me want to do things and be things, to pick up a bubblegum pink rotary phone and make some very important calls. She sounds here like she really wants it, even though she also sounds absolutely confident that she is going to get it. But you really should listen to it – there is a rawness and desperation in her voice here that you rarely hear later when she was a Big Star luxuriating in the buttery (buttahry?) certainty of megafame. Babs started singing in the small cabaret on West 8th Street when she was just eighteen, and she made a live recording of a twenty-four song set thinking she might release it as her debut album, but she was instantly such a sensation that Columbia Records roped her into a shiny studio deal and her scrappy little club album was scuttled away into the archive. Speaking of Babs, a fun fact: she just last week released a new (old) album, “Live at the Bon Soir” a 1962 recording from her personal vault of master tapes (imagine sitting on a masterpiece for sixty years just because you felt like it….god, I love her).

Surprise! This newsletter – now almost SEVEN years old, can you believe ? – is turning out to be the Barbra Streisand of perfume-adjacent web content we keep “retiring” and yet we cannot stay away from one last command performance of “Cry Me A River” in a belted cream-colored sweater dress.

Hello Dry Downers (and newcomers to the DD family) –

Wild hearts can't be broken perfume