Favorite Song No. 359: Barney Kessel – Honey Rock

There are many things I could say about this song, and nearly none of them are about the song itself, so let me briefly address the music before I go off on a series of tangents and reminiscences. It’s a simple song. There’s a chugging beat, a huffy horn, and a girl says “oh honey” a bunch. I’ll also mention that although the record you see pictured above has Ricky Nelson on the cover, the album featured songs from other artists, including this one from Barney Kessel. Music aside, this song is one of the ones I warned you about in a previous post: a song that wouldn’t be on the list at all if it didn’t have some emotional connection to my life, so let me tell you about my favorite cafe.

Caffe Mediterraneum was a fixture of the Berkeley landscape. It was the one of the oldest coffeehouses in the Bay Area, the site of the invention of the cafe latté no less, and it even has its own Wikipedia page. So naturally, it’s gone now. In its place is… another cafe? Why? Who’s to say? Not me. All I can say is that I’ve sat in coffeehouses on five continents, and sipped coffee in every imaginable setting, but never found a cafe better than Caffe Mediterraneum. Why, there was even a piano in there, and patrons were allowed to play it. True, the espresso is better in Rome– the best espresso I’ve ever had is found at Cafe Rosati in Piazza del Popolo; the best outside Rome is at Bar Bruno on Wardour Street in London. I’ve never had great espresso in the U.S.– but one doesn’t judge a cafe solely on its coffee, one judges it on its atmosphere, and in that regard, Mediterraneum won, hands down. In fact, I wish I were there now, for I know of no spot on earth more conducive to writing than was “the Med.” I authored some of my greatest prose there.

I also cookied my compie¹ there once. That was not a fun thing. I decided to try a Cubano that day, which is an espresso that is made with a thick layer of brown sugar added to the coffee grounds before brewing. The resultant product is a syrupy elixir, tasty to be sure, but not meant to be poured onto a laptop, which is exactly what I did with mine. As I sat down, I bumped the cup on the edge of the laptop screen and proceeded to pour the entire contents of the cup, in a very even pour, no less, over the entire keyboard of a 3-month old MacBook Pro. Needless to say, even though I immediately turned it off and washed it out as best I could, that computer died less than a year later. Still, that memory aside, Caffe Mediterraneum is to this day a place I associate with happy memories.

Among the happiest of all my Med Memories is no doubt meeting my friend Christina. I’d gone there one evening with my friend Chris, who objected, wanting instead to go to a bar, but it was too early and the bar was not yet open, so I convinced him to sit with me in a cafe for an hour until the bar was serving. He complained that it would be a bunch of intellectual types droning on about Foucault, but I assured him we could talk about other things. Once inside, I spied a girl sitting by the window, and a vacant table next to her, and told Chris to grab that table while I got drinks. Soon I was sitting next to the girl, who shortly thereafter asked if we minded that the window was either open or closed, I can’t recall which, and with whom we began chatting. It turned out she was visiting Berkeley from Minnesota, doing some sort of summer thesis something-or-other, and was currently writing about Foucault. Chris threw his hands up in despair, and we left soon thereafter, but it was okay, because I’d made a new friend, Christina, who is the person who introduced me to the song “Honey Rock” when she used it as the soundtrack to a video she sent me. And that is why “Honey Rock” is among my favorite songs.

¹compie/ˈkämpē/noun 1. a programmable electronic device designed to accept data, perform prescribed mathematical and logical operations at high speed, and display the results of these operations.