It could certainly be Manfred Mann's Earth Band. If you aren't familiar with Manfred Mann, he was a keyboard player from South Africa who made it big in England in the 1960s and then quit to simultaneously be more cynical than the pop hit factory his band had become and more pure at the same time; by doing jingles to pay the bills while he made the music he wanted on the side.
He was a musician who could see things lyricists could not so some of their hits were covers that were reworked, like Dylan and others. In 1976-77, back into music again, Manfred Mann's Earth Band blew up in the U.S. because they did a cover of a song by a relatively unknown musician named Bruce Springsteen, called "Blinded By The Light".(1)
Springsteen always had lyrical power but his musicianship was suspect early and his first album, "Greetings From Asbury Park N.J." where he debuted this song, was an example. But Mann heard it and had to be impressed. Mann was Springsteen's perfect complement, an older, wiser craftsman who could draw out the power of the story. Give it a listen if you choose:
and then here is Bruce Springsteen. (2)
On that same album as the Bruce Springsteen cover, "The Roaring Silence", was a track called "Singing The Dolphin Through". If you prefer disco or Kiss, it won't be to your liking but the album was clearly crafted to be part of a structure and the song fits in perfectly. No one can read some chapter about a little kid in George R.R. Martin's "Game of Thrones" and understand why people like the book and so it goes with this album - if you don't like what came to be called 'progressive rock' it won't do anything for you but as a standalone it is extra meaningless.
So it goes with dolphins as well as songs about them. I am always vaguely suspicious of people who say things like 'only my pets understand me', it sounds to me like they can't get along with people or they are a little kooky. But for every Dian Fossey there is also a Jane Goodall, who is able to straddle the worlds of man, animal, science, activism and outreach quite deftly.
Dolphins may have their own Goodall in Dr. Denise Herzing, who chronicles a 25 year effort to try and understand dolphins in Dolphin Diaries.
In reading their story, hers and the dolphins, the first thing that impressed me, in this age of entitlement science, was her willingness to go beyond government to get funding. If you are going to swim with dolphins - for 25 years - you are going to need (pardon the pun) a boatload of cash. Rather than lament how stupid grant agencies are if they don't see how awesome her research is, or give up, she made people part of the solution - she has been a practical activist and scientist. Result: She isn't putting the environment in some bubble and insisting people are the enemy of nature, if you want to hang out with some dolphins, you can, but bring your checkbook because you are going to help fund science to do it. It's so refreshing she had me wanting to write a check and go swimming after 15 pages and I have no interest at all in boats, recognizing there was a good reason my ancestors moved to land.
Not all of the expeditions had the public involved, of course. She details her efforts to understand whether dolphins 'communicate details intentionally' the way humans do - to discuss things not in the immediate area and make a plan, like we do. If so, she surmised, something must be encoded in the physics of the acoustic waveforms themselves, so they came up with a two-way system of communication system to try and find out. That's a lot more rigorous science than the 'animals are soooooo much better than humans' kind of stuff we get too much today from activists with a pretense of science. This is research.
It takes more than lyrics to make a great song, which is why I used that Manfred Mann example in the beginning.(3) Herzing has a certain musicianship in describing her science work and what it could mean and that makes it fun to read. If you don't like progressive 1970s rock, for example, you are not going to like Manfred Mann regardless, just like you won't like this book if you see people researching animal behavior as kooky, but if you are open-minded, this is interesting stuff.
We're in the dark ages of even human neuroscience, of course, and animal neuroscience is far behind that, but there is no lack of optimistic hypotheses. Do I communicate with my dog? I suppose I do since the dog understands when I say 'no', and we play together. But my dog will not understand 'no' five minutes later and Herzing notes that dolphins seem to be able to grasp human time and meaning in a way most non-humans cannot. There's something there and that means it is a gap we can close. We're not really close yet to understanding our dogs or dolphins but solving mysteries in nature is a fundamental part of the human condition.
Do dolphins have that thirst for knowledge about us too? I have no idea but, if so, Herzing is a lot closer to finding out than most people will ever get and that's a good enough reason to read her book.
NOTES:
(1) Other people had hits with his songs in the 1970s for the same reason - he was playing with his friends so never reined them in nor did they with him. But songs he didn't think were right, like "Because The Night" done by Patti Smith and "Fire" by the Pointer Sisters showed early Bruce just needed to let a producer do his job. It took him six months to record just the "Born To Run" track, for example, but when the studio finally made him listen to a producer, the "Born To Run" album became a huge hit.
(2) I can't find embeddable versions of the studio tracks and Mann's live versions I can find are a little too jazz spiral-y to get the point across whereas Springsteen is a much different musician now, he no longer hears songs in his head but is unable to describe them.
(3) And Moog-ing it up doesn't always work. Mann also covered Springsteen's "Spirit In The Night" from the same 1973 album and it was no better. Honestly, I do a better version of that than both of them do. Sorry, Bruce.
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