1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+...=∞

What's that song? That stupid song; it's by Three Dog Night.  It starts off this way:

One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do
Two can be as bad as one
It's the loneliest number since the number one

I remember listening to the album; it belonged to my brother.  I remember laying on the floor of my older brother's bedroom, studying the lyrics in the album cover.   I was a kid in the early '70s (10 or 11 years old): my older brother had run away from home again (not the first time, not the last time), and my father had announced that we would be moving again (he was always striving for higher paying white-collar jobs, so we moved a lot).  Nixon was in trouble, which meant that the country was in trouble.  My family was in trouble, which meant that I was in trouble. No one was happy, it seemed. It was a sad time.  And the song's melancholy tune spoke to me.

Ironically, I wasn't alone--one wasn't the loneliest number--many of us were lonely, just not lonely together.  Music seems to have been more societal back then, but not as community based as it was before the heyday of electronics.  Once upon a time, folks got together and sang, and that was their only choice for music--live music, derived from and thriving within the community.  By the 1970s, vinyl records and 8-tracks were in mass production, so that one could sit  alone in one's room and listen to songs, songs, and more songs for hours and hours.  This ritual seems to have anticipated the MP3 players that stream music into the ear-buds nestled in the two ears of one person today, who may be sitting in a room full of people and yet is listening to that music alone, as one.

As one blogger once noted:

Music history tends to completely overlook the dominance of Three Dog Night from 1969 to 1974, both on the charts and with radio listeners. Then again, maybe they don’t need a critical rethink or a re-mastered reprise, because everything you need to know is in the songs when you run across them. Even though I can barely withstand “Joy to the World” due to endless repetition, it’s still the best description of how people react to their old hits: joy. ("February 1972--Three Dog Night--Never Been to Spain") 

So very true...