Probably THE happiest song I’ve ever heard, Miss Maxine Nightingale’s stomp-and-clap soul-pop perfection, “Right Back Where We Started From.”

Too bad Maxine was considered a one-hit wonder, but Pierre Tubbs and J. Vincent Edwards gave her a monster groove and the most upbeat message in 1975 of rekindling love with optimism of the deepest conviction before it fades out together. I often wonder if my late Aunt Maxine (a Caucasian woman) was a huge fan of the song, since her hair was, to her dying day, modeled in the precise sculpt as Nightingale’s.

Fans of the hockey comedy Slap Shot (one of the most hilarious romps in cinematic history) will no doubt be thinking of the Hanson Brothers, Paul Newman and Charlestown Chiefs road dogging scene segues criminally replaced on the VHS version with some awful schlock not worth mentioning. No doubt in a scrum of its own at the time for rights to use “Right Back Where We Started From.”

Fortunately, DVD and streaming have rectified this gratuitous error in thinking.

For the longest time, my most favorite song in the world. I can see my young self bouncing all over the living room when this song was out and asking my parents to turn it up whenever it came on the radio while in the car. This lip-synced clip was broadcast on the Dutch music variety show Toppop (not to be confused with the UK-based Top of the Pops), though you can dig up an even cheesier video attributed to the same show of Maxine swaying around in Seventies’ glitz hovering atop a golden ocean and surrounded by a deserted island and a hysterical gliding shark fin. It was the 1970s. You had to have been there.

Try to leave this blog in a bad mood after spinning this infectious number. I triple dog dare you.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.