How the CEO Murder Suspect Helped Me Chase the Clouds Away in Time for Christmas

It's not because I think he's hot. Or because I condone murder. It's because of his effable, effanineffable name.

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Today, I’d like to tell you about two very popular albums from the 1970s, which still have a powerful effect today. The first is Chase the Clouds Away, whose title track was used at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. The second is Feels So Good, which peaked at Number 2 on the 1978 Billboard charts. If you’re a fan of the animated TV comedy King of the Hill, you’re probably familiar with the album because it’s been mentioned several times on that show.

But I stopped listening to those LPs a long time ago, even though they’re still part of the vinyl collection I cling to as if my life depended on it. At any given time, I can tab through my jazz albums and find them if I need to—and when I have reason to remember they’re there.

The downside of having a lot of albums

is that it’s easy to forget about them once they’re all lined up in alphabetical order. You tend to reach for the new ridiculously expensive ones, which despite their vaunted 180-gram weight don’t always sound better than the far cheaper ones you could buy at Tower Records, Musicland, or Sam Goody’s back in the day.

Which is why I’m grateful to Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old suspect in the terrible murder of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson on December 4th. Let the late night comedians joke about him all they want.

Let the Today show and The Atlantic, and everybody else talk about the unseemly public reaction to the murder, Luigi’s unlikely rise to folk hero status and Internet heart throb. Let them ogle his pecs and fetishize his face all they want. If it’s really Luigi in that video, he’s just a cowardly murderer to me.

And wouldn’t it be nice if the networks would stop showing the moment he aimed his gun at Thompson’s back and took the life of the unsuspecting husband and father? The image looks a lot like a screen shot from the Assassin video game. The surveillance clip has the same creepy stalker vibe as the game, and it’s more than reasonable for police to be concerned about possible copycats.

But as I mentioned in my last post, I’ve decided to reduce my media consumption in the interest of sanity. Before the election, I watched five newscasts a day—two from the BBC, one from Japan, the PBS NewsHour, and the Today show. I also read the New York Times, The Washington Post, and occasionally the National Review, the New Yorker, and The Atlantic.

I see now that it was too much

So I’ve dialed that way, way back. Since the election, I’m down to about an hour of news a day. And I feel as if Mary Magdalene is singing to me from that crucial scene in Jesus Christ Superstar. “Let the world turn without you tonight.”

So with apologies to T. S. Eliot, I found myself triggered by the murder suspect’s ineffable, effable, effanineffable, deep but familiar name. In other words, it didn’t take much for Luigi Mangione the murder suspect to trigger Chuck Mangione the jazz musician, whose delightful albums from the 1970s have been quietly waiting for me to pay attention to them again.

What I’ve discovered since dropping all those newscasts is that staying positive in the face of relentless negativity takes work. Endorphins help too, whether you get them from exercise or laughter—like the hour I spent talking with an old friend this week who kept me in stitches the whole time. And I’m not talking about toxic positivity here. We all know about Pollyanna and Voltaire’s Professor Pangloss.

Music does the trick too

Poet and author Rachel Rose recently wrote about how good it feels to sing in a choir in her Desperate Writer Substack. And for people like me, sometimes just listening is enough. So thank you, Luigi, for reminding me of your namesake. Who hasn’t killed anyone yet, though he has been known to slay millions with his flugelhorn.

Because of you, poor unhappy Luigi, I now have this opportunity to share the title track from Chuck Mangione’s Feels So Good with the generous souls who make room for my posts in their emails and in the Substack app. The short three-minute version many people remember from the radio is here. But I find the nine-minute video version from Mangione’s 1989 Cannes concert is much richer and far more satisfying because of the journey it takes you on.

The second Chuck Mangione album I mentioned at the beginning is Chase the Clouds Away. Listening to that LP is like having Star Trek’s Scotty beam me back to another place and time.

All of a sudden I’m in my flat on San Francisco’s Russian Hill. The party I’ve hosted has dwindled down to the last few guests. Among them a future senior producer at CBS News in New York, a future editor-in-chief of Esquire magazine, and a future mayor of a pricey California city near Silicone Valley. There’s a wood-burning fire on the hearth. And most of us are sitting on the floor. I don’t remember who put that album on the turntable. But it was the perfect end to a very happy night.

Maybe what really made that album perfect for us that night was the LP’s final track, which came immediately after “Chase the Clouds Away.” It’s called “Soft,” and it’s sung by the lovely Esther Satterfield. I’d be remiss if I didn’t share it with you now. Not only because I always associate the song with this album and that night. But because the song evokes what this whole earthly journey is all about. Love.

There’s something soothing about that song, isn’t there? As I listened to the album again, I was reminded that love is exactly like that. It soothes. It heals. It comforts. It feels so good. It chases the clouds away. And there’s an infinite supply as near as the human heart.

I hope your holidays are filled with lots of it as you make your way through the heightened activity of the season. Thanks so much for reading my stories and supporting my work this year in whatever way you’ve been able to do. I appreciate every like, share, coffee, and subscription. And I look forward to catching up with you again after the New Year.