"It Don't Matter to Me"

"It Don't Matter To Me," by Bread
Written by David Gates

Bread was the easiest of the easy listening bands, the Carpenters for boys. Less dark than Lightfoot, less groovy than anything, Bread was the soundtrack for the bearded twentysomething too young to have been a hippy, but who still believed in love—especially making it—and peace—well, more or less. Let us journey back in time to when every young man was a guitarist, when Mr.

Natural adorned denim jackets worn ragged by the misadventures of older siblings, when the radio reflected the age of chaos between Jimi at Woodstock and KISS on lunchboxes. Light the candle that bleeds wax in nine soothing colors. Call up your special lady, she of the long straight hair and the splendors of bralessness.

A breeze stirs the chimes. The macramé plant hangers sway with the beat of the music. David Gates is with us.

Gates joined the songwriting team of James Griffin and Robb Royer to form Bread in 1968, after far-flung work with the likes of Rod McKuen, Bobby Darin, and Captain Beefheart. Though Griffin/Royer had a few of Bread's minor hits, Gates led the band to the big money with wave after lapping wave of soft-rock, most of it still familiar, none of it an assertion of masculinity.

"It Don’t Matter To Me" plays to the band’s strength from the go.

One chord and Gates goes dulcet with that high tenor—sweeter than a custard-filled chocolate mousse smothered in powdered sugar and served with a Hawaiian Punch chaser. For three minutes the music swoops and climbs through several tempo changes, carried along by the band’s ear for melody and some polished studio production.

By far the most distinctive part races through the middle.

As Gates said, "It had this unusual bridge that takes off and does some crazy things musically." Amen. For one thing that lead guitar champs to throw off the balladeer's bonds and launch into a nine-minute solo.

As if sonic explorations in mellowness weren't enough, Gates's lyrics pave the bridge with a little psychological understanding:

Lotta people have an ego hang-up
’cause they want to be the only one
How many came before it really doesn’t matter
Just as long as you’re the last
Everybody’s moving on and try to find out
What’s been missing in the past

I bet he picked that shit up from McKuen.

The saddest aspect of "It Don’t Matter To Me" is that women listened to this stuff and got a warped view of the male capacity for compassion. Many songs report what it’s like to have a lover walk all over you.

"It Don’t Matter To Me" actually invites such treatment:

And it don't matter to me
If your searching brings you back together with me
‘Cause there'll always be
An empty room waiting for you
An open heart waiting for you
Time is on my side ...

Need time to find yourself? Understood. Found someone else?

No problem. Slept with more men than Madonna, Michelle Phillips, and Christopher Isherwood combined? Watch my shoulders shrug as you raid my refrigerator and pass out upstairs.

"It Don’t Matter To Me" encourages the tragic lie that a busted couple can remain friends. In fact, taken together Bread's hits form a concept album built around romantic masochism. In "Diary" the narrator learns it’s over in a crushing way, though he shouldn’t have been reading in the first place.

"Make It With You" sounds like a plea to continue the relationship while using the sort of double entendré sure to end it. There’s a lot of need and a speech impediment on "Baby I’m-A Want You," the self-explanatory "Down On My Knees"—alas, not a double-entendré—and when the relationship finally ends what awaits but the devastated survivor (?) of "Look What You’ve Done"?

† Escalating misfortune finally takes us through "Everything I Own," where the poor guy’s father dies, to "If,"* where the entire universe perishes!

It is easy to make fun of Bread. But the truth of it is, if you like this sort of thing, Bread did it as well as anyone.

The comparison I led with is unfair. The band really belonged to the guitar-based singer/songwriter genre rather than the supper club stylings of The Carpenters. That does not erase the wimp-rock label.

But it does allow us to judge the group by a different set of criteria, that of, say, Dan Fogelberg or (groan) America. See? Put them in the context of their own time and they sound better.

Though it still helps if you light the candle.

† An early Griffin/Royer single. Less polished than the band's usual, but—full disclosure—a high-carb Bread guilty pleasure.

* Telly Savalas's cover of "If" spent two weeks at Number One in the U.K.