“Let’s turn on some music…” said Brian, one sultry night in 1966.

We were far from legal drinking age, but there were plenty of saloonkeepers who didn’t seem to care. One ran a bar named “Mickey’s”…a rickety dive built on stilts. Beneath it, the salt water splashed against abandoned automobile tires and washed up beer cans into the reeds and bushes on the shore. We were 18 years old, just graduating from high school, and vaguely wondering what to do next. And if we didn’t think of something fast, the U.S. Army would come looking for us.

After trolling the airwaves for a minute, we found what we were looking for:

“When a man loves a woman…can’t keep his mind on nuthin’ else…”

“You can’t beat Percy Sledge,” said our friend.

“No, you can’t beat Percy,” we replied.

“…he’d turn his back on his best friend, if he put her down,” Percy continued in the background.

“What are you going to do?” Brian asked.

“I’m going to college. I got a scholarship, remember? What else can you do? Otherwise, you’ll get drafted…besides, I thought you were going too.”

“Nah…my mother is on my case about it all the time. But I don’t want to go. I don’t see the point. I like it here. I went to look at UVA, but I don’t like preppies. And I didn’t like the smell of the place. I like the smell of this place. It’s where I like being. I’m just going to keep planting tobacco and hanging out at Mickey’s.”

“Don’t you want to make some money…get ahead in life?”

Percy over the radi “…he’d give up all his comforts, sleep out in the rain…if she says that’s the way it oughta be…”

“What are you talking about? I already make more money raising tobacco than these jumped up college graduates make in their office jobs. And I’m outdoors doing what I like doing. I can stop and drink a beer whenever I want. Nobody tells me what to do. And besides, I don’t want to leave Dottie…”

“Yeah, but they’re going to draft you…”

“Well, I’m not worried about it. My brother is already over there, in Vietnam. He says it’s not so bad…at least where he is.”

We never saw our friend again. He was killed in a bar fight at Mickey’s a few months later. Another friend hit him in the head with a pool stick. He fell to the floor; got up; started drinking again and then collapsed. The tobacco economy disappeared soon after, too. And long gone are the days when a farmer in Southern Maryland didn’t have people telling him what to do. Now, every one of them must have a dozen inspectors and regulators looking over his shoulder.

That world of the ’60s is no more. But last night…a part of it came back, almost better than ever - Percy himself. (About which…more below…)

Meanwhile, investors turned a whiter shade of pale yesterday, as the Dow dropped another 166 points…oil rose $3 to a new high of $144…the commodities index, the CRB, hit a new record high of 614.

It was not a very rewarding day for investors…and it comes hard on the heels of what has been one of the worst six months on record. As measured by the MSCI world index, investors have not taken such a beating in 26 years.

The Royal Bank of Scotland has a “crash alert” warning out. And the European Central bank threatens to raise rates. Jean-Claude Trichet says there’s a risk of “exploding prices” as the rate of producer price inflation in Europe reaches a record high.

Already, the U.S. key lending rate is only half the ECB rate. Already, the dollar seems to holding on by its fingernails. If the ECB raises rates again, the dollar could be kicked off its narrow ledge.

We have been trying to figure out the queer dynamics of current central banking policy. So far, all we’ve been able to figure out is that it is more perverse and more complicated than we thought.

In a nutshell, it is obvious now to everyone that the world economy is going in two directions at once.