Music Sounds Better With Two

Troubled Dolly: Clodagh Rodgers: "Come Back And Shake Me"

2012-01-31T01:00:00.000-08:00

If you said the words ‘Northern Ireland’ to, say, earnest young people at this time, they would talk about The Troubles; but the same words would evoke quite something else in those younger and more interested in pop, particularly boys; Clodagh Rodgers would be their main response, which puts a whole different spin on what, at this time, Northern Ireland meant to the British public in general. To some, sectarian strife; to others, home of a dream babe.

Unlike Mary Hopkin, who prospered under the aegis of Apple, Rodgers prospered with one American Kenny Young, who wrote and produced this song and finally got Rodgers (who had been performing since she was a teenager and recording for several years already) her first real hit, an NME number two. It is, in effect, a song about wanting her man back, the aggression of the title lyric implying she is all but dead without him – “My sleeves are all torn, my buttons are loose/My makeup’s starting to fade away*” – she is his “baby doll” and a rather sullied and sad Raggedy Ann. She begs him to come back and fix her up, and bring her back to life. It’s a standard uptempo song as you’d expect – “Hug me, bug me, be my friend!” she commands in the chorus – and her requests are topped with this bare fact: “My life is my love, my love is my life/My world is my man” – feminist anthem this is definitely not, but then it is1969, and this song chimes in well with Rodgers’ appearance as a “dolly bird” who is dressed up much as a Barbie would be, with a hint of invitation that would indeed make her the boys’ favourite at this time. Rodgers went on to other successes in the charts** and controversially represented the UK in Eurovision a year later (there were IRA death threats against her); she became part of 'all around entertainment' and was always there either on tv or the stage, even if she had bad luck with singles. (For instance, she recorded "Stand By Your Man" before Tammy Wynette did, but Tammy had the hit.)

Rodgers was a star, launched with Kenny Young's songs; he would go on to write and produce with Fox and Yellow Dog (Fox's hit "S-s-single Bed" in 1976 was too coy for Rodgers, I imagine; part of her appeal was her directness). The simplicity of Rodgers, that star quality, were part of the whole puzzle of 1969, when show business was going right along as usual, just as the 'classic rock' era was beginning and strangeness was starting to seep into things. If you were a boy, Rodgers was easy enough to understand, even if The Troubles was something hanging in the background, in direct opposition to just about everything she stood for.

Next up: a Manchester band that did much better in the U.S. than at home.

*I cannot help but think of the whole riot grrl 'kinderwhore' deliberately rough baby doll look here, as championed by Courtney Love; in the 60s that would have been unacceptable. Rodgers here wants joy in her life, as well as neatness and tidiness.

**She was the biggest female star of '69 in the UK, and her voice was insured for a million pounds. And yet growing up in North America I was unaware of her - a good example of how divided the two sides of the Atlantic were becoming at this time, a gaping crevasse that would increase in the early 70s.

The Muse Sings: Mary Hopkin: "Goodbye"

2012-01-20T22:45:00.000-08:00

While it may seem like time can be evenly split between ten-year chunks we call decades, the actual feel of any given time is oblivious to anything so arbitrary. The early 60s are now a half century in the past, but they must have seemed a long time ago even by 1969 standards; the 60s moved with such force that by its last year it had toppled over, collapsed through its own momentum, and much like a party where anything can happen and so it does, all kinds of good and bad (not to mention previously impossible and horrific) things were bound to happen. Which is to say it was a time of possibility; a time when those who, to quote the Dream Warriors, found meaning in their music addictions were able to start having hit singles and albums of their own, inspired by their own version of the 60s.

In the midst of all this was a voice; a young woman who won Opportunity Knocks and was signed to The Beatles' own Apple records, who became - if only for a brief time - a voice for this turbulent period. "Those Were The Days" is a song of remembrance and things returning, salvaged through the very act of remembering itself. This song, the follow-up, is already ahead of time - saying, literally, goodbye to the strained and somewhat exhausted decade. A voice like this persists; it becomes an emblem to those who need it and feel it, and it can return when you least expect it...to act as a kind of muse? Or to act as a reminder that there was a time when inspiration was not at all hard to find?

This is what I mean by a voice attaching itself to a certain time; or rather a certain voice coming to stand for that time, which was ephemeral and yet vivid, like a brilliantly-colored bird. Hopkin's voice has this quality, maybe because she was young - still in her teens when this was released - and her songs were ones that seemed to be about appreciating well enough where things were but wanting to move on. Whether she appears in "Sound and Vision" deliberately as that musing figure or not I don't know, but the effect is to give "Goodbye" a totemic feel of being a song of leaving and the typical McCartney blitheness hides whatever sadness there is in that; there, she seems to be saying, the 60s are gone and there's no point in being sorry about it; time for new horizons, opportunities, experiences...and in a short few months "Space Oddity" is recorded, and the 70s may not technically begin there, but then again decades do not always start where you might think they do. Hopkin leaves the party just before things start to get strange; Bowie's song is also about escape, though what kind of escape anyone can make from the 60s is a debatable point.

By this time many were lost and looking for a way home; something solid to grasp. But for those who were just getting started, departure was the thing; finding solace and energy in not being like others. Hopkin's voice symbolized this, and hers is one of several songs in this blog for '69 that sum up the whole time. It is deceptively light, but utterly firm in its convictions. The muse comes and goes as she wishes, appears when least expected...

Pink Fluff: Lulu: "Boom Bang a Bang"

2012-01-10T01:37:00.000-08:00

And now we return to the baffling and consternating (to this American, anyway) Eurovision Song Contest. The UK entry was this song, chosen by the UK public from several, and sung by a rather unwilling Lulu (she didn't like the song, but if the public wanted it...).

My general puzzlement with Eurovision is simply that so many of the songs chosen as entries aren't very good; Alan Moorhouse's oom-pah-pah was the same as every UK entry from this time, and Peter Warne's lyrics are so silly they were satirized almost immediately by Monty Python. But the UK public got it right, and this song won the contest...along with three other songs. Yes, there was a four-way tie, a situation that led several countries to boycott the 1970 contest as it was evident that the voting system was screwed up. I will pause here to give you, my dear readers, the other songs - "Vivo Cantando" by Salome (Spain, host country*), "De Troubadour" by Lennie Kuhr (Netherlands), "Un Jour, Un Enfant" by Frida Boccara (France). All of these songs are typical of Eurovision, but they all seem to be about something a little more meaningful than just cuddling; poor Lulu is stuck with a song that seems desperate, in comparison, to be called 'young' and 'pop' and 'fresh' while it's really just more of the same - drivel given to the UK's best singers at this time wasn't just for the men (Englebert, Tom) but evident here as well, sadly. (Even the great Sandie Shaw couldn't escape this: she hated "Monsieur Dupont" but it was a hit at the same time as Lulu.)

Whose fault is all this? (I mean song quality, not Eurovision.) Ultimately it is the public's I'm afraid; if these songs had not been hits, the producers/songwriters would not have been encouraged to do more of the same (and for everyone I've mentioned from the UK, worse). It's 1969 now but "the industry" (as Sir Cliff refers to it) still seems to think it's the swinging 60s when cheery bits of fluff were all the public wanted, and unfortunately, they were right.

As for Lulu, she followed Dusty Springfield to the US to make music; Sandie Shaw's attempts to do tougher stuff went nowhere** and she sensibly retired to raise her family. With songs like "Boom Bang A Bang" the UK had a hit across Europe, so I suppose it was a success commercially; but there is no punctum in it and it is all sugar without much substance. (I wonder how many people voted because it was Lulu, ignoring the song altogether.)

Next up: another young woman in a privileged position who has better luck with her songwriter.

*I should mention here that Austria boycotted this year's contest as it was being held in Franco's Spain. Isn't Eurovision supposed to be about the music? You can see why this American gets consternated.

**Reviewing The Situation has to be one of the great 'lost' covers albums; I say lost as the whopping majority of folks who know vaguely of her have no idea about it.

The Knowing: Dean Martin: "Gentle On My Mind"

2012-01-04T07:03:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the invisible is just as important as the visible; intangible, tangible. As important as it can be to have an experience of something, it is in some ways even more rewarding to know that that experience is yours and yours alone, softly tucked away somewhere, to rest upon when you need it. It can make a harsh world seem more friendly and bearable, and the rough life smoother, more elegant.

I see a clear path; one away from the city, the town, the village even. It's where he walks and remembers and walks some more, parallel to the railroad track perhaps, nearby some woods where he's found a safe place to sleep...he's away from her and yet she is always there, an interior night light of sorts, a sureness that gives the randomness and, yes, repetitiveness of his life an extra dimension. As he talks/sings he unwinds his tether to her, one that is the most slack imaginable without being undone altogether; neither is one for clinging or even letter-writing.

She and he have a bond; that bond exists not as two irresistible soul mates but almost as two sides of one person, one forever there and content to see him when she can, the other out there in the civilized wilderness, rough and forever on the move. There is no great unrequited longing of romance but instead the sure knowledge that she is there, a quietly profound presence that soothes like medicine and is as solid as the earth itself. He may roam, but he knows there is that one path, that floor he can sleep on...and this gives his freedom a sweetness that takes any sense of deprivation or desperation away.

This is indeed the sweet life without caring; a genial warmth that spreads easily from the singer to the listener, and while Glen Campbell had the biggest hit with John Hartford's song in the US, it was Dean Martin's in the UK, and his laissez-faire style of singing (on his tv show he does it so lazily I can't always make out the words; not sure if Liz Fraser ever heard this or not) suits the words perfectly. The song is carefree, open, wide as the plain I imagine the narrator walks and knows well; and Martin's cheerful embracing of that joy is a pleasure, and you can imagine happily walking along with him, sharing that gurgling soup, if not envying the fact that she is constantly - though not heavily - on his mind. Is he going away from her, going towards her, orbiting her? All are possibilities, but that she and he have that connection is the point, and essentially as long as they are both safe, they are both happy.

This was Dean Martin's last UK hit in his lifetime; it neatly helps to end the decade, to give notice that the early glamorous Mad Men 60s had not entirely disappeared (and how much more secure and at ease this is than Sinatra's persistent hit of the time, "My Way"). It is also damn refreshing to hear a song of love that goes along at its own pace (in a faster tempo than "Honey" - this is the flip side of that in many ways) and is coolly but glowingly happy, instead of miserable and maudlin. Extracting the sweetness in life and teaching the zen of being happy by making others happy - of enjoying the ride, even if he has to hug himself - that is what Martin is doing here, and as it is so many times, it is a stark contrast to the top song, which is one of insecurity, aching and dread. Blessed were those at this time who could live life so easily; whose only needs were a place to eat and store a sleeping bag, catch a passing train and drink the waters of memory.

Build A Better Dream, Then: Cilla Black: "Surround Yourself With Sorrow"

2012-01-02T10:44:00.000-08:00

As we go into 1969, I should note that while I don’t remember this year at all in any general sense, this is when – if I do know a song – I seem to have a profound relationship to it, as deep as any smell or taste; I was two at the time and so I was raw, more than easily impressionable and my whole reaction to the mere mention of 1969 is one of apprehension and stupefaction, as if something wholly unthinkable just happened and there I was, trying to understand what I had just seen*.

That this is the case – my complex and wordless reaction to the music of 1969 – is solid, but that is based on US hit songs; and this blog exists to chronicle the hits of the UK chart, as you dear readers know. Looking at the events in the news here for this time, there exists an unsettling thing in the background for most people who are aware of it – a thing that seems far away but is in fact close**, a historical circumstance that looms…and then becomes public in this year, something the general public would prefer to consider momentary, like student protests at the LSE or some form of political cold that will, with the correct remedies, disappear.

I mention them because as of this time – mid-March – The Troubles are well underway. Now, I don’t know how much of an impact they had on the charts directly, but I can certainly understand how a song that is cheery but admits to blankness and misery might have a resonance it would not have ordinarily. The “buttercup” (hm, that word again) here has had a fight and looks out to a wet, neon-flashing world and there’s Cilla telling her to buck up, presumably because this is – OOH! – how a modern young woman would behave. There is more than a trace of ye olde morale-building war spirit here, as if being miserable after a fight just won’t do; there is more misery in the world than you can comprehend, so why add to it? Falling apart over one man, one fight, is almost palpably not good enough. Cilla (interpreting the work of Bill Martin & Phil Coulter – one Scotsman, one Irishman) understands the sorrow the woman in question feels, but hey, she also says, even in the tone of her voice, her smile – the world is a big place and just looking out the window re-hashing things isn’t going to improve anybody’s situation. (Or so George Martin's brassy, punchy production seems to say; he did this rather than work with The Beatles, who were in the slow process of falling apart, and were nearly impossible to produce at the time.)

Love is gone; the pressure is on to either continue in some way or fall apart completely. Perhaps the promise of The Summer of Love has expired, but to give up now and be self-pitying is just not appropriate; not when this apocalyptic year holds a new promise, a re-making of the world that is necessarily going to cause a lot of heartbreaks all over the place. Something bigger is taking place, "tomorrow" may as well be right now and that pressure, while unrelenting, needs something more than just crying (the water in this song falls, surreally, inside and outside the woman's head - she is but a little boat that has briefly capsized but can right itself with enough - OOH! - willpower and determination). Maybe the neon lights that Petula Clark once sang about can cheer her up too?

Next up: why struggle with thoughts when they are all you have?

*At the time I was growing up in Los Angeles, there was a certain growing tension and paranoia in the air; this is written about very well by Andrew Hultkrans in his book about Love’s Forever Changes in the 33 1/3 series on classic albums. I will get to the eruption that ends this later on.

**Strictly speaking of course Northern Ireland was the place of conflict, but tensions between Catholics and Protestants existed in parts of mainland UK as well; as I understand it, the worst area was West Central Scotland, Glasgow in particular.

Boy Toy: The Foundations: "Build Me Up Buttercup"

2011-12-22T07:39:00.000-08:00

And so we come to the end of 1968; it may have been a year for worldwide revolution, but for this blog it clearly has been a year of relationships, whether they are viewed nostalgically as with O’Connor or tormentingly, like Ryan. This song sits about halfway between those two extremes, in that the man clearly loves the woman but is disappointed by her actions, or rather inactions. He loves her but those inactions speak volumes about her attitude, which is decidedly blasé. There doesn’t seem to be much reason for him to still be attracted to her, and he himself questions why he needs her; he doesn’t understand himself, nor does he understand her, save that she thinks of him as a "toy." Perhaps it is because he is so desperate that she stands him up, forgets to call, and “mess(es) him around.” His aching “ooo-OOOH”s are as much about his pain as physical longing, and I don’t know if it is perverse of me to guess that maybe he secretly likes being in love with someone so unpredictable; someone who is very much like the butterfly girl in “Jesamine” who irritates and is yet still inherently lovable.

The song is upbeat, led by piano and horns, a radio staple to this day** as it is cheery, even though it depicts a man at the end of his proverbial rope, the singer almost screaming “WHY” at each chorus, maybe to her, maybe rhetorically as he stares at the clock*, runs to the door, looks imploringly at the phone...wondering about his fate and telling her how much he loves her.

He believes one day he will win her over, but I don’t know if this one-sided relationship has much of a chance; no matter how many “hey hey hey”s and no matter how loud he gets, this woman’s inability to commit, even to something as simple as a phone call, must mean there is either something about her he doesn’t know (not that he has any suspicions in the song) or that maybe, as the saying goes, she just isn’t that into him and he, poor sap, is trying to get pears from an oak tree. (I am not ignoring the obvious implications about her building up his expectations either; those yelps of his are from thwarted desire, and in between this and him not even knowing why he’s attracted to her, something awkward and unpleasant might just happen.)

The Foundations’ previous hit points to a sort of theme here of hapless pointless attachment (“Baby, Now That I’ve Found You”) and this need to be with someone – even if it’s not reciprocated – kind of hints at what is to come. If the Summer of Love was all about love as a universal solvent, then in ’68 love came back down to the dogged and irrational personal perspective, wherein men have feelings for women that don’t necessarily make a lot of sense, but they are true and genuine and that – that realness – is what counts. 1969 is going to take that realness all over the place, as the decade ends and everyone has their final say on what counts.

*Sloan do an excellent song on the bonus EP of One Chord To Another called “Stood Up,” all about a guy who is left in a café, watching the clock…

**If I sound a little...arms-length about this song, it's because I associate it with a compilation I heard way too much in a situation that I didn't exactly enjoy. As much as I try to be fair to songs, some have been drummed into me in a way that doesn't make me think of them with automatic enthusiasm. I should note that it was written by Mike d'Abo (lead singer with Manfred Mann) and Tony Macaulay, who helped to write "Baby, Now That I've Found You." I should also note that The Foundations were the first multi-racial group to hit it big in the UK, at a time when (inexplicable to me) The Black and White Minstrel Show was still on tv. The struggle was still definitely continuing...

How We Used To Live: Des O'Connor: "One Two Three O'Leary"

2011-12-21T03:34:00.000-08:00

And now we return to the NME number twos for a song that was written by Barry Mason and Michael Carr, and performed by all-round entertainer (comedian, singer, tv chat show host) Des O'Connor. That something so utterly and completely sedate could jostle its way to the top amongst The Scaffold, The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and Love Sculpture just shows how fragmented the pop audience was, and how well a song like this could do.

It is a quiet song, a song about innocence and first love, harpsichord-led and gently going down memory lane, and it has nothing to do with liberation or freedom and everything to do with recalling a different time; a time when they were both young but also when the "wildwood" was theirs and everything seemed magical*.

To some this might seem a bit soppy, and O'Connor himself didn't think much of his singing, but pure, 100% proof nostalgia like this always does well in the holiday season, when thoughts turn to loved ones, and Mary here clearly is loved, even if it is so long ago that the narrator (if pressed - he isn't, here) doesn't know where she is now. Now is just a vantage point to then, and then is what is fixed in the narrator's mind. This song could appeal to anyone, I guess, but it is the generation just before the Housewives of Valium Court that it hits directly - those who remember life before & during WWII, those who suffered through it and take refuge in utterly peaceful and genteel music and find most rock too ugly and loud. (The harpsichord is what makes this a 'modern' sounding song, as baroque meets old guard pop.) As songs about love from this year go, this is thankfully free of death; an oasis of calm, even if it is a cul-de-sac.

From the rock vantage point O'Connor seems out of place; however, I should mention a much more 'hip' song that O'Connor did that he himself could stand: "Dick-A-Dum-Dum" is total London silliness as interpreted by Jim Dale, but shows more signs of life from O'Connor because of its humor. (And yes, whenever I hear 'the Buckingham beat' I think of Fleetwood Mac. I'm predictable that way.)

As '68 closes, we have more girl trouble ahead; beyond that, 1969 looms, the final year, as the 60s turns to look at itself.

*The game played in question is fully described here.

The Flesh Succeeds: Nina Simone: "Ain't Got No/I Got Life/Do What You Gotta Do"

2011-12-19T04:55:00.001-08:00

After great grief, there has to be a stock-taking; a simple assertion of what and who you are. It is a painful thing to realize that you don't have things, that what you once had is gone; you have to rejoice in what you do have and make the most of it, while you can.

Nina Simone's recording of this song* came just a month or so after Dr. King's assassination, a time of anger, a time when a purpose that seemed unstoppable had to be buoyed up and sustained. Simone was no stranger to covering songs from musicals and besides the gospel-style music I am guessing she picked this one (actually a medley of two songs from the first act of HAIR) as it directly addresses the loss everyone was feeling...that they had nothing left - nothing external, not even a name. The eternal value of the person and his/her right - freedom - that was all that was left. It is like hearing a birth in reverse; everything, even the mother, is absent. Life is the main thing; it is the only thing. That no one can take away, though as the story in HAIR runs, even that is a debatable point...

But Simone's voice, astringent and fierce, makes it sound as if life is at the same time a base line from which to start and something that is hers, as if she had in fact created herself. The burden of not having anything becomes a blessing of a clean slate, again rejoicing in the physical body (HAIR is a very physical show, from its title on down) and the life all of these parts lead together to make up a human being (not unlike this song, which is also one of liberation). The body as a weapon; the body as an ultimate assertion of something that cannot be lost, unless there is death...and this is a song, ultimately, of life over death, of life over the "measly little world" (cf. Hendrix) that would tie it down. It is also an angry though - as if all these losses were unnecessary in the first place, robbings that have left the person with nothing more than themselves.

"Do What You Gotta Do" is a Jimmy Webb song, which is to say it's about freedom and love and how they clash. It is another song as well about how she knows she's hard to love and her heart is her own; this is self-possession on another level. If he has to be free, well, that seems inevitable; 'they' are against him and she loves him more than they ever will. Instead of being deadly fierce here Simone trembles and admits vulnerability, not as a virtue in and of itself but as a symbol, paradoxically, of strength; she is strong enough to love and let go and may never get to see him again...because there is something bigger out there that he has to do - follow his "dappled dreams" that she understands, even if no one else does.

In the first song, she asserts her freedom; in the second, she honors the freedom and needs of someone else. As the 60s come to a close, it seems freedom is the ultimate right and the ultimate gift; but there is another side to them, that wants a sense of belonging and attachment, a side that is less HAIRand more Grease. In the swirling and confusing late 60s, some basic truths have to will out first, and the toughness and quiet sorrow and acceptance here are and were the best ways for riding out a difficult period.

Simone strode in, better equipped than most to handle the situation; and Alan "Fluff" Freeman's support of this is how it got, improbably, into the UK chart in the first place**. Next we go back to the old guard, for a song about love and loss...

*The version I've posted isn't the single one that has applause from the April 7th concert mixed in, presumably to make it 'flow' as a total album ('Nuff Said!) I can only wonder if, years later, a certain producer remembered this and did his own live-to-studio tinkering for this classic (for all I know it was influenced by her; Elton certainly respected her, as anyone would).

**I am still puzzled as to how this, also a cover of a song from HAIR, only got to #11; I guess it was just the times. I still find it overwhelmingly moving...more evidence, I'm guessing, of my American childhood.

A Kind of Seizure: Barry Ryan: "Eloise"

2011-12-15T05:30:00.000-08:00

We have had songs before where, clearly, a line was being drawn between the present and the past; songs which, once they get out into the general world of pop, charts and listeners' ears, prepare them for what is to come, and inspire a few to follow...this is one of those songs; it's a dangerous song, as well.

Songs like this usually come from bands that are already fairly well known (The Beatles did it several times) or from the most unexpected of corners, those who are brand new or are determined, to quote Ezra Pound, to make it new.

Avant-MOR, a term I've used enough, is simply taking regular middle-of-the-road balladry down a strange lane or two, until something like "MacArthur Park" or "Montague Terrace (In Blue)" - songs that take lyrical and emotional flight, whether they are anguished or secure. This takes guts - in a way it is too easy to just sing the same songs, essentially, over and over again - and the skill to pull it off. There is no halfway point here, no way to just say 'let's just be a little avant-garde' - this is unvarnished stuff emotionally despite the high production values.

Twins Paul and Barry Ryan were popstar pin-up types in the mid-60s; Paul suffered too much stress performing live, though, so the two decided that Paul would write the songs and Barry would sing them; in this way there is already a doubling effect, as if two men had one voice. Paul had heard and absorbed "MacArthur Park" and wanted to do something like it; not a neat song that would be something a mailman would hum, but a proper EPIC song that would unashamedly give voice to something far bigger and uncontrollable, that would gallop along, at first dramatically, then pause as if to recall reality, if only for a second or two, and then speed into a maelstrom that makes much of UK music in '68 sound as if it is asleep.

Which is to say, this is not baroque at all but romantic, the kind of romanticism where emotions are high-pitched to the point of hysteria; wild, as if she has loved him and spurned him but he will not give up, he cannot give up as he has no other point in living.

This is a dangerous song. I'll explain what I mean: we've had Cupid before, and The Casuals had that experience too, if a bit stronger, but I must go back to Joseph Campbell to explain the difference between those and "Eloise":

“The troubadours were the nobility of Provence and then later other parts of France and Europe. In Germany they’re known as the Minnesingers, the singers of love. Minne is the medieval German word for love. The period for the troubadours is the 12th century. The troubadours were very much interested in the psychology of love. And they’re the first ones in the West who really thought of love the way we do now — as a person-to-person relationship.

Before that, love was simply Eros, the god who excites you to sexual desire. This is not the experience of falling in love the way the troubadours understood it. Eros is much more impersonal than falling in love. You see, people didn’t know about Amor. Amor is something personal that the troubadours recognized.

The troubadours recognized Amor as the highest spiritual experience. With Amor we have a purely personal ideal. The kind of seizure that comes from the meeting of the eyes, as they say in the troubadour tradition, is a person-to-person experience. That’s completely contrary to everything the Church stood for (in medieval Europe).

You know, the usual marriage in traditional cultures was arranged for by the families. It wasn’t a person-to-person decision at all. In the Middle Ages, that was the kind of (impersonal) marriage that was sanctified by the Church. And so the troubadour idea of real person-to-person Amor was very dangerous.”

Or, as Bill Moyers summed it up: "The point of all these pioneers in love is that they decided to be the author and means of their own self-fulfillment, that the realization of love is to be nature’s noblest work, and that they were going to take their wisdom from their own experience and not from dogma, politics, or any current concepts of social good.”

Even if Barry Ryan didn't know it, Paul had written a troubadour's song for him, a song of obsession, which didn't care for taste, politeness or anything modest. People think of courtly love as being stuffy and formal, but once the true origins of it are recalled and understood, the whole notion of The Summer of Love as revolutionary begins to make sense. Love goes against everything here, including common sense and even sanity (at the end when he sings about not being "there" I am not sure if he means not with her or not in her heart). Ryan sings like there's pretty much no tomorrow, attacking the song and freaking out at the end, passionate and fierce, the go-faster guitars and AAAAHHHHs of the backing singers forever egging him on.

Because it was now nearly 1969 and with that finality ahead, there was nothing to lose. Revolution wasn't just in the air, it was the air; the cute, the maudlin, the merely okay were not enough now. Not when songs like this and this* were in the top ten at the same time; not when Hendrix was singing about a coming apocalypse.

"Eloise" was a huge hit not just in the UK but all across Europe, in part because it was so unhinged ("Kitsch" was a later hit for Ryan, it being "a beautiful word"), and its follow-up, "Love Is Love" goes beyond even this lyrically to sum up love so totally that it's almost embarrassing. But that was the point; to go beyond what had come before, and belatedly to inspire those to come. Years later a certain band, wanting to do something big and memorable themselves, would be inspired by "Eloise" to write their own EPIC tune that would not just stomp all over their rivals but become one of the best-loved UK songs of all time; which is how Queen got to "Bohemian Rhapsody," itself a song that drew a line neatly between old and new rock, not to mention deliberate kitsch. The only way in which it differs is that the narrator there claims that nothing really "matters" to him, whereas the narrator in "Eloise" is so utterly focused that nothing besides her matters to him.

The drama of this song cannot be ignored; the sense that something out of the ordinary is happening, the sense that in hearing it you are participating, sharing his desperate need. Certainly a couple of boys in Dundee heard and absorbed it, coming up with their own 'popera' years later, with songs such as this. Here, as with "Eloise" I can only feel awe: this is what music is, what it is capable of, something beautiful and fearless and intense. Music that comes from somewhere else.

In a way there is nothing after this, though as '68 comes to a close there are a few more songs, pointers this way and that. But with this the Ryans abruptly took UK pop into a different world, a world that others would and did find inspiring, and I thank them for that.

*The Motown resurgence was due to Tony Blackburn on Radio 1 and the saintly Dave Godin, who were determined to get as much Motown in the charts as possible.

Love's In Control: The Casuals: "Jesamine"

2011-12-15T03:57:00.000-08:00

As common as they seem now, musicians have been going on tv to compete against each other for promising stardom and riches for some time; The Casuals won Opportunity Knocks three times in 1965 and got a recording contract, but the public enthusiasm for them, as it does for so many in these situations, did not translate into an instant hit for their first single. Sure, people liked them, but not the song. And so they moved to Italy and had a career there doing Italian covers of English-language hits (they did The Bee Gees' "Massachusetts" for example). Then they changed their label from Fontana to Decca and got this hit, a cover of a song by The Bystanders written by Friendly Forbear* Marty Wilde and Ronnie Scott, the Bystanders' manager.

It sounds as if it was written and performed almost anonymously; there were no stars in this hard-working band, and it sounds very much as if the old-fashioned beat of the 50s is combined with the "butterfly child" 60s vibe of a man in love with a girl who is life and death to him, who "makes his life a dream" but doesn't seem to know what effect she has on him. It is a wistful song with a sense that beauty like this is ephemeral and a hesitancy to do anything lest she fly away, forever. The music circles around this dilemma elegantly, the music itself slowly settling and then soaring, aching to break free but not really able to; not yet, anyway. The awfulness of how he is "not really living" without her is balanced by his adoration of her, her opening his eyes being her real gift, again one she may not know she is giving.

If the previous song had the feeling of "Gee, this what falling in love is like - gosh, I'd better get used to it" then this is much closer to the near narcotic state it can have, wiping the mind clean of anything but the Other, making the rest of the world seem irrelevant and the lover can find nothing and be nothing without the beloved. Again, this might seem extreme, but the songwriters - even if published this under psedonyms - are right to emphasize the Romantic here, which The Summer of Love tried to make universal. This presents a truer sense of what nobility and vulnerability there is in love (especially, as here, one-sided & maybe even unrequited love); the next song will go far beyond this, and far beyond anything I've written about so far in terms of love's intensity and all the desperation those arrows can cause.

This song, by the way, like Leapy Lee's was The Casuals' only real hit; not to get too meta here, but it is as if Love itself was propelling these artists into the charts, to right a certain wrong. With this next song, it certainly sounds as if Love has got the reins.

*The name I use to describe anyone who has anything to do with New Pop before it actually starts; in this case, Wilde is Kim Wilde's father, so he is a literal forbear!

This Won't Hurt A Bit: Leapy Lee: "Little Arrows"

2011-12-15T01:22:00.000-08:00

The experience of falling in love is, to say the least, an interesting one. It is swoony, it is perpetual, it puzzlingly either seems to grow over months or happens seemingly within seconds (or even weirder, both of these occur). To those of you who have yet to fall in love, all I can say is you certainly will know when it happens - it is an overwhelming experience and an understandably confusing one, because the world is being newly refreshed all around you, and this renewal is constant and suddenly the Other is magically everywhere.

After so many songs of death, sacrifice and sorrow this song is a very welcome reminder that, even in the chaos of '68, Cupid is still hard at work, his arrows scattering everywhere. Here these arrows are as common as the twirling maple seeds in Toronto, getting into hair and clothes; not even armour can stop them, so powerful are they.

While Leapy Lee is not exactly the first name you think of when the word "punctum" comes to mind, the piercing quality of those arrows cannot be denied. Falling in love makes you wake up; it makes you vulnerable; and to a certain extent, you have to be ready for love in order to fall into it*. Those arrows may be little but their accumulative power is awesome, and Leapy Lee (dressed much like Cat Stevens was) makes it sound like fun, kind of like winning the lottery. I can only attribute this to the songwriters, Albert Hammond and Mike Hazelwood, who were country/pop writers and not opera composers after all - the lightheartedness here is a joy, a little inane to those who always take love Very Seriously, but a joy nonetheless. Because of its mythological basis this isn't bubblegum (bubblegum never presumes you know anything, or that you're over ten) but a kind of giddy, winking (though not knowing) embrace of Cupid, whose own character was naturally mischievous.

In a way this song is only for those who haven't fallen in love yet; it is fair warning for what is to come, though kind of a camouflage as well for what really happens, which feels less like being covered in arrows and more like a drug-like experience that doesn't let up...

Next up: more romance, courtesy of a Friendly Forbear.

*Erich Fromm says you have to know and respect yourself before you can love anyone else; not terribly romantic, but absolutely true.

Family First and Last: O.C. Smith: "Son of Hickory Holler's Tramp"

2011-12-14T02:21:00.000-08:00

In music, as in life, there is no greater figure of importance than the mother; and especially in music from the South, whether it be folk, country or soul. This is not apologetic or high falutin music; it says what it says as if to say that this is reality, as opposed to the often idealistic/nihilistic edges of rock. Mother is the bedrock of everything; there can be no criticism, because criticizing her is tantamount to criticizing everything else that surrounds you, and ultimately, yourself.

So when O.C. Smith tells the story of how his mother got to be a woman of the night, however exaggerated the tale (how could there be fourteen children who didn't understand adults' gossip?), it is at heart more a song about the pride of the family - the mother and the children - than any factual details. It's a pride that is defiant; the father is feckless, a drunk, who leaves them nothing (and unlike a future song, the children here don't ask about him) and having so many children to look after, she hangs up her "scarlet lamp" and brings them all up, on "chicken dumplings" and "goodnight kisses." Trying to figure out the logistics of how all this works is not the point; the mother loves her children and vice versa, and she dies (no indication how or why; since there's none I'm guessing old age/illness) and is remembered fondly by all of them. (Since they have a farm I guess some of the kids farm, but again that's not mentioned.) The song is about a boy who grows up and returns to his childhood home, defiant in his own way, but not looking to provoke a fight. He is proud - no one helped the family when he was growing up, and so I imagine it became like a military unit, self-sufficient and wary of outsiders. But again, there is no fuss; justified self-satisfaction is due, just as the roses on the mother's grave are due.

That this song was written by Dallas Frazier (who also wrote "Alley-Oop" and "Elvira"), a country songwriter, and done in a soul style seals the link between the two musics - blurs them really, as this song was also a hit for Kenny Rogers. There is, unlike "Honey," no pathos here, no clammy uneasiness; there is some grief that what happened had to happen, but it is not dwelled upon. That this song is at rock bottom about doing what you have to do in order to survive, a mother's sacrifice - well, no one is unfamiliar with that, no matter where you live, in the country or the city.

This song was a hit during a time when the charts could - and did - have just about anything and everything in them, from avant-MOR to easy listening to soul to rock to bubblegum; 1968 in singles was a swirling and sometimes (as we've seen) morbid look at life, life often seen in extremes, as if regular life was somehow not big enough to contain the feelings and tendencies of the time. Apart from all the strangeness, a song like this is like walking barefoot on grass; a reaffirmation of the fundamentals of life, even if that life is lived as the narrator's mother had to live hers. It also feeds into the 'back to basics' movement that had its rock counterpart in The Band, whose first album* caused a whole wave of prominent musicians to take a step back from psychedelic heaviness and get into something more subtle, acoustic and, well, soulful**.

Next up: a song about Cupid, because there have always been songs about him, thank goodness.

*The Band had no doubt played in many of the places O.C. Smith had played and knew both country and r&b intimately.

**There is a whole other wave of musicians in the UK who are coming up via the blues, but I will get to them in time.

Laugh Until You Cry: Bobby Goldsboro: "Honey"

2011-12-13T05:28:00.000-08:00

There are certain songs that are disliked and then there are songs that are hated. Of the many songs I get to write about in this blog, this is one of the most hated, to the point where it is some people's least favorite song of all time, which is saying something.

That the song is hated so much at least shows that it touches something primal, and in this case that primal feeling is a surprising one: dignity. This song, which tries so hard to be heart-tugging and tear-wringing, gives us a "kinda dumb and kinda smart" figure whose death, just from that description (and the lament at the beginning, not to mention the funeral home 'your call is important to us' music) is beyond foretold: it's mandatory. Once again we are at home, seemingly outside, with a man who is telling his sorry tale to a 'friend' (presumably the audience, as this man doesn't have friends - I'll get to that in a second) who is given a description of a woman so utterly depressed and lonely, that tears may indeed be shed, though another emotion might come to the fore afterwards...

It is hard to kick, if only metaphorically, a man when he's down; the narrator here is sorry and trying to be "good" and misses Honey, but it is he who is himself the cause of his own misery. He laughs at her when she plants a tree; he, even though he's her husband, never seems to question why she might be crying, or even why she would wreck the car. She is, to him, "young at heart" and perhaps messed up in ways he can't understand, but his lack of curiosity or empathy are his undoing. Is her crying "needlessly" due to his lack of sensitivity, care? There is a coldness at the heart of this song that gives me the chills; placidly Goldsboro tells the pathetic tale of a woman who would literally rather die than live with a man who cannot give her the dignity of being a real, living person whose life is worth taking seriously. That he keeps saying he misses her and would be with her "if he could" doesn't help matters any; sure his life is an "empty stage," but by the end of the song he surely deserves his fate, and indeed is doomed to repeat his story again and again, about the "kinda dumb" girl he mocked and condescended to while she was alive, and now pathetically mourns*.

That this song was such a hit shows a few things: there's no accounting for taste, some people don't listen to lyrics, and that if they do the wash of sentiment can outweigh anything else. The dignity of the listener is ultimately what is offended here, as the audience is called upon to be sympathetic with a narrator who is lamenting a death that did not need to happen, one which he no doubt contributed to; marriage is unity, but there was no unity in this one and I can't help but feel that I am listening to a story narrated by a man who is more than "kinda dumb" myself.

Bobby Russell was responsible for writing this, though, and not Goldsboro (who, to his eternal credit, didn't think much of the song and had to, according to Randy Bachman, keep doing takes as he kept laughing during the recording - right at the end you can sort of hear a suppressed smile). Russell also wrote the only slightly less unbearable "The Night The Lights Went Out in Georgia"; Goldsboro went on to host his own tv show and have other, less maudlin, hits. Just why he recorded this I don't know; perhaps he was needled into it, and perhaps it was simply that he needed a hit...

That this was such a success (it got to #2 again in the UK in '75; I'm just posting about it the once) could only be explained by a nationwide sulky/self-pitying mood that this song plays into like a home run with men on all bases**; but even here not once does the narrator look at himself and try to figure out what went wrong, and my only (thankfully unnecessary) fear is that he will fall in love with another woman who is "young at heart" and he will be just as callous to her and the whole thing will happen all over again.

I wonder if any of the Housewives of Valium Court had their consciousness raised by this song; in the shared miseries of '68 something is stirring, even as the songs of women's deaths and woes continue to pile up.

Next up: A woman's gotta do what she's gotta do. I guess...

*This song reminds me, of all things, of the sadness that Thomas Carlyle had after his wife Jane's death; not that she killed herself, but that she had a miserable life with him (he read her journals after her death) and he never really appreciated the continual sadness and anger that she felt.

*This song was #1 in the US in the weeks after Dr. King's assassination; having this reach the top was just more misery than was needed.

Sophisticated Misery: Englebert Humperdinck: "A Man Without Love"

2011-12-13T03:16:00.000-08:00

It is easy to see that on the same block as Marriott and his bothersome neighbors, the Housewives of Valium Court have their own method of escape; not just through doctor-approved medication but through daydreams. There he is, unable to leave the house as he is crying (and real men don't cry in public) over his lost love. It was, perhaps, a Mediterranean romance - Spain, Italy, somewhere where (the Housewives think) Romance is constantly in the air and a broken heart is seen not as a mere scratch or bruise but as a near-fatal condition that must be treated with respect.

Crying is a funny thing in songs; it's an easy enough thing to sing about, but if you have the wrong voice for it, it renders the emotional outpouring as something more or less as emotionally involving as trimming the hedge or kneading dough*. It requires a big voice to handle those big emotions, and if Englebert here sounds less than believable (compared to say, Roy Orbison) he at least has the appropriate voice for the song and its Italian origins. (The song was originally written by Roberto Livraghi, Daniele Pace & Mario Panzeri as "Quando M'innamoro" for the Sanremo Festival, an Italian song competition that was the inspiration for Eurovision; Barry Mason wrote English lyrics.) Part of the reason this works is simply that so many I'm-going-to-stay-right-here-and-mope songs** were Englebert's territory already, but there is a languorous smoothness here as well, and the Housewives could easily imagine him wearing his silk dressing gown and eating his eggs Benedict and being as elegant as hell, and still suffering.

Loneliness is indeed a cloak he wears, as a more avant-MOR balladeer would sing, and if he can't go outside he is in a way just as imprisoned as his intended audience; what may look like more fromage to some was more than likely reality for many. That it has a slightly too-sweet aura about it - like a kind of glaze - adds to the sealed-for-your-protection feeling of immobility he's felt since she went away, after that Mediterranean romance.

Still, this immobility is cozy in way - there is a reassuring gentleness and suaveness in the music that guarantees that once the narrator (who recognizes himself as one of many lonely men, a member of a tribe if you will) gets over his loss and goes outside, he is bound to meet another woman and Romance will bloom again. For now he cries and can't go outside, though, and while that seems harsh at least his suffering isn't as acute as the one in this song, a song that brings romantic agony's endless and near-morbid condition only too close to home***. (That it didn't get into the Top 40 in the UK could in part be because of its intensity; it could also be because Motown music wasn't as of yet being pushed that much by certain DJs and music folk.) The Housewives of Valium Court are comforted in their way by this shared misery, thinking and feeling the common "He's too beautiful to suffer!" as they pause after housework or during the baby's nap; that maybe in a few years they might think that way about themselves is possible, but at this point marginal. For now they sit and imagine the Mediterranean breezes, exotic romance, meeting a lovelorn man while strolling by the sea...

Next up: a song that lives, like other things, in infamy.

*Witness the completely emotionally non-involving Jason Derulo single "Fight For You" where when he sings about crying he sounds like a robot. The overuse of Toto's "Africa" doesn't help much either.

**As opposed to Tom Jones, who is forever trying to get home and never really managing it.

***Roger Penzabene, the lyricist, wrote the song about his marital troubles; he killed himself on New Year's Eve, 1967. The Summer of Love had many victims, and the heaviness of '67 was beginning to crush many in '68.

Caught Between Two Worlds: The Small Faces: "Lazy Sunday"

2011-12-12T05:29:00.000-08:00

There is a type of guy that the UK specializes in: the bloke. A bloke is not quite a dude (US) or a hoser (Canada) but is something like both in that he is a guy that is a guy; in the UK I take it that the word 'bloke' means someone who is sociable enough, enjoys manly things or has a manly taste in things, and doesn't care for airs or fancies, most of the time. A great deal of music writing in the UK, from what I can tell, is aimed directly at these men, men who have an opinion as to what is and isn't music as strong as those gatekeepers of the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in the US.

Which leads squarely to this song by The Small Faces, who are almost the uber bloke group*; from East London ('real' London as any bloke sees it), tussled and then broke free from dominating manager Don Arden, were drug-taking psychedelic mods who sang about getting high and got away with it. That they broke up (in part because they found themselves unable to do any songs from their hit album Ogden's Nut Gone Flake live, including this song) and reconfigured with Ronnie Wood and Rod Stewart to become The Faces is yet another confirming fact for any bloke that this was their band, fun-loving, unpretentious and devoted to R&B and a good time.

This song, however, follows a growing trend in this blog of singers who have to be coerced into singing songs and bands having songs released against their wishes; "Lazy Sunday" was recorded as a joke, never intended to be a single (it was, as you can tell, Steve Marriott complaining about his neighbors) and was resolutely pop when Marriott wanted the band to be more serious. The "tweedle dee bite"s and exaggerated accent (done because the Hollies taunted him about his not singing with much of a Cockney twang) are pure music hall near-farce, the neighbors complain about his loud ways while he just wants to space out and "drift away". The tug-of-war between the two worlds - the complaining outside world and the peaceful inner one - resolves with the rush of surf, bells, birds; either this is the world he wants to escape to, or he has given up on staying home (so much for laziness!) and gone to the seaside himself.

In this, Marriott is not just a guy in a band who likes to escape but an Everyman, and an Everylondoner at that. London is a big place and a crowded one; the jostle and crowding might be fine for some, but for others just one day where they can be themselves and not have any hassles is desperately needed. But there is no escaping from others, some complaining, some inquisitive, all interrupting the need to just veg out and do nothing. There's a smile on Marriott's face - you can just see it - in the song, and even if I don't understand all the lyrics ("To sing in the khazi while you suss out the moon" is a bit more intelligible to me than Spandau Ballet's "Stealing cake to eat the moon") but I can certainly understand his joy in "sitting in a rainbow" and feeling at one with the world, only to have that broken by someone banging on his door, stopping his groovin' and making his life miserable.

That the group then made an album they couldn't reproduce live shows the difficulties bands had in (on the one hand) wanting to make progressive, psychedelic, modern music and (on the other) being able to make any headway with a public that would just as soon have them do songs like this (and "Itchycoo Park") than anything more complex. The Beatles could do it simply because they had stopped touring, thus freeing them from having to really please any crowds anymore; but they and only they had that luxury - everyone else had to play live. (Marriott left the band as he felt they couldn't top Ogden; in the free-floating crap game that was UK rock, there were always a few other musicians to form a band with, and Marriott got together with Peter Frampton** to form Humble Pie, yet another de facto bloke group.)

If other people are a bother in this song, then its most famous offspring is a celebration of the many people who make up London, all going about their own business with one of them giving a running commentary (saying everything but "Gor blimey Mrs. Jones/How's old Bert's lumbago?" as Marriott asks here) on what he sees and what he does. Here instead of irritated next-door-neighbors there's a stronger sense of unity - everyone hand-in-hand - though the jostle and crowding are nearly palpable, so is the joy in feeling a part of something larger. But in '68 the joy is in escape, in separating one's self from others, especially if those others are not like you - the song is a joke but the generation gap here isn't, and even in relatively placid London there is a tension between the public and private, not to mention tensions within bands as to whether to stay pop or go rock. You cannot please everyone, the late 60s seems to be saying, and so escape to somewhere else more congenial is one solution. Not everyone can fit in...not even blokes, who tend to think they are normal. But at this time there's normal and normal...

Next up: another song about someone who wants to leave the house, but can't. Has The Summer of Love turned into the Spring of Agoraphobia?

*The ultimate uber bloke group is up for debate, but I'm guessing it's either The Who or The Rolling Stones. There are blokes who hate The Beatles, I have learned (I've learned many things since moving to the UK) so I can't include them.

**Frampton was in his own strange pop band at the time called The Herd; if you like the idea of mythological 60s pop, they are for you.

A Child Shall Lead Them: 1910 Fruitgum Company: "Simon Says"

2011-12-06T07:41:00.000-08:00

And now we come - all of a sudden, like a sugar rush - to the wonderful world of bubblegum music, which was a haven for garage bands who liked to make music for drunk girls to dance to (to borrow from Franz Ferdinand) as opposed to far-out psychedelic blues jams for those who wanted to get high. One of the great joys of pop is the complete inanity of it, that it does not and really should not be taken so seriously; and as you can see there was a lack of cheery, perky songs around at this time.

So in come the bubblegum army to give the increasingly heavy late 60s a big lift. The biggest source of bubblegum was one Buddah Records, run by Neil Bogart (he who later gave the world KISS and The Village People) - he saw the success of the Monkees and wanted in on the action - luckily he met the producing powerhouse duo of Jerry Kasenetz and Steve Katz, who proceeded to work with the 1910 Fruitgum Company (an actual band from New Jersey, btw, and not just a pseudonym for themselves) to do this song. I cannot say much about it except that the various looks on the faces here show that while this may not be what the group first got together to do (the b-side is called, after all, "Reflections From the Looking Glass") but it was what the kids wanted and it was dumb fun and what is wrong with that? (This is yet perhaps another variation of the childlike qualities of psychedelia, with this game* winning out as little kids were simply too young for anything else.)

What was one way out of the 60s? Bubblegum was maybe not what the serious types would have thought up, but it persisted in the US and in the UK, feeding into and energizing other music to make this old thing called rock 'n' roll new again (bubblegum + rock = glam). As absolutely non-threatening as this song is, it helped to refocus some on what mattered - sweetness, youth and a lightness of touch that during this time in particular were sorely needed. It reassured people - even those who hated playing this game - that there was still a place for simplicity in music, if not out-and-out nonsense. This is playground stuff, but it's the roots for a lot of what is to come; in a way bubblegum is the roots of a lot of good things about the 70s, if by good you also mean silly, addictive, sweet and ridiculous. That's fine; in fact bubblegum may have even pushed the whole 'back to basics' '68 movement along in its own way, just as much as The Band. Who knows? Anything can happen when travelling back to square one.

*Whenever I had to play this game I did well until it got too fast and I invariably messed up; but this song never does speed up or play tricks. Bubblegum's too good-hearted for that.

Death Becomes Him: Tom Jones: "Delilah"

2011-12-05T04:07:00.000-08:00

There are many benefits of being a singer/songwriter, and one of them is that you don't look at the lyrics someone has given you and think to yourself, this is a joke, right?

But Les Reed and Barry Mason weren't kidding, so Jones dutifully sang it, and the public loved it and still do (particularly the Welsh Rugby Union and Stoke City fans). I am not sure if anyone concerned knew the word "camp" (as it had been recently specifically defined by Susan Sontag) but even your average mailman could sense in the oom-pah-pah rhythm and male-hysterical lyrics ("I was lost like a slave that no man could free") that this was, even for Jones, not a normal song. It is almost a Punch-and-Judy show-level song about insane jealousy, and the narrator's murderousness is caused by her "laughing" (I will leave it up to you to figure out why she is laughing). And so he stands at the end, the other man having of course already left, singing to her corpse, rehearsing his story for the police and thence the judge*...

That some members of the jury might be women is conveniently overlooked here, but not by this man, who knows full well what the song is about. It's about a man who is obsessed, a stalker; a man who considers the woman to be his even though she is no good for him (and he knows it). Alex Harvey digs into what Jones couldn't at the time - the unnerving self-justifications that make his begging for forgiveness hollow, the horror behind the drama, the flat face of a man who is not temporarily nuts but is deliberate, who would have killed her even if she hadn't been laughing.

But this is how things were in 1968 - an at heart grisly tale is done as a sing-a-long, grotesque and dramatic as a soap opera, while real deranged killers (Dr. King was assassinated while this was #2) were on the loose. Perhaps this song was one of the truer fruits of the Summer of Love, but I tend to think it is one that has gone sour, a twisted pleading yelp. As a song it is cheesy and I'm sure that Reed & Mason wrote it knowing the public would respond to its outrageous pantomime heart. (It also has, in the band and chorus, all of what would soon become Led Zeppelin, not to mention one Reg Dwight, aka Elton John, on piano.) In a way it is an oppositional #2 as well, sitting just under "Lady Madonna," a song where the only anger evident is in the sax solo, a precursor to another song I'll get to by McCartney about an ordinary woman's travails. But all is Drama with Jones as ever, and by now this is what his audience expects from him.

1968 was a year of violence, and in some way this song reflects that; it has lasted because it is easy for the terraces to sing on one part, and on another Jones himself does it in a jokey way now, as if to say, that era is gone. That may be true, but then it was another piece of the lurid and irrational end of the 60s, as idealism was giving way to despair and the decade was already being disowned by some as not being all it was cracked up to be (certainly the hippie scene of California was getting ugly). This song waltzes and and trots by it all, as if to say, in part, what do you expect? (The musical Cabaret had just started in London a month before; the uneasiness of that show reminds me of this song.)

Next up: the counterpart to all this madness, available at your local corner store.

*Jones was in prison waiting to be executed in a previous song, and here he is again, about to go through the whole rigmarole again. I can only assume a young Nick Cave was absorbing the sort-of song cycle at the time...

A Lover's Discourse: The Four Tops: "Walk Away Renee"

2011-11-29T01:46:00.000-08:00

Or, The Summer of Love With A Vengeance

"My language trembles with desire." Roland Barthes, "Talking" A Lover's Discourse

There are certain voices that can sing anything - and then there are grander voices that are best suited to whatever their voices most suggest. Holland-Dozier-Holland knew what Levi Stubbs' voice was capable of, what it could bear, and wrote songs for him and The Four Tops that only they could really sing. Stubbs' voice is big, pained, noble; it needed a setting and lyrics that could match it.

When H-D-H left Motown The Four Tops were (like everyone else H-D-H had worked with) at something of a loss for songs, when someone - I'm not sure who - found this and knew it would work. (I am writing about this, by the way, as a #2 hit on the NME chart.) I can well imagine them hearing to the original in '66 song by The Left Banke and being impressed by it; the singer is paralyzed with hopeless love. He is stationary, empty, and the world floods around him, the sky cries the tears he can't, the symbol of love - a heart on a wall with her & his names - haunts him. Because she can never be his, she may as well leave; he cannot follow her or even be near her. It is too much for him, he literally cannot stand it. The singer Steve Martin (and here we come to feeling The Four Tops understood) cannot help himself; he sounds as if he is singing from a fugue state, just conscious enough to sing, to say what little there is he can say, that can be expressed in words. The rest is taken up by strings, harpsichord, flute; the elegant and comforting touches around a terrible loss.

He is noble in recognizing what the situation is (she's not to blame; there's no blame here at all) and being able to sing it. (Renee was an actual person, a muse for the harpsichordist/lyricist Michael Brown, and she was present when the song was being recorded, but not during his playing; he was trembling and in no fit state to record when she was around, and he did his part later when she'd gone.)

So this is not mere infatuation or a crush; this is closer to the scary, sweaty but inspirational Robert Graves' The White Goddess situation, where the writer is almost driven to write out his profound and worshipful experiences*. That is the kind of urgency and agony that suited Stubbs' voice very very well, and the grief and baroque pop of the original also suited the Motown's continuing aim of being 'The Sound of Young America' - they had started recording in Los Angeles as well as Detroit in 1967 and the baroque/psychedelic sounds were starting to filter into the songs and production. (Think of "Reflections" by The Supremes or "More Love" by Smokey Robinson & The Miracles.)

The version by The Four Tops sounds large and perhaps a bit rough compared to the original (there's no harpsichord or flute on it, that I can tell - horns and piano are dominant here). Stubbs dominates the song with his pauses, his soaring exclamations, as he is supported by his group and other backing singers. He isn't so much paralyzed as proclamatory; he is past the agony of the situation, sure, but not so much that every thing - the one way sign, the heart - are just reminders of what he can never have, and he sings about them as if (almost) he is wounded by them, like arrows. He can live without her, but he can never escape her, and the emptiness and literal signs of love will outlive him.

That might sound a bit hyperbolic, but this is a song about one man vs. the world, the awfulness of every particular thing as symbols of what he wants and cannot have. They are noble because they are his; no one will ever feel about them the way he does. For Brown they are actual, for Stubbs they are dramatic (that the song starts with 'And' implies there is something that could come before the lyric, but doesn't - the listener is thrown right into the thick of things). With each high "AWAY" she is willed further and further out of his life**; the song resolves on a downward graceful landing, a note of peace that points back to the beginning - starting with "And" means he will go on, it's not the end of the world, just the end of his possibility of requited love (which can seem like the end of the world, admittedly).

The crushing feeling here is the aftermath of love; the Summer of Love left many heartbroken and in '68 - a time of turmoil and trouble almost as soon as it started - is full of songs where emotion, not reason, come to the fore. From hope comes desire, and from thwarted or doomed desires come drama; an awful lot of drama is to come on this blog. But few of these songs are as cathartic as this one, which leaps immediately in to fill in the once empty air with a near-operatic song. Like I said, The Four Tops understood this, and by extension give the listener a compassionate hug, as well.

"How does love end? - Then it does end?" Roland Barthes, "The Ghost Ship" A Lover's Discourse

*Brown referred to his love for Renee as "mythological."

** The Four Tops did an Italian version of this called "L'Arcobaleno" ("Rainbow") - something else that can be admired but never reached.

We Are All Together: The Beatles: Magical Mystery Tour EP

2011-11-22T04:30:00.000-08:00

When an artistic movement helps to define an era, the era can – and often does – supersede the movement, leaving whoever is participating in it to their own devices until they can regain their bearings. The haze of ’67 was brought on in large part by The Beatles with “Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever” and Sgt. Pepper, and celebrated by “All You Need Is Love.” The Beatles didn’t invent psychedelic music, but without their success with it other bands wouldn’t have recorded some of the songs I have written about/mentioned recently.

Ian MacDonald describes the summer of ’67 as something of an egalitarian free-fall, a time when the movement was starting to show its cracks. The Rolling Stones were framed and put on trial and sentenced, pirate radio all but disappeared; The Man plc had had enough of the fun times, the party was over. If Charles Shaar Murray could write a piece about the public abuse of The Sex Pistols and call it “This Sure Ain’t The Summer of Love” then I should say that the Summer of Love itself wasn’t all that loving in the first place (and hence the worldwide rebellions of 1968 didn’t come out of nowhere).

For The Beatles it was as if they had been elevated to a status that made them godlike, which is pleasant enough if all is well. The artistic highs – writing and recording one of the greatest, if not the greatest single of all time, album ditto – led to a dual anxiety and laxness, neither of which are helpful in making music. Add to this the death of Brian Epstein in late August and you can see how Magical Mystery Tour was more or less going to be patchy, and if you factor in drugs and their lingering side effects then it is a wonder the thing – soundtrack and movie – were done at all. Most groups would take a good break and think things out before proceeding, but as pioneers The Beatles were naïve in their way; they had to keep going in order to keep existing at all, and had already begun the project when Epstein died. In a way it was griefwork, and if it sounds distracted then that’s a good reason why.

I should also mention the collapse of the SMiLE project of The Beach Boys, due to the pressures Brian Wilson had as he tried to get his recalcitrant band to work on something utterly different while fighting Capitol Records’ legal team at the same time. The sessions were legendary from the get-go, and The Beatles (because the two groups had the same publicist, Derek Taylor) must have heard some of them, though just what they heard I don’t know*. If SMiLE had been released in January of ’67 as planned then so much would have been different, but it wasn’t and The Beatles, in effect, had no competition**. This added to their laissez-faire attitude, one which didn’t really suit them. (They also of course had stopped touring – something no group would normally do unless they were about to break up or were taking a breather. They had a right to stop, but it took the fresh air out of the group, and in the long run I think they suffered for it.)

If the public – or at least a good section of it – turned away from psychedelia, it was because they could hear in it – even if the words made little sense – a rejection of the world as it stood, and unless they were also were part of the counterculture, that rejection would include themselves. That psychedelia did matter to many as not just meaning drugs but an embracing of such things as the I Ching, Tarot cards and so on as guides and symbols shows the longing for another order of things altogether, a sensing even that behind the modern world of new-fangled things was an older order that would feed the soul…that randomness was a way of making art as well, what with everything – every symbol, every card – meaning something, after all…

Before '67 for The Beatles, this randomness was a tool to inspire new songs; but now it became for them a way to just get things done, an end in itself. The I Ching is a profound work, however and not one to be taken lightly; the Tarot can be used to present situations and suggest the obstacles and solutions to them, rather than just being a series of medieval symbols that are pretty. I don’t know if they used either of these in their work, but it was in the air, and as with anything the more attention and care given to them, the more you get back. Again, laxness and anxiety are not helpful in harnessing these random (or some would say not-so-random) sources, when what is needed is calmness and concentration.

Magical Mystery Tour the tv movie was shown on Boxing Day; this EP preceded it by a few weeks. It has six songs, each one a little more strange than the previous – “Magical Mystery Tour” itself sounds like a tv show theme, hectic, full of brass, echoes, desperate for attention and winning it, because they are “DYING to take you away.” It is as if The Beatles are more or less kidnapping their audience, promising strangeness and beauty and whatever else they need in return. If it’s “an invitation” then it is one of the most demanding ones of all time; the audience has a right to feel uneasy.

Then, from the menacing “coming to TAKE YOU AWAY” it goes quiet and still; “The Fool On The Hill” observes the spinning world, oblivious to public opinion, simple in his way but wise as well. I don’t know if this comes (as IMac guesses) from The Fool in the Tarot, but if you know anything about that card you know he is going along his business, dog nipping at his heels – far from the lonely figure McCartney sings about. It is a gently sad song – is the fool a pitiable figure, or is he at one with the world, centred, while everyone else is mad? He is there perpetually, “day after day” and his naive and childlike nature are admirable but also kind of unnerving. No one seems to know him, like him, care for what he says – so I, anyway, tend to find this song a little off-putting, though lovely as well. (The recorder and other instruments suggest the medieval Tarot-like vibe of the song, far more than the lyrics.)

“Flying” is a mellow instrumental ; it sounds uncannily like Stax, reminding me of Booker T & the MGs’ McLemore Avenue, which is their own laid-back take on Abbey Road. This sounds as if it is an homage to that label to me, with added mellotron; weightless as the title suggests, and proof that all the Beatles together could indeed write a song.

“Blue Jay Way” is a song that Harrison wrote while in Los Angeles, waiting for Derek Taylor; he may have been listening to the SMiLEsessions before writing this, if only because the tempo changes are of the same sort. It is - like all of Harrison's songs at this time - based on Indian music, but instead of being enlightening, it sounds as if he is just being whiny, unable to just go to sleep when he wants to. This is what I mean by the chance element - being stuck waiting for someone - might seem like a good idea at the time for a song, but in reality it's not. Maybe he should have just meditated, gone to sleep, called someone up? But MMT needed songs, and so this was included...

“Your Mother Should Know” may not seem very intimidating or strange, but the fact that it’s an unfinished song (musically it just meanders along pleasantly enough) adds to the unease that has been steadily building up. The idea of dancing to an old song – a song from “a long, long time ago” (the WWI era, perhaps?) verges on the vintagizing effect. This sounds cute – to throw away the present for the past – but as a song it lacks knowingness that The Beatles usually kept in their collective back pockets. Is it anti-Modern? Has time stopped? Are The Beatles now like Hamlet, in a world out of joint? I am not sure, but I do know that while they were recording this Brian Epstein dropped by to see how they were doing – the last time they were all together. The old world is gone, there is nothing new and so why not celebrate the past? Things are getting more and more confusing, and I can’t blame the UK audience for finding this a less than satisfactory ending for the movie.

None of these songs could prepare the listener for the next song, however; in it a threshold is crossed, and the palpable underlying dissatisfaction in so many psychedelic songs utterly explodes.

“I Am The Walrus” is the point at which The Beatles justify this entire exercise. To say that it’s monumental is barely adequate; it is such a big song that as it ends you aren’t in the same place as when it started, and hence pop music isn’t in the same place, either. It warps and changes and surrounds the listener, inducing (I’m sure, because I feel it) in more delicate listeners dizziness and slight nausea. There is simply nowhere to hide. The lyrics are deliberate nonsense (Lennon wrote them to frustrate any hapless interpreters, so I am going to leave them alone) and they are sung with such disgust and venom that they cannot help but be scary. (Not as scary as the Blue Meanies, but pretty close.) Every key is hit here, every target Lennon can think of is included, and this howl is more than matched by Steve Race (orchestration) and George Martin in the slowly vertiginous alternating keys and general claustrophobic feeling. (The only thing that breaks up that is the pause for “Sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun” which inspired Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne no end in Birmingham***.) The closest thing I’ve heard to it is “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow” from SMiLE– that same repetitive churning, the same loudness, reflecting a world in chaos. Another small link is Lennon’s high “I’m CRYING” with Wilson’s “too tough to cry” in “Surf’s Up” – the nonsense of Lennon comes out of frustration/repression, whereas Van Dyke Parks’ lyrics are an expression of a collective memory, one where the child is father to the man. For better or for worse, Lennon spoke only for himself. (Another generation would bring their own energy to the song, of course.)

This was not pop music as usual and in a song that cries out against everything, some novelty – something new – must come to take its place. Lennon had caught up with McCartney on the avant-garde art front (thanks to Yoko Ono) and thus Lennon & McCartney then up the ante towards the end by baffling/assaulting the listener with the Mike Sammes Singers yelling, like cue-carded Village residents on drugs, “EveryBODY’s GOT ONE!” repeatedly while a live radio feed of King Lear is put into the mix, a record is scratched (the first time this happens on a single, I think – hello rap) and the cellos and horns keep blaring away. Gradually it fades away, as a whole world is falling apart. That this wasn't the last song in the movie makes sense, but on the EP it could only be at the end; because in more than one way, it is the end.

Out of the death of Brian Epstein came forth MMT, much like the unwanted liberation of Julie Vignon in Bleu - her husband's death eventually leads to her being discovered as a composer in her own right. The Beatles had already been in the process of finding their own voices, but with Epstein's death this was accelerated, with the attendant artistic egos coming out of what was once a gang bent on taking over the world. So the MMT stands as the last time The Beatles were indeed The Beatles; after this they began their lives as solo artists, the cover of their next album being blank, representing the effective clean slate they had been given, whether they wanted it or not.

So Magical Mystery Tour EP is a record of how they were caught up in the haze of '67, the death of Epstein, their own naivety that they could do anything and because they were The Beatles, it would be good. The grief and whimsy sit uneasily together, though, auguries of what is to come, just as in a couple of months another (overlapping?) tv audience will be outraged by this ending, one that includes "All You Need Is Love" and may or may not have the group itself as cameo masked figures. (They wanted McGoohan to direct MMT but he was too busy with The Prisoner to do so, and rightly figured they'd probably take over directing anyway.) Other groups would have done one more album to tie things up and then called it a day; but The Beatles had no leader (McCartney was their ringleader, as such, but there was no one outside the group to herd them) and thus lacked focus; they still had plenty of music to make, but after the movement, what was left for them? The times would now determine them, as much as the reverse; and the Magical Mystery Tour EP would be an indicator of everything to come, good, bad or indifferent.

Here we leave 1967 temporally, but it will come back, as ever when least expected, multi-colored and kaleidoscopic and celebratory. Why? In part because it is the year of the 60s when all held promise and so much was expected; expected in part because so many things had already happened. The intense flood of emotion and drama to come are the result of the feelings of being let down; of being betrayed. Maybe The Beatles continued on because others looked to them for The Answer; 1968 gives answers all right, but not the ones people wanted.

In a way that starts here too - MMT the movie was not praised in the UK at the time and people felt as if the Fab Four had let them down. Just the cultural weight of that alone would bring a new spin to '68 as if to say: the gods have clay feet. No one is perfect; better to enjoy the here-and-now-roughness of life than dream of an ideal world. So say we, The Beatles would have answered, born again, squinting in the new world's light; so say we.

*Paul McCartney visited Brian Wilson in April and played him “She’s Leaving Home” and guest-chomped on “Vega-Tables,” and generally encouraged him to “keep up.” The Beach Boys were able to salvage the SMiLE sessions and get Smiley Smile out of them, and then recorded Wild Honey in the same time The Beatles did Magical Mystery Tour. It seems unfair to compare the two groups, as ever, but these days Wild Honey gets a lot more love than MMT.

**The Rolling Stones were in disarray and both The Who and The Kinks were in states of transition from being Shel Talmy-vestibule-inhabiting loud rockers to being more thoughtful and rock-operatic.

***John Lennon once remarked that if The Beatles had continued they would have ended up like ELO, little knowing that once he’d died Jeff Lynne would produce “Free As A Bird.” There is no winning, sometimes…

The Same Old Song: Tom Jones: "I'm Coming Home"

2011-11-15T03:49:00.000-08:00

As Christmas approaches, certain kinds of songs tend to get released; in '67 (as you'd expect) Tom Jones released a big ballad in full expectancy of getting to number one, as he had the previous Christmas.

As a song, it is about as close to what he wanted to do - be on Stax or Motown - but he can never really cut loose here and dig into the emotions of the song, due to the predictability of the music (it sounds just like you'd imagine it does). This catches Jones in his Las Vegas phase - big emotions, open shirts, otherwise sensible women throwing their underwear onstage, etc. That it's a song about a man who has done his woman wrong who is coming home - whether she wants him back or not - seems to get lost in the soaring voice and sense of familiarity the song has - hearing it for the first time, I already have felt like I've heard it before. That must have been the appeal he had - a handsome bad boy/man who wore his heart on his sleeve, who would repent and show his vulnerability, all the better to maintain his sex appeal...begging forgiveness, claiming his life is nothing without her...(this song may seem like it's translated from another language, but I believe it's Les Reed & Barry Mason, yet again)*...

...all that is fine, but something got in the way of this plea in getting to number one, which in this time of big sobbing ballads must have seemed like a sure thing. Unfortunately for Jones, those pesky Beatles had a hit single - far-out enough for psych fans but chirpy enough for those who thought they had perhaps forgotten how to do something uptempo. The Beatles were literally saying "Hello!" to a whole new crop of fans as well as their old ones, and no amount of manly confessing was able to get past that.

I would like - for a moment however - to look at the U.S. charts and see what was happening there, as a reminder of what else was going on. In the Cashbox chart's Top 40 for around this time are these songs: "Summer Rain" by Johnny Rivers, "Wear Your Love Like Heaven" by Donovan, "The Rain, The Park and Other Things" by The Cowsills and "Chain of Fools" by Aretha Franklin. So there definitely was something up at this time, reflective or active, but for whatever reason - again I am guessing the radio playlists - but there are hardly any sob story songs there, besides the Old Guard of Bobby Vinton and such.

So what is going to happen next? Can anything break through this Housewives of Valium Court drear? Has there been something lurking for months in the corner, something revolutionary that will once again make people look at their stereos in confusion and delight?

Well, YES. Did someone say, out of death comes new life?

*I feel it necessary to note that Scott Walker also has a single out for Christmas - the avant-MOR "Jackie." I wonder if Tom ever wanted to sing something like this? (The lines about having a bordello and a number one single may have cut a bit too close...)

In Public: Dave Clark Five: "Everybody Knows"

2011-11-15T02:36:00.000-08:00

For some reason, in late '67 the charts start to go retrograde; there is hardly anything that could be called "forward" actually making much headway, and there are songs from the 40s creeping in, such as "Careless Hands" and "There Must Be A Way." Meanwhile, songs that pointed to the future, such as The Who's "I Can See For Miles" and Simon Dupree's "Kites" - songs that I should be writing about - didn't do nearly as well as songs like "Let The Heartaches Begin" by Long John Baldry (not a song he wanted to record), or "If The Whole World Stopped Loving" by Val Doonican.

In part this is due to hardly any competition from pirate radio; and radio thrives on variety. The charts at this time were like amber, with lively butterflies stuck in them, all the more obvious for their brilliant differences. Into this morass appear The Dave Clark Five, who needed a hit; they went to Les Reed & Barry Mason, reliable purveyors of songs to Englebert and Tom Jones and got a song from them, and hey presto, it was indeed a hit. The DC5 were not known for sitting down in frilly shirts and singing ballads about how they were crying and everyone could see; their usual singer, Mike Smith, was unsuited to this sob story, and thus Lenny Davidson does the job here.

The dilemma here for the group was that, unlike other groups who could adapt, psychedelia was just not meant for them; there was no way they could harness that big stompy beat of theirs to bucolic wanderings in parks or tales of fantastic happenings. And so they were reduced, as such, to this; they needed and got a hit. (They had not been in the top 10 since '65.) Thus the DC5 add, unhappily, to the ongoing sense of torpor in the chart - the summer is over, the nation is hunkering down for a ballad-heavy winter of stupor. I can see the empty bottles wine, the flickering candles, the exhaustion; it is as if the party is nearly over and hearts, oh hearts have been broken all over the place, and people are weeping in the streets.

The grooviness and enlightenment which '67 promised has nearly evaporated, though it still exists, waiting to spring up with just one ray of light. I can only shake my head at these charts; but then the radio situation was as such that the easy way out was almost always the one taken. And maybe a breather was necessary, after such excitement. But does it have to be so uniformly old-fashioned, dowdy even? What happened to rock 'n' roll, to anything silly or outrageous or gloriously weird? It's gone underground...for now...

The Language of Love: Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich: "Zabadak"

2011-11-14T07:03:00.000-08:00

And now we turn from earnest psychedelic pop to...earnest pop? Seeing how last time they were trying to instigate nothing more than erotic chaos, to a Greek beat no less, here there is percussion galore and an attack on...lyrics themselves?

This NME #2 is predictably sweeping and loopy and everything you'd want/expect from these guys, the sort of song that could get played, no problem, on the new Radio One. It's an awkward thing in songs always to point out (in words, of course) that lyrics/words have less meaning than feelings, that love itself is more important as a feeling than as something expressed. Love, as a band we'll be getting to again soon, is all anyone needs, and words just get in the way...

...and this of course opens up a whole bucket of worms as to how important language is in songs in general as opposed to the feeling the song is trying to promote - that ultimate goal, Love. Do lyrics in songs matter as much as they should? Do they matter at all, ultimately? Are they dispensable? Are they a necessary but unwelcome part of a song? Lyric writers have the annoying position of working for hours on songs, only to have the public mishear them, misunderstand them or just plain ignore them altogether, which can be irritating if the lyric writer is actually trying to get something across*. (There are people I know who only listen to music because of the lyrical content, and others who tend to see it as superfluous because music is their main thing, not words.)

Using words to explain that ultimately words aren't as important as you might think is very Friendly Forebear, and Ken Howard & Alan Blaikley must have realized this when writing it - as T.S. Eliot's puts it, "I gotta use words when I talk to you." Even in trying to escape from language and make it sound like a bunch of nonsense, there has to be some kernel of meaning or the listener is going to wonder why you bothered to say anything anyway. (Even, God bless them, The Trashmen were saying something with "Surfin' Bird" although it's never going to be seen as poetry.) Even if you go by the Bangsian notion that rock 'n' roll is nothing but a huge indestructible joke that will go on forever because it's at bottom it's all about THE PARTY, there is still that basic message to relate, in one way or another.

So when songwriters reflect on the relative unimportance of what they are writing, there is another wall casually knocked down; one between the listener and writer, who here is saying that the feeling of love - love as big as an ocean - dwarfs anything he could write, and maybe that's '67 hyperbole but also, just maybe, it's true. Words can do a lot, but they can also only do so much, and the indescribable is sensibly left that way, to a lot of percussion and grinning and general good vibes. This is Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich's "All You Need Is Love"; but it's also saying that as a song it (in a way) is meaningless, next to the epic feeling that it's patiently pointing towards...

Next up: one last swim through balladsville, before the end...

*There are lyricists who love to write and others who leave it at the last minute, as for them it's a chore, not a pleasure (Jarvis Cocker and Rod Temperton are two I can name right off the bat). I wonder how many songs have been written where the words are seen as homework, something to just get done and over with.

Backyard Trip: Traffic: "Hole In My Shoe"

2011-11-10T12:49:00.000-08:00

As many a group found out in the late 60s, the key to success in a group was having a stable and happy group dynamic. This doesn't sound very sexy, but when you consider the groups that kept on going as opposed to those that didn't, those that did were able to continue because everyone was - more or less - content with what their role in the band was. If you have three people in a band who work together on songs and a third who comes in with a song in hand, expecting the others to play it just so then there's going to be problems.

Traffic were such a group; Jim Capaldi, Steve Winwood and Chris Wood wrote songs together (the first two wrote the previously mentioned "Paper Sun") and Dave Mason tended to write songs on his own, like this one. The other three didn't like it but recorded it anyway; I can guess it was a bit too whimsical for them. (Traffic were made up of musicians who had gone out to the countryside, away from the industrial Midlands, to, as they said back then, "get their heads together.") It has all the hallmarks of something almost too typical of the time - sitar (played by Mason), flute, lyrics that once again focus on water (is water the most psychedelic of the elements?), a young girl's narration straight out of a fairytale. The "elephant's eye" harks back to Oklahoma!, the unreal fields (strawberry?) full of tin soldiers, the passive voice wherein everything seems to be happening to him - the only thing he is sure of is that pesky hole that is letting in water...

...this does seem a bit cliched, but then being on a trip at this time was likely the same as having a mystical experience way back when; there are similar experiences and vocabularies you use to explain what is otherwise hard to describe to anyone else. But there is a fine line between using language others can understand and using language everyone has heard before. The psychedelic experience here is fantastical ("bubblegum tree" Mason sings, as if foreseeing the bubblegum pop explosion to come) and disconcerting, and it is only the literal hole in his shoe that is grounding him, perhaps keeping him from floating off to this other world altogether.

So this is not a song about complete absorption, but that tingling sensation that can be an anchor through an otherwise strange experience - and he ends up on his back, his coat getting wet, waking up much like the narrator of "Flowers in the Rain" in that he's outside and communing with nature, not airborne like the child narrator on the albatross, off to a place where the music plays loud.

This is psychedelia as genteel escapism, as opposed to psychedelia that has something to say, per se: it is always awkward when something that seems meaningful to you personally has to be explained to the masses, so Mason must have been gratified (though it irked the others) that this was their biggest hit. They wanted something a bit tougher lyrically and musically, I'd expect; but in the late hazy days of '67 the single-buying public wanted to digest psychedelia as a pastoral thing that didn't threaten their lives but gave them a window to a world where having wet feet was the biggest problem.

What was startling in the winter of '67 was by the fall an accepted commonplace. Dave Mason came and went in Traffic as they themselves ebbed and waned (Winwood formed Blind Faith with Eric Clapton for a while when the ever-embattled Cream broke up in late '68). As the music indeed got louder, bands found themselves in a dilemma - whether to make light "pop" music like this song or go into more complex and tougher territory, leaving behind anyone who just wanted a nice tune to hum on the way to work. '67 was a year when bands could have it all, but many had problems being all things to all single & album fans, and they had to make their choices. (Some had theirs made for them, such as Pink Floyd, whose most "pop" member was Syd Barrett, who was sidelined in the band and then formally left in '68.) The pop scene was changing and rock was the new thing - pop being left for The Housewives of Valium Court and kids who were young enough to enjoy psychedelic pop without asking too much of it.

Yes, the dreaded-by-some 'classic rock era' has by now begun, leaving the singles charts open to almost anything, as we shall see.

Fantastic!: The Move: "Flowers In The Rain"

2011-11-08T06:46:00.000-08:00

Imagine it's the early morning of September 30, 1967. It's 7am; you are just waking up when you hear this.

A whole world - save for rebellious Radio Caroline - has ended. The future - as brought to you by George Martin himself - has begun. Before I get to the main song here, I'm going to pause a bit and remember my own reaction to hearing Martin's piece...I must have first heard it in 2007, when I was haphazardly planning, along with Marcello's help, the music for our wedding. I wanted it to be launched with something dramatic, of my year, but also something warm and cozy. Something to say: a whole new world has been achieved, something that was a mere notion has grown into this - true love and hence, marriage. And I cried when I first heard it, so of course it was the only choice...

The first song played on the station was this one; thunder booms give way to a chirpy song which is about flowers, trees...and escaping the commitments of the world by immersing yourself in nature, even to the point of sleeping outdoors. Lost in fantasy, taking a break to realign priorities - all done to a typical march-beat that sounds anything but dreamy. In the video you can see them in their psychedelic finery, eating apples and reading comic books - there is something deliberately regressive going on here, another facet of the rebellious/childish part of UK 'hippie' music (as opposed to the more confrontational US version).

Or perhaps this nyah-nyah I'm going to watch flowers business is more rebellious than it seems? Perhaps some notions of a greater society will occur as the day passes? It is a huge leap to go from this to the current occupations across the UK - the only thing they have in common is their refusal to go 'indoors' and 'behave' normally. (Well, these ideas have to start somewhere.) But the group's manager promoted the single with a controversial postcard illustrated with a drawing of a naked Harold Wilson (then the Prime Minister) linking him to his secretary. The band were sued and forced to give their royalties from the song to charity, which shows that maybe egging The Man plc on isn't always the best idea. (To this day the group don't make any money from the song, which considering Wilson died in 1995 is kind of unfair.)

This, if you were to believe in omens, was a mixed one at best for Radio 1, and The Move themselves got rid of their manager and were shy to do anything quite so bold promotionally again. This song did give a certain young producer fresh from NYC - Tony Visconti - experience in arranging however (he did the woodwind and strings). And thus we take a step from the mid-60s to the late 60s and the increasing strangeness on one side of pop, just as the other becomes more and more uniform*. This got stuck behind new heartthrobs The Bee Gees' "Massachusetts" - the second record played that morning - and while it found friends in the chart ("Homburg" by Procol Harum, "From The Underworld" by The Herd) it must have seemed something of an understandable disappointment to the group, who (like so many 60s groups of this time) mutated away until The Move had a parallel band, Electric Light Orchestra, as a Wood side project. Psychedelia turned out to be much harder for groups to adapt than you might think - The Who didn't really 'go' psychedelic beyond clothes; The Rolling Stones' late '67 album wasn't...very...good...[though it has its champions]; The Kinks were busy with writing about English life in its strange normalcy.

The genteel oddballness of UK psychedelia is undoubtedly because the UK wasn't involved in Vietnam, and thus the listeners did not have the ugly fact of the war beyond news reports - whereas it was the daily life of every American, because of the draft and so on. (If you didn't know someone who was over there, chances were good you knew someone who did, and draft dodgers were rampant, as well.)

So a song about kipping in the garden and evading the requirements of daily life was all that was required or needed; sooner rather than later, though, the true cost of being on the outside of society was going to make for some astonishing music, music that more than lives up to the golden promise of "Theme One." The village of A Teenage Opera, the disturbing tidiness of "Penny Lane" suddenly come to life on tv, as if its creator was also creating his own psychedelic masterpiece, trying like Wilson, Wirtz or Wood to keep a handle on it, lest it suddenly gets scattered and lost...what, was that the sound of thunder again?

*"King Midas In Reverse" by The Hollies is a good example of this; it was Graham Nash's last stab at making the band more hip, but they - and their producer - weren't interested in getting further out, and so Nash left them the following year for the welcoming hippie world of Laurel Canyon.

Psychedelia Has A Right To Children: Keith West: " Excerpt From 'A Teenage Opera'"

2011-11-08T04:43:00.001-08:00

Throughout the late summer a song has been steadily climbing up the charts, to rest at #2; it had the advantage of being played a lot (esp. on pirate radio) and being a narrative that could be understood by anyone - the sad passage of time, as experienced by not just one or two people, but a whole community. The sob stories that have just passed are merely personal - this is about a whole village losing its grocer.

How on earth could this have happened? Well, this is 1967 and we find ourselves at none other than Abbey Road with one Mark Wirtz, who had been hired by - remember him? - Norrie Paramor to work as an in-house producer for EMI. Wirtz was hip; he was responsible for Pink Floyd being signed by EMI and dug another underground group he saw playing at the same time - The In Crowd (soon to change its name to the even more underground Tomorrow), featuring guitarist Steve Howe and singer Keith West. He had had the musical idea of a teenage opera for some time and mentioned the Grocer Jack character to West, who promptly wrote the lyrics; the group recorded the song and it was a hit - (such a hit that for a while Keith West was a pin-up, much to his & Tomorrow's discomfort).

The song is as lush and orchestral and Beatles/Kinks inspired as you'd expect; West sings with compassion about an 82-year-old grocer who dies, the village's lack of food and the funeral, where the folks realize they should have been nicer to the old man. The most poignant and influential part of the song is the children's chorus - little girls who wonder where Grocer Jack is and want him back, even though their moms tell them he won't be back. I can't help it, their voices tug at me - the children are the voice of the village, missing Jack, helpless to change the way the whole village is going to have to operate. (The premise of the opera is that the songs are all sung to a young woman who must stay awake after a motorcycle accident; they are almost all songs about people in a village who are antiquated, about to disappear, if not gone already.)

That a song such as this did so well shows that the public maybe wasn't so scared of psychedelia as previously reported, if it's focused on an understandable narrative and has little kids singing on it. There was also the tantalizing idea of it being an 'excerpt' - that there was a lot to come and that a teenage opera was indeed possible. Wirtz found out, however, that the audience was maybe more fickle than expected (and he lost West's involvement, as he wanted to focus on Tomorrow), and while other singles appeared, none of them did that well and he soon stopped working on it in '68 to work on other things.

This is a pity, because had it been released (as it was in '96) it would have been the first real rock opera, complete with a whole cast of characters ("Auntie Mary's Dress Shop," "The Paranoiac Woodcutter," "[He's Our Dear Old] Weatherman," "Shy Boy*" to name a few). This year pretty much saw the flowering of the concept album - not to mention the album market in general, as the kids so happy to buy 45s in '63 had grown up and wanted something a bit more substantial. This - for all I know - would have done really well, but as Brian Wilson could have told Wirtz, doing something so concentrated and thematic is not easy. (The other lost album of 1967, The Beach Boys' SMiLE, surfaced first as bootlegs, then as a Brian Wilson album in 2004, and just now as an actual Beach Boys album.) A Teenage Opera was for some just as legendary - who knows what the talented Wirtz & Co. were getting up to at Abbey Road? (One Pete Townsend was certainly curious, and this in part inspired Tommy.)

What this song also cements is psychedelia's interest in and sympathy with children. This might seem a bit odd, but at heart it is the siding with the young instead of the old, the naive and hopeful as opposed to the tired and traditional. Children were to a point romanticized, but their spirit of adventurousness and tendency to blunt speech - then as now - meant they could at least be trusted, unlike the older generation who were - not to make a big point of it - square and didn't approve of anything the counterculture believed in, from pirate radio on down**.

There is also nostalgia; a whole world is disappearing and the spirit of the times is to reflect on this, to bring the old and new together in a mish-mash (think of the military-style jackets worn by The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix) that somehow liberates the culture from the past, even as it's being remembered (anti-vintagizing). The village is changing, old customs and ways are going, ones that may be going for good, for all anyone knows.

Rock 'n' roll has now split between pop and rock; avant-MOR as pioneered by Scott Walker is appearing, alongside a new station the BBC is putting together to play what the pirates did - sort of. Its name is Radio 1, and with it the chances of Wirtz' concept album took a dive, as its listeners weren't as adventurous as the pirate ones. What did they want? The answer is next.

*Done by Kippington Lodge, with the lead singer, one Nick Lowe, making his debut.

**A personal anecdote: When I was two-and-a-half I 'ran away' (the gate was open and I left to walk down the sidewalk). My mother predictably was concerned and called the cops, who found me not that far away being guarded as I walked by...some counterculture guy who was looking after me on my little escapade. No one famous, though this was in Hollywood, so you never know.

Loneliness Is Such A Drag: Tom Jones: "I'll Never Fall In Love Again"

2011-11-07T06:10:00.000-08:00

Ah, and now to someone this here blogeuse will get to know only too well. Tom Jones was a star by this time, his anguished voice and more saucy demeanor a contrast to the more stolidly romantic Englebert. Jones is forever getting caught up in Drama, being deceived and luring other women into who knows what mischief in turn. Clearly here his girl has gone off with another man (how CAN she?) and he...sniff...knows he's never going to fall...in love...aggaainnnnn....a patently silly thing to sing, obviously, and the cheese that was in the fridge with Carr is plainly right on the table here for all to see.

That he had to drag himself through such songs was the secret misery of Jones' career; he wanted to be on Motown or Stax, he wanted to be the Welsh Solomon Burke, but The Man plc said there was hay to be made singing weepy ballads like this, which was written by...oh look who's here, it's Lonnie Donegan! Yes, this song marks the unexpected return of Donegan, who wrote and recorded this song in '62 and must have been delighted with Jones' hit version. Suddenly another facet of the complex world of music is revealed - Lonnie Donegan, inventor of punk rock, has this as a hit, in the US as well as in the UK. See? There is always an upside in the darkest of times; and late August '67 was the beginning of the last month of pirate radio, with the effective switchover being signalled by this song's great success (#2 for a month) as well as Englebert's next #1 - and there is hardly anything the Light Programme can't play in the Top Ten.

The Housewives of Valium Court are the audience that is being courted here, not the kids. The vivacity of the charts of just a few months ago has been swept away, and in that sweeping away the charts are confusing, the general tone is becoming more and more bleak...it is as if it's the end of an era and everyone knows it, and Jones is just carrying that sorrow, unwittingly, for all who thought that Love could conquer all. It is a bittersweet time, one of "Itchycoo Park," and "The Day I Met Marie" and "Burning of the Midnight Lamp"; wistful songs about how enchantment is either fleeting or already gone. The Summer of Love isn't over just yet, but it certainly hasn't been all that it was cracked up to be - or perhaps it could have happened, had more people been less scared and more adventurous? The Housewives sat back and got gently drunk as Tom sang his song of woe - ah women, he's giving up on them now, for sure...while station after station packed up and brought their ships ashore. What now?

Don't Touch That Dial: Vikki Carr: "It Must Be Him (Seul Son Sur Etoile)"

2011-11-07T04:47:00.000-08:00

And now we step, seemingly simultaneously, into the swanky world of international hotels and the less elegant rooms of that most put-upon figures in pop music, single girls. It is alternately grand and hysterical, tough (what other song of the period uses the word "chump"?) and maudlin. Carr sings the song as best she can (it was originally a song by Gilbert Becaud and Maurice Vidalin; the English lyrics are by Mack David, Hal David's older brother), giving a three-alarm-fire performance of desperation that nearly stood alone in the Top Ten against the invasion of strangeness and beauty that was the Summer of Love. You might wonder how something that reeks (if I can put it that way) of obsessive-compulsive behavior and disdain for others (that "puppet on a string" reference, as if she's in a position to judge) could be so successful, while songs like "See Emily Play," "Strange Brew," and "Paper Sun" didn't get to #2?

The answer is, that as receptive to psychedelia as the some of the British public were, there was a large segment that found it kind of...scary. Not hide-behind-the-sofa scary, but disturbing and weird nevertheless. (It should also be noted that psychedelia's greatest audience, from Sgt. Pepper on down, was in albums, not singles.) What was left for those who didn't dig the new scene, and who weren't crazy for Motown/Stax? Songs like this one, where our heroine has a relationship with the nameless/characterless "him" that makes you think she's virtually a prisoner of her love, unable to see how maybe if she just didn't answer the phone once and got out and mixed things up a little - instead of being so available - he might actually take some real interest in her. It is as if the whole world consisted of nothing but her and him, and all her praying and subsequent dashed hopes and wailing, etc. are all that matters.

This is yet another in I don't know how many songs of the 60s where the woman suffers and suffers and the song succeeds (commercially I mean; it was a big hit in the US as well) and it walks that very fine line between telling like it is and masochism. This puts Carr in the same unfortunate boat as Janis Joplin, who had to live with guys getting off on the pain in her songs - different crowd, of course, but the same dynamic is in place, whether it's in the glamorous world of Carr or the freaked-out one Joplin inhabited. (Oddly enough, they're both from Texas, of the same generation and may well have known of each other. Who knows?)

What is clear is that there are those who like the experimental and those who would just as soon hear a song of woe sung with unironical conviction; these two audiences don't crossover and the latter is taking over the singles chart, just as the former is taking over the albums. For some the 60s were just fine until about now; for others, it's just getting started. The generation gap is clear, and by the time the next song appears, pirate radio will be illegal and stations will begin to disappear from the dial. This lowest-common-denominator everyone-can-relate song will persist in the charts, the single woman's tormented relationship with her phone will also continue...but it's the sob stories that make the Summer of Love a lot less cool than it could have been, and it's not ending here...

We've Got Something To Say: The Monkees: "Randy Scouse Git" (aka "Alternate Title")

2011-11-04T04:43:00.000-07:00

And now, I feel, dear readers, that we have reached the crux of this year, the point where the let's-just-have-fun part of the 60s gives way to something more serious. That it comes from a 'manufactured' group that The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame still don't deem as legitimate is ironical to say the least, because nobody ever rebelled and wanted to be a band as much as they did.

By this time The Monkees (the band) and The Monkees (the show) were a big deal; recruited in '65 for a show about four young guys in a band who lived together and got into wacky trouble each week, their very theme song was a big HELLO to middle America, where guys with long hair and funny clothes were definitely suspect. The Monkees was a huge hit and yet the songs so integral to the show weren't theirs, for the most part. (The proto hip-hop "Mary, Mary" was by Nesmith, however.) Seeing as how two of them were musicians already (and the actors, not at all bad musicians who, ironically again, did almost all the singing) this was a situation bound to explode, with Dolenz, Jones, Nesmith and Tork demanding the right to write and perform their own songs. Artistic control - to stop being so many Pinocchios and be real musicians - was theirs, but the whole process was exhausting, as you can imagine.

This song is about that struggle, even if Dolenz is singing about meeting his future wife and The Beatles ("kings of EMI") on a short trip to London. The kettle drums and off-kilter piano set up the two sides, and the unpredictable hurriedness of the song explodes like a thunderstorm at the chorus: "Why don't you be like me?!/Why don't you stop and see?!/Why don't you hate who I hate, kill who I kill to be free!" Silence: then the kettle drums erupt again, with the piano nervously trembling, as if it's about to be smashed. This is no ordinary song. It is, in effect, the first real protest record on this blog, against a world that wants conformity and has no interest or sympathy with - and this is only a slight jump - the rebellious counterculture itself, who look at the world and see that its very straightness and conformity leads to social and political ugliness, if not corruption. Dolenz even gives The Man plc a voice: "Why don't you cut your hair?/Why don't you live up there?/Why don't you do what I do,/See what I feel when I care?*"

The struggle, as they say, continues. What do The Monkees have to do in order to get respected? They didn't play at Monterey for fear of getting booed; they took their artistic freedom as far as they could while still being tv stars; they begat, unintentionally, bubblegum pop; they toured happily with Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles liked them, in part because they took the pressure off them having to be The Beatles, in effect. Yes, The Monkees were anxious and uncertain - a fake 'band' turning into a real one is bound to cause that - and with this song all of that jittery instability comes to life. (There's even an argument for The Monkees being a model of sorts for all boybands to come, particularly a certain one I'll get to in the 70s.)

With this song, The Monkees break through that fourth wall - leap from being two-dimensional group into a living, breathing real one; there is no Don Kirshner telling them what to sing, no producer telling them they have to let the session pros do the job. They managed to do more music that is just as good as this, and while the tv show got predictably routine, they did manage a small coup: one Tim Buckley appeared on the show in '68, introducing him to who knows how many impressionable teenagers. So perhaps they did win in the end, even if their own creators killed them off the same year in the movie Head. Thus the singer-songwriter movement gets a push from a band that had to fight to be truly heard. There is something sweet about that, and it makes the sour Hall of Fame look even more as if it had just bit into a lemon.

Next up: something the Light Programme loved - it's the complete opposite of this, as the two sides of the radio stand. For now...

*"Randy Scouse Git" means, translated from the English, "a horny jerk from Liverpool" (or words to that effect) that he picked up from a tv show Dolenz saw while in the UK. (I think it starred Tony Booth - am I wrong here?) The record company, knowing this was not a polite name for a song, told him they needed an alternate title; thus the song charted as "Alternate Title."

This Is The End: Englebert Humperdinck: "There Goes My Everything"

2011-11-01T05:17:00.000-07:00

There are certain historians of late who have tried to give a different spin on the 60s, on 1967 in particular; these are the sort who will point out the album sales of The Sound of Music were still going strong and that this man, Englebert Humperdinck (a stage name given to him, after the Hansel und Gretel composer) was the true star of the time. All else is hippy-hypey nonsense, so much florid ephemeral noise. The solid majority of folk did not want backwards guitars and baroque orchestration; they wanted a four-square song they could understand, with lyrics that are brief, lovesick and thus romantic. This is true enough; his first hit was on the charts for over a year, and this one stayed around for over six months. He had been working in the club circuit for years, honing his craft as an entertainer (a term he takes seriously) and his management thought that his way forward was to change his name (from the less exotic Jerry Dorsey) and give him some big ballads that would have women and girls a new idol to worship, more or less.

Idol worship is strange; reality shows that try to find one tend to come up trumps a lot of the time as idolatry is really either one of two things: temporary or permanent. It's also another thing: illogical. No Fullers or Cowells can ever really gauge what any given audience will want after a certain point, and the ones that are chosen who succeed tend to do so because they don't agree with their so-called masters. Cliff Richard still has his fans in part because he does what he wants, as does Englebert*. The "too beautiful to suffer" element is also here, of course; idols are adored and glamorized by women who feel they could be the one, if only in their dreams. (In his previous hit he wanted out of a relationship; in this one she's leaving him - how many adult listeners heard these songs as reflections of their own lives?)

And the narrator in this song is a pitiable creature, indeed. He hears her footsteps as she leaves, her last statement as she goes; clearly he has no energy to try to win her back, to plead or beg. That is all done. And so this song seems vast and empty, as if all the air has disappeared from the room. I could be all new age and say that it's not right for someone to be so utterly dependent on someone else (his only possession is her, he now has no reason to live) but again that would be our good friend logic talking. If you have been in the unfortunate situation the narrator is in, you would know better than to judge the absolute extreme he presents, because to him it's real. His heart is broken and there's nothing for him, he can't even speak. He can't move. It is as if a thick black line has been drawn, dividing him from...everything else.

This does seem terribly romantic, this waltzing misery, and yet there is a horrible realism to it, one that stands stoutly next to Procol Harum or Jimi Hendrix (who learned a thing or two about working a crowd from Englebert when he toured with him). The Summer of Love is here, but love is a risky thing that, like idolatry, is either temporary or permanent. Romantics are those in love with love, who maybe even enjoy a good wallow in despair once in a while; and if they can't sing, then they can listen to music that doesn't think they are backwards or old-fashioned, but instead puts them on a kind of eternal plane. (I'm not saying this is a timeless song though: referring to anyone as a 'possession' as if they were a car or house isn't very hip these days, and must have seemed positively Brontesque to some - not all - in '67**. Country songwriter Dallas Frazier wrote it, but then he also wrote "Alley Oop" and "Elvira" amongst many hits, so I can forgive him.)

The realism and romanticism appealed to women, who love him to this day; women who want a handsome man who has a handsome voice and seems to understand that life isn't always pleasant or fair. He may be an idol, but he is grown-up, laid-back, unlike Tom or Cliff or any of the others. 19th century by name, 19th century by nature? 1967 has opened a time warp wherein the past and the future are blending together, or where time has stopped making sense altogether...but then for romantics, Love is eternal...

Next: another bunch of romantics fight The Man plc in the name of Art. Oh yeah!

*Like Tom Jones, Englebert's son is his manager now, since his previous one turned down a chance to appear on a the Gorillaz album Plastic Beach without bothering to ask the singer first, which upset him greatly (as it would any right-thinking person). This gives me an excellent excuse to post this, of course. Maybe next time?

**Two of the musicians on this song - guitarist John McLaughlin and bassist Dave Holland - were a bit tired of playing such traditional music (as well-paying as it was) and not long after this they both joined (at his request) Miles Davis' group; thus they were liberated to play on In A Silent Way, a sublime album every jazz lover should own (if s/he doesn't have it already). They tried their best with this song, goodness knows, but some musicians just aren't cut out for standard country ballads.

Across The Bridge: The Kinks: "Waterloo Sunset"

2011-10-31T04:05:00.000-07:00

As I have said before, part of the reason I started this blog was to understand where I live - the UK - better, through the, uh, unique if not oblique angle of its #2 chart hits. Very few of them are as acclaimed for their Britishness (not to mention their representation of London) as this song. Many believe it's the greatest song Ray Davies ever wrote; one critic called it "the most beautiful song in the English language."

For Londoners this may be their anthem, but what is going on? It's a very pretty song - with time it has become a bit vintagized* - wherein the narrator (who, as with "Penny Lane" may or may not be reliable) looks out his west-facing window to Waterloo station. He sees the sun set, from his chilly flat there in Lambeth, above the dirty ever-flowing river and the too-bright taxi lights; his only need is to see the sun set, to see the glowing sky. He 'gazes' at it (which kind of implies he has nothing better to do - he might be a senior citizen) and it is like a painting to him, maybe like this one. He is still; the sky changes and darkens slowly and (of course) naturally, just as the melody gently ebbs and flows...

...so far, so good. Then he gives us another reason to gaze out the window, a clearer version. He sees two lovers meet at the station on Friday night (how does he know their names?); they are among the hordes who are like "flies" there, but he watches them meet and cross the bridge to another and better world, north of the river, and perhaps even out of the country altogether.** He's seen them meet up before enough to recognize them, but now they are going, and the word that crests this song - "paradise" - is not just his, but theirs. But it's theirs as long as they gaze with him, or alongside him. Once they are outside of London, they may or may not find life so wonderful.

Does the narrator know something we don't? Why is he so partial to this area when he says he's too "lazy" to go out? Why does he insist he's not "afraid" (afraid of what?) and that he needs no friends? Everyone needs friends, even Londoners. There is something quietly disturbing about this song that its fans (Paul Weller and Damon Albarn, hello) must admire and understand, but as someone who is still trying to understand London, I feel a bit baffled. The melody is melancholic, implying that the narrator isn't going to change because he sees no need - he is in "paradise", why would he? - and the couple he sees have each other and are (unwittingly?) there as well, but only just for now. The sunset itself seems to bestow something near magical on everyone who experiences it, but the song shows a sharp division between the narrator in the chilly evening flat and the lovers who have each other and who are crossing the bridge to another world altogether.

As you can see, this strikes me as an uncomfortable song - the narrator's satisfaction in just being able to see such a magnificent view is one thing, but the divide between the two ends up making me feel sorry for everyone, in a way. Terry and Julie are a bit like Adam and Eve, leaving paradise; the narrator is like God in a way, watching and judging but not actually doing anything. This is not my idea of an anthem, because it gets back to the notion that there is only one place that is any good, to the exclusion of everywhere else; it is an intense distillation of the "Little England" idea which fixes everything in its place, forever***. (Perhaps that is what I mean by vintagizing, though I also mean things like this, which are unthinkable in North American terms.)

I remain - and I think this is a good thing - an outsider to really 'getting' this song, I feel. I can appreciate why others would like it, why it would be their favorite, particularly as there is one thing the song does which puts us - unconsciously, unless you know your keys - in the literal center of the action. "Waterloo Sunset" is in C major, the middle of the keyboard, a cozy and indeterminate place. So maybe in hearing the song the listener is not supposed to side with the narrator or the couple, but floats between the two, light as a feather, resting on a beam of late sunshine. If that is the charm of the song, then I accept it; in effect it makes the listener almost like the sun itself, shining on everything indiscriminately, going, going, almost gone.

Next up: another narrator who is immobile. Hey, isn't this supposed to be the Summer of Love?

*By which I mean that it represents something that is typical of its time that is accessible now only to those who are interested in it; the word 'vintage' has a tendency to mean 'quaint' and the item is somewhat separated from what it actually sprang from at the time. The passage of time does this anyway, I know, but the separation isn't so strong. I have a sneaking hunch that some who love this song may not appreciate what's going on in it.

**Terry and Julie were names given by Davies to this couple who, in his mind's eye, were going to leave the UK for elsewhere.

***That the song was nearly called "Liverpool Sunset" and was inspired by Davies' love of Merseybeat is interesting but doesn't change the meaning of the song, for me anyway.

The Waiting Game: The Mamas & The Papas: "Dedicated To The One I Love"

2011-10-25T02:56:00.000-07:00

To be attached to someone and yet not be able to be with them is a difficult state; even while you know you will be together again, the time seems endless and empty and yes, slightly depressing. All you do is think of the Other, and if you are so moved, you can write for the Other and console yourself by recording the time in your own way. (My husband did just that and the result is, if I may say so, this very fine book.)

The Mamas & The Papas were a folk group who had aspirations to doing more than hanging out in Greenwich Village; they wanted in on pop, and brought to it a multi-voiced armoury that stood for (in retrospect) nothing less than the collective joys and sorrows of everyone who listened. Even in their happiest songs there is lurking sorrow, and vice versa; and so this song was utterly perfect for them, being one of alternating hope and sorrow, sunlight and darkness. By the time it was a hit, the band were having problems of the sort that foreshadowed those of Fleetwood Mac a decade later - an affair was found out, emotions were tangled up, the affair ended and unease and (on Denny Doherty's side, heavy drinking) began to take a toll on the group. As you might expect, a band so dependent on literal harmonizing must have harmony outside the studio as well, and at this time this was pretty much impossible; for one thing, John Phillips and the band's producer Lou Adler were helping to put together the Monterey International Pop Festival, along with a few others (including Paul McCartney).

So there is weight here, with Michelle Phillips singing lead, she who had been unfaithful and for a while was thrown out of the group; Monterey may have heralded the Summer of Love, but love is, alas, more than just a good good feeling that you can share with flowers and peace signs. Love is what kept most people going in the 60s (as ever) and love for many then as now meant waiting. Not just waiting to be with the Other, but waiting for a time when being with the Other would not cause so much waiting to begin with*. The Shirelles did their version in '61, but the song was written in the early 50s by Lowman Pauling (guitarist) and Ralph Bass (producer) of the still-underrated The "5" Royales. In them you can hear the longing and frustration even clearer, as the 60s (so to speak) hadn't happened yet, and the longing is for something even bigger and more important, in a way, than being with the Other. It is the darkest hour, the worst time; the stars are the only light visible...and no one is having an easy time of it. The singer might not reach the Other soon, Love might not be perfect but there is the promise, based on hope, that things will change. When? Who knows.

With The Mamas & The Papas version, it is a more straight-forward expression of lovesickness, hopes and fears balanced (the trickiest part being the bear-trap line "Love can never be exactly like we want it to be" which is sung as if tiptoeing past one, as if this is a fact, sure, but one that is going to be avoided, for now). The harmonies are strong and vibrant as ever, but as the song ends and the voices separate, there is a feeling that something indeterminate has once again ended, or perhaps been set free. Maybe this is the end of all that waiting; the end of all that dreadful insomnia and emptiness. Maybe now something is going to happen. This group were the collective voice of that longing, and began to unravel along with the decade; this song is their last big statement on how difficult love can be, how beautiful and sad at the same time.

That we had this on our wedding cd was an acknowledgement that we had been apart for too long, and an unwitting premonition that we would be apart once more for a lot longer. It was a terrible and stressful time, our time apart, but at least we could communicate with each other; this song rests on prayer alone, and is a prayer itself.

Next up: a song about looking down at a city instead of looking up to the stars.

*Lest we forget, many are separated by war at this point, and have been for years...

What Is Too Silly To Be Said Must Be Sung: Harry Secombe: "This Is My Song"

2011-10-18T08:29:00.000-07:00

What to make of a song that no one wanted to sing? "This Is My Song" was written by Charlie Chaplin to be included in his movie A Countess From Hong Kong, a throwback to the shipboard romance movies of the 30s. He wanted Al Jolson to sing it, but, convinced that Jolson was dead only by being shown his tombstone, he decided he wanted Petula Clark to sing it. She didn't want to sing it in English (she sang it in German, Italian and French first) but she recorded it off-handedly with The Wrecking Crew while in Los Angeles and it was a hit. (She didn't want to sing "My Love" either, for that matter.)

It is hard to know just why Harry Secombe did the song; perhaps because it suited his noble Welsh tenor. The fact that another version was released so soon is itself a throwback to the 50s, when two or three versions of a song would crowd the charts. (Chaplin's "Terry's Theme" from Limelight was #2 in 1953, as you'll recall.) Secombe had trouble keeping a straight face while recording the song (he found the lyrics to be "risible" just as Clark thought them quaint and not for her), breaking out laughing at the line "I care not what the world may say." (No wonder Petula sang it in other languages first; no wonder it went on to be a hit for various European singers.)

It is a measure of how much things had changed in popular culture that two people - not counterculture types but those totally part of the mainstream UK all-around-entertainment world - didn't want to record this song, as it was so hokey. The 60s were supposed to be where the UK public sprang from the sappiness of the 50s, after all - that sweet, cloying string section-with-backing-singers aura had been around long enough, and any vestige of it was...passe. But not to a large segment of the public, who obviously were perfectly happy with a stolid song of love, perhaps as a reminder of a past they cherished, or as an old-fashioned SONG that may be a bit kitschy but has a TUNE they can whistle, just like in the old days.

That Secombe was part of the transition from post-WWII culture - with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan - as part of The Goon Show makes this record more of a straight-faced song from that show than anything else. The show rose out of the group's experiences - awful and absurd - during WWII, helping to bridge that traumatic time so that a fresh start could be made in the 60s, free of any hang-ups or errant nostalgias*. Thus this is something of an oddity - a man of one generation determinedly bringing something back, and two singers of the next generation complying, out of respect if nothing else. The escape from the past that the 60s in part tried to be was beginning to fray, with almost the entire top ten being Light Programme-friendly tunes that challenged nothing and (some would say) were the real 60s - not the far-out experiments and friendly forbears we have seen so far. Have the 60s run out of steam? What on earth comes next?

(*If there is one historical event the UK psyche cannot seem to escape, it's WWII. In some ways it as if everything that has happened since is a mere footnote...and there seems to be a disconnect between the whole 'vintage' style that is popular now and what was happening when said style was not vintage, but current. But I digress.)

Flower Power: Vince Hill: "Edelweiss"

2011-10-18T03:23:00.000-07:00

And so we wander from a back garden in Liverpool to...Austria? For a song about a...flower?

See, I told you this was a different kind of year.

The Sound of Music was by far the biggest phenomenon of the mid-60s moviewise; starting as a musical in 1959, it was made into a movie in 1965 and the soundtrack was the album of the time, taking the top spot for months and bobbing up now and again whenever it was a slow week. By early 1967, its songs were already common parlance...except in my house. As I wrote, I grew up in a household more interested in The Doors and Charles Mingus than musicals; unlike virtually everyone else in my generation, I didn't grow up with a copy of this in our record collection, nor did my parents watch it when it was on tv. I first encountered it live in Los Angeles at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion (so glamourous - it's where the Oscars were held!) with none other than Florence Henderson, a.k.a. Mrs. Brady, in the lead role. My aunt Debbie took me. I must have thought it was okay, but at eleven I was maybe a bit too young to get this song.

"Edelweiss" comes near the very end of the story; the Von Trapps know they have to flee before the Nazis capture them. You might think that a man about to take his family on a treacherous journey over hill and dale would have other things to sing about, but The Sound of Music is in part a paean to the natural world, a world that is free from man-made things like politics. In the movie it is sung twice - once by the Captain to his children (he has been distant from them, but due to his love for Maria, he has become warm and loving to them again) and then by the whole family at the Salzburg Festival, as an audience sing-a-long. Thus it is a uniting song, a song that exaults the national flower of Austria and a flower that represents family love. Though they had to flee, the Von Trapps sing what is in effect a song of defiance right in the Nazis' faces; what seems to be on the record a gentle tune has a tougher side (Vince Hill's butter-rich voice does it justice, I think; it is supposed to go down easy, in part to mask its defiance).

There is a sadness to this song of course; sadness in that they have to flee the land they love, symbolized by the flower, and then there's the sadness that this was the last song written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II; Hammerstein died less than a year after writing this, not long after the musical opened on Broadway. They wrote the song while the show was in rehearsals in Boston, feeling the Captain should have a song at the end, and so convincing was their composition that "Edelweiss" was taken by many to be a native folk song of Austria instead of another Broadway show tune. (Ronald Reagan thought it was the national anthem, and I'm sure he wasn't alone there.)

Now, I know that some - like Pauline Kael - would think the songs from this musical are "sickly, goody-goody*"; in which case I think it's only right to say that having attachments and feelings for a place is part of what makes people, for better or for worse, human. She may have objected to the sentimentality of the songs (even this one), but as the title reminds us, the show is about Music, and the ways music can uplift and transcend even the most horrible of situations, such as forced evacuation of not just your home but your home country.

The humble, small flower is happy and makes its beholder happy; and so a man sees his family, his nation. We know it and they will pull through, finding strength through this humility, this beauty, however square that might seem to some. As Light Programme as this is, there is a bite to it, a reminder that beauty has power, too.

*Presumably she never heard this; this is as close as I got to the musical growing up.

You Are Free: The Beatles: "Strawberry Fields Forever"

2011-10-13T04:55:00.000-07:00

"It was as though the usual gap between desire and necessity had been bridged during some freakish fit to absent-mindedness on the part of old Father Reality, temporarily indisposed with sunspots. His first sensation could not be anything but pleasure, for here were all his pumpkins turned into carriages with the gilt still fresh and the price tags in full view. But if one is not willing to believe in fairy godmothers, such pleasures burst at a finger's touch: they are not real.

What then, with any certainty, was?"

The Prisoner, Thomas M.Disch

"What thou lov'st well remains,
the rest is dross
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage
Whose world, mine or theirs
or is it of none?
First came the seen, then thus the palpable
Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell,
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage,
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee."

Ezra Pound, Canto LXXXI

He floated there, into the nearby woods, to get out of the town, for some peace; to be with the birds and beasts, sure, but also to connect as best he could with the actual world again, away from others. One day he would return to his old turf, there in London; but not just yet. This was the other world he wanted so badly? It would take some getting used to...

...and out of the fuzzy brightness the bright colors dim slightly, and as the focus sharpens an object - a balloon? - seems to come down slowly and unsteadily, resting and being pushed aside by a very light breeze. The flip side of the solidity of "Penny Lane" begins, uncertain and yet beckoning, quiet and compelling. The singer is so isolated, so alone, that the effect is that he is singing to just one other person - you, perhaps, or his Other, who he is away from, at the moment.

A man gazes out into the garden of his house and is reminded of his childhood haunt, where he would go and play no matter what. That Lennon was away from the rest of The Beatles when he started this song in the fall of '66 (he was in Spain doing How I Won The War) is one thing; that he had just met Yoko Ono was another. Her effect on him was immediate; and where he stayed in Spain did indeed remind him of Strawberry Field, where he played as a kid. But this is as far from the jauntiness of "Penny Lane" as is possible.

There is nothing to hold on to here.

It's not enough to say that the narrator is unreliable (as in the previous song) as it is that there is barely a narration that happens. It is because he sees things so indecisively that you have to accept the invitation of the song - to guide him in a way, even though he is the one who is going, is taking you, and as the song intensifies and grows darker (as if you were now in the woods and the sunlight was blocked by the trees' density), "nothing is real" becomes a promise and a threat. His indifference - "it doesn't matter much to me" - is also ambivalent, as if the old polarities and labels no longer really count. If this song is a gift, it is one you have to figure out the value of; a kit, if you like, rather than the thing itself. And then he disappears, it seems...

...then returns, turning back on itself, goofing off, getting lost, seemingly saying that every way here is the right way, again it is your choice - he has brought you here, back to his childhood, to how it was for him; your empathy gives the song life, makes it into an experience...that he got to this experience himself through taking LSD is interesting but ultimately not the point. The swirling, changing and near-classical drama of the song is to make you remember your own Strawberry Field, your own place of creativity and imagination; maybe unhappiness pushed you there, or boredom, or just the desperate need to escape. And that place returns, things inevitably happen to remind you that that place exists, even if only in your head; that liberation and creativity - freedom - can be confusing things, but they are the essential things, too.

And that was the gift of 1967, which may be submerged or lost but always, inevitably, shows up when you least expect it. It is as if once it was released, it was impossible to think of anything before it as modern; just as once you take LSD or have a similar transformative experience, the world does not look or feel the same. There is more than one way to experience the world, and once seen you cannot go back; and there is no way of knowing what your experience will bring to you - there is no guarantee it will be wholly "good."

That was a relief to some, a deep threat to others, and effectively divided the pop music audience. It was one thing to copy The Beatles in '63/'64 - that effort launched a thousand garage bands - but this? Once again they had leapfrogged everyone, even Brian Wilson, who had to pull the car over and listen, dumbfounded, as he heard what he wanted to do with The Beach Boys had already been achieved. (The Smile sessions continued on, but the album was effectively running out of steam by this time; though I must point out the tremendous "Surf's Up*" as something Wilson should have regarded as being just as good.)

As you might expect, UK radio didn't play this too much - psychedelic music was not going to fit in well with the light programme. It got equal airplay in the more open US market, getting to #8 as a b-side - such was the power of the song, the popularity of The Beatles, and the readiness of a large segment of people for this kind of song. (Note that neither this nor their previous double A side were 'love' songs as such, unless you count "Yellow Submarine" as one, in a way.) But there was a percentage who would rather have those conventional love songs - happy or sad, glad or mopey - over anything as quietly disturbing as this song.

It would be facile to say it was all housewives and secretaries who loved Englebert and only hippies and counterculture types who loved The Beatles; my mom, for one, loves this and she was busy looking after me, at the time. My aunt was (and is!) a confirmed fan and she was 12 when she first heard this; for her it was a logical continuation from Revolver, the album Brian Wilson had been trying to beat at the time. Pop music had come a long way in a short time, though, and some were finding things hard to keep up with, found this song a little too strange to love.

The psychedelic box was now open for all who wanted it; but even those who just wanted the licence to make noises that were fuzzy or backwards or just...not...steady had freedom granted to them as well. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that shoegazing gets its emotional start here, as well as its sonic roots; and the space here is vital, the space to explore the inner world as well as the outer. The split starts here, floating and swimming on invisible currents.

...and so he floated; the shock of it was that it had made him free, but seemingly free from nothing. He could observe, see, but could not do, act. And it was tiring; he could travel but never rest, lest he be discovered. He could spy on others, but what could he do with the knowledge? No one could hear him. Only his music was audible now, when anyone bothered to listen to it. He stopped by a house and heard a song coming from the radio in the kitchen; he could not quite make out who it was first. Those boys, he thought, are so lucky. Do they appreciate life?

A cat hissed at him, and he ran, though he didn't need to. It wasn't even a black cat, but he was scared. And yet weren't ghosts supposed to scare others? Back to the town he floated, as night fell...

*This was going to be on the Smile album but then was shelved until '71, when they released an album of the same name.

Only Everything: The Beatles: "Penny Lane"

2011-10-10T06:39:00.000-07:00

"I was thinking," he said (it was not an answer, but then what answers had he got this morning?) "that I've been here before."
"Lots of people get that feeling. Here."
"In front of the church?"
"In the Village, generally. It seems to do that. You know what I think it is?"
"What?"
"I think it represents something." He stroked his small, square chin, savouring the plum of represents. "People come here from other places. Like you. And they see our Village, and they get the feeling that something has always been missing from their lives."

The Prisoner, Thomas M. Disch

Part I:

If there is any one reason the 60s - once they had passed - proved so hard to shake off, we have now reached it. If you have ever - for whatever reason - had to leave behind something you did not want to leave behind, some place or some person...well, imagine that place or person as a time. Not just days on a calendar or ticks from a clock but an actual, near tangible time when things in general held promise, dignity, style, substance, color and humor. Once experienced, this time will be missed; indeed I think many still miss it, as disorienting and Utopian as it could be, by turns.

That this period lasted for only about a year or so just adds to the mystique; it also adds, I know, to the annoyance of others. It is easy to say "What is so different/special about 1967?" and be right. It wasn't a perfect year (as well shall see) and a great divide opens up during it - in fact that divide starts right here, in early March. It is the divide, simply, between those who buy singles and those who don't.

Or between those who "got it" and those who didn't. (There are still those who don't.)

**********************************************

It was not really supposed to be like this.

The custom was common - release a single, then soon after an album with all-new songs on it. They had finished their last tour in the summer and thus had time off to think of what to do next; an album about their Liverpool childhood was agreed on and two songs had been written and recorded for the album...but the label, nervous that they hadn't had a single out since August, insisted they release another one...and so they reluctantly released what wasn't supposed to be a single as a single. They may not have expected it to do very well, all things considered. That it got to #2 did not seem to bother them at all.

Part II

The man was dead; dead, by his own hand. It was not a mystery, in the end. He died, nearly penniless and yet well-known, his paranoia and depression and anger spent in a moment, killing his landlady and then himself. He had no sense of community, in being part of something much bigger, including history itself. He did not want or need others and this was perhaps a death sentence as well. The other world that called to him, which he longed to explore, was always there, and he ran headlong for it, as he had worked so hard to achieve things while he was alive. If only he could have waited; so much would be his in just a few months, in the spring, in the summer. But he wasn't much for waiting.

He knew music was the one sustainer, that long after death the music was still there, a gateway to another world, an eerie gift that was there for the taking. Put the needle on the record and sit and listen; try and tape ghosts in a graveyard and then maybe the same thing will happen. To hunt is one thing, but to be captured while hunting is something else.

By now his ghost haunted the streets, the old ones he knew, the ones he had gotten away from. This is where I once lived?

PART III

The town is a still-life; the area itself is alive, with characters that seem cartoonish, though they are real enough. This is Peter and the Wolf gone to Liverpool, for all I know. The song shifts as it goes, sounding like a simple depiction of what happens of a morning...

...if only it was like that. As cheery and life-affirming as this sounds, there is something...wrong...lurking in it that makes it tougher than it might seem at first. The barber is friendly, sure, but just why does the fireman rush in? (Yes, it is raining...but then aren't the skies supposed to be blue, the air sunny?) The banker doesn't wear a 'mac' (raincoat) even in the rain...is this why the children laugh at him? How is it that it's summer and yet Remembrance Day poppies are being sold by the pretty nurse behind the bus shelter? This is the mystery, and one that is in the 'ears and eyes' of the singer, who is not in Penny Lane beyond his own mind. We seem to be in a place, but we aren't. The nurse feels as if she is in a play (ie acting something out in the 'real' world) and yet she is, anyway. So says the singer, but can we trust him?

And what is that burst towards the end, the thunder in the clear blue sky? It approaches in the song, halting the ineffable swing of the song, as it returns again and again to the increasingly strange world where everything seems fine, though the singer comments plainly that it's "very strange." No kidding, Paul.

But then: the end.

Let me digress and say that the one thing that annoys me more about radio in general is that DJs talk over the end of songs; indeed sometimes they play a minute or so and then start babbling and the whole point of playing the thing in the first place is lost. They forget that a song is a story, and the story is told not just with words but music, with sounds. Cut off the ending and something is definitely lost, and here it is vital; the song starts briskly enough, the lyrics just a note behind the music.

But the end!

The singer says the name of the place one more time, as if wrapping a bow; and then the scene fades, the piano and cymbal squeak into feedback, as if the place is suddenly full of light or dimming beyond focus. It evaporates. What once was is gone, is gone again, nothing is as it seemed. Is this a happy song? For all intents and purposes, yes. The sprightly beat and hints of brass bands; the smile in Paul's voice; the Motown roots and warmth; the way you can close your eyes and be there with the singer, maybe even remembering your own childhood neighborhood - all these are joys.

But there is something lurking - that burst and then unnerving feedback at the end - that make this more than just another happy McCartney song. It's not like the memories are being made fun of, or the people. It's that even as they existed, the scenes were surreal, unreal, "very strange." This all seems familiar, too familiar...and the solution? Turn the record over and see what is on the other side.

It was now as if he had never left. This was intolerable. He had to escape. But how?

The Man Can't Stop Our Music: The Rolling Stones: "Let's Spend The Night Together"

2011-10-05T01:46:00.000-07:00

"Nineteen sixty-seven was the watershed year, the year the seams gave way...There was a tension in the air. It's like negative and positive ions before a storm, you get that breathlessness that something's got to break."

Keith Richards, Life

Though technically we are now in mid-February '67, I want to go back a month, specifically to January 15th. On that night this song was performed live on the Ed Sullivan Show with an altered title - the more modest "Let's Spend Some Time Together" - with Mick rolling his eyes every time he had to sing the bowdlerized lyric. Afterwards the band then went backstage and changed into Nazi uniforms (not sure where those came from, the episode is not mentioned in Life) and Sullivan told them to change back into their regular stage clothes; the band refused and left and never appeared on the show again. For any other band this would have been a disaster, but for The Rolling Stones this more or less cemented their bad-boy status. The rest of the year for them included the "stitch-up" bust, trial, imprisonment, bail, a psychedelic album that was "flimflam" to Richards. But back to the song...

The song (an NME-only #2, by the way) is about as straightforward as the Stones ever get, both musically and lyrically; it's simply a demand/request from the hard-of-dancing Mick to his new love, Marianne Faithfull, who he had met not long ago. That she was a mom and wife didn't seem to matter to him (nor to her) and I wonder if Sullivan knew this was about more than just a mere lusty crush. It is shameless, in all senses of the word, and just changing the title barely disguises what is going on - "I'm going red and my tongue's getting tied/I'm off my head and my mouth's getting dry" - put that together with the pumping music and the way the words and music seem to be coupling themselves and there you have it.

However far-out music is getting, here are the Stones to kindly remind everyone what rock 'n' roll actually means and if Mick is a bit of a clown here, well, all for the better. That they get sidetracked by psychedelia just shows what purists they are, or perhaps how what they want to do (and do best) has very little to do with fashion, and more with an obsession over sounds, textures, moods. Here it's heart-pounding, nearly unbearable excitement, pure and simple. (It was banned when they went to China a few years back, but having matured as a band, they simply played other hits instead.)

The day after the Rolling Stones were banned from Ed Sullivan's show, I was born. It was also the day after the weekend of the Human Be-In in San Francisco, where some of the hipper people already had copies of The Doors' first album. The Rolling Stones, whether they knew it or not, were now a part of the counterculture, the ones who said 'no' to straight society and would thereafter have to deal with the outside world at increasingly desperate ways. When a lusty song is enough to rile the Establishment, you know they must be scared of something much bigger - namely, the breakdown of society altogether. The tensions Richards mentions are growing, this song is a (hapless) symbol of one generation's attempted censorship of another.

What comes next was not what anyone expected; it made the Stones look old-fashioned, practically Teds in context. The crossroads are going to become startlingly clear.

Baffled Dancers: Cat Stevens: "Matthew And Son"

2011-10-04T05:41:00.001-07:00

The hijacking of pop music for other ends is commonly called New Pop, and New Pop has its forbears - those who came before it to act as examples and inspirations for those to come. Cat Stevens may be best known for his early 70s folk anthems, but here in '67, he's a friendly forbear.

This is a pop song - the horns and tinkling piano and sparkling melody all make sure of that - it's a commercial pop song and sounds like it comes from a musical (West Side Story was a big influence on Stevens). But as you can see here, the public - namely, the kids - who heard it were unsure what the heck to make of it. There is Stevens, a junior member of the swinging London scene, all velvet and lacy frills, singing about crushing capitalism as if he was Heaven 17 or something. The audience is baffled and confused, because this kind of thing...is not done. This, to borrow a phrase, is not a love song. Stevens dances about and smiles as if he knows exactly what he's doing, and the kids who are used to happy songs to dance to hear lyrics like "There's a five minute break and that's all you take/For a cup of cold coffee and a piece of cake" which is the precise opposite of 'groovy' or 'cool' or 'far out'. "They've been working all day, all day, all day!" he sings as if the workers were as happy as the seven dwarfs, when in reality they are wage slaves and take their work home, unable (due to their boss' orders?) to get it out of their heads.

That Stevens is doing this and having a hit with it comes from several things - he was a pin-up of the time (believe it or not); it's a darn catchy number; and the drudgery portrayed here is the very thing that the psychedelic scene is trying so hard to push against - the all-work no-play straight world that gives no importance or space to anything approaching enjoyment, adventure or even rest. In a way all of Stevens' other songs are a reproach to this one, and to see him a-swingin' away here is poignant. He, the artist, is able to escape what he is depicting, whereas how many in the audience actually work in such places? What is it like to have your life portrayed in a seemingly-cheery-sounding song while you're trying to dance to it? Art is supposed to be a mirror held up to nature, and here the mirror is being held up to them. This is Art, to be sure, and the audience look as if they are still trying to make up their minds about it*.

That the song is a mere depiction and not overtly a protest song is even more confusing - rock 'n' roll ("Summertime Blues" "Yakety Yak") is all about protest, always has been, always will be. But this is pop, isn't it? The crossroads are getting bigger all the time, with crumbs of cake leading trails to who knows where.

*I wonder if the '67 audience in general listened to lyrics and got them or just wanted something to whistle/dance to as they did in the 50s. Certainly the careers of the balladeers depended on lyrics, so I tend to think they were heard, if not always understood.

BOO!: The Move: "Night of Fear"

2011-10-04T02:02:00.000-07:00

And appropriately, we have left the warm, hazy sunshine and stumbled into what seems to be its opposite - it's dark, it's windy, something - who knows what - is causing chills and hallucinations. What on earth has happened?

The Move came out of the tough Birmingham scene (whence previous MSBWT subject The Fortunes ["You've Got Your Troubles"] also came) and they wore their freak flags high. If you sense that these men - Roy Wood, Carl Wayne and later Jeff Lynne - were interested in bringing classical music into rock, you'd be absolutely right. In this case it's nothing less than Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, in specific the culminating part (best known to Americans as when the fireworks happen at Independence Day concerts). The Move had originally been a covers group (doing The Byrds, Motown, 50s rock 'n' roll - whatever appealed to them and their audience) and were already known for being outrageous onstage and off, with various things getting the literal axe, including a television, a Cadillac and a bust of Hitler. Their manager encouraged Roy Wood to write songs, and then they started to have hits, including this one.

What is happening here, clearly, is a bad trip. Paranoia is one of the natural side effects of mind-altering drugs, and with good reason. If you can't perceive what is going on around you accurately, then anything can become...anything, with possibly more than just scary consequences. Green and purple lights, cold blood and howling winds would make any ordinary night a night of fear, but there is nevertheless a jauntiness here that comes as a kind of security blanket, as if the band are saying that yes, some trips are going to be bad but you will survive them. How many heard the warning and understood it I am not sure; it could also serve as a general come-down song after the explosion of energies from '64-'66, that the past (represented by Tchaikovsky) can either be a hindrance or a comforting reminder, depending on how you hear it. Musicians are now listening to others and bringing their work in, and here we have a past master being dropped into the present, helping to jolly along a song about sheer terror.

Already the crossroads are present, confusing and misleading those who try to read the signs too quickly. Whimsy mixed with menace: the sinuous "Sunshine Superman" turns into the night when hobgoblins all too easily become apparent, Halloween happening way too soon. Psychedelia was starting to open up and reveal all kinds of things, good and bad. But could this fear be better than something else?

Back to the Future: Donovan: "Sunshine Superman"

2011-10-03T03:02:00.000-07:00

The term "psychedelic" comes from two Greek words - "psyche" (the soul) and "deloun" (to manifest). With this song the psychedelic era comes to this blog, though in truth psychedelic music had existed for at least a year if not more (Pet Sounds is psychedelic in the sense that it is a soul-manifesting album, for instance). It was recorded a year earlier but due to record company problems was a hit in the UK long after it got to #1 in the US. (Trust a Scotsman to be ahead of the curve musically.)

The term psychedelic was coined in 1957* - ten years earlier - to describe what LSD actually (they hoped) would do. It was never meant to be used outside of psychotherapy, originally, and many doctors and scientists did experiments to see what effect it would have on patients and 'artistic'** types. By the mid-60s they had determined that it was a drug with a rather unpredictable effect on people, and was much tougher to obtain, which didn't stop those in the know from getting it and giving it to those who felt they needed to go on their own trip. Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary and other respected folks encouraged those who were disenchanted to take it and enlighten themselves - to see the world in a new way and thence evolve.

Suffice it to say this Utopian idea - tuning in, turning on and dropping out - appealed to many who felt that just about everything going on in the 60s was wrong - the war, racism, sexism, the boring straight world with its hierarchies and tragic lack of soul. Others took it to prove they were brave enough to do so - Ken Kesey's acid tests had turned many on the West Coast on in '66-'65 - though taking it was never supposed to be about posing or boasting. It is also true that musicians who took LSD had to have a strong constitution to survive doing so, and that many tried to get their experiences into their songs, via words and/or music. It naturally appealed to those who were bored, restless, experimental - John Lennon and George Harrison were the LSD heads in The Beatles, for instance, as opposed to McCartney (who by this time still hadn't tried it). In the UK it was an American import and was one of those scandalous drugs that led to drug busts, even though it was not a crime to possess it (other ones, such as pot or cocaine, yes).

If you are wondering why I am going on about a drug as opposed to a song, that is because this year is unlike any others. This is the crossroads; this is the tightrope moment when musicians - particularly UK ones - begin to break down barriers and experiment and really listen to each other. LSD has a way of breaking down barriers as well of course, of making what is there simply more intense or perceptible in a way close to a mystical experience. It's a Utopian time all right, but with drugs there is always the risk that something will go wrong, that the classic "good idea at the time" will evaporate and what seems to be glaringly obvious to the tripper will be fuzzy or incoherent to those straighter folk who are trying to understand what the heck is going on.

1967 is unlike any other years in that so many musicians did their best to express the inexpressible and give the world a chance to hear what they heard, see what they saw, with uniformly stunning results. Apart from the strobe lights, fluorescent posters and the like, the music is what really lasts from this period; that a huge generation experienced it and gave it its popularity in the first place means I have always known it, almost have over-heard it, if that's possible.

Donovan's proud boasting that he can outdo Superman and Green Lantern in his exploits in order to win his girl are one thing, but a video with no lip-syncing is another, not to mention those psychedelic hallmark: distorted pictures, kites and random wackiness (avec kitten). This is psychedelic courting, full of pearls and rainbows and a sly wink in the song that doesn't take away from its seriousness. I grew up in a house full of Donovan's records and so this is as familiar to me as The Beach Boys. That it could be heard as an invitation from the hip to the straights to succumb to the ennobling and beautiful world post-trip is also there, the appeal as warm and enriching as, well, sunshine itself. But as we all know, too much sunshine can be dangerous, and LSD was never meant to be taken for that long.

This is the sunny introduction to a year that will transform a great deal of what can be thought of as 'rock' (in just about every way possible). It brings Jimmy Page (electric guitar) into this saga as well, then just a session musician who was still (at the time of recording) to join The Yardbirds. A whole world is opening up, erratically but inevitably, as the counterculture/flower power movement moves in from the fringes and starts to get noticed; hippies spring up wildflower-like and the enchanting strangeness and startling humor - not to mention rebelliousness - give The Man plc a big headache. The laid-back mood of the year is set, with barely one or two club hits managing to make it to #2, and none make it to #1 (save "I'm a Believer"). The torrid excitements of '66 are fading, to be replaced by musicians who are starting to slow down so they can hear each other better, who are becoming - for now - a real community. Their souls, if you like, are staring to manifest.

*LSD itself was invented in 1943, though its psychedelic properties weren't discovered for a few years.

**My father was the subject of an experiment, along with another painter, in Los Angeles in 1959. Everything he saw was brighter than usual, so the painting he did was darker, just to give his eyes a break. He later saw Hollywood Boulevard and thought it was on fire. He didn't show any interest in LSD afterwards, though we had old Psychedelic Reviews around the house, so he must have been curious...

All Aboard!: The Seekers: "Morningtown Ride"

2011-09-27T02:46:00.000-07:00

As the frenzied year of '66 draws to a close, we find ourselves on a train; the whistle blows and out it chugs, with its passengers - sleeping children - safely tucked away under blankets (where they are is cold, cloudy, maybe even a bit frosty - it is Christmastime)...and they go along the bay down to Morningtown, where everything will be sunny and pleasant. This is cosy children's music and folk music as well (the popularity of folk music is rarely shown by this blog lately, but it's about to branch out into folk rock - we'll get to that soon). Children's music is normally big around Christmas, but there is something here for grown-ups too - something akin to this song, wherein a train is also involved, also headed for a destination where things will be better. In the depths of winter, the promise of spring is not far behind; we are moving towards it, or it is coming to us, depending on how you see it. I have been known to like soppy songs for kids, and while I don't know this one from my own childhood, I do know others...

The promise of warmth and sunshine may sound odd coming from an Australian band, but this song was written by the American singer/songwriter Malvina Reynolds, who also wrote "Little Boxes" - she also contributed songs and appeared on Sesame Street, whose own theme song is also for children (obviously) but also is about a place where everything is just that much better. (Sesame Street was just the beginning for US public television's radical ideas on how to do shows for kids; it was thought up in '66 and the first episode aired in '69 - by '72 it was able to do this, which is a heck of a long train ride from The Seekers).

So, apart from this Christmas cheer - again, a bit sad for my taste, but maybe that's just Judith Durham's voice - what else is looming for the new year? Tom Jones is ONLY DREAMING at number one, The Kinks sing about getting nowhere on "Dead End Street," The Supremes are getting tough...and this new "power trio" called Cream lingering at the bottom, biding their time. Death, in a way, stalks the chart, from the top song to the continued presence of Jim Reeves, who had departed in '64 but persisted, Tupac-like, for years afterward. Fellow Australians The Easybeats longed for escape as much as anyone, but there was one song that talked about a different kind of escape; it starts '67 off very appropriately.

Two Are Better Than One: Val Doonican: "What Would I Be"

2011-09-26T05:14:00.000-07:00

"I don't ponder because I don't even see the world without it. It's too big, or buried too deep, with edges that thin out to nothingness, binding itself to everything else."

Julie Powell, Cleaving

Suddenly we are out of the club and have ended up in one of the country variety, or perhaps in a waiting room somewhere. This may be called "easy listening" by some, but any song which has "angry voices raised in vain" and "unspoken thoughts we both regret" could only be called easy by someone who is going through a very tough patch indeed. Jackie Trent wrote this song and while I can't say if it was autobiographical or not (I hope not - she was falling in love with Tony Hatch at this time) it has the ring of authenticity. It is as if the man in the Manfred Mann song is speaking up - the other one - and describing what marriage is really like. There may be irritating things but they are far outweighed by the irresistible ones, the ones that make despair or dismay evaporate, the ones that make thinking of life without the Other impossible. What would he be, he wonders - and he will never know. It is one of those unknowable things, unthinkable, because it is literally beyond the bounds of perception. This is what Powell is saying here, and Doonican as well - that the minor troubles they go through are in reality nothing compared to the much bigger alternative. Adolescents and young folks may sulk after a fight or a bad day, but adults know that there will always be the rough with the smooth and that the balance between the two is what counts; a relationship that lasts takes this well into account and even, so to speak, banks on it. It is a mature song, realistic, perhaps a little sad (Doonican always sounds a bit sad to me, but perhaps that's his Irish accent).

Marriage is a complex thing that requires a lot of attention and care (I am presuming this is a song about marriage, though it could stand for any long-term relationship) and it has always been a fringe subject in pop, since so much music is about crushes, flirting, searching, maybe finding, being dumped, etc. There are songs that celebrate weddings, too, but beyond that, it's up to "easy listening" crooners and the odd star like Kurt Cobain or Biggie Smalls to sing about marriage, as if it was a fringe state and something that happens every day. I am aware that "easy listening" is almost presupposed to be for those who are married, older, who don't go to clubs but don't want to listen to their parents' music all day, either. There is a substantial bloc of listeners in the 60s who like this kind of music and they don't have any interest in pop music unless it speaks to them: and this is exactly what does.

Val Doonican himself was an colorful-sweater and rocking chair-friendly Irish singing star who had his own television show, where he had a regular cast and many guest stars, including American singer-songwriters such as Tim Buckley, Jackson Browne and Laura Nyro, whose first album comes out around this time...and actually born around this time is Sinead O'Connor, who grew up with Val Doonican records and learned to sing "Scarlet Ribbons" - Doonican himself admires her version.

Yes, we are far from the sweaty club, and by the time we get back, things will be far more complex than they were before.

Going Out On Top: Spencer Davis Group: "Gimme Some Loving"

2011-09-23T06:53:00.000-07:00

And here we are, dancing wildly on the edge; the crowning song of the beat boom rightly belongs to the hardest working band out there, the Spencer Davis Group. The band (even in this...Swedish?...version) is tight, Steve Winwood sounds as if he's much older than 19, and the kids are raving in the sweating club, the emblematic Hammond organ conjures up all sorts of images of what 'groovy' and 'Swinging' could mean...

...and there is something sweet, too, in a band from Birmingham - right in the center of the country - uniting everyone in the face of a cold and uncertain winter (Cathy Come Home had just been aired on tv; unemployment was rising yet again). The effervescence of the mid-60s was slowly wearing off, for various reasons; obviously the party continued for many, but even from this version I get that something more contemplative and not quite as simple is around the corner for Winwood. There are only so many nights you can pound out foot-stomping classics - even one as elemental and contagious as this one - without wanting to vary things up a bit, expand what you can say and how you can say it. In short, this is another club banger, from a band used to making people dance, and there is no topping it (though the Winwoods' last single with them - "I'm A Man*" - is as fitting a goodbye as possible). Both of these songs were produced by Jimmy Miller, an American who had drifted (anyone know how or why?) to England (see also Tony Visconti and Joe Boyd - here beginneth the era of Americans helping to push UK music forward**). He got to work with The Rolling Stones with his success here - making a song sound as if it was the apex of the boom itself, the figurative end of the long hard week so many bands had had so far, zooming through the years, riding on their own hard work and good luck and love of music.

I hope I am not getting too sentimental about this time, but the joy and innocence and simple good times of the mid-60s should not be forgotten; they help to define the decade as a whole and are the only way the late 60s make any real sense. By now, John had met Yoko; drugs were in wide use, LSD in particular being what the self-consciously cool types were dropping; those mutant energies were growing stronger and would not always be satisfied with a simple "boom-boom-boom-boom-BOOM-boom." That is sad, maybe, but expanding minds were going to change the way music sounded, the way it sold, even the way it was performed.

For now we are going to leave the sweaty club, the land of a thousand dances, happy to hear this pounding out and even now I can hear the giddy "Hey" and hands clapping in unison. Goodbye mid-60s, you won't be forgotten.

*Forewarned: I will be including as many songs from my wedding cd on this here blog as possible, because I can. I hope you enjoy them!

** Shel Talmy, producer of the early singles by The Kinks and The Who, is also American. This makes me wonder just how British the British Invasion was, sometimes...

Man and Wife: Manfred Mann: "Semi-Detached Suburban Mr. James"

2011-09-23T02:17:00.000-07:00

And so the 60s sit, perched, as it seems from here, to break into two not-so-clean pieces - the one that, raunchy as it is, still wears matching suits (as we have seen) and the more rebellious types who wear whatever they want and have more ambivalent feelings about what 'normal' people do. This song stands clearly on that side, the one that asks, effectively (decades before Lloyd Cole) "Are you ready to be heartbroken?" Not in the dumped way, but in the way that cozy security and regular routines can fetter those free spirits who aren't quite ready for domesticity. Is the woman here, newly engaged, able to see her future? Does she know what awaits her, out there in the new town? There are two possible answers: yes, and no. This song wouldn't have much point if it's the first answer, because then the Manfreds would be patronizing, right?

Or maybe...not. Even those with something of a clue of what is ahead cannot see everything which is to come; but the subtleties of that are more for the introspective 70s, not now. Clearly this is about a girl who is about to see her life change and probably not for the better. "Semi-detached" refers to a kind of house, but you can imagine Mr. James is a lawyer or physician or someone who works in The City and will not have much time for his Gidget-type girl, who will become - so the singer believes - something of a bored drudge, listening to pirate radio* (maybe) to keep whatever is still vital and sparkling from being smothered completely. The 60s were the 60s, but there was still an expectation that women - no matter how wildly they danced or how short their skirts or radical their views - would eventually settle down (both connotations apply here). Is the girl in this jaunty song ready to do this? Can she do it without becoming depressed, numb or just bored? Manfred Mann don't think so, and the next year will see them proved right.

The chart at this time is ablaze with many emotions, from joy to loneliness, desperation to liberation; whimsy, even. That better-have-a-drink-before-I-sing-this schlock was in the mix was fine, too; but the divide is about to become greater as the year comes to a close, though the swinging 60s aren't going to disappear once the church bells start ringing. Those who want to conform and be "square" and those who marry into that life will sit and be - annoyed, bemused or baffled - by those who refuse to join in. Now seems like the last time the two sides will even talk to each other, let alone contemplate marriage.

*Pirate stations only employed men as they were supposed to be substitutes for husbands for any wives listening. I may have mentioned this before, but I still think it's worth noting.

The Boy Can't Help It: The Hollies: "Stop, Stop, Stop"

2011-09-20T05:15:00.000-07:00

Okay, what the hell is going on here?!? I mean, DDDBM&T and The Troggs are expected to perform songs that are suggestive (hell, suggestive - they practically give instructions) and now these nice boys from Manchester (not London - what did that guy think) are singing about...sexual obsession?

He's sweaty, the belly-dancer's sweaty, he's getting excited and there is no way this is going to end well. If anybody wanted to know what the 'male gaze' is about, it's all right here - she enters the room, the spotlight is on her - even if he wants to look away, he can't. Even more than The Troggs though, he is nervous; he compares her to a snake - alluring and strange - and he can barely breathe. The dancer dances on, unaware of him, doing her job, tapping her cymbals and rolling along, gyrating to and fro...

...and then he's there, onstage with her! Standing in the light, stock still I'd guess, but then just as suddenly he grabs her and they tussle, falling into the crowd and knocking down drinks. He wants her and he wants her now; who knows anything beyond that, even himself? It "happens every week" (for how long now?) and he of course gets thrown out, which may or may not also happen every week. The sparkling harmonies and high ringing banjo are very typically Hollies, but this song (by the band's composers) goes beyond just wanting and needing to obsessing and taking (or trying to take) the girl. That he keeps pleading for the dancing to stop could mean he knows what he feels is wrong, he knows darn well what's going to happen, but his desire for her is so strong that it drowns out that more sensible side of himself. On the one hand, he's a jerk; on the other, a man who really should know better but- in a different way from The Troggs - can't control himself.

Who could have expected this from The Hollies? What the heck was going on with pop in general? Here Clarke and Nash talk about what pop is and how much things have changed in a few years. The kids have moved on, a new crop of girls scream for them, and presumably the older kids want something different now. I'm not sure if this song is for those older kids (it's a strange song for The Hollies, after all) or if the older kids are now getting into...rock?

There is a shift here, something is indubitably happening and all the bands must sense it, and the old restlessness is returning. The kids of '63 who went crazy for Merseybeat are nearly four years older now and can handle psychological complexities and weirdness - as long has a good beat and they can dance to it. Just how a song about - let's face it - attempted rape/abduction got on the airwaves I don't know, save for The Hollies' general good reputation, and the brightness of the song itself. But that they - Graham Nash in particular I sense - want to keep pushing limits just as much as anyone else means something seriously is up, and if this is acceptable then all hell's going to break loose*, if it hasn't already.

*Beyond the intensely sexual side of the charts in late '66, there's also the freakout of "Good Vibrations" (talk about people staring a radios wondering what that was) and "Painter Man" which is allied with The Who's taking-art-to-the-masses idea quite literally. Happenings, where the action was part of the art - and participants could become part of the work-in-progress - knocked down the idea that art was special, even as The Creation lamented the life of the artist.

You Can't Play That On The BBC part 3: The Troggs: "I Can't Control Myself"

2011-09-20T02:49:00.000-07:00

"AAAwwwwOOOOOOOHHHHHHH NNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" screams Reg Presley, as if he is doing something he likes maybe a little bit too much and also maybe has done something wrong.

But it's not his fault!

This man is on fire, after all, and possesses (or is possessed by, more accurately) something way beyond anything he's experienced before. Unlike "Wild Thing" where he bosses the girl around, here she is an idol, a figure with naked hips and long hair and a way of breaking him down until he's helpless, swamped by a fervor so big it could "move a nation" (whatever thatmeans). In such a state he of course is going to scream and the bubblegum "ba bas" are like so much background noise to his passion. He is swamped by something he can't control (and this loss of control is fun, of course, as long as she's faithful) and if only she knew how it felt, her hair would curl. Well! He may be ridiculous to others but what the hell does he (or should he) care?

I can't say this is the beginnings of ye olde punk rock*, but I can't say this band (beloved of Lester Bangs, mais oui) isn't getting back to the basics even as the baroque and (shh-it's just starting now) psychedelic modes are beginning to take hold of the more famous bands. The Troggs knew where their bread could be buttered, so to speak, and it wasn't in anything that would take long to write or record. Mutant energies were working elsewhere; here the thudding bass and hapless howls are enough to make sure that rock 'n' roll stayed just as degenerate and disrespectable as it should be. His scream of pure pleasure at the end is miles away from anything normal radio would play. I wonder if it will return?

Next: more uncontrollable behavior, believe it or not.

*Chrissie Hynde dedicated this to Sid Vicious at the Pretenders' first gig; before the concert she found out he had died.

You Can't Play That On The BBC part 2: Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich: "Bend It!"

2011-09-19T05:45:00.000-07:00

In the midst of all this it's important to remember that we are still in the Age of Meek, though the man himself was entangled in a lawsuit and increasingly (understandably) anguished over many things, he was still writing and producing songs. Not hits; Edinburgh's own The Buzz's epic "You're Holding Me Down" should have been a monster freakbeat hit of the first order, but it was just too much for The Man (talk about a song only playable on pirate radio). Meek was a producer who had his own technique and sound, stubborn, unable to just simply record a band and have a "live, off the floor" vibe that was the hallmark of others (The Who songs at this time all sound like they were recorded as is in a broom closet, for instance.)

How I wish I could say that this song was a Meek production, but songwriting team Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley (who had had success with Meek with this song, one so compressed it sounds like a singing baseball bat) had no luck with the band (then called Dave Dee and the Bostons) as Meek wanted them to play slowly, then speed them up on tape; the band just knew how to play the songs they had one way, and that was that - Meek stormed upstairs, and the band schlepped their equipment back down the stairs. Howard and Blaikley then not only were their songwriters and managers, but producers too. Part of Meek's anguish must have been knowing how successful they were, while his own songs were busy getting nowhere.

If The Who introduced gender confusion to pop, well, here comes DDDBM&T with something so utterly blatant that I am surprised anyone played it...but a cheery bit of "Zorba's Dance" makes this playful and you just know girls loved Dave Dee*, the sort of guy who could sing this with a smile and enjoy its campness without being camp himself in the least. It got played because it was naughty (so naughty that they had to re-record it with different lyrics for the US) and the fact that it was written by a gay songwriting team...did not seem to matter. (DDDBM&T's first chart hit was called "You Make It Move" - no kidding.) The slow-building excitement, the clapping, the insinuating melody - it's like a Greek dance meeting a late-night Blow Up-style freakout wherein everyone is having a good time and anything could happen afterwards, to the point beyond just flirting and dancing. This impending shagfest rave-up was too much for the BBC (who only played The Honeycombs after they had reached the Top 20), who still are reluctant to play it. It may seem embarrassing now, I suppose, but such insistent and scrunching rhythms were exactly what the grannies in Arboath/Iowa didn't approve of, bless them. Pop always needs a WTF song of one kind or another, and while this is the strangest of the bunch of '66, it is by far the last...

Alas, this is the only time I get to write about these colorful, winking and theatrical men (Howard & Blaikley and DDDBM&T) - Meek was growing ever more morbid, trying to record ghosts in graveyards...just as the 60s were at their most vivid and alive, just as the strangeness began to creep in, around the edges...things were only barely in check.

*Dave Dee was a policeman before he formed a band; he was called out to help at the crash that killed Eddie Cochran and injured Gene Vincent, a moment that may well have transferred some of Cochran's rebellious spirit into Dee. Who knows? I am sure Meek would have understood, and maybe even envied him for it.

You Can't Play That On The BBC part 1: The Who: "I'm a Boy"

2011-09-19T03:17:00.000-07:00

Away from the pastoral sweep of The Beach Boys, now, and back to the UK, where something was most definitely happening, though for just now there are only glints of it on the pop charts. That something is the division between pop and rock, easily seen by the differences between album and singles charts. For now they remain more or less the same, but this state will only last for a couple more years, at best. The word 'art' comes back naturally with The Who, lead by the self-consciously audacious Pete Townsend, who wanted more- more than just regular pop songs as provided by everyone else. Other groups did too, of course (the Rolling Stones always being hip to trends, and The Beatles personified restlessness) but Townsend's sincerity makes this song (from an abandoned project about a world of gender-selected babies called "Quads") stand out.

There is no overt menace here, just a refusal (because she wanted another daughter) of a mother to accept that she has a son, which makes Bill into a "headcase" - dying to escape from the world of femininity to one of cricket, mud and bicycles and blood - but who "gets it" if he does. This goes beyond the Stones' dressing up in women's clothing for "Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, Standing in the Shadows" (a different way of defying norms and testing of their audience; the song stalled at #5).

"I'm a Boy" wins out because it seems to be leading the listener into something, something different and interesting, unless you are a light programme devotee and songs about gender differences and incipient madness make you...uncomfortable. The song is full of harmonies (influenced by Pet Sounds, I'd guess) and sung as prettily as possible, as well, by both Townsend and Daltrey. It is nearly weightless (anticipating "I Can See For Miles") and the anger comes out in Moon's drumming as usual, but the two harmonize at the end, lamenting and asserting the boy's point of view, one that can't be denied forever...

...it is a good point to ponder the role of pirate radio at this time, mainly because it would play what the BBC would not - songs such as the ones mentioned here. The pirates - from what I can tell - created the utterly free climate for bands and songwriters to do whatever they wanted, within reason, and then to see just how much they could get away with. Would they have been as daring without the pirates? Just how closely did people then listen to lyrics? Part of pop - or rock, if you will - is to push limits, to say the previously unsayable, to give the outcasts and freaks and geeks a voice - a voice that was needed and at present able to be heard, though by now objections to pirate radio were getting louder and louder, much like the music itself.

Townsend would eventually write longer and longer pieces about confusion and alienation and the search for some kind of resolution; this song is the start towards Tommy and Quadrophenia as well, rock as art (as opposed to art rock, which this blog will reach in time). In the meantime a whole new crop of bands would appear, blowing the minds of some listeners and driving others (more timid ones, perhaps) to the more standard fare of love songs and cheery uptempo toe tappers. Pop is the girl and rock is the boy? If only it were as simple as that; but once the door is open then anything can happen, and the idea that a song has to be anything will be tested during this time, until something breaks.

The promise of this song is that the boy can sing at all (unlike Tommy he's not dumb) and he will go on singing, even to himself. Another singer/songwriter heard this and was perhaps encouraged to write his own song, one that would be too much for even pirate radio. Something was happening, indeed.

Brian Wilson, Western Recorders, Los Angeles, California...the solar system, the universe, the mind of God: The Beach Boys: "God Only Knows"

2011-08-31T09:31:00.000-07:00

"Listen to 'God Only Knows' - as beautiful as anything ever recorded, and Brian Wilson starts a love song with "I may not always love you" - that's nerve."

Martin Skidmore, March 6, 2002, ILM

Part One: Five Men in a Room

There are five men in one room; they are all sitting down, perhaps some more comfortably than others. They are about to listen to an album, an advanced copy of it no less, and there is a certain tension in the air, of excitement and uncertainty. The album title is odd, for starters. The eldest of the five puts the album on the turntable and the needle on the starting groove...

They look at each other with some nods and smiles at first; yes, this is exactly what we expected, but, but...it is as if there are new colors and textures emerging at any given moment and the effect is of strangeness, more than anything else. This is like a flower opening, a bird flying; amazing and fragile and utterly natural, all at the same time. The eldest listens very carefully; one of the others is cool to the sounds, the words, but the effect is building up, until it hits a plateau they have already heard, of course...

...and then the most affected of the five gets up and turns it over, beside himself to hear what comes next. The first song glides into the air, serene as a swan. He covers his face with his hands, knowing that this is it. IT. They all know this is what they will have to equal on their next record or they will have fallen behind, and they cannot possibly do that. Even what they are doing now - which is pretty amazing - is not nearly enough. The room is quiet when the album ends; the eldest takes the record off the turntable and says: "That is our next goal, boys. To equal that."

Part Two: Pray

"The sheer emotion that comes out of the speakers is TERRIFYING. It is the pause between your declaration of love and her response."

Joseph Cowart, July 9, 2005 ILM

"Carl and I were into prayer. We'd pray together, and we prayed for light and guidance through the album. We kind of made it a religious ceremony."

Brian Wilson on recording Pet Sounds

And so the brothers prayed before recording this song. When you pray you hope, you try to bring something into being, to manifest it in some way. To say what that is precisely or to be too demanding is not needed; just to have that right energy and feel is the thing. Like anything ecstatic, there is no real explanation for what happens. There is almost no describing it. There is a melody, a beat, musicians, instruments. The song unfolds as it should and yet does not settle down. It is pointing towards it (the root chord) without ever saying directly what it is. That is probably because it - what the song is about - is unnameable, impossible to describe...it exists, but can only be felt, not heard...

...to digress to the 90s, this is one of my favorite songs, one that wouldn't exist without this one. What is it about? Here are the lyrics; but beyond those is the music, which reminds me at one point of something I don't talk about very much, because music is the only part of it that I can relate to others, and that is my own mystical experience. The chorus of the song (in particular the solo organ, at 1:29 or so) is about the only equivalent I have for the experience*.

"God Only Knows" works the same way for me but on a far more essential basis than even that; it came out when my mom was pregnant with me and as a native Angeleno I cannot help associate it with that important time. Objectivity for me is nearly impossible, therefore, but from what I sense this song either hits people right where they live - uncomfortably, as Cowart and Skidmore remind us - and they either reject it or accept it. There is no dodging the difference in this song - not even Mike Love's part in the break (the low bah-bah-bah-bomp-BAHs) can give much of a connection to anything they have done before.

The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby/Yellow Submarine" was number one at the time: two songs about either being isolated from the rest of humanity or joyously attached; and as an unwitting riposte here were the Beach Boys writing one of the ultimate songs to the Other, with sublime music which circles around the point - the indescribable point - as opposed to the rather blunt Beatles ones. The lovin' vibes that Wilson wanted here are more than apparent, the psychedelic swirl of instruments (accordion, french horn, sleigh bells, string quartet) are homely** and clip-clop delicately, the front room piano is the ground out of which all of this - voices, instruments - rises...and there is the word God, the word which had never been used in a pop song (jazz or patriotic anthems at this point only) before, right there in the title and chorus. The song was easy enough to write, compared to others on Pet Sounds, but it was the one most worried about.

Prayer was not only needed for the singing, but perhaps to get God's OK for the song. If the song took a short time to write, then doing so might count as a mystical experience, one that Wilson and Asher may have been too busy to notice. Brian Wilson was going to sing it but then decided his brother Carl would sound better; and they prayed before singing it. And so it went into the world as a prayer of its own.

Part Three: Influence

Stereolab have already been mentioned here; I should also mention the High Llamas (there are links between the groups, namely Sean O'Hagan). The more immediate influence is all over the place though, including (yes) the Velvet Underground. They may have been led by uber-rocker Lou Reed but John Cale, a Beach Boys fan, snuck in this; (ah irony in the host saying it was the most influential album).

Pet Sounds is notoriously a musician's album, which means it crossed (as thence did this song) into all kinds of ears, from Keith Jarrett to Charles Lloyd (who worked with the Beach Boys because of this), to Carla Bley, who was influenced by Wilson's way of orchestrating and arranging. (This is the full overture to Escalator Over The Hill; when I first heard it I was immediately reminded of downtown Los Angeles - now I know why). Marvin Gaye heard it and it helped to shape how What's Going On sounds - miles away from the regular Motown sound, denser and overlapping, profoundly moving in and of itself. (This may just be a way to say Pet Sounds is a soul album, come to think of it.) And it also fed into how The Carpenters would sound, from melodies to gentle melancholy; Richard Carpenter is also a Frank Zappa fan (oh yeah - us Californians stick together, you see) and some of the musicians here also appear on The Mothers of Invention's Freak Out!, which came out at around the same time and was another album to give The Beatles a pause for thought***.

Those most influenced by it were The Beach Boys themselves; it was Wilson's project to write it as the rest toured Japan, and there were initial mixed feelings about this and the other songs - no cars, no surfing, no girls, no fun; but the band came around to it in the end. At this point work began on Smile, a "teenage symphony to God" (the spiritual mood clearly continuing). No one was more ambitious or having more fun than Wilson at this time, but alas along with that came the gnawing sense that others were out there trying to surpass him, and so they were; we will see how far they got soon enough. Suddenly the stakes are much higher, and that they are centered on a beautiful song makes the attendant ironies that much keener. 1967 is just around the corner...

*That I had yet to hear any Stereolab when I had the experience just makes it all the stranger, plus this song hadn't been recorded yet...

** I mean homely as in old-fashioned but also as uncanny. The song seems familiar even if you've never heard it before, Wilson taking from the Four Freshmen, Lovin' Spoonful, Gershwin, Ravel for all I know...the roots here are deep.

*** I may as well also mention the other groundbreaking band from L.A., The Byrds, who brought everything together in the most stunning and different way - this - breaks the sound barriers, if you will, of what a pop song can be.

Tension In Any Language: Los Bravos: "Black Is Black"

2011-08-30T03:53:00.000-07:00

It's the summer and everyone's feeling good. That goodness is in the air, a positivity that spread out and flared up into a kind of manic glee. Men wear tight suits, women have miniskirts, asymmetrical haircuts and everyone says "wow" and "far out" a lot. Though it's not a 60s term, this song is a club banger of the old school, loud and in-your-face and defying normal conversation.

Such songs either work or they don't, either making the club-goer dance or remain in his/her seat; what happens is based on a hundred things, the words usually being pretty low on that list. I once assumed (wrongly) that Spain's own Los Bravos wrote this color-based song, but they didn't; Michelle Grainger, Tony Hayes and Steve Wadey did. (Did they ever write anything else? Not sure.) The song's simplicity - it's like a nursery rhyme, really - meant that it could and indeed was translated easily into Italian, French, Finnish, Croatian...the main thing is the beat, the club/garage crossover that is just this side of out-and-out cheesy, pounding away as the the singer (who sounds remarkably like Gene Pitney though he isn't - and like he's from Spain even though he's German) blares out like a living siren about his helpless state. It is an anxious song, never resting, pacing up and down like someone who has lost something and, even though he knows it's gone, cannot stop himself from looking anyway. There is only tension, but thee is joy in that tension, in expressing it; thus the dancer has to dance and the singer smiles. It is a happy kind of sadness, or a sad kind of happiness that resolves into a good feeling, for a moment.

What is needed is a song of another kind that does more than compel a release of tension; but in the club the songs pound on, the dancers rejoice in England winning the World Cup - (itself a tense game that found release at last) - all seems right in the world, London is swinging and the party goes on, fuelled by drink and drugs, the search for the right 'bird'...

...meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, something quite different is going on. How different? So different that it will, in effect, change everything.

The Turning Point: Gene Pitney: "No One Needs Your Love"

2011-08-28T07:17:00.000-07:00

There is a quiet revolution happening at this time in music, quiet because those participating cannot, so to speak, be heard. There is a division - and to a certain extent there always will be - between those who write the songs and those who record them; between those who sit at pianos in tiny rooms pounding away writing songs (such as in the Brill Building) and those who have to puzzle over how to sing those songs best to do themselves and the songwriters justice. As things have been going it is the upstart rock groups who are writing their own songs, while everyone else is still dependent to a certain extent on the (mostly) men who write lyrics and melodies. There were a few performers - such as Gene Pitney - who wrote songs as well (oddly enough he didn't record his own songs), but by and large singers did the singing.

This is how things stood in '66, so if you were a young man who wrote songs who, perhaps, didn't consider yourself (or maybe the labels didn't) teen-idol material, you just ploughed away writing songs for others. Eventually, if your talent was appreciated and understood, you would go on to some regard and even fame, of a kind. But that would be in the 70s; for now, you hone your craft and hopefully have some hits.

If you listen to this, you might be able to guess who wrote the song. It is the lovelorn ballad taken to the extreme - he cannot live without her and questions her continuously as to why she has changed - it suits Pitney's astringent quality with its own ruthlessness. He is part lover here and part interrogator, and this could be an incredibly annoying song...and yet it isn't, and that's due to the music. It is hopeful, the chorus rising to a word-on-every-note precision that is proud and vulnerable at the same time, as if he knows he is being a pain and is trying to make up for it the best he can.

Yes, '66 is a turning point for music in that musicians were soon to split into two camps: those who wrote for others and those who wrote for themselves, and as the market for songwriters dried up in the US (much less so in the UK), songwriters such as this one - Randy Newman - would slowly begin to take to the studio and stage themselves for their own reasons*, while singers like Pitney would slowly fall out of the charts (though Pitney was always able to pack 'em in live). Newman found his voice in having his own to sing his songs(such as this** one), writing about subjects that were far off the usual Top 40 map, but in this song his solid skills in building a mood and having hooks galore are already evident.

We will soon be returning to L.A. for heart-tugging of a different sort, but next we go back to Europe...

*As Greil Marcus explains Newman's: "He made a lot...but since he didn't much like the way other people did his stuff, he began recording it himself." (Mystery Train, pg. 99)

** "This peaceful, quiet song is more outrageous than anything the Rolling Stones have ever done..." (ibid, pg. 108)

One Take's Enough: The Troggs: "Wild Thing"

2011-08-24T02:33:00.000-07:00

Following the explosion of '64, everyone but everyone wanted to be in a band, and if they didn't have the songwriting chops well then (as we have seen) there was always someone somewhere writing songs in the hopes that their version of what rock should/could/oughta be would take off. Chip Taylor wrote this, born-in-'64 band The Troggs - from southern England and given to much arguing, as later tapes* would show - recorded it, played it on a tv show called Thank Your Lucky Stars (not, as it sounds, a talent show but one where all the big groups of the day would come on and mime songs; it ended not long after The Troggs appeared because the no-fun Musicians' Union didn't approve of it). And thus it was a huge hit. If I seem to be downplaying its importance - which I am, kind of - it's only to highlight that ye olde garage rock had already been going for some time in the US, and that this song coincided with its apex - there is a multi-volume series of cds that are nothing but garage rock/punk from '66, stupefying in its intensity and determination to be different and maybe even successful, if only regionally. (As an example, here's "Love at Psychedelic Velocity" by the L.A. band The Human Expression**.)

While "Wild Thing" is raw and so laissez-faire it has an ocarinasolo (the only one in pop I know of), it is also about as subtle as a 345 bus in a rush going over a speed bump and about as pleasant. What can I say? I want songs to use the word 'groovy' in an, um, groovier way, and the guy is obviously just bossing his girl around...sorry to be so picky but if she makes his heart sing, why does she have to do anything else? I know garage rock is supposed to be stoopid in a good way...but this is, to borrow from another garage rock classic, just pushin' too hard on me. It needs more...something to make it really work for me; something like, oh, this.

*Warning: lots of swearing here. These tapes are beloved in rock by the way, because every rock band bickers and argues over dumb stuff...fairy dust though? Hee.

*"Wild Thing" sounds feral and direct and plain compared to a lot of the garage rock that came before and after; I tend to think it has lasted because it's relatively simple to play and if you don't have an ocarina handy you can just whistle, as was originally intended. In a chart that included "Paint It Black," "Shotgun Wedding" and "Over Under Sideways Down" The Troggs found themselves in good company, but it was fast company as well; how fast we will see soon enough.

The New World: The Beach Boys: "Sloop John B"

2011-08-22T05:21:00.000-07:00

If you look at a globe you will see the world, but if you are from California you will see the world mostly as either this or that - land or sea. The Pacific Ocean is the largest and most mind-boggling thing on the Earth, and if you look at a globe in a certain position it is literally all you can see. To live on the edge of it in what the rest of your country considers to be a paradise is a profound experience; as an Angeleno myself I can't say I spent a lot of time at the beach, but knowing it was there made everything seem...different. It was a tangible cold wash of infinity right there, not stormy like the Atlantic but deep and peaceful, hypnotizing, even....and growing up in Canada with the perpetual roll-down map of the world for geography lessons (an old map, showing all countries with UK ties as red), the Pacific itself stretched and went on in a way that almost laughed at the idea of humans ever really truly taking over the planet. Empires come and go; the vast remains...

We've had The Big Four already in this blog, but now comes the US band that leapt up from being merely another surf band to giving voice to that land/sea division, out of which blossoms everything from fun and more fun to a growing appreciation of what actually matters in life.

The Beach Boys were the band - the only one, I'd argue - who could do this, as it was they who sang so loudly and rocked so hard about cars and girls and the majesty of California itself in the first place. With them, life in California made life anywhere else sound boring and routine; it made surfing a national right and having the right car the key to happiness itself. Perpetual recess sounds like a good idea, but on those foggy, rainy (the song is wrong - it does rain in southern California) days a man can get to wondering if there is more to life...

...and if you are Brian Wilson, steeped in American music from Stephen Foster to George Gershwin, you are going to want to do something big. Something that can bring the California sublime to a point and then present it and give it dimensions and richness. It was a huge project, but he had to start somewhere. In July 1965 he was at the piano when Al Jardine, a folk music fan, sat down next to him and presented him with this song. Wilson wasn't much for folk and Jardine had to then show him how it could be done in the Beach Boys style.

Wilson still didn't seem all that enthused, but what did Jardine find the next day but all the musicians, from Carol Kaye and Hal Blaine on down, there in the studio ready to play, Wilson building on Jardine's arrangement and slightly changing the lyrics to suit the band (Wilson sings the first and third verses, Mike Love the second; of course Jardine wanted to sing it but Wilson was boss).

Something mythic in the song - its sadness balanced with hope (surely the captain will let them go home) must have called out to him; and the tension between the misery of being at sea to the joy of being back on land is there too...though the song just fades out, with no resolution. It's the worst trip, and yet it continues...and yet the song (compared to this, much closer to the original calypso) is almost by definition cheery because of the music - glockenspiel, baritone saxophone and flutes will give something extra to the song, wider dimensions, a feeling that all will be well...

...that Wilson did this amidst doing more 'standard' Beach Boys music (for Beach Boys' Party!) shows that his ambitions were rising - let's do some Beatles songs and then - boom! - he heard Rubber Soul and vowed he would make the greatest album of all time. He was just 23, but had been working like crazy for years writing songs, and now he was inspired...

...and "Sloop John B" got caught up in the madness, coming out as a single as the band were still working on their new album, and put on that album as that is what happened to singles - they just got stuck on whatever album was coming out next. Wilson must have known this and realized he had to be at least this good in order to be cohesive; but then everything he did was of a piece, so incredibly focused he was, bringing the rest of the band along to make music that wasn't just unlike anything they had done before, but unlike anything anyone had done before. The one-off folk song became a template, the music itself at one point stopping...

...for the voices.

Oh, the voices!

At this point the harmonies were well known, but in this song they come to the fore, from high to low, as if they are all on that damn ship, somehow tethered to the song just enough to keep with it, but also flying high above it*. There is so much going on in just a few seconds that - though of course all their songs have harmonies - that in the context of this blog, a new standard has been set, the Pacific has been reached and oh, what are other groups going to do now.

There is rippling brightness and terrible fights, loneliness and gorgeousness, rock sweeping up folk and its history and making the old new, by bringing new and old together. Foster and Gershwin were next, but there would be a lot of praying beforehand.

*I tend to think of the The Beach Boys' harmonies as a stunning Californian scenery like Yosemite or Big Sur - of course it was a product of a lot of luck and hard work, but it epitomizes the overwhelmingness of Californian life, at once ordinary and extraordinary, normal and abnormal. Brian Wilson learned from The Four Freshmen as much as from Chuck Berry, but was after something...new here. He more than got it.

Folk Explosion No. 2: The Lovin' Spoonful: "Daydream"

2011-08-19T04:47:00.000-07:00

And now we are in New York City with its folk rock heroes, The Lovin' Spoonful. There is something utterly American about this - the slackerly speed, the whistling, the idea that if you want to just zone out on somebody's lawn, hey, go ahead - you'll either be with someone you love or dreaming about him/her, and the experience may lead to you dreaming "for a thousand years". Time itself becomes flexible in this song, incidental really, as the dreaming takes hold...yes there are dues to pay, but that is for tomorrow, man. What matters is now.

I don't know if this is the first 'drug' song I've written about here, but it certainly points to that state of mind drugs create, that warm safe feeling that nothing bad can happen and what do you know, maybe something will happen - something in fact that only could happen to you in an altered state. The anguish of "Bang Bang" - a distressed lasagna of a song - is far away, as this is more an amble down to a peaceful spot, even if it's your neighbor's backyard. It's a beautiful day...why not?

I remember such a day in Kingston, Ontario in the late summer of '93 and walking right by Chez Piggy, which was Zal Yanovsky's restaurant - he who was the Lovin' Spoonful's co-founder along with John Sebastian. He was caught in a marijuana possession dilemma in '67 about either being deported back to Canada (he was born in Toronto) or ratting out his dealer...and since he ratted out his dealer, that made him MOST uncool and he ended up going back to Canada anyway. Considering some foods are practically drugs in and of themselves, this makes perfect sense; the sweet sensuality of this song can from a contented stomach as much as a elevated mind, after all.

The next entry here is the other side of joy, folk taken to another level altogether - the intensity of the Sixties comes to its next peak, unexpectedly.

Folk Explosion No. 1: Cher: "Bang Bang"

2011-08-19T03:17:00.000-07:00

This is the next in this blog's irregular look at NME-only #2s. The folk rock boom in the mid-60s was a genuine thing for some, for others it was a way in - Sonny Bono was a fast learner in the studio and he wrote and produced Cher's songs before she even went by her own name; they both learned how to do drama from Spector and Cher, in effect, was Sonny's one-woman girl group. (The girl group era, as such, was starting to fade just a bit at this time, at least on the Spectorish side of things.)

There is an uneasiness to this song that comes out of the fact that while it was recorded in dear sunny Los Angeles, it comes straight out of the kitschy Italian folk song tradition, which treads a mighty fine line indeed between letting it all hang out and making the audience feel as if something vaguely sinister is happening, or has happened, and most likely they will never find out what it is. Which is to say if it is sung in another language (and it has been - Italian of course, French too) it might actually sound even better*. There's kids playing; there's young love; there's a frenzied section wherein a wedding happens (least...fun...wedding...ever) and then he dumps her for no apparent reason - I suppose in a folk song there would be some kind of denouement wherein she goes after him in some way, but not here. She's on the ground again, her only consolation being maybe she will now know not to go out with a guy who was mean to her and didn't even play fair in the first place (he always shot her down - wow, what a guy).

This also treads a line - an uneasy one - between being a kind of folk rock and being just plain showbiz, exactly the kind of thing regular radio would play, and exactly what would do well in Las Vegas, too. I can well imagine real folkies scoffing at this, even as their parents enjoyed it. Sonny was betting the army of girls who loved Cher would buy this as well, and they did. Cher was their homegirl, in effect, not perfect but somehow more real because of that, and from this point on they would stay by her, the girl who would suffer much (in real life and in her songs) and somehow survive. This song set her up as tough, vulnerable and her later songs of woe and vengeance start with this one, wherein she dies and dies again, always coming back no matter what.

*Of course there are some people who think everything sounds better in another language; amazingly I don't get to France for a long time and then...well, you'll see, dear readers.

The Chivalrous Shout: The Hollies: "I Can't Let Go"

2011-08-16T02:08:00.000-07:00

The men of flashing brilliance are back; no one is ever going to argue that The Hollies were great - they aren't in the Big Four (Beatles, Stones, Who, Kinks) in terms of capital-I Importance. But as it happens that may not matter as much as you might think. Just as Baroque pop gets going at this time, so does power pop, which is all about high harmonies, key changes and a cheery determination about love, no matter the odds. In the original this song* is slow and soulful, done by the underrated Evie Sands; there it is a song wherein she almost cannot let go of him physically because she wants him so much, it is as if her soul is stuck to him. (One incongruity of the Sixties is that this rather painful condition is backed by go-go dancers.)

Sands' version properly should have been the hit, but she was dogged by bad luck and in swooped The Hollies to cover it, polishing it up and thus transforming it from a song of visceral attachment to one of bright and shining chivalry. He's tried and tried and has given up and is simply going to wait; it is like an anthem sung in a queue. Allan Clarke sings this smiling, the voices leap and tackle the lyrics as if they were flying fish, and any pain in the song is forgotten in the sheer sonic rush.

When people look back at the Sixties and think merely of turbulence, they should also remember that there was a lot of exuberance and thrills involved too, intense attachments that could simply take people over...and groups which may not have gone way out there (I can't imagine them doing a concept album, for instance) but were steady presences in a time when having a group that was reliable was a relief in itself. Anyone who says The Hollies are their favorite group (or who says they are majorly influenced by them) values power pop, or perhaps makes it themselves, such as Canada's own Sloan (who covered it on their Recorded Live at a Sloan Party! album). Power pop may not have survived in the UK, but it flourished in North America, thus proving that The Hollies were more important than even they thought; and as you might expect I am far from done with them. Indeed by the time I am, they will have helped invent another kind of musical style altogether.

*Written by Chip Taylor; we will get back to him, dear readers, with a very different song quite shortly.

Hip Aristocrats: The Mindbenders: "A Groovy Kind of Love"

2011-08-15T04:59:00.000-07:00

There are certain songs, their writers will say, that more or less write themselves; get a good melody, a song title, and the rest will flow from there. This song was written in about twenty minutes by Toni Wine and Carol Sager (making this, importantly, the first song here written solely by women), who took liberally from Clementi's Sontatina in G major and the new slang word 'groovy' and went from there. So if there is something stately and Romantic to the music, that's why - and the lyrics follow suit, the world boiling down to two people and their utter togetherness, the joy of being close. The music too circles and enshrines their love, the Mindbenders make it sound rather martial (the drums in particular) but this adds to the old-fashioned origins of the song. It wasn't written for them in particular but was recommended to them - now Wayne Fontana-less - and amidst the frenzy of the bigger groups this was a genteel pause, like a cool clear glass of water on a hot day. Oddly enough this is a rather 'square' song to use the word groovy and thus the BBC and pirates both played it, rare neutral ground in a chart that's at this point still very much pirate-dominated. For now...

The Mindbenders, despite their best efforts, weren't so successful after this as they'd hoped, and went their separate ways in '68; Eric Stewart (who was the impish one in "The Game of Love" and who sings this) and Graham Gouldman even wrote a concept album before anyone else called With Woman in Mind, but it was perhaps too much too soon. I will get to their next group in the fullness of time, but also note that the world of pop was going into its baroque phase at this time, which will become evident soon (indeed some might call this song Baroque, come to think of it).

Here They Come: The Rolling Stones: "19th Nervous Breakdown"

2011-08-12T03:51:00.000-07:00

By this time you may be wondering when they will show up. The bad kids from out of town; the ones who are supposed to be such great rivals to the ones from up north. Girls love bad boys and so they scream at them; but I wonder if the screaming here isn't more complex than, oh, the "he's so CUTE" variety, which is more suited to lovable mutts at the local home for wayward dogs.

Before I even get to this song, I have to say that the whole "Beatles vs. Stones" thing may well have existed in some peoples' minds in the Sixties, but growing up much later I have found that this particular construct, if it was ever real, has gotten quite stale. Indeed, there's more genuine conflict between those who love John vs. those who love Paul than there ever was between the two groups per se. Whether people take sides with The Rolling Stones I don't know - certainly within the group there have been enough struggles to make any public grievances redundant, particularly Mick vs. Keith, who are quite a different dynamic to John and Paul. I think the groups respected each other and complemented each other, in that this song - about a woman who is technically rich but in many ways poor - gets its answer a few months later in "Eleanor Rigby."

"19th Nervous Breakdown" is about a girl who is "insane*" - raised with all mod cons and more but unhappy, prone to talking too loud and saying nothing, she is an emotional vacuum cleaner that the singer (who might call himself "Our Hero" - there's always so much drama in Rolling Stones songs) tries and fails to change her, in fact leaves (hence her next breakdown) because he's afraid she's deranging him. Why this man would be at "dismal" parties I don't know, unless he's just the kind to either be invited to parties or maybe he crashes them? Not sure. Her parents don't care that she's a basket case and she was taught to be unkind by some cold-hearted wretch while at school, and there we are.

But why are the girls screaming? Is it just because that's what you do when you're at a Stones concert? It is as if the sad disdain that Mick has for the girl is somehow being applauded, in a starry-eyed "oh I'm the girl for you Mick not HER" way, or maybe the words don't really mean anything or are even decipherable above all the screaming. The guitar and bass say as much as the words to the tough luck she's going to have, the bass sounding as if you can hear her crashing down the stairs now, screaming and wailing worse than Marianne Dashwood.

Others might say that this is a class song, the middle vs. the upper, the modern vs. the old-fashioned (this must be the only song to mention "sealing wax"). It may well be a swipe against a certain girl Mick actually knew, or a take on someone he observed. The music and lyrics go together perfectly, coming out of Bo Diddley on one side and the Angry Young Men on the other. The Stones were that gang and their followers wanted to be - if they weren't already - on the side of the badasses who had had enough; the apolitical types who maybe in essence didn't want change but sure could point out what is screwed up in the world, starting with all the weird chicks they know.

And still the girls scream and pee themselves silly, loving the group and their music and ignoring this critique which could well be leveled at them. At some point all this will change, but compared to the Beatles' recognition of loneliness, this is a song that dumps not just one young woman but the whole society that produced her. I cannot help but think there are some deep ironies here, including the fact that Mick wanted in on this scene, as opposed to Keith who couldn't be bothered** - and that the Stones, as far as I can tell, are the rock band of the ruling class that is disdained in this song. Are they biting the hand that feeds them? Or is this just good business? In the end I am more sympathetic with the girl here, as clearly Mick will go to other parties while her life dries up. And still the girls scream.

*As opposed to another song where a girl is called "stupid" - Mick is so picky when it comes to women, ne c'est pas?

**You might wonder which one has been happiest in the long run. Upon all evidence Mick still hasn't found the right woman, and Keith has. (If that is your definition of happiness.)

On Guard For Thee: Crispian St. Peters: "You Were On My Mind"

2011-08-10T05:59:00.000-07:00

"...a country with a rich heritage of identity crises and inferiority complexes, enough open space for everyone to co-exist in a state of complete aloneness, cold and snow and long winters to ensure cyclical depression for up to ten months a year, an endless supply of trees that could be cut down and fashioned into acoustic instruments of many varieties, and a shared sense of what it's like to grow up under the influence of The Tommy Hunter Show, Don Messer's Jubilee, The Friendly Giant and other TV fare with strong singer-songwriter content..."

Phil Dellio & Scott Woods, I Wanna Be Sedated

It is rare to have a look-in on Canada in this blog, and as you might expect whenever this does happen, there's an awful lot behind just the one song. As Phil & Scott write, there's a lot of time, space and wood in Canada, which adds up to a ton of music, sometimes cheery, sometimes, not. "You Were On My Mind" is as ambivalent a song as has been written about in this blog, in that - no matter who sings it - here it's St. Peters - just what is preying on the mind of the singer is never made clear. Is it the Other, who has dumped him/her? Or is it something more sinister?

In the world of folk (which is undoubtedly where we are - St. Peters is out in a field miming in a way that suggests he is lost in thought and the words are near-emanating from his heart) it can be both; "you" is somehow inescapable, maybe even a sign of something bigger that is hopeful and yet - that word again - ambivalent. I don't know if Sylvia Tyson wrote this about the end of a relationship or not, but the blues in her shoes and her worries seem to be competing with the persistence of this Other, and to me this Other seems to be winning out. Or could it be that no matter what her worries are, the Other is on her mind anyway and there hasn't been a break-up at all, just relationship difficulties?

As usual it's hard to listen to this and point to what is specifically Canadian about it, but that it's a far more complex song than usual, and it has an openness that strays into solitude...a normal condition, but here the Other is part of that large space that is in the back of all Canadian imaginations (certainly Glenn Gould will tackle this in his own way in his Solitude Trilogy) in that it is ALWAYS there, representing whatever freedom or aloneness means to the person beholding it. This may seem a big claim, but Canadian music differs from American at this point - "Four Strong Winds" (which was voted the top Canadian song of all time by CBC listeners) is full of romantic longing, grounded in the brutal realities of the seasons...is profoundly Canadian. St. Peters does a cool version of it, getting its urgency, the ambiguity that makes it as haunting as it is, but I cannot help but prefer the acidity of Tyson's voice. The aching emotions of '66 begin right here, teetering between wanting to forget and holding on to the memory in defence of something else even bigger...

Far From Mechanical: Cliff Richard: "Wind Me Up (Let Me Go)"

2011-08-09T05:42:00.000-07:00

And now 1965 draws to a close; a tradition begins here as Cliff performs a song I thought at first was from a pantomime (he and The Shadows did Aladdin in '64), but is actually from his show Cliff Richard's Christmas Cheer. Yes, Richard was at this time so big and established that he could host his own show, cementing his 'all-around-entertainer' status. So far, so normal; but what tugs here is something more profound. (Ah, if only I wrote about superficial songs with no meaning - but songs do not become hits without having some import.)

It is the singing toy, the object that becomes real and has feelings because the boy/girl gives it a life. I am not sure how important this is psychologically as a stage, but whenever anything inanimate is given life, a name, a history, it is alive. (Thus the pathos of the song, which Richard handles very well.)

To others it is a thing, but not to the kid who loves it. And here we have the pathos of an unloved toy, a tin soldier, who would rather be alone than belong to someone who didn't care for him. The leap to a man who loves unrequitedly isn't a big one, so the song applies to adults as well as kids, but it's still a bit odd to think of Richard singing this as an adult (he was 25). In a weird parallel to The Who, this is also a song of someone who wants to be left alone, and is in a way more sympathetic as he is admitting to wanting to cry and obviously as a soldier is being nobly brave through his near-tears. This song is not that far off from this one, save that Richard demands to be let go instead of being forgotten about - which is healthier in a way, though I still feel it strange to be writing about a singing toy. But that is where things stand; Richard sings a ballad for Christmas, it's a hit...but the singing tin soldier angle makes me think something different is going to happen soon, beyond this cozy season. Coming up next: a welcome trip to Canada.

Feed-Back, Metal, Sound, Wire, Wood: The Who: "My Generation"

2011-08-08T01:59:00.000-07:00

"The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!"
Mikhail Bakunin, 1842

"The amplified sound of the auto-destructive process can be an element of the total conception."
Gustav Metzger, 1959

First, here is man destroying something inanimate. The man is Gustav Metzger, and he is an artist.

And now this; it's art too; art which in part wouldn't be possible without the above example. Nor would it be really possible without this artist, either.

Gustav Metzger wrote his manifesto Auto-Destructive Art in 1959; a few years later it would become a lecture that turned into a 'happening.' That year was 1964, when The Who formed, drummer Keith Moon asking to join and being accepted when he accidentally smashed up the drum kit during his audition. Townshend famously first destroyed a guitar accidentally as well, but since this got them some renown immediately (could you imagine the Stones or Yardbirds doing such a thing?), the band continued to auto-destruct, drums as well as guitar, for some time. That Townshend would go on to link it to Metzger's manifesto is no pose, as Townshend was an art school grad who knew very well what it meant, politically as well as artistically, to smash up instruments onstage.

But there is another collage here, one that we haven't heard explicitly before - and that is the influence of jazz on UK rock, specifically in drumming. There is no getting away from the fact that Elvin Jones' drumming was IT for Keith Moon (who also loved surf music, which also has a fast and relentless beat). Those who were in theory allergic to the idea of jazz and rock being mixed up together (which reminds me of this old ad, of course) had that notion demolished by this song - which in construction is just as much jazz as it is rock. (Yes, one of the most totemic of rock songs comes out of jazz.) The utter freedom of jazz - to take a simple melody and then just TAKE OFF with it - is just what was needed here, particularly by the Mods, who were fans of modernist jazz (as opposed to trad) and would have understood immediately that it was for them musically as well as lyrically.

That The Who are a precarious balance of elements is obvious with this song - Moon's explosion at the end balanced out by Entwistle's droll bass solo before it, just as Daltrey's nearly-swearing stuttering sneer balances out Townshend's straight-ahead playing, which is, as the song 'ends', literally detuned and then fuzzed up while huge chords bashed out between strings being grated like cheese - this is not a normal band. The Who are taking the idea of a pop band and altering that idea to the point where 'normal' and 'regular' are suddenly quaint notions. Whether the audience thought this was just a good song they could dance to or performance art hiding within a pop tune I don't know. As a song it has persisted way beyond what Townshend's aim was - to give voice to those who didn't fit in to naff, boring society they found themselves in, the kids who liked to go and have FUN, gathering their buds in May instead of sitting around politely, "barely daring to breathe or Achoo*."

The generation gap erupts again and again, but the gap is never between those who are older and younger but those who get it and those who don't. It wasn't a big hit at first in the US, but musicians & their audiences there have taken it as their own, from Patti Smith (who in one much later live version berates her own generation for having produced George W. Bush) to Green Day. In the UK everyone has done it from Iron Maiden to Oasis and The Sweet.

Destruction as art, transforming negative into positive energy, beauty in ugliness; not only are musical styles being mixed up here, but it as if art itself is being remade before our ears and eyes, that pop is symbolically and literally destroying itself in order to continue. The guitar has to be played because it is his instrument, but then it too seems not enough, music itself is not enough. Pop music carried on as usual, only some noticing the violence and different feeling in the air**. This is defence as attack, a "big sensation" which claims to be an ordinary night out, a concrete slab through the window of pop. Mod couldn't last long after this, commercialized and demonized as it was, but The Who made the point of performing this at Monterey, astonishing an audience that had thought it had seen everything. 1966 will prove that 'everything' is a relative concept.

*I should add here that poetry was reaching an apex of sorts in the mid-Sixties, as it also was now a forum for free speech (for those on both sides of the Cold War) and was a way of saying what ordinarily would be almost inexpressible. Ariel by Sylvia Plath (1965) was just as sensational at the time as The Who, making its own lasting impact. That Pete Townshend would later work with Ted Hughes makes me wonder if he read it at the time...

** The Beatles listened to and absorbed what The Who were doing, 'accidentally' putting feedback on their '64 Christmas hit "I Feel Fine" and then a year later doing a Mod-speed-rush on "Day Tripper" - one of their toughest songs yet.

With Eyes Closed: Andy Williams: "Almost There"

2011-08-03T04:53:00.000-07:00

The sudden upsurge in all things 'retro' in the mid-to-late 90s was due to many things; one, I'm guessing, is sheer nostalgia for what once was and could never be again, a kind of relaxed gentility that evokes cocktails, shag rugs, people using 'swell' as an adjective and lots of sleek furniture and witty repartee. A more innocent time? If you were maybe four and remember it as such, well then yes. But there is hardly an innocent character in I'd Rather Be Rich and while it may be a remake of It Started With Eve, it really reminds me of A Room With A View, with Maurice Chevalier as the wise man who tells Sandra Dee she must decide and face up to her real love.

The song comes in just as Williams and Dee are thinking they are going to get away with it - he with marrying her, she with her whole scheme (involving Andy's rival, Robert Goulet). As such he is like a Zeus figure, carrying her away towards Heavenly Haven; her face betrays a sense of unease, though, even as she sincerely likes Andy and wants him to be happy...is she happy?

This is yet another song of waiting, anticipation, Williams' voice smooth and calming as if there can be no other way of living but this - swooping down and scooping up a pretty blonde as part of his genteel, but not innocent, life. I can imagine many a housewife settling down and gliding off to this with or without chemical enhancement - Williams' singing is an audible teddy bear here, urging the listeners to close their eyes and wait, not for too long, because what is going to happen will be soon, and will be better than even this. It is this spaced-out reassurance that many obviously needed, and the tenderness of it distracts the audience from the fact that next door, all hell is breaking loose. That hell will be in the next entry...

Now Is The Time: Manfred Mann: "If You Gotta Go Go Now"

2011-08-03T02:32:00.000-07:00

There has been a man stalking the charts all this year; sometimes he is there himself, sometimes it's others covering his songs or being inspired to sing or write songs like him. If there is a simple divide - state vs. pirate radio - then there is another one - those who know and dig Bob Dylan, and those who don't. He isn't now (and I'm guessing wasn't then) to everyone's liking, but those who embraced his casual twangy sound and sharp lyrics could not help wanting to be him; even Lennon succumbed for a while, inspired by the sheer exuberant noise of his songs, not to mention the fact that he was usually saying something - something complex, never simple.

The Manfreds were the first UK band to cover Dylan and get him near to the top (they would get a number one with "The Mighty Quinn" a few years from now) and they have just the right blend of roughness and odd tenderness to make this work. He wants her, but not if it's going to put her off her stride; she's got to make up her mind, not him. He is happy no matter what. And that is the undercurrent here - happiness. He's poor, it's late, he's tired - but there is no Stonesy condescension or smugness, nor is he going to miss her and whine about it next day to his friends. There is - can I say this? - an American plain-speaking here that is quite refreshing and the candid way Dylan had in all songs of saying what needed to be said must have hit all UK bands and songwriters quite hard (not to mention his dress sense and general gnomic nonchalance).

I don't know if the Manfreds were the first UK band to record a Dylan song, but they were the right group to do so. Dylan's work is certainly a challenge to The Beatles (whom he has already met); they start to go more acoustic and self-reflective just as he takes up the electric mantle. This is a crossroads in pop to be sure, one that not every singer or band could step into, but once again the line has been drawn between us and them, in attitude as well as style. That attitude would soon explode, but for now all remains quiet...

In The Same Boat: The Fortunes: "You've Got Your Troubles"

2011-08-02T07:30:00.000-07:00

This is an odd shrug of a song, suggesting two men in a bar or party who have both recently been dumped but the one singing has no interest in hearing the other's story, in part because he is too numbly sad to really feel another guy's pain at this time, and anyway his story is much likely the same one. Musically it flows much as the lyrics do, blending sadness and helplessness with the bland knowledge that this happens all the time; Rod Allen's voice is almost pre-rock. It is a smooth song that hints at the coming split of rock and pop, the pop here being cool (but coming off as blase, even cold) while rock was getting hotter and more frenzied all the time. (It was kept off by "Help!" which is the opposite of this song, for instance.)

The real fortune here (if I can put it that way) was for Roger Cook & Roger Greenaway, who wrote this song and thence many others, including one for The Fortunes again - a song I have heard on a dreaded workplace cd compilation* (unlike "You've Got Your Troubles"). The two Rogers went on to fame and renown with songs including "I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing" and The Fortunes still tour with a typically ever-evolving line-up & with songs like these - amiable, modest, simple - they could just go on forever. That their manager was killed in a pirate radio showdown a year later is about the most 'rock' thing about them, but that is 1966, when anything could happen, as opposed to 1965, when everyone is desperately trying to keep their cool.

*The workplace was dreaded, not the cd. There must be a thousand songs that are partially heard with involuntary shudders every day because of this same situation, and it's never the song's fault. Feel free to mention yours, if you wish.

Nothing Left to Lose: The Animals: "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place"

2011-07-29T04:51:00.000-07:00

The promise of rock 'n' roll - and of all music in general - is that it can liberate the individual. Rock in particular is the ultimate democratic music in that just about anyone with some skill can play it and music lessons are not strictly necessary. Thus it is that people can free themselves just by having the guts to go onstage and play, play and play until they get heard. If you want freedom enough you will go through just about anything to get it, and the same goes for rock*. Who knows how many dubious parents watched as their sons and daughters set off for musical glory, though I am guessing they were mostly supportive as well, since music is like a bug - it cannot be helped, and the need to play and sing is as strong as other primal urges...

...all of which is to say here we are in Newcastle, with a band who undoubtedly had music as their one way out; it surprised me to find out they didn't write this song, as it is so much their story. And yet once heard it became everyone's song, from the UK to the US to soldiers in Vietnam, for whom this was an anthem. The imperative to break the chains and start up fresh and GET OUT are fuelled by the tense, rough vibe of the song and Burdon's compassionate and loud pleas. Can things really go on as they are? Can a young man go off to join the Freedom Riders, only to come back and find his girl's parents watching The Black & White Minstrel Show? Generations were slamming into each other all over the place and the intractability of the older generation was threatening to smother the younger - they simply HAD to break free, because 1965 wasn't 1945 or even 1955 (how much of UK culture refuses to comprehend this, I wonder).

Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil wrote this for the Righteous Brothers; then Mann was going to record it himself, only to have this come out first (due to Allen Klein's giving a copy of the demo to Mickie Most). From New York to Newcastle the message was sent and received, and heard and understood worldwide. In the above clip the Animals seem to be in a post-Shindig!-riot Victorian museum - bad boys they may have been, but freedom perceived and freedom not-quite-within-reach could make anyone angry. And one way or another this song spoke to many everywhere yearning for escape, even if they had no real expectation of it, just kids with transistor radios under their pillows, listening and biding their time. Freedom is there, you just have to be determined enough to take it. How to escape, though; that's the thing.

*There is a wide manly sentimental streak in rock that forgives and tolerates a great deal; in the Sixties the liberation was on all fronts, which of course caused some to overdo it. The repercussions of those excesses caught up with some faster than others.

Taking Off: The Yardbirds: "Heart Full of Soul"

2011-07-27T06:42:00.000-07:00

And now, an important crossroads...this blog has, effectively, reached the mid-point of the Sixties itself. Merseybeat is effectively gone, folk rock is on the rise, and guitarists are starting to buy gadgets that make their instruments sound different - the days of slashing speakers are over, and the fuzz box becomes the first of many pedal effects every band either has already or is going to get soon. Not only are guitars amplified now, but they are sounding warmer, fuzzier and dirtier, in part because guitarists like to experiment and in part because other instruments are starting to attract their attention. In the case of The Yardbirds, they wanted a sitar on this song, but Jeff Beck couldn't quite master it in time, so he got a fuzz box and made his guitar sound like one instead. Clearly, merely playing a song in the suddenly old-fashioned way isn't quite enough anymore.

And thus at this near-legendary point in time, the blues roughness that so many UK bands (The Yardbirds coming up following the wake of The Rolling Stones, who are about to launch their own fuzz box anthem) wanted to get into their songs is just there, and every garage band everywhere immediately saves up its nickles to get one, either in sheer imitation or because they want to make themselves sound even dirtier and rougher than their UK counterparts.

The song itself is by Graham Gouldman* and it has odd echoes and a rather menacing vocal from Keith Relf - his girl is gone, he has no idea where she is and he seems to be talking to someone - WHO? - about how he will never make her sad, "if she'll have me back again." Pretty basic stuff, but between the acidity of the guitar and Relf's voice there is something indeed beyond mere love here - it is as if his pleading is desperate yet cool at the same time, Relf trying to be suave behind his sunglasses while he's actually nearly crying. There is a creeping aloofness coming into rock at this time** and the tensions here for once aren't between a squaresville singer and his band but within the singer's psyche itself, as his band dutifully try to play what he can't sing. And the screaming girls want to put him out of his misery, as they do with all groups at nearly any time. But it's now that the whole decade slides into a harder, louder and rougher phase and the concepts of what is "pop" and what is "rock" start to become more and self-evident - though at this time it's all still pop, no matter what effects are used. For now.

*He also wrote their hit "For Your Love" which has a harpsichord on it (you see what I mean?) - a song that one member of the group deemed too "pop" and so he left in a huff to play the blues for a year amongst other purists. His name? Eric Clapton.

**Check out the near-magisterial aloofness of The Byrds, who were #1 at this time.

Having Fun, Feeling Numb: The Everly Brothers: "The Price of Love"

2011-07-27T02:41:00.000-07:00

The persistence of certain Fifties acts in the Sixties is interesting, mainly because pop music was so young there (I'm guessing) was barely a perception of time passing - I'm not sure when 'oldies' became 'oldies' as such, but then I tend to think of musical time as being quite different from regular time...in that the Everlys here seem to be rocking away as usual, only the context for what they are doing has changed.

Before they'd be onstage by themselves, or with a band, but here there's a near-riot going on, a riot that comes out of a mixture of joy and determination. It is as if - and this is just the feeling I get here - that through partying and having fun something is being avoided, but also there is a real joy in immersing yourself in the music that can't be denied. All this next to a song wherein a man who has lost in love is himself determinedly drinking and dancing with every girl he meets, but it's no good, the cost of his heartbreak cannot be paid that way, no matter how he tries. He's having fun trying, but he always ends up alone, with bittersweet memories and a vague sense that some things can't be solved by throwing yourself into fun. He has to think, but who in this time really wants to do that very much?

And so they are in time with this song they wrote themselves, still popular in the US and becoming even more popular in the UK; the Everlys still have that marmalade sting in their voices and doesn't the song sound...Beatles-influenced? Which would only make sense as they influenced the Beatles in the first place. What goes around comes around, or perhaps doesn't need to go anywhere in the first place...

"The Price of Love" came second to Elvis, another Fifties survivor - however, next we go back to the New, to a group whose importance and fame never quite matched up.

We Two Are One: Peter and Gordon: "True Love Ways"

2011-07-26T08:45:00.001-07:00

Another facet of the British Invasion - quite apart from the groups only pirate radio could fully embrace, such as Them or The Kinks - were nice earnest young men with longish hair who made dreamy music with sometimes extreme lyrics. (The lyrics to "A World Without Love" are sung sweetly, but there is menace in them, too.) Peter* and Gordon met at Westminster School** and found they sounded pretty good together; there was more luck in that Peter's sister Jane was going out with...Paul McCartney, who in turn gave the duo a few songs that he felt would suit them. Whether McCartney suggested they record this Buddy Holly song I don't know; it could be they were Holly fans already, and so needed no urging.

The original was a song Holly wrote for his wife as a wedding gift; their relationship was a brief but intense one (he asked her to marry him on their first date). It was recorded two months later, just months again before he died. The figure of Holly hangs heavy over music in the Sixties, sparkling and twangling in a pure way that marks it out as something to strive for, and a modest hand always works best in this endeavor. Peter and Gordon don't have a saxophone or harp on hand - the extra decorative touches of the Fifties are discarded - it's the more standard piano and drums, with some strings to keep the sweetness of the original. It is a poignant song - even without knowing Holly's fate - and a reminder as to how important and popular Holly was, years after his death. The possible mush of the song is undercut by Peter and Gordon's voices, Gordon's slight Scots accent coming through to give gravity to what could have been, in other hands, something bland or dull. I can imagine this being a last dance song, the sort of song that gets dedicated to others on the radio - a fine antidote to the new-barriers-being-broken-every-day hustle of Sixties pop.

This is the part of the British Invasion that tends to be forgotten - the side that didn't hit people upside the head, but rather ruled the heart and made people want to make music in the first place - for the beauty of the thing. Next there is another duo who no doubt inspired Peter and Gordon to begin with, as '65 goes ever-so-slightly backwards.

*Once Peter and Gordon ended Peter Asher went on to produce Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor; Linda had a hit with "You're No Good" which was written by the same man who wrote "Game of Love." It is a small world.

**You might be surprised at the number of musicians who went there; everyone from Thomas Dolby to Mika, Shane McGowan to Dido.

Past, Present and Future: Them: "Here Comes The Night"

2011-07-26T03:14:00.000-07:00

Once again we are with a man who is alone, looking out the window. There is someone he is thinking of, and there she is...

...he used to try to interest her in things, please her as best he could; movies, cafes, just hanging around his place listening to jazz and blues sides. But for whatever reason, maybe he was fooling himself, maybe she was fooling him, it ended. He knows that she left him for another guy, one who maybe dressed a bit sharper or had a different accent - is she really that superficial? Then he checks himself, wonders if he isn't just as superficial, in his ways. Would he have wanted her had she worn a bandeau or had green eyes? He can't move away from the window, knowing it is wrong but unable to stop. He won't do anything, as he watches them go along, watches them go in and turn the light on; it is all too vivid and he cannot stop now, but it is as if he is watching himself. Another version of himself, veritably a doppelganger, not in looks but in results. She is swinging from man to man as if she were at a dance and there is nothing that can be done about it. All this time the night encroaches, he is alone, things are getting darker and darker...all the time he veers between the emptiness of the night and the near-puppet-like show he is watching, too hapless and just plain down to do much of anything but maybe drink and listen to the blues...

**************************

This is the first time this blog has gone to Northern Ireland, Belfast in particular, and politics aside (or perhaps...not), there is a point to the shifts in the song from the dreaded and inevitable night and the girl and her guy, going about their affair - it can be said that any area with tensions will create great music, not that anyone really wants tensions, of course. Van Morrison grew up in a house full of music courtesy of his father's varied record collection of country, blues, jazz and folk and was playing guitar from 11, saxophone a few years later and he started playing in bands as soon as anyone would have him. But above all this is his voice; here he brings in the whole scope of jealousy, doubt, resentment and acceptance. He blows hot and cool, is self-reflective, bitchy and oddly warm. Sung by someone else this could be ho-hum; however Them* make it a full picture even though we are there with the man as he watches, keeps watching even though he shouldn't. Unlike other songs, he does not wish he could be with her still, but then why does he watch if she did him wrong? This is what the night cannot answer, and he cannot answer himself, either. The song is a big illustrated question mark. There is no way out of this, besides the growing darkness...

The b-side to this is a rough blues called "All For Myself" (written by Morrison; "Here Comes The Night" is by Bert Berns). It is the answer to the a-side, or maybe the true feelings he has and knows he shouldn't have, despite himself. I mention it as I had assumed (wrongly) that "Gloria" was the b-side here, a song that is the direct opposite of "Here Comes The Night" - there he sits and anticipates her arrival, her every action, before they meet; but he is in much the same place, and the anticipation is just as exciting as her being with him, maybe even more so. He is saved in this song by her presence, just as here he is somehow lost, unable to see anything in the darkness besides her. I will mention it anyway as it is Morrison's gift to garage bands everywhere, and eventually would be turned on its head by this woman, who in '65 is still a fan and not yet a performer.

*"Them" are mostly studio musicians here, including a young Jimmy Page on guitar.

One of These Men Is Not Like The Others: Wayne Fontana and The Mindbenders: "Game of Love"

2011-07-25T02:20:00.000-07:00

In '65 the explosion of '64 was deepened and widened; groups still had chances to hop in for their moment of glory while the British Invasion was still fresh, and Wayne Fontana (named after Elvis' drummer, btw) and his Mindbenders - who had only been going for a couple of years, with middling success - had their one big hit with this song. Now, the song is simply a come-on in a jaunty frat house way, the sort of song that is dumb and probably sounds best if you're a bit sideways. (So much of the British Invasion sounds, in retrospect, to be a big loud and Other distraction for Americans trying not to think about Vietnam and other societal ills; this was a #1 in the US.)

But if you notice, there is an element of schism here, Fontana trying his best to be as American as possible, Eric Stewart (the other singer) sticking Popsicle sticks in the spokes of Fontana's bike. You just know in watching this that there isn't going to be another follow-up smash, as while Stewart isn't exactly making fun of Fontana (this isn't as bad as Poole vs. Tremeloes), there is something going on that is somehow proof that the weirdness of the Sixties has begun, and once again the lead singer is left out. The Mindbenders went on to some success (with "Groovy Kind of Love") and Stewart and later band member Graham Gouldman eventually started 10cc. This song is the seed for them, or one of them anyway, and I like to think of it as a Friendly Forebears song (written by Clint Ballard Jr. who also wrote "You're No Good" and "I'm Alive"), so cliched and obvious that it almost makes fun of itself as it goes along, and Stewart gets this.

It is as if pop is both able to be the straight man and the sly stand-up at the same time here, a doubling effect that will grow more complex as the decade goes on. Of course I can say this with the benefit of hindsight; in '65 this was in the top ten in the UK at a time when the chart was in flux - on one side the deceased Jim Reeves, Val Doonican and The Seekers and on the other, The Kinks and The Animals; this kind of genial dumbness was getting squeezed out, though being fundamentally indestructible it will, thank goodness, never go away. The pirates win out next time, however, with a song that would never be played on "official" radio.

Singer, Not Her Song: Cilla Black: "You've Lost That Loving Feeling'"

2011-07-22T05:56:00.000-07:00

There are certain things which seem to be near-iron rules in pop, and one of them is that cover versions that are the most effective have to have the right arrangements and sentiment, but more than that they have to have the appropriate singer(s) or there isn't much point to them. They end up being, even if everyone is trying really hard, giving their best, a bit awkward and perhaps dubious, as if someone is trying to pull a fast one over on the public.

Black's got a fine voice for a lot of songs but here she seems out of place, as if she is singing the song as close to its US version while remaining sturdily British in her noble sentiment. George Martin wanted to do something different with this, but it is not, ironically, different enough to really matter in any way. The Righteous Brothers did not get their name by holding back emotionally - the agonized high "PLE-EE-AASE" in their version is unthinkable here, maybe because Martin felt it unsuitable for Black to let loose; I don't know.

The near-apocalyptic storm of the original is something that should be approached (if it is to be covered) in an oblique way; this sounds as if Martin & Co. were far too close to it to be able to hear it any other way. There are many great covers of songs but for some reason this one comes to mind as taking a well-known original and making it new, as Ezra Pound would say, and giving the song a new life as well. In the end, Black's version was trumped by the original, as 1965, that snake of a year, slowly but surely began to change what was (the early 60s) into what was going to come, which at this point is still unthinkable...for now.

Lend Your Voice: Petula Clark: "Downtown"

2011-07-21T04:27:00.000-07:00

The man, in the dark, after he cries and perhaps is a bit cold and numb, turns on the radio, and hears this.

He is perhaps warmed by it, by the simple piano and then the unveiled band behind her, as if the city's core itself were made of music, bright and shiny and capable of lifting even the most tired and bedraggled soul. Of course he resists and tries to pretend that what is on offer - all the distractions - are beneath him or beside the point. But then it filters through slowly that it is just being out there that matters. He does not have to do anything but go and walk and look, really look and let himself become part of a greater whole. There is no great mystery to it, or conspiracy. Yes, the city is yours too. Do with it as you will. And yes, I am there, you might meet me, and we can exist, if only for a while. The city knows no time or particular emotion; it is what it is, and it accepts you, whoever you are.

It is easy to feel as if you don't mean very much, but then you can turn it around and say, it's just a city, of course; and cities are made of people. The idea of "life" making you lonely is no joke, and the city can only act as a bandage at first, while the real work goes on underneath. But all reviving souls need a distraction, and the city is there for you, if you can stand the "noise and the hurry."

Losing yourself to find yourself; getting rid of loneliness by becoming part of the lonely crowd - these are primal Sixties ideas and gathering together in order to do something good is a natural when there is a sudden boom in people who are young and don't have much else to do; but this song goes deeper than just addressing gawky, awkward wallflowers and hermits to go out and learn to socialize. In Canada a man the same age as Clark heard this song and was struck by it, and it was something of a soundtrack to his own outings, wherein he began to think of the voices of others - the sound of the crowd, if you will - as instruments in and of themselves, interweaving, contradicting, supporting, that the flow of life itself was music.

This was far beyond producer/songwriter Tony Hatch's idea of course - he simply wanted to get the song finished (it was, in the men's room minutes before recording) and give Clark a hit in English (she was doing much better in France than the UK at this point). It was a fragment he played for her at first, something he'd written hoping it would be recorded by The Drifters; Clark immediately recognized it was for her, and Hatch had only a few days to finish it. So in a way she is pouring herself into this song, singing directly to you to join her, in a way that is not just pretty or elegant but a personal invitation. There is a small clause in her "might" at the end, but this is because so many will turn out that she may not be able to see you. The song gives confidence to the listener that s/he will not be alone, whatever happens, and that includes the shattered man, gathering pieces of himself, recognizing himself in others, and others in himself.

Can He Do It?: Gene Pitney: "I'm Gonna Be Strong"

2011-07-20T02:37:00.000-07:00

Here is a different type of intensity altogether. In pop there are just a few singers who can start at a certain pitch and then move higher; there are even fewer who can go higher than that, to a place almost no one goes, because it is either physically or emotionally impossible for them to get there. Watching Gene Pitney perform this song is not unlike watching someone perform some great feat, such as crossing the Niagara Falls on a tightrope or climbing a skyscraper bare-handed. Even as you watch him you can't quite believe what you are hearing, even though he is in perfect control the whole time and may well be enjoying himself, just as mastering any art is both a pleasure and a serious matter at the same time.

This puts Pitney in a very special place; he zeroes in on a moment when the decision is made - no matter what happens, I will not show how much I hurt; I just won't - with almost sun's-rays-through-magnifying-glass intensity. His whole concern is in fooling her, but he cannot fool himself, is burning up inside, and she will never know. Unlike Smokey Robinson, he does not cry out for recognition of his disguised hurt; this is almost like backstage pep-talk before the big performance. Are we, the audience, convinced it will happen, that he will be strong enough to part without showing any emotions? Or will he, like Nick Cave*, give in at the last moment? There is no way of knowing, save for the last and most heroic effort in the song, put in by Pitney himself - his leaping "CRY" at the end, going up two ocataves where songwriter Barry Mann just put in a steady high note (Mann didn't believe Pitney could do it, but then he did & that was that). So maybe he does pull it off, but there is no escaping how much torment there is in doing so, the moment she has gone he stands a little stunned perhaps, not bowing or waving, because there is no energy left for even those small gestures. (Such gestures would be inappropriate, anyway.)

Pitney emboldened a whole generation of singers to simply go there - you may suffer in the meantime but there is no choice in the matter - if he can do it, so can you, and the results will be more than worth it. (This is the closest thing to an aria this blog has encountered in some time; I wonder if people threw flowers onstage when he performed.) Marc Almond certainly heard him growing up (he duets with him here), as did, unmistakably, Billy MacKenzie (astonishing all present at the end of this).

Thus '64 draws to a close, proud and exhausted and emotionally drained; but there is one consolation left, and it is not found in isolation.

*Cave is also a big Pitney fan; I can only wonder what he thinks of this, for instance.

Loud Hard Fast Rules: The Kinks: "All Day and All Of The Night"

2011-07-18T05:12:00.001-07:00

The origins of genres of music are always murky; from the primordial mud that is this song - which rattles the foundations of rock itself - many things will flow, aided and abetted by other songs from The Beatles and bands we have yet to meet in this blog. This song the LEAPS out at you, it cannot and will not be resisted; there is something more than a little obsessive about the lyrics and the choppy way they are sung (choppy to go with the power chords) in what sounds like a big broom closet. This is rock pounced upon with glee (you can hear their joy in the break, in Dave Davies' no-holds-barred solo), as if rock itself was just invented last week and its almighty power to stun ears and energize listeners was there for the taking by anybody, even some young men from Muswell Hill.

And what are the results? Screaming chaos, at first, but you just know that garage bands across the world made yet another racket to bug their parents, some digging the speed (and thence to punk) and others the distortion and LOUDNESS (punk again but also heavy metal). Nobody knew about the latter at the time and a 'punk' was someone usually found on American cop shows (wearing a windbreaker/sneer and up to no good). The sheer attack of this song must have taken The Beatles and DC5 aback; but The Kinks themselves probably knew they could not just write knock-'em-out songs like this for long without being bored and/or out of fashion. Meanwhile I can see Mods dancing to this, future guitar heroes jumping on their beds with their air guitars, lots of play on pirate radio and lots of screaming girls caught between the relentless energy of the song and the slight smile in Ray Davies' voice, as if he knows he's wrong, but OH how it feels so right. Is obsession always such a bad thing?

All By Myself: The Supremes: "Where Did Our Love Go"

2011-07-18T01:50:00.000-07:00

At first it was horrible, but at least she had been able to cry. Now she was blank; a blank, numb figure out in the humid, swampy city dense with foliage and trees dropping ripe fruits. There was a chance, a window, but it was closed now, he gave her the things he was going to give her and then walked away, plain as that. The blankness didn't go away, despite all she could do to distract it, and the city seemed quiet, still, her steps the only thing she could really hear. He said he would call, and now she could wait.

It was all she could do. The voices urged her to look, to keep looking, but there was nothing to really find. The wall-like air was like a mobile prison. Others did things, but all she could hear were her own steps, solitary in the street, in the shops, in the museum; and it wasn't supposed to be this way at all. Everything had been so perfect it had been making her giddy, but now she could only smile wanly. A city full of monuments to greatness sopped up her need to belong, if only temporarily, to something. He said he would call; this promise seemed unlikely but she had to hang on to it, even if she knew he wouldn't. She had no way to write to him, and anyhow, writing was what had gotten her into trouble in the first place; he was away on the weekend and was unreachable. So she sat and looked out the window, her godmother once again apologizing for the heat. But the heat wasn't the problem. What had happened? She could not just sit and mope, but had to go out there and lose herself, before heading back on the train, where her sadness would slowly turn into anger, then defiance. In truth, it already was, and she was determined to enjoy herself, heat or no. But the underlying sadness was slow to go away.

**********************************

To an American's eyes, the early 60s UK charts seem rather resistant to Motown; it is as if some unknown force is keeping its relentless hit machine at bay. However with The Supremes the UK finally succumbs and (according to the NME) this nearly got to the top. It is only appropriate it did so well, as the clapping comes right out of the stomping of "Bits and Pieces" - as does the general lyrical misery, though the angry march of the DC5 turns into the desolate clomping cheer of this song, one that The Marvelettes had turned down for sounding too childish; and they warned The Supremes not to take Holland-Dozier-Holland's orders (for they wrote the song) without a fight; thus they made the song simpler and thus more sophisticated. It stands for a failed relationship, to be sure, but it also mourns for something indefinable that has been lost, happiness perhaps, innocence most certainly. Something has been thrown out and the rest of the 60s is merely a process of trying to replace it, if that is possible. Could music itself be the answer?

Raggedy Ann: The Four Seasons: "Rag Doll"

2011-07-15T02:56:00.000-07:00

And now we hit the streets of Newark, New Jersey: a place I passed by while on a train once, to see a sign proclaiming "Newark Makes - The World Takes." By far the biggest band out of Newark in the 60s was The Four Seasons (indeed they were the Popstrological leaders of 1962) and I sometimes wish people paid more attention to their work in full*, as opposed to the fine-but-stagey Jersey Boys version, but their combination of compassion and toughness that came from the streets (this song was inspired by a street girl who cleaned Bob Gaudio's windshield and was tipped generously by him, to her astonishment) and thus was real in a way that even the fabled Brill Building songwriters sometimes couldn't muster. Gaudio and Crewe wrote this song immediately, and of course it went to #1 in the US.

That his family is the only thing from stopping him from getting involved with her points to the generational divide that would tear up the nation (in truth, it already was), though the love-thwarted-by-families situation is as old as the proverbial hills itself. She is pretty, she is poor, but she is not objectified; somehow in the "AAAAAAAAAHHHHs" and "OOOOOHHHs" of Valli & Co. there is a tenderness that shows empathy rather than any kind of condescension. The song, if you will, is a loving gaze towards the girl as opposed to a mere glance, and in a way it is as much a protest song as "Have I The Right?" (lest we forget we are still in the Age of Meek), only the divide alluded to there is unspoken (because it was illegal). So much love in the air, so much frustration, so much need: in essence, the 50s as a concept is dying, and so many butterflies are wriggling desperately trying to be free. The next song takes us back to the NMEchart for a long-overdue trip to Detroit, where the British Invasion is being repelled successfully, just as it was in Newark.

*The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette (1968) album, for instance, which took inspiration from local papers in post-riot Newark; as intense and rewarding an experience as you'd expect.

Chop Chop: Brian Poole and Tremeloes, The: "Someone Someone"

2011-07-15T02:18:00.000-07:00

The taste of the British public puzzles me at times; I cannot tell, for instance, if this song did well because it is so utterly inoffensive as to have no character at all, or because of the performance here, wherein the singer - a drip of a man, judging by this - is more or less ignored/mocked by his own band. The song - a post-Holly Crickets b-side - is thin gruel to begin with, but some singers have ways of taking inane songs and making them mean something; Mr. Poole doesn't. Perhaps the Tremeloes know something that he doesn't?

In any case, this serves as an inter-band example of the schism happening in UK pop, wherein some people are solid as sides of beef (eventually Poole went back to his original calling, being a butcher*) and others are all about the giddy enjoyment of just being there, like chefs being happy at their work. I am amazed that this song - on evidence a big hit - did better at the time than "My Guy" or "Chapel of Love" - but then time has a way of figuring out what is worth keeping around and separating the temporarily useful (as a last-dance song, for instance) from the ultimately not necessary in the long run. The 60s are heating up to a sizzle and there is no time for warmed-up leftovers like this.

*Instead of being a butcher of songs, some might say, though on evidence he sings songs as if he has already put them in the cooler.

A Young Girl Shall Lead Them: Millie Small: "My Boy Lollipop"

2011-07-13T02:47:00.000-07:00

Where there is a will (and some willing backers) there is a way; and so it was that pirate radio began, Radio Caroline the rebellious daughter playing her records just loud enough off the southern English coast to get the attention of not just the aforementioned bored teenagers but their moms as well. It all started when one man couldn't get his artist (Georgie Fame) on to the playlist at Radio Luxembourg; he got an old passenger ferry and rigged it up to be a floating station, complete with places for the DJs and staff to eat, hang out, and sleep (as best they could).

The monotony of British state radio was broken up, as suddenly pop was available not just for an hour but all day, and into the night. The effect on the charts was not immediately apparent; but here we are in May of '64 and all of a sudden there is a veritable English civil war going on between the government's idea of proper music (Vera Lynn, Mr. Acker Bilk) and what the public wanted to hear. (This is also when the old-school Rockers and the hip young Mods had a huge and in some ways parallel fight, the Mods being the pirate stations, of course.)

The old order was indeed being challenged and millions listened to Caroline and others as they sprang up around the coast; and this song was the first proof of their power. It is a song as sweet and swinging as the object of Millie's affections - and importantly for this blog, it's not from the US or UK but Jamaica. The wave of late 50s immigrants brought their music with them - bluebeat, ska - and with this massive hit pop music in the UK essentially changed overnight, even if the musicians themselves didn't always prosper. Was the UK ready for a different beat*? OH yes it was, and Caroline was instrumental in getting this heard and thus giving the fledgling Island label its sea legs. The kids and moms (not to mention Mods) were most definitely alright. Would the government find a way to fight back? Soon, but not this year...

*Late in '64 The Beatles showed their effortless cool in picking up ska and doing it their way; it would take reggae to bring a lot of other UK musicians into the Jamaican groove.

That Stunning Moment: The Hollies: "Just One Look"

2011-07-12T02:48:00.000-07:00

She looks at him and somehow knows; love is a baffling mystery, sometimes, but there is no bafflement here. Spring has arrived, the rush of love is in the air, birds hop from branch to branch and even the puddles seem to shine with happiness. She is being pulled to him, tugged, and she states her case finely and satisfiedly, as if she has just completed a rather difficult knot and is admiring what she has accomplished. She is not in a dream, this is real, and he is it.

Thus goes the original, co-written sung by Doris Troy; a hit in the US but not in the UK, where a band from Manchester who were always on the lookout for a good song decided to record it, and lo and behold they had a big hit.

The one characteristic The Hollies have over everyone else (save for The Beatles, of course) is their harmonies. They are strong and almost overpowering, as loud as the DC5 are in their own way. "Bright" is a word that is used to describe it, but "blinding" might be another, more apt word. It is a high, keening sound - there is no bottom to it, so to speak - that soars and uplifts, and I can imagine for some it can be wearying, because when you hear them you have no choice - you are up there with them, whether you want to be there, or not. This rather stupefying effect has to be managed carefully, but it fits this song, about total fixation and resulting ecstasy, very well*. It may be because of this quality of theirs that I get to write about The Hollies several times, but in their inimitable way they give a drama and sweetness to the charts, along with their dazzling vocal skills. But as we see next, just being able to sing in harmony is not enough, for some...

*Just over a decade from now another band from Manchester will take stupefying harmonies to another level; here "Just One Look" gets a whole different meaning.

Back To The Future: The Bachelors: "I Believe"

2011-07-12T02:10:00.000-07:00

This song represents the growing chasm in the listening experience of, say, an eager 13-year-old listening to the BBC. S/he wants the Dave Clark Five or Manfred Mann or Rolling Stones, but they are only broadcast on just a couple of shows - Brian Matthew's Saturday Club or on Alan Freeman's show, or perhaps wedged into an otherwise uninteresting and not at all funny 'comedy' programme - but this is what the poor teenager gets. It is totally representative of the music that is broadcast by government-approved-and-funded radio, in that the grannies in Arbroath are happy to hear it and buy it.

Who are these grannies? Well, apart from any literal ones, they are anyone who likes good, clean-cut songs sung by good, clean-cut bands and singers; music that is solid and earnest and four-square, music which would make a fine background to a church picnic or family outing. If you think, dear readers, that we are being sucked back into the 50s here, you would be right. The stentorian delivery; the sudden and unwelcome reappearance of the awed choir in the background; the fact that this song in its original version was a huge hit (thebiggest, in fact) from the 50s in the first place - all this hit the grannies quite hard, whether they were young or old. I can imagine young Louis Walsh (proof you don't have to be an actual granny to be one) loving this and even using it as a template of sorts for later Irish boy bands he would manage to come; fellow granny Simon Cowell was too young at the time, but The Bachelors were a big group (they did have that boy band appeal) and even he must have noticed them as a boy.

There is one segment of the audience I have not accounted for yet, however - the large Irish population in Liverpool and Manchester, to whom The Bachelors would appeal on a whole other level - good solid men, to be sure, but Irish and therefore loved, right alongside Jim Reeves. This north-south split will manifest itself in several ways as the decades pass, but let us return to the bored teenager, stuck listening to, in effect, their parents' radio, if not their grandparents'. In the US, s/he thinks, there are stations that play pop music all day! Why can't there be anything like that here?

Pop Rocks: Dave Clark Five: "Bits and Pieces"

2011-07-11T07:00:00.000-07:00

As big as The Beatles were, you can't invade a country alone successfully for too long; and so Tottenham's own took up the fight to give garage bands across America a new song to practice and soundproofing to test, because this is by far the LOUDEST of any song I've written about so far. Dave Clark (drummer and obv. bandleader; Mike Smith, keyboards, led the yelling and stomping) put his drum set right up front onstage and this relentless pounding and yelling is a portent of all other stomping classics to come, in both this decade and the next. There may not be a lot here to chew on, metaphorically, but this band's forte was being heard first and foremost - there was nothing subtle about them, how could there be? He's in misery, can't tell day from night, she's dumped him and he just can't pull himself together. If this song means anything, it is release, and maybe a gaining of energy from sharing that release with others. That this should be done with smiling faces and coordinated suits (complete with Beatlesque group bow at the end) shows that pop was still regarded as 'light' entertainment at the time, the tv appearances no doubt neater and tidier than their live shows; gradually the dissonance between these two will start to show, even as conventional radio is about to have its own headaches. Pop rocks, rock pops, and it is all too much for those who thought it was going to blow over once the kids 'grew up.'

Nevertheless, I cannot overemphasize how big the DC5 were in the USA and worldwide, leading to their own movie (Catch Us If You Can) and to this later cover, which in turn leads to this proud induction. The British Invasion of the US has just begun, and garages across the land begin to get busy...

End of An Era: Gerry and the Pacemakers: "I'm The One"

2011-07-06T08:37:00.000-07:00

It is odd to hear a song for the first time - as I have with this one - and know almost to the minute when it was a hit, and seeing this (with Gerry looking like a relative of Mike Myers; for all I know they are related) confirms that this was the era when people would sing about loneliness and possible broken hearts with smiles on their faces, because though he is down he's confident she will indeed see that he is the one; the upbeat smiley Mersey sound almost insisted on smiling no matter what, after all.

I wonder sometimes if the naturally more modest or shy folks ever really cottoned on to the bright cheer of this period, instead clutching their folk records and staying away from the raucous sounds from upstairs; or perhaps they were into the blues, man, and had no time for mere pop (though they may have bought this, out at the same time). These good-natured professional Liverpudlians were huge - only The Beatles could eclipse them - and yet by now there are a myriad of new bands flooding into the charts in The Beatles' wake, and the new is driving out the old with alarming swiftness. Gerry and the Pacemakers only had two other hits beyond this, fading out just as the other bands began to take hold; The Beatles must have seen this happen and heard a clock ticking on their own careers, but were too busy dealing with endless recording and touring to maybe comprehend the change. The party had just begun, with some of the arrived-early-leave-early types going elsewhere, and for the first time for a while, we go back to London next for a new band who have their own sound.

Let The World Know: Swinging Blue Jeans, The: "Hippy Hippy Shake"

2011-07-04T05:39:00.000-07:00

After great complexity and grief, something is needed to clear the mind, refresh the soul and encourage people to just let go and make fools of themselves; the world may be different now, but life does, indeed, go on. That the song makes almost no sense is almost a necessity (as Lester Bangs writes, "...rock and roll is at its core merely a bunch of raving shit, its utterly hysterical transience and intrinsic worthlessness the not-quite-paradoxical source of its vitality") and of course it's a cover version, pumped up on a desperate need for release. The sickness of "Hippy Hippy Shake" is something that doesn't need a cure because it is the cure for numbed-out grief, a positive sign of being ALIVE, dammit. Then, once the shaking stops, some people can go back to however they were, maybe a little abashed, perhaps. For some though, this is just the start of the high-octane Sixties, when anything goes. The Merseybeat boom is at its peak, about to take over the world, effectively. So why not dance?

Turn A Deaf Ear: Cliff Richard and The Shadows: "Don't Talk To Him"

2011-06-29T07:01:00.000-07:00

But not all UK pop is as benign as it might seem; in Liverpool, it's amplified nursery rhymes, but down in London...

...a certain paranoia is taking hold. Boyfriend and girlfriend must be apart (why? it's never explained) and he is telling her not to talk to "him." Just who is this man? Why is he so unreliable, so disruptive? Cliff all but says that he is a liar, a rogue, a man who simply cannot be trusted. Cliff's love is true, but "this guy" (strange for an era that liked names that he's not even named) is presumably telling our heroine that if he hears that he, the redoubtable Cliff, is going out with Sue or Jean that she isn't to believe him. So much drama, paranoia, all of it done with The Shadows' ease in the back (they are of course on Cliff's side in this triangle) that we might begin to wonder if Cliff isn't being a little bit unreliable himself - why doesn't he just go to the other guy and tell him off? Why can't he trust his own girl, to whom he is so (so he says) true? This song offers far more questions than it can answer and Cliff almost sings it as if he is singing not to a girl but to a wayward pet. He means well, you can hear that, but this insecurity (perhaps a more accurate word than paranoia) is edged here with condescension, as if this girl cannot be trusted to know truth from falsehood, has no intuition to know what is what. This is, however, the era of songs like "My Boyfriend's Back" wherein the girl who has been the unwanted object of another man's affections presumably scrams before said boyfriend returns to give him a black eye. A girl cannot tell him to get lost, as she is weak; all she can do is just hang up the phone or perhaps go to the bathroom to fix her make-up for a long time.

But the issue of mistrust here then widens into a world where a world leader was just assassinated, the Cold War has already polarized many and paranoia indeed is rampant, and a certain degree of innocence is lost, convictions are strengthened for some and for others they weaken. As for Cliff, when we return to him he will be trusting and even hapless once more, and by then pop and indeed music will have jumped fully into the multicolored flashy era known as the Swinging Sixties. But for now all is still beehives and pastels, twinsets and anxiety. A more innocent era, perhaps, but then again, maybe not.

That's What Hits Are Made Of: The Searchers: "Sugar and Spice"

2011-06-28T04:45:00.000-07:00

And now, for a moment, a step away from the sturm-und-drang of US pop to the somewhat more placid waters of UK pop. The Searchers were one of those revolving-door-membership Liverpool groups that played in Hamburg as well as their hometown, sticking a bit more closely to their skiffle origins than their compatriots The Beatles; and thus they were eagerly sought after by agents & managers hungry for Merseybeat. This song was written by their producer (not that they knew; he used the fine pseudonym Fred Nightingale) Tony Hatch and while it's not exactly going to win any poetry contests, it does its sprightly best (high, close harmonies; plucky ringing guitars, folk-chirpy melody) simply to show the joy a man can have in having his sweetheart, his honey, that love can be as simple as a nursery rhyme and be charming and even poignant for that. To a nation that was still rebuilding some sense of itself and finding its feet musically, as in so many other ways, The Searchers were part of the morale-bolstering Merseybeat tide that became the first wave of the British Invasion (they were the second group to have a hit in the US in '64). That the tide would be welcomed at all is due to an event outside of the literal boundaries of the charts. Merseybeat is reaching its peak here, marking a time when songs this innocent and direct could be big hits. That is about to change, however, as we near the end of 1963.

Apexes, Real and Imagined: The Crystals: "Then He Kissed Me"

2011-06-24T05:06:00.000-07:00

"Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children."

"The Munich Mannequins" Sylvia Plath

"That is the irony of it all - the irony that distinguishes great literature - it is all so ordinary."

Kenneth Rexroth, introduction to More Classics Revisited

The story is simple; the narrative, straightforward. He and she meet; they dance; he kisses her; she lets him know she loves him, after a time, and he says he loves her too; she is accepted by his parents, they get married, he kisses her again. The End.

The song circles around, like the thump-ka-thump of the heart, building in intensity as the courting dance begins; this could be another century, as she looks at him and decides to give him a chance. The sky is dark, the stars are bright, everything is in focus and yet blurry at the same time; there is a ghostly quality about this record which is in part due to an accident in the studio (making it more echo-laden than it was supposed to be)...

...and that odd quality is only really apparent upon re-hearing the song and realizing it's sung from a wife's point of view. This is not a girl group staple, per se; usually the girl is massively crushing on or missing her guy, with the occasional foray into anticipating The Big Day when she and he will be actually married. (And there are of course the many songs wherein she loves him but he doesn't love her but OH she will make him see.) But a song from a wife's point of view - even a newlywed one - is rare. The drama of the song is that he kisses her, but the bravado of it is that she is the first to say "I love you" and just from this one piece of the story we know that they will be happy. La La Brooks sings it as if she has lived it, or perhaps as if she is telling this story to girls as if to say, you see, it can be done. But the production is, as Nik Cohn put it, a "heroic combustion" - "Through multitracking, he (Spector) made his rhythm section sound like armies, turned the beat into a murderous massed cannonade." Why such apocalyptic noise for what is an utterly normal story? Is it just the drama of being a teenager finally reflected in music, the zinging pounding insomniac blood of the courtship itself?

I wish I could say that this song (written by Spector, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich) was art, but it is Art; that is because it isn't just about love, but about death.

Now, I am not saying there is anything deathly in this song; but the main riff is somehow both optimistic and settled, and no amount of production can deter its comfortable if slightly unsettling repetition. No, the death is in the woman's life; for in the girl group world (which is, to say, the real world), once you are married then your life is by definition set; set as in matched, paired, and ultimately fixed. There is no more story, just as there is no more story after any fairy tale's happy details of weddings and contentment. Whether this is exactly positive or not I am not sure, but in 1963 the second wave of feminism was only just beginning, and the debate about just what being a wife means is probably as old as the custom (if I can put it that way) of marriage itself. The plain upshot of all this is that the woman who sings here so happily and fondly has no more to sing, her tale is done, at the end she remembers the kiss as if it was the beginning and the end, as if it was an infinity of kisses (which she hopes will continue; again the explosive production bolsters this hope, as if it would ever dare not to come true).

In all this I have been trying to invoke within me Larkin's Law, the one that says look at the work, not the man. Phil Spector was at the apex, the top, when he produced this, a bigshot at 22 and not at all shy about it; to read about him in Cohn's piece it seems as if he is taking revenge on the world by making the loudest and densest music this side of Wagner, the wall of sound both pleasingly and overwhelmingly there and at other times near-oppressive, as if there is no way you could escape it, even if you tried. I am trying hard to concentrate on that and not the perfectionist personality who would construct it, why he would construct it and for that matter what happened long after the apex; though I shouldn't say 'long after' as Spector fell victim to The Beatles' runaway success as much as anyone (he did end up producing them in the end in such a way that Paul left after hearing his song having had sonic golden-syrup-with-cream topping put on "The Long and Winding Road" and really, who can blame him). Ordinarily I would pity him but I cannot do that; Spector should have lived a very different life in the post-Beatles world, but he too was fixed, set in his ways, too used to bodyguards and guns and life apart from the real, pulsing world where the ordinary was elevated to Art by him and others.

As with all Art there is indeed something almost instantaneous about this song, as if it has always existed and only now is being sung. It spirals up and up like two birds in spring and then simply disappears, the screen going black as the picture fades out...only to, unexpectedly, come back in at the end of this song, as if to say, this may be the end but this is how it began, and who knows, the seeds of rebirth may be sown here too, just as she once could not wait to see him again, to be with him, to hear those bells and be kissed. That she knows that that moment is not the apex, but the beginning of her new life is the true happiness here, and elsewhere.

Don't Talk To Me About Love: Cliff Richard: "It's All In The Game"

2011-06-20T04:53:00.000-07:00

There are certain moments when everything comes into focus, almost too sharply, the contrasts are almost too precise and vivid to look at for very long...and in this case, the two songs - this one at two and the other at one - set out the differing paths of music (at least chart music) for pretty much the rest of the decade.

What is most interesting is that the struggle here, if it even is a struggle, isn't between two generations but two whole ways of thinking about music itself. On one side is the new, the brash, the massive "YEAH" of The Beatles (whose "She Loves You" prevented Cliff from getting to the top); on the other is The Man plc, who told Cliff repeatedly that this whole rock 'n' roll thing was a kid's game and that to really make it in "the industry" he had to branch out, to become an all-around entertainer*, and this gift would give him a kind of immortality. Clearly Cliff had already chosen this route (if in fact it hadn't been chosen for him by his label) and thus here he is, doing a song whose music predated the birth of his own producer, Norrie Paramor. In the face of the Huge Inevitable that was The Beatles (after this song Beatlemania, which had been building up all summer, simply exploded), Cliff and Co. may have felt that the best way to deal with it was to retreat, retreat into a past that was theirs for the taking. The song is barely sung as such but quietly pronounced; he sounds not as if he's been through the ringer romantically (though of course he had; Jet Harris had left The Shadows because his wife and Cliff had an affair - how much of this the public knew I don't know) but has been disappointed himself too many times and is now content to sing about love rather than experience it. That may seem like a harsh judgement, but Cliff was already paying the price for having a loyal female following (nicknamed The Screaming Nellies) - no girlfriend - and so whenever he sighs or moans it always sounds as if there is something vital and messy being avoided - or is that just plain old English reserve?

In the face of the winking knowingness and good humor of The Beatles, Cliff does his best (and this was also his biggest hit in the US at the time); but the yawning maw that was "the industry" was indeed making him immortal, bit by bit, separating him and those of his "ilk" from the vagaries of music, if not rough, vernacular life itself. But, I wonder, who could change him and give him back, rescue him from The Man plc? That will be answered in time, but when we get back to him, it will be with something much creepier than this.

*Clearly Cliff's career in the UK was a copy of Elvis Presley's, right down to making reasonably good movies and churning out hit after hit to an admiring and fervently loyal following; he may have felt it unfair that he had to go head-to-head with The Beatles, but then so did Elvis, with middling results. Cliff has been married to "the game" (as Tim Westwood would put it) for so long, but does he get his due? Some may think that the metaphoric worm has turned over the decades, but if so, where are the deluxe repackagings of Cliff's albums from the 60s? Hm...

Manchester Enters: Freddie and the Dreamers: "I'm Telling You Now"

2011-06-17T03:26:00.000-07:00

In popular culture there are some places that generate certain sounds; you hear a group or artist and you can just tell where they are from. The closer you are to the place, the easier it is; thus, if you were from the UK you'd know that Freddie and the Dreamers were from Manchester (clearly where the ravening horde of agents and managers went once Liverpool was picked clean), but your average American wouldn't know a Liverpudlian from a Mancunian, and so this song was a hit all over again in the US two years after it was here, under the general understanding they were Merseybeat when in fact they weren't; but with such unselfconscious exuberance, there was no mistake they were part of the massive British Invasion of the time.

Freddie and the Dreamers are Mancunian in that they have a lead singer who did a wacky dance, was not in the least conventionally 'sexy' and wore glasses. It was his spirit (and the band's co-ordinated dancing) that made them so successful, even if musically this is not exactly Lennon/McCartney*; the Other here is maybe not able to understand he loves her (or to understand what he's saying, altogether) for all the standing-jumping-jacks Freddie is doing. But then Mancunians have a way of reminding everyone they can sing and dance and not be mistaken for anyone else; a delightful awkwardness which is matched by confidence and persistence. Though swept up in Merseybeat as the UK was, Manchester stakes its claims to greatness in a typically oblique manner as if to say: "You think this is good? Wait and see what we have in store."

*Freddie and the Dreamers' effect on The Beatles was interesting; after they copied the arrangement of cover The Beatles did at the Cavern Club ("If You Gotta Make A Fool Of Somebody") and had a hit with it, The Beatles realized they had to start writing their own songs, songs presumably too complex for just anyone to hear once and then cover themselves. Thus began the long period of hide-and-go-seek that The Beatles played with pop music, never really resting in once place long enough to be caught. (That a song by Billy J. Kramer and The Dakotas kept this off - "Bad To Me" by Lennon/McCartney - is one thing; that "She Loves You" was released the same week shows just how ambitious they were.)

A Strand of Sand: The Shadows: "Atlantis"

2011-06-15T04:03:00.000-07:00

This somehow reminds me of the last weekend before it's too cold to go to the beach; to sit and picnic; to happily just gad about, getting lost and then finding your way. It reminds me of these things because, as big as The Shadows were, the tide (so to speak) was turning against them. They had lost Meehan and Harris (replaced by Brian Bennett and Brian "Licorice" Locking, both from Marty Wilde's band) and thus had also lost some of the energy that made them so popular in the first place. "Atlantis" is a sprightly song that sounds almost ready-made for Winnipeg boys Young and Bachman to practice for hours on end, not to mention many others, but it is also a bit too polite, even as a song about a long-lost probably (how can anyone know?) mythical water kingdom can be.

The whole thing sounds unreal, Marvin's guitar as liquid as can be, the soothing strings a song that doesn't even sound like the 60s, or at least my understanding of the 60s; I don't know if The Shadows were at all envious, say, of the Surfaris (about to have a hit with this) or The Chantays (who had just had a hit as well). It could simply be that the saltwater-in-your-face abandon of The Surfaris or the hang-ten cool of The Chantays were simply beyond the experience of The Shadows; or perhaps it just wasn't their style, or that they were produced by Norrie Paramor, not a man given to adventure as much as George Martin or Joe Meek (how would they have sounded produced by either of these men I leave up to you). The neatness and tidiness that served them well as it could in the late 50s/early 60s was beginning to be beside the point; of course they still had hits after this (and remain popular to this day - witness their successful tour with Cliff a while back). But it is poignant that I get to them when they are still popular but are about to be eclipsed by many groups who were inspired by them, from The Beatles on down. I can only salute them as pioneers, once and future kings of British rock, imitated and copied but never really duplicated.

People Who Know People: Billy J. Kramer and The Dakotas: "Do You Want To Know A Secret?"

2011-06-13T07:28:00.000-07:00

One of the continuing threads in the charts of the 60s - starting very successfully here - is the Beatles album track being covered by another group and made into a hit single. I don't know of any other group being covered so much in their own time, with (of course!) their permission and indeed help; Billy and his band were from Liverpool themselves and thus knew The Beatles when no one would give them the time of day, and so were more than happy to help their pals out with not just already-recorded songs but songs they had written but didn't, for whatever reason, want to record themselves. Other groups may have been jealous of handsome Billy and his tremendous luck, but Billy could definitely sing and The Dakotas could definitely play and this song survives the transition from shadowy flirtation to gleeful proclamation quite well. It seems to move closer and closer incrementally, just as "Can't Get Used To Losing You" seems to move further and further away, bit by bit. The joy is in knowing that the secret is theirs and theirs alone, and can be that way, deliciously, as if their new happiness was a particularly rich cake they can either eat and/or admire...

The generosity of The Beatles here is amazing, but even more amazing are the songs that were just left on albums for others to cover; I don't get to write about any of the others, but suffice it to say by the time The Beatles prove themselves to be more than a passing fad, it is a regular occurence, whenever an album of theirs was released to pounce on it for any songs that could easily be covered. Of course at this time there were almost no unsigned bands in Liverpool, as managers and agents went on a veritable gold rush of whatever they could find, and soon the charts were full of Merseybeat, produced by George Martin (as this was). (In almost too perfect timing, this was a hit around the time of the Profumo Affair, when secrets were spilled, lives changed, and the Sixties, as understood by many, really begin.)

A Woman in the Background: Jet Harris and Tony Meehan: "Scarlett O'Hara"

2011-06-03T03:08:00.001-07:00

The past is sometimes just the past; I sometimes wonder why it is that people would ever worry about it being 'hunted' or 'mined' when the past is like a vast cave that in reality most people are happy to consign to, well, their own past. There have always been periods of unease that can create (later on) nearly inexplicable crazes for this decade or era or that; while other times collect dust, or are overshadowed.

Jet Harris and Tony Meehan left The Shadows - they were the rhythm section - and had immediate success with "Diamonds" (much later sampled by Chipmunk in a song that was about being aspirational without talking about pushing himself to the limit). The follow up was this, a Jerry Loudon composition that takes the Gone With The Wind heroine and makes her into something of a cool 60s "dolly bird." It is a jaunty instrumental, rocks just as hard as The Shadows could, with that cool man-about-town edge that Harris simply exuded (what is it about bass players?) - a cool that was unfortunately aided and abetted by his troubled life, including a chauffeur-driven limo accident that left him and his then-girlfriend Billie Davis in a mess, both physically and other ways (she was 17 at the time, he was married*).

As incredibly popular as Harris and Meehan were, it is a sad fact that they - and so many other UK acts from this time - are more or less forgotten** (save for Brian Matthew's Sounds of the Sixties) by what I call State Radio. There the past is lovingly and almost obsessively catalogued and enshrined; and yet perhaps this is part of the problem itself - the past as a museum cannot fly beyond the lives of those who remember the music in the first place, who were there. In popular received history The Beatles simply own the charts now, with everyone else running a poor second,

*In case it needs underlining, we are in the 60s now, when being a ladies' man was very much in vogue; how much embarrassment this caused I don't know, as keeping things secret was just as in vogue.

**Cliff Richard and The Shadows did do a tour and new album recently - a single of theirs scraped into the Top 40 for a week and left again, but the tour was a rip-roaring success. But they are the exception here.