No Hesitation Goes Unremarked By Horn-Blowing: "The Last Farewell" by Roger Whittaker

It is sometime in the second half of 1975, and the jukebox at Graceland is a talisman to remind the singer that other lives, including his, once happened. It holds old records from the time when he still possessed energy and hope, as well as newer, not quite so hopeful or energetic, ones. Already slowing down at forty.

And there is this one record on the jukebox which he plays, over and over to the point of obsession. Something in the song being sung on that record touches him in a place no one else, bar one, has located. He needs to have the song's atoms ingrained into his tormented soul, now on the verge of becoming as red and mottled as clay.

But what was he capable of locating in this humble epic of a sea song which might have dated from the era of Drake? It was not a song that would normally be expected to be entranced into his radar. There is absolutely nothing "rock and roll" about it and perhaps not much that might be ascribable to the twentieth century.

Yet it stayed with him, within him, and the Memphis Mafia were frankly baffled. It was a song he might not have been expected to be able to hear at all, so thoroughly British - so English, in fact - a study that it could have proved as indecipherable to American ears as Slade.

Moreover, the song's singer and co-author was only English by virtue of parenthood; Roger Whittaker was born and raised - and, for a time, fought, when called up to serve in the Kenya Regiment - in Kenya, his parents having emigrated from Staffordshire to the flame trees of Thika. He began a medical degree at the University of Cape Town in South Africa but dropped out after eighteen months and signed up as a civil service teacher. Eventually he ended up at what was then called Bangor University in North Wales, reading zoology, biochemistry and marine biology, although his sideline of folk-singing eventually superseded any ambitions of that kind.

Throughout the sixties he quietly built up a reputation as a reliable fellow to have on board, and by the time he finally had a British hit with the melancholy "Durham Town (The Leavin')" in late 1969 he was already a well-known radio, television and stage performer.

Whittaker didn't so much sidestep current trends in music as leapfrog them or stroll through them as though they did not exist. This meant that he only paid occasional visits to the pop charts, but you usually knew when he was around; his was most certainly not a career that depended upon hit singles. But his 1970 top ten hit "I Don't Believe In If Anymore" was a quietly enraged, methodical deconstruction of the Kipling ethos with slashing Psycho strings and a dolorously authoritative French horn fully worthy of Scott Walker, while 1971's "New World In The Morning" was a jaunty study of cynicism in which Whittaker states that, not only does he not believe in such utopias, but also that he is baffled as to why he had to write the song in the first place.

"The Last Farewell" in fact began its life as a track on that year's New World In The Morning album. It derived from a radio show which Whittaker hosted, one of its regular features being a sort of song-poem interlude where the singer invited listeners to submit a poem or set of lyrics which Whittaker would then try to set to music.

One of these was "The Last Farewell." A Birmingham silversmith named Ron Webster sent in what read like a rather Kiplingesque meditation - the sea captain summoned away from his tropical paradise to return to England, in the midst of what sounds like a bloody war. Or perhaps it was the Baden-Powell of 1899, called away from his luncheon at the Naval and Military Club in Piccadilly and asked to travel to South Africa. In any case, the song was not released as a single in Britain, but did become a firm live favourite.

In Canada, however, a single of "The Last Farewell" did appear in the late autumn of 1974, and became a minor hit. It so happened that the wife of the program director for a radio station in Atlanta, Georgia, was travelling through Canada on holiday in the first half of 1975, heard the song on CBC, and upon her return home urged her husband to add the song to his station's playlist.

The song then slowly took off commercially, as such phenomena sometimes do, and by June 1975 had reached the Billboard Top 20. It also returned to the Canadian charts, where on this occasion it made the top ten. By that time, Saigon had fallen, and the Vietnam war was effectively at an end, so the song doubtless struck a nerve in those surviving troops returning home and the families who awaited them.

Following the song's success in North America, however, it began to be released as a single in other countries, including Britain, where it belatedly peaked at number two in September 1975 (behind, with some irony or concordance, Rod Stewart's version of "Sailing"). Overall it sold more than ten million copies worldwide.

"The Last Farewell" is a very controlled song, wistful sighs of memory coming up against clenched-teeth expectation of blood and death. Yet the singer does not surrender hope; the song's final verse sees him dreaming of mist rolling through the English dell (has the word "dell" ever been used in another pop song?), Zach Lawrence's piano and orchestration, and Denis Preston's echoing production, adding to the song's determined stateliness.

But why did this of all songs burrow more firmly into the marrow of his mind than any others? The answer is surprisingly simple - having been called up to the U.S. Army in March 1958, his mother had been diagnosed with hepatitis during his basic training and was seriously ill. He requested and was given emergency leave to go home and see her, but she died two days after his arrival, scarcely into her forties. I don't expect he ever got over that - who would? - but it does, I think, help to illuminate his fascination with "The Last Farewell"; he listened to it again and again because he was thinking about his mother, and 1958, and being called up perhaps to fight, and maybe he interpreted what Whittaker was singing as a hymn to her ("For you are...beautiful"). The song's 1975 obverse? A desperate gatecrash of an epic song detailing a frantic need to get away from home, to find...something, anything, that he and his lover could love more dearly than the spoken word could tell - i.e. "Born To Run."

Pieces Of A Hazy Rainbow: "Misty" by Ray Stevens

 

The talk at the moment is all about country music, and if you grew up in the West Central Scotland of the seventies, it was country, not rock or pop, which was the dominant music you heard; songs like Freddy Fender's "Before The Next Teardrop Falls," number one in both the U.S.A. and Scotland, unbought south of Dumfries, Tammy Wynette's seven-year-old "Stand By Your Man" which suddenly became a semi-expected national crossover smash, the continued resonance of Jim Reeves, local stars like Sydney Devine.

If you were growing up in 1975 with the music of Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen richocheting between your eleven-year-old ears, you might have thought country as square as Andy Stewart on television at Hogmanay. But it was actually quite a fertile year for the music; indeed, at least three groundbreaking country albums appeared in 1975. There was Pieces Of The Sky by Emmylou Harris, anxious to demonstrate she could do things without Gram, and which proved an excellent set of interpretations. There was the astonishing Old No 1 by Guy Clark, whose character studies and instinctive empathy with working people directly parallel those expressed on Born To Run.

Most strikingly, however, there was Willie Nelson's song cycle Red Headed Stranger, a mixture of old songs and briefer new narratives expertly sequenced to convey the feelings inspired in the singer by a song called "Tale of the Red Headed Stranger," which Nelson regularly played on the radio while a D.J. Think of the two "Smoke Hour" cameos Nelson makes on Cowboy Carter and you'll see where I might be going with this.

It was therefore quite a natural progression for Ray Stevens - the man who discovered and signed Dolly Parton to Monument Records in the sixties - to make a country record, and perhaps furnish a subtle but good-natured rejoinder to Ray Charles' appropriation of the music thirteen years before. The resulting album was named after its title song, a tune written by Erroll Garner in his head while travelling on a 'plane from San Francisco to Chicago in 1954. The 'plane passed through quite a turbulent thunderstorm, and on approaching O'Hare Airport Garner could see a hazy rainbow in the sky. He began to imagine the tune there and then.

Eventually Johnny Burke was persuaded to provide lyrics to the tune, which was promptly subjected to many interpretations, most strikingly that recorded by Johnny Mathis in 1959; a record which really resembles no other (with the possible if distant exception of the Flamingos' contemporaneous "I Only Have Eyes For You") in its weightless ethereality and the singer's supreme confidence in working the studio and treating the record as a record - he frequently stands a little distance away from his microphone before slowly walking towards it, like a lonely sea reclaiming its river.

Stevens presumably decided that, if a song was great enough, it would work in any musical style; hence he treats "Misty" as a modestly-dazzled hoedown with continous pedal steel commentary, a battalion of fiddles whenever a thousand violins begin to play and a vocal performance which in its seemingly unobtrusive and amiable way covers scales as widely and emotionally as Roy Orbison. He is dazed but happy and that's all he wants to communicate, and evidently it was all people in 1975 wanted to be told. When Stevens downplays the comedy - this is the humble novelty of a well-known song interpreted in an unexpected manner - a real smile can develop. He'll be damned if you won't fast dance with him.

It's Never Too Late To Change Your Mind: Tammy Jones: "Let Me Try Again"

If hauntology is to mean anything, then it must involve something from the present coming back to haunt the past, and it therefore incidentally follows that some unlikely pop records of old are bestowed with a new and unexpected significance. This record peaked at number two in the NME chart week ending 24 May 1975, twelve days before the United Kingdom European Communities membership referendum. Those of us able to vote at the time obviously did not include the eleven-year-old me, but certainly included my parents, both of whom voted "Yes," as did some 67.23% of British voters, many of whom were young and unburdened by the alleged legacies of heritage and war (I note that Windsor Davies and Don Estelle's "Whispering Grass" was vaulting from 26 to 11 in the same NME chart, on its way to the top).

 

Listening to this interpretation of what was originally a French song in 2023, amidst the wrecked dreams and blasted economy of what used to be Britain, is nearly, if accidentally, unbearable in its poignant promise - and I do not discount the competing but not necessarily contradictory "Let us go alone" mantra emanating from the Wales and Scotland throughout the spring of 1975.

 

Tammy Jones was born Helen Wyn Jones in Bangor in March 1944 and rose to prominence after winning a season of Hughie Green's Opportunity Knocks television talent contest. Although the publicity spoke about an ordinary Welsh housewife who just happened to have one heck of a voice, Jones was actually quite a well-known name on the cabaret circuit who had undergone formal voice training at the Guildhall School, had been recording (albeit mainly in Welsh) since the late sixties, and had already appeared on stage and television many times before OK, including at least one Royal Variety Performance.

The song "Let Me Try Again" had originally been called "Laisse-moi Le Temps" ("Give Me More Time") and had been recorded by many French artists, including two of its co-writers, Romauld and Caravelli (the third co-writer was the lyricist Michel Jourdan). In 1973, Frank Sinatra, bored by early retirement, was looking to make a comeback, and as with his previous farewell song "My Way," Paul Anka was asked to write an English lyric to the tune; this he did with the help of Sammy Cahn - so there was a real, concerted effort to bring Sinatra back.

While the parent album OI' Blue Eyes Is Back is not at all bad - it is for the most part a wistful, reflective and slightly melancholy study ("There Used To Be A Ballpark," "Nobody Wins," an interesting alternate emotional take on "Send In The Clowns") - Sinatra's "Let Me Try Again" is a little too self-satisfied and in places a shade too bossy ("Just forgive me," he demands twice, like a subdued Joe Pesci); the British public I think spotted that flaw and didn't make the single a hit.

Whereas Tammy Jones sings the song like she means it. Being Welsh, there is an obvious Shirley Bassey influence at work (although intriguingly I do not think Dame Shirley herself has ever recorded the song) but Jones goes at the emotions of the song as though she'd been waiting her entire life to sing it, to articulate them.

The crucial emotional difference here is that, instead of Sinatra's "Just forgive me," Jones offers "Please forgive me" (and, in the second chorus, a rhetorical "Oh, please forgive me"). As the key goes up for the final chorus, Jones' voice rides it smoothly (whereas Sinatra does his best to avoid or minimise the pitch shift) and by the time the song and record end, her larynx and teeth cling onto that final syllable of "again" as though she has been shaken to her core and will not let go of the song, her plea, our hope.

But in 2023 one hears such expressions as "Think of all we had before," "I was such a fool to doubt you/To try to go it all alone" and especially "Now all I do is just exist" and "Pride is such a foolish mask**," and this record sounds like the rational Britain - you know, the one in which we all actually live, not the one the government and media want to think we're inhabiting - pleading to Europe to give them another chance, with no further "Non!"s, crying out for a future. It is almost intolerably emotional and makes me think of how much promise appeared in my view of 1975, what I was taught by my parents and teachers then, and how all of it has now been wrecked and destroyed. If the Manic Street Preachers ever come across this piece, I'm certain they'd agree with its outlook.*

*A curious but logical counterpart for Welsh music of 1975 - not simply "Rhondda Grey" by Max Boyce, but also "Leaving It Up To You" by John Cale, who fed that anger directly into another important record of later that year - and the boy looked at Tammy (who returned to Wales after a long spell in New Zealand, and will celebrate her 79th birthday two months hence) and handed her a branch of cold flame.

**T.J. actually sings "But love is such a foolish mask" which is an obvious mistake, but I think it was charming that the producer (Robin Blanchflower) let it stand, since it's a sign of humanity. You wouldn't get that in today's fearsomely airbrushed world.

DO IT!: Van McCoy: "The Hustle"

 

There is nothing quite like waking up to frankly miserable weather/news only to hear about it and then be thrown by an overly upbeat announcer telling you to cheer up and dance and get moving and DANCE ---

Disco is a fine thing, but like everything it does have its place.  It has been more than suggested that it is the popular music everyone likes and the one music which people turn to when things are relentlessly tiresome or numbing.  But it wasn’t music for just anyone at the beginning; in fact it was music for those who liked to dance and also a refuge for those who were not exactly welcome elsewhere. 

In early 1975 Van McCoy was working on an album to be called (of course) Disco Baby.  In need of some inspiration information, he sent his business partner Charles Kipps to a disco to see if he could pick up any moves or grooves, and he brought back two dancers from the Adam’s Apple.  McCoy watched these dancers do the Hustle right there and then and was stunned and a little puzzled, but fell hard.  The next day (yes, the next day) “The Hustle” was recorded, and the rest is history.  We have, inadvertently, reached the second half of the 70s, the disco half.  The fog has lifted and the sun is shining and all is elegant and glamorous and exciting, emotional even.  A dance that came up from the Bronx gangs, the Latin Hustle (close to salsa) has bumped into some very seasoned studio musicians and a composer who clearly wants to write the disco song. 

Make no mistake:  this song is just one of many varieties of Hustle, but it takes OFF.  It’s catchy, simple, sweet –  kind of like Philadelphia International, but lighter and determinedly open somehow.  It is an anthem, an ode to the spirit of New York City, which was bankrupt but continued nevertheless.  It bumps and soars and sweeps and entreats you to join in and dance, never exactly telling you how to do the Hustle, but just to do it.  It is the little engine that could's triumphant lap.  It's emotional because McCoy had been in the music business for so long as a writer and producer and this dance appears one night and YYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAH "The Hustle" comes to him, as if in a fairy tale, and the joy he has had in creating it is right there in the music.  It is devotional music in a way, a tribute, and all it asks is that you dance however you want to and voila - you are doing the Hustle.  (It is significant that it's a dance for two people, though I always imagine the housewife in Des Moines dancing in her kitchen, as well as professional dancers in Hustle contests across New York City.)  

McCoy lived to see disco thrive and prosper, and was working on a 12" version of "The Hustle" when he died in 1979 - DJs wanted a 12" of it, which goes to show you what an instant classic it became.  That no one expected the song to do very much business is the cherry; it was merely supposed to be filler.  Thus I cannot claim McCoy to be a prophet but he inadvertently set the second half of the 70s agenda and there were those who (in the fullness of time, not now) bitterly resented him and disco in general.  But I don't think these people deserve my writing about them.  The happiness here erases all that, supercedes it, has already gone past it.  There is no looking back for disco now, and those who insist on playing it at 7am are, as irritating as they can be, doing everyone a favor by reminding people to dance, the Hustle or otherwise.

Next up:  the umbrella underneath which all other musics stand.

                                                                                                                    

 

 

 

Why Cry When You Can Dance? : “I Wanna Dance Wit Choo”: Disco Tex and His Sex-O-Lettes/ “Try To Remember/The Way We Were”: Gladys Knight and the Pips

“Nostalgia has always been a bit of a bunko scam.”  David Rakoff 

 The current situation has made people nostalgic, but what is it they are nostalgic for? This is the big question, perhaps too big for this modest blog. Is it the 1970s, a time of one actual/manufactured outrage and disaster after another? As a girl growing up in this time I have (for personal reasons that don’t really fit in here) very little nostalgia for this period, as so much of it was so monochrome and repetitive when it wasn’t disturbing and frightening. Yet even there, you can see how for so many anything distracting or weird or indeed nostalgic was attractive, even necessary.* 

“I Wanna Dance Wit Choo” was the second hit single for Bronx-born Sir Monti Rock III and his backing singers – including Four Season Bob Crewe and his writing pal Kenny Nolan, who both dug the disco scene and very much wanted to get involved. I could go into why disco was popular and the people who went to discos, but let’s just say at this point people were already starting to see disco was a ‘thing’ and they weren’t just male-only spaces as they had been before. At the same time, this is a camp single if there ever was one, (with Sir Monti sounding like David Johansen, ranting in English and Spanish**) and it can be heard as either very enthusiastic or kind of annoying, depending on how much you knew about the already outrageous public appearances of Monti Rock (who had been on tv regularly since the 60s, charming Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show.) That said, Disco Tex and His Sex-o-lettes definitely made personal appearances in actual discos, telling people to open up, loosen up and have fun and dance - it's disco time, baby!*** 

While this single got to #2 on the Luxembourg chart, Disco Tex and his entourage were never going to stay around for long – one more album (Manhattan Millionaire – but of course) and he was off making movies and Crewe and Nolan had already written “Lady Marmalade” and “My Eyes Adored You” which have both fared much better over time than the kitschy, outspoken man from the Bronx. People remember (or they lazily let the radio/media remember for them) certain things, but not others. The 70s was a weird decade, and this being as decisively not played as other obscure #2s from this time shows how people want to look back, for sure, but not that much. 

Also getting to #2 on the Luxembourg chart, Gladys Knight and the Pips (though the Pips are taking a break here; it’s just Gladys) certainly know what nostalgia and looking back are really about. Knight mentions ‘the good ol’ days’ in a way that show that while she knows the pleasures and satisfactions of looking back, they are themselves a bit fatuous and she wonders if the children of the mid-70s will look back at this time – a time of real hardship in Harlem and all of NYC as it was declared bankrupt – if even this time will be recalled with aw-c’mon-it-was-great-really fondness. 

This is a live recording from the Apollo; Knight’s audience is not exactly looking back at the same world as those who heard this song in the context of its movie. The classic line about “what’s too painful to remember we simply choose to forget” (thank you, Alan and Marilyn Bergman) is true, but I know from my own experience that it’s a privilege to ‘choose’ to forget something. It’s far more common (for me) to have to be vigilant about not recalling things and being active in forgiving people in my past in order to move forwards. Let the past be the past. Knight knows people will talk about how much better things were, but she also knows it’s a folly, a way of avoiding dealing with the here and now. 

But people who are living in tough times want fun – and if nostalgia is a way out, they will take it. The 70s was in a way a long process of trying to escape from itself, done in part by trying to remember. Though again, what is being remembered? 

Up next: It’s not how you do it, it’s just that you do it. 

*Nostalgia for the 50s was at a high-tide point round about now, what with American Graffiti more or less begetting Happy Days. The 70s would go back even further in the next year or so. 

** His real name is Joseph Montanez Jr. 

***The Pet Shop Boys song “Electricity” directly mentions Disco Tex – sung from the point of view of perhaps Neil Tennant himself?

Maximal to Minimal: Minnie Riperton: "Lovin You"

Now I feel we have reached a song that divides people to this day – is it good? Is it unbearably twee and girly and yuck? Certainly the latter was my reaction to it once I had grown up a bit, had my own radio and so on. For all I know this is how some still respond to it, because of Riperton’s high voice, because of the birds tweeting away, because they think music (particularly by women) must somehow involve suffering, and there is no suffering here. There is no struggle here, no abandonment, no imminent collapse or mourning. It is all love, optimism and joy.

I listen to this now and carefully note that this is a heroic tugboat of a song. Happiness with a strong voice (a coloratura voice with four octaves) gliding along emphatically as well as gracefully. She looks forward to the future, knowing in her heart it will always be springtime, there will always be birds chirping and sunshine and and....

Let me back up a bit in Minnie’s story. She met Richard Rudolph as a young woman in the group Rotary Connection, a band on the Chess label which had Charles Stepney producing and (rests gracefully on sadly non-existent chaise longue) among their albums there was one of covers from 1969 called Songs which kludged rock and soul together in a way that still sounds startling. Then two years later came Hello Love and the abundanza of “I Am The Black Gold Of The Sun.” Stepney really should have been nominated for Producer of the Year because WHAT WITH THE WHAT NOW and IT CAN BE DONE BUT ONLY I CAN DO IT reasons. But Producer of the Year didn’t exist then (Thom Bell was the first to win one in 1975).

In between these albums her first solo album, Come Into My Garden, was released in 1970 (produced by Stepney). Rotary Connection had had some bad luck (declining Woodstock, for instance, as it was too far away – instead they opened for The Stooges closer to home) and Stepney was determined to get Riperton’s voice heard. He tried, with the amazing “Les Fleur” but the label she was on (a subsidiary of Chess) was floundering and eventually everyone left for Los Angeles to make a fresh start of things, save for Riperton, who basically needed a rest and wanted to settle down, moving to Florida with Rudolph in 1972. However, Riperton was coaxed into getting back into music a year later (lured inevitably to Los Angeles).

Riperton started to work with Stevie Wonder as a backing singer, and then he produced her album Perfect Angel, where “Lovin’ You” appears. After the ornate and sometimes flat-out overwhelming Stepney productions, Wonder made things simple – just a few birds to add to the perpetual springtime of the song, with Riperton’s voice front and center, as opposed to being part of a chorus. It’s an easy song that Rudolph and Riperton wrote, a kind of lullaby to their baby Maya (you can hear Riperton sing her name at the end).

Is there something guileless about this song? I’m not sure there is, though it certainly can seem that way to hipsters who disdain open sentiment. The remarkable thing is what happened after this was a hit – she made more albums, continued to perform and at the same time had to live with the diagnosis of breast cancer, which doctors told her at first was going to end her life in six months. She had a double mastectomy and kept right on going, becoming a spokeswoman for breast cancer awareness and even recorded her last album while in great pain – presumably at her own insistence.

She died at the age of 31 in 1979, an indomitable force and an inspiration to many musicians (Mariah Carey, Kate Bush and of course Stevie Wonder) and the women who were also dealing with cancer at the time – not a taboo subject these days, but one hardly mentioned in the mid-70s. This song is a song of love, a heroic and happy song of the mother and wife, ultimately a song about being alive itself as a joy.

Next: There’s looking backwards and then there’s taking stock.

 

*Could someone at Ace Records do a Charles Stepney compilation please? It’s way overdue and there are all sorts of music he did while at Chess. Thanks!

 

Animal Crackers pts. 2 and 3: The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over The Lazy Dog: "Fox On the Run" Sweet and "Love Me Love My Dog" Peter Shelley

For the foreseeable future I am going to have to speed up some here at MSBWT in order to get out of the emotional ditch known as ‘the mid-70s’ – perhaps you feel the same way? Though when (for lack of a better word) landmark #2s come along, I will devote more time to them.

Thus, these two very different songs have to be together. They both point to something – the end of the Glam Slam and what happens next. The Sweet, a bit at a loss as to what to do (and politely told by their label to have another hit already), found a song on their album they wrote themselves, rejigged it and lo and behold it was a worldwide hit, just at the time when Glam was pretty much over and this tougher style was...no, I can’t use that word just yet.

They continued to exhaust themselves touring and relying on writing their own material, eventually hitting it big with “Love Is Like Oxygen” in 1978. That is the first time I heard them – however that song is no fun* whereas "Fox On The Run" (not as odd as The Hollies’ “After The Fox” of course) rocks and jumps and struts around its Glam victory lap before disappearing, all shiny and loud and stompy as ever.

Peter Shelley (I’m sure he’s heard all the comments) once wrote songs for Alvin Stardust, but as Glam faded he and Marty Wilde wrote about his dog instead, about how anyone interested in him should appreciate his dog too. Which is.... fine. Every sentiment can get written about, though in this case the song (an NME #2, posted below) has disappeared from the common memory just as “Sugar Candy Kisses” did, hiding somewhere on a European compilation which is lingering in an attic. The song is sincere at least (he appeared on Top of the Pops to perform this song with his loyal dog by his side) and it does add to the odd number of mid-70s songs about animals, including “Shannon” and “Mandy” (originally) and “Wildfire” which I think is about a horse that disappears into the West.**

These were anomalies for the time, little signals of the decade as it turned quite decisively to something else. Disco, reggae, these guys from Germany called Kraftwerk, the Rollers – this replaced Glam***, along with the Soulboy contingent who were into...well, anything from Bowie to jazz-funk to Northern Soul. Any casual look at the charts from this time will show that what was going on wasn’t boring, though if you were fifteen or so you might find a lot of what I just mentioned too...sophisticated? Safe? The very complicated situation (or you could say grown-up) of music meant certain sectors felt a bit ignored and left out.

This is addressed eventually, but for now there’s a homely man and his dog, and a fox disappearing over the horizon.

 

Next: The birds and the bees et les fleurs.

 

*It’s them trying to be New Wave, and failing miserably.

**Loudon Wainwright III’s “Dead Skunk In The Middle Of The Road” sort of fits in here, more or less.

***Not that Glam goes away entirely – there will always be echoes of it here and there, the most prominent of them showing up in the due course of time.

 

 

Animal Crackers pt. 1: The Goodies: "The Funky Gibbon"

“This House stinks of racism!” Cornelius Cardew, October 1981

“We had marvellous musicians on those sessions, but they couldn't get it. They knew what I was sort of trying to do, but I probably listened to that sort of thing more than they did, and it was driving us nuts, so we sent the drummer and the bass-player and the guitarist home. And I had a keyboard player called Dave Macrae, who'd played with Matching Mole and Robert Wyatt and people like that - governor player - and he started playing some clavinet, very Stevie Wonder-type feel to it, and I said, 'That's fine; could you do a synth-bass on it?'

And then I literally started whacking the top of the grand piano. So the actual rhythm-track of 'The Funky Gibbon' has only got me and Dave on it - he plays clavinet and synth-bass and we miked up the top of the piano. Then we got the horn section of Gonzales playing a Memphis Horns-type thing. It was lovely for me to be able to use musicians I liked and try to reproduce sounds which I also listened to. And then put the stupid song over the top of it. The idea that all that effort went into 'The Funky Gibbon'!” Bill Oddie. as quoted in Alwyn Turner's blog The Lion and the Unicorn.

I recently saw a comment about irony and music – its author very clearly stated that he did not appreciate it.  And you know what?  I do understand this point of view.  Most great music does not have a side; it is not trying to do two things at once, though it is possible to hear a song for some time and not know what it is really about.  In that case, you might get upset that you yourself did not realize this or you might project this anger on to the song itself or the person who told you. 

Most songs are very directly what they say they are.  However it is noticeable that anyone trying to express something by saying it with irony or in an indirect way is usually saying something the public at large may not want to hear.  It is entirely possible to enjoy a song and not get its irony*, and irony comes in many levels, of course...

I did not expect “The Funky Gibbon” to be in one of these spirals of irony, but it is the 1970s, when juxtapositions were all over the place.  The beginning is simple enough – jazz/funk fan Bill Oddie wanted his comedy troupe The Goodies to have a song for their hit tv show, and came up with something suitably dumb lyrically – the trio had an association with gibbons, doing a song called “Stuff The Gibbon” when they were on the BBC radio show I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again in the 1960s.  (I will also note that before they made total fools of themselves on The Goodies, Oddie, Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor had a tv show called Not So Much A Programme, More A Way Of Life which was a faux-documentary show that hardly ever gets mentioned.)

Oddie was on the fringe of the UK jazz scene and had the good fortune to work with the Mike Westbrook Band’s Dave Macrae and Gonzales’ horn section, as explained above.**  The song reached #2 on the Luxembourg chart and got them on Top of the Pops – I doubt if they expected the song to do so well, but the kids loved it and so it happened.  It’s a catchy song and you could imagine it spreading around to the parents of children, to certain ears....

...to the ears of a certain composer who had been in various modernist trenches for many years, doggedly loyal to political ideas which may or may not have helped his music; a man who led a group of musicians (the Scratch Orchestra) that worked bottom-up and was too avant garde to be mistaken for another early 1970s conglomeration of musicians, Centipede.***  By 1975 the composer was beginning to shift his thinking to writing popular hard-left songs for people to hear and be moved by (politically at least).  Take the ideas straight to the people, with language and melodies they can sing and understand.

Cornelius Cardew’s need to make overtly and transparently popular music was not perhaps what was expected of him, but it is what he (once a disciple of Stockhausen) wanted to do – and so in 1977 he wrote “Smash the Social Contract.”  This is the chorus:

So smash, smash, smash the social contract

It’s the cry of workers all over the land

No to class collaboration      

We’ve sorted out your lies and deception

                                

Sure to be a hit, right?  Well in a way, it is.  (And yes, the chorus’ melody sounds an awful lot like...”The Funky Gibbon.”)  Cardew’s instinct – that he had to bring his political ideas into popular music, not just live them with whatever free-jazz avant garde music he was doing for the greater good (as self-effacing/self-satisfying being in AMM or the Scratch Orchestra must have been) was in keeping with the times.**** I don’t know if he wanted this to be a hit or just something played to striking workers; I don’t even know if he knew about the Goodies, though having two sons the right age to be into them must have helped.  He seemed happy to compose lively tunes to, well, non-rhyming and just clunky but sincere revolutionary lyrics.  His being arrested for disturbing Parliament (during a speech by Enoch Powell, quoted above) shows how committed he was...I can't say his works have been hits, exactly, but Cardew is a fine example of English rebelliousness and I sense the establishment still isn't really ready for him yet.

 

I don’t know if Oddie ever heard this song, but the whole idea of the one song lifting from the other would have been (I’m guessing) more amusing to him than anything else.  You can’t really sue someone poor and Cardew at this point – while in demand and travelling around spreading the word – wasn’t exactly wealthy. 

 

And so we have the story of a dumb but reasonably catchy song entering the revolutionary atmosphere, fitting into a lively song about the deconstruction of the world as we know it. If this can happen, what else is possible?

 

Next up:  Exit, pursued by foxes.

 

*”Good Times” by Chic is the gold standard here.  Sadly I won’t be writing about it as it only reached #5 in the NME and regular charts. 

**I can imagine he wanted something between Rufus Thomas’ “Do The Funky Chicken” and Stevie Wonder’s “You Haven’t Done Nothin.’”

***Both groups had a short lifespan, both groups had (live, at least) Brian Eno as one of their members.  Coincidentally, the Oblique Strategies cards Eno helped to make appeared around this time:  go here to get a random card if you like... 

****Cardew, by the way, had no interest in punk – he called The Clash “reactionary” and I can’t imagine he had much time for Citizen Smith either.  This despite him looking a bit like Joe Strummer in the early 1970s.

A Cookie Crumbles: Guys 'n' Dolls: "There's A Whole Lot Of Loving"

I sometimes remember the 1970s as a mostly regular time, but with jarring oppositions too. It was in many ways a bluntly realistic era, but there were a lot of very determinedly happy things to balance that out, including the smiley button (I wore a variation on it myself as a child), not to mention a lot of cheery upbeat music, including this song.  Now, I could go down the path of picking a side in the perpetual tug-of-war between oh-so-sensitive singer-songwriters and the manufactured production line of producer/songwriters/singers*, but this song would not exactly fit in to the debate.  Oh it has songwriters (Chris Arnold, David Martin and Geoff Morrow) and singers (Tony Burrows and Clare Torry) but uh, wait a minute.  It came from a commercial?  For cookies?

Yes, we have reached the stage where a song from a McVitie's fruit shortcake tv ad can be recorded and released as a hit single.  The song itself has nothing to do with cookies and a lot to do with the natural hugeness of the United States (the songwriters were American).  It’s a proper song, not a jingle fleshed out.  The loving going on is abstract; the love could be for anyone, but it’s heartfelt and the wholesome goodness of the song’s sing-a-long style matches the Hoover Dam mention.  It could be straight out of a musical, though usually there’s a bit more plot in a stage song.

I don’t know if this was expected to be a hit – but it was.  So, what to do?  On very short notice, a group of male and female singers were put together so they could appear as Guys 'n' Dolls for promotional purposes – miming the song and dancing on variety shows (one of them being Julie Forsyth, daughter of Bruce – do you see how showbiz this is?)  There was no time to re-record the song with the new group, however. It worked, at least at first.  The main problem was that the lead singer of the group, Dominic Grant, didn’t sound anything like Tony Burrows.  He sounded more like a wannabe Scott Walker, completely pointless as the actual Scott Walker existed and at this time was plotting the return of The Walker Brothers.**  

The group had its problems as you might expect and two of the six were dismissed for (I am guessing) wanting to do things in a different way. Guys 'n' Dolls were essentially there to fill the gap before The New Seekers reconvened, before the Brotherhood of Man made this kind of music uncool for a whole generation.  They had one more hit in the UK but were far more popular in Europe, where they had hits right into the 1980s.

This scam, if you like, did have one unintended consequence.  A few years after their being relieved from Guys 'n' Dolls, Theresa Bazar – the female of the pair – approached the studio bass player, one Trevor Horn, to see if he would be interested in working with her and David Van Day, the male of the pair.  He was and so they did – as the duo Dollar.  And so from late 1974, the tiny seeds of something different were being sown. 

 Next up:  keep the red flag flying, kids!

                                        

 

*There are times when I don’t mind singer-songwriters, and then there are times I just want to avoid them as much as possible.  I don’t know how common this is amongst those who grew up in the 70s.

**There are certain voices that are inimitable, and Walker’s is one of them.  There’s a song by The Herd where the lead singer does a Walker-style vocal and it’s awful.  No wonder Peter Frampton left to start Humble Pie.

When Is A Song An Unsong?: Mac and Katie Kissoon: "Sugar Candy Kisses"

What is it like to listen to a song that has fundamentally been...forgotten? This song is essentially no longer part of what I (guess) is the musical “canon.” Of course this may not be a bad thing, but in a time when people seem to obsess over the past in a way which is unhealthy (look at the current album charts – how much of the music is from the past or are greatest hits from the past? A lot) it is rare.  If you are me, trying to find the new is increasingly difficult but the past seems to loom and even interrupt, making the new (and interesting) harder and harder to locate. 
                          

Do people deliberately like bad things?  Do people deliberately like mediocre things?  These were my first thoughts upon regarding this song.  But I have had a bit more time to think these things over.  This song is neither bad nor mediocre; but it is in a unique and unenviable position of being utterly forgotten.  Finding a 70s compilation with this song on it – and there are so many 70s compilations – is nearly impossible.  It has been virtually erased from music, been turned into a non-song.  An unsong, if you will.  This is a rare feat, as so much of radio (in the UK at least) is fixated on the 70s, as the album charts to this day show.  Almost all songs from the 70s which were big hits (that can still be played, of course) are still being given airtime somewhere (if not on Radio 2 then on 6 Music or elsewhere).  The overwhelming narrative is not just on the radio but on these compilations; for a song to only be available on a Disky (Dutch) box set is saying something.  It is saying only Europe still cares; the UK has effectively turned its back on this song and Mac and Katie Kissoon, denying its existence and leading us, dear reader, straight into the void that I somehow instinctively knew was at the heart of the 70s UK single charts.  With this song we are beyond the edge; we are in the world where things disappear, and must go forth carefully.  This is not The Fog as much as what The Fog has been hiding.

Of course, there are many songs which managed to get into the charts which are, for any number of reasons, no longer played – singles are, lest we ever forget, supposed to be evanescent things, things which strike at the moment acutely, moments that reach out to the listener directly as if taking up a conversation, adding their voices to the discussion. (By the way, while I remain ambivalent about the 70s personally, I think they are far more interesting than radio generally lets on.)  They can be good or bad or indeed mediocre, but they all hope (or the songwriters and performers do) to be at least remembered and even celebrated. The music industry loves (in part because this is how it survives) to remind us of the past, even if it is just the recent past of the NOW series. 

For a song to be left out of all this is a puzzle, particularly as these two were already part of the UK  musical world – Katie Kissoon had been recording since the 60s (under the odd name Peanut) solo and with her brother Jerry (stage name Mac).  This song was their big chance for a hit in the UK, and as it was as deliberately written* as The Rubettes’ “Sugar Baby Love” and it worked, getting to #2 on Radio Luxembourg and #3 in the UK.  (That a love song is being sung by siblings was something blithely ignored at the time I am guessing, especially since Donny and Marie were also popular.) 

I can think of a few reasons this song has been...left behind.  It sounds as if they are singing the song – their voices are genuine and sweet enough, but somehow still there is no punctum. It is, even by 1975 standards, a bit square; like a music box it dutifully revolves and then fades abruptly once it’s done.  It is professional music, done by professionals; Mac and Katie Kissoon are and have been very much part of the business as in-demand backing singers** since their heyday (mostly in Europe) was over.  They are doing their best with a song that is just too rote and routine to spark any actual fervour, the sort of song done on variety shows.

Ultimately this song shows that just being a hit is not enough.  Being in the charts at all as we have seen is not really enough either. There is something amiss about the charts themselves at this time – which I will address in due course.  A whole other thing is quietly and determinedly already existing and growing, music which is not perhaps as technically good as this...but that will not, in time, matter.  Alongside this in February 1975 Margaret Thatcher becomes leader of the Conservative party.  The end of “the 1970s” is not in sight...yet.


Next up:  a different pair with a different future.

                    

* The composer credits are Bickerton/Waddington, who also wrote "Nothing But A Heartache" by The Flirtations. 

**Katie is a favourite with Van Morrison in particular, though I should note she has also worked with the KLF and Dexy's Midnight Runners.. I should also note that as Mac and Katie they had the first crack at “Love Will Keep Us Together” before the more famous version, and had the US hit version of "Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep."

 

 

Radio Romance: Helen Reddy : "Angie Baby"

It is easy enough to state that this song was a transatlantic hit (#1 in late '74 and here #2 on Radio Luxembourg in February '75); it is also easy enough to state that the songwriter, Alan O'Day, worked on the lyrics for some time, even showing them to his therapist* to get his/her advice on them.

But what is the song about?  No one, even O'Day and Reddy, who you would think would know, don't.  This is actually rather refreshing, as how many songs actually seem to be flattened or reduced by having their meaning/origin explained?  It almost even takes away some of the power - the listener's power - in understanding and interpreting a song.  So my version of this song may not be yours, but here goes...


A girl loves music, loves it so much and thus it takes over her life.  Is she touched, a little crazy in the head?  For some reason she doesn't go to school but gets to stay at home, in her room** listening to her radio all day.  She whirls around with one song, one fantastic partner, after another. She is, as Sister Sledge will later attest, Lost In Music.  Whether she knows this or not isn't stated, but Reddy's voice is always present to hint, to insinuate, to make the case for Angie that she is a "special lady" and not one to be messed with. 

A girl's attachment to music is a strong thing.  The power of music matches her own power, which can be so great and yet so ephemeral, but always is there, and the radio becomes a means of possessing this power in a way, of having means to escape even if you are shut-in at home, it seems in the song for Angie's own good. 

But there's a boy, a ne'er-do-well, who wants Angie and looks in on her and sees only her body, of course.  He doesn't know about her "really nice place to go" but perhaps knows she's a bit "touched."  This boy wants and gets into her room, only to find himself, his very soul, spun around and somehow disappearing into the radio, never to be seen again.  The radio keeps him - he's not dead, exactly, but he can never escape.  She has a lover; she has her radio; she has her land of make-believe...or is it? 

Even here I can say that the radio, that music itself, somehow defends and protects Angie, that she who is so utterly devoted has her just reward, and that the confusing, fuzzy and emotionally and psychologically profound reactions a girl has to music are all here.  The way a guitar and drums and voice can hit your nerves, all your nerves, so that you become altered, even liberated, by what happens to you when you hear them.  The effect is instantaneous and all those radio stations who didn't need any encouragement to play this song (radio stations love songs which mention radios, after all) maybe didn't get the whole subversive sexual undertow here, or maybe they very much did. 

A girl and her radio; a radio romance.

Next up:  it's the Valentine's Day massacre.




*Hardly anything more 70s than doing this, though how much popular culture - through books, music, movies - was about young women who were deemed "odd" or "weird" or flat-out "crazy" in this decade has no doubt been written about, but also sort of written off.  The male/masculine version of the 70s has become the default understanding of the decade, with only a few women accepted as part of that male world, and this goes for all media, really.  I know this is a super-obvious point, but it always bears making.

** How much would I have loved to stay in my room say circa November 1981 and listen to the radio all day? A lot....

Very Strange Vibration: Gloria Gaynor: "Never Can Say Goodbye"

There are few moments better than the one where confusion and doubt are conquered, even eliminated.  We are in disco when this particular and precise emotion happens to make sense, as disco is about that joy, a joy that magnetic and crushing and inexplicable, an energy that cannot be denied.  That it comes in with Max Roach-inspired drumming, swirling strings and an I’ve-lived-this-and-we-can-share-it vocal from Gloria Gaynor (who sounds as caught up in the song as anyone) is just as well.  We are far from the laid-back pleasures of "Rock Your Baby" or the get-down Miami horn blasts of KC & the Sunshine Band here.  Gaynor is singing to be heard, and that this is a Jackson 5 song seems to make no impression on her whatsoever.  She is making this her own.

What those who bought this en masse may or may have not known was that “Never Can Say Goodbye” was the middle of a trilogy from her album of the time – a “mix” really – by Tom Moulton*, which starts with “Honey Bee” and ends with “Reach Out I’ll Be There.**”  This mix was the first to appear on an album – let’s just pause to ponder this – and capitalized on Moulton’s ability as a mixer to really get into the songs – not in a complicated way, just in a way that was supposed to elongate the song, and have Gaynor’s voice in your head *even when she wasn’t audibly there*. Dancing in your head? That the very male world of disco (I have been reading Peter Shapiro’s book on it and early discos were definitely male territory, with disco becoming a more female-friendly phenomenon later on) should have a woman taking on Levi Stubbs’ aria of a song and making it sound like the veritable audio version of the last helicopter out of Vietnam is, to say the least, quite something. 

The power of the song is to worry away in the verses and then dismiss these worries in the chorus with a rising "I love you ssssooooooooooo" that has in it right there a real vulnerability/strength moment which disco (when it wasn't just exhorting you the listener to dance, which it often did) does so well.  Can you stop?  Is stopping on the dancefloor possible?  Tom Moulton didn't want you to stop, and put this together with oh say Eddie Kendricks' "Girl You Need A Change Of Mind" and it won't stop.

 

Next:  A radio, a woman, a man. 

 *Tom Moulton is the first person to use a 12" single to do the pressing of a song, giving the song more space to breathe, sound better and of course have more time to let the song be itself. That he found this out by accident is charming. 

**We are not done with Motown yet and in a few entries the topic of jazz will appear, with Motown popping up unexpectedly.

The Right Time: John Holt: "Help Me Make It Through The Night"

One of the contributing factors towards 1975 being the amazing year it was has to be the general openness of the charts.  The old stalwarts of pop and rock were still around, but new things, new permutations of things, abounded in the early 70s.  In short, anything went, and amidst the joy/chaos there were more than a few songs that showed vulnerability and a slight sense of loneliness and even tiredness.  Country and reggae were old friends, and here they sound just right together.

By early 1975 the high that Trojan Records had been riding was coming to an end, but label star John Holt was wise/lucky enough to have a hit album 1000 Volts of Holt (the cover screams early 70s, right down to the paisley/plaid combination which Holt pulls off because star power) come out before the financially-struggling Trojan collapsed altogether in May, bought out by Saga Records. (This could be, as is suggested in Bass Culture, that the English kids who dug reggae c. 1971 were no longer interested in it, it being passé.)

“Help Me Make It Through The Night” was released in late 1974 and got to #2 on the Luxembourg chart as a crossover reggae/lovers rock hit that was solid musically and sung with warmth and ease by Holt.  That it was so sophisticated was due to the English producer  Tony Ashfield, who had been involved in Jamaican music for some time and had worked with Holt on a previous album, The Further You Look.  That was 1972 though, and while it was a big hit in Jamaica it wasn’t elsewhere – hence Ashfield and Holt decided to do another album, one with proven songs like this one, which had already been a hit for Gladys Knight & The Pips as well as others, including a reggae version by Duke Parker.  The song suited his voice and modest mien* and its devil-may-care-desperate lyrics somehow work in with the longing in his voice.  I wonder if this song would have made it to number one had all the shops it sold in – not just Boots or Woolworths – were counted?

In the meantime, Ashfield and Holt split over differences, Holt continuing to record in Jamaica both in the lovers rock style and doing more political songs.  This song marks a moment when someone who is a worldwide star finally gets his due, and had things been different...

 

Next up:  Music, non-stop!

 

 

                                       

 

*Holt turned down a certain song which author Max Romeo eventually had to record himself.   Ahem.

Remembering the Forgotten: Ralph McTell: "Streets of London"

We have now arrived at the end of 1974; we are about to enter the then to-some scary area known as 1975.  A time of big decisions and already there's a sense that whatever will become of this decade will be worked out now.  The Nixon era has already ended and the Vietnam War is drawing to a close.  In the UK there’s the growing sense of unease coupled with two events that are responses to that unease.  This unease continues to this day and in fact its crushing and terrible logic is attempting to be worked out even as I write this.  There is hope however; there is always hope....

 

"Streets of London" is the sort of song that sticks; McTell is not singing of any general sense of loneliness but about specific people and to a specific person - a friend of his who was a heroin addict.  It is the realistic loneliness that stands quite opposite to the song which kept it at #2, Mud's "Lonely This Christmas."  It is a gentle, near classical song with a touch of folk; country blues, even.  The power of it is the musical simplicity which acts as a welcoming warm hug of a frame around the four people depicted, all of them alone, all desolate.

McTell's voice is warm too, familiar, as opposed to the (at this point) recently departed Nick Drake, who was more unworldly and yes, seductive.  McTell is taking the listener by the hand into the streets of London, starting at the Surrey Street Market in Croydon (where he was raised), ending on the Thames by the Seaman's Mission with a veteran (WWI? WWII?) who has been cast aside, just as the bag lady and the T.S. Eliot/Beckettian figure who does nothing but drink tea all night to pass the time.  These are all people who are alive but whom society does not want to recognize, who are yesterday's news. The addict is gently shown those who are lost, in darkness, wandering and sadly friendless.  I would like to think that some heard this song and it opened their hearts, or as McTell wanted to do, changed their minds.  Not through preaching but through the powerful examples that especially at Christmastime are a reminder to look out for others and to be more considerate.  That is the real meaning of the season as it happens.

That it took three times, three different recordings, to make this song a hit shows how sometimes a song just has to appear at the right time (and in the right way) to make its impact.  It has become a standard folk song (recorded first in '69, produced by Gus Dudgeon) so much so that punk (ah yes punk - we'll get to that in enough time) band the Anti-Nowhere League did their own cover, with altered lyrics (mais oui) "Let me grab you by the hair and drag you through the streets of London, I'll show you something that'll really make you sick" was heartily approved of by McTell himself. The song is McTell's main legacy, one he has accepted as his gift to the world, even as he continues to write and record albums to this day.  Can the world change because of a song?  Can it have an impact beyond itself? The answer is, as always, with the listener.

 

Next up:  Lord have mercy!

You've Come A Long Way: "Rock Me Gently" and "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet"

Now then, where was I?....

You may or indeed may not know that I have had a long break from this blog as my husband was diagnosed and tested and then finally operated on last year.  It was a big and rarely-done operation and was, thank goodness, a success.  I spent a lot of last year either at work, shopping or in the process of visiting him in hospital, which I did nearly daily until I knew he was okay physically and mentally.  2018 was a hot summer; a summer of record; but I was blanked out by the end of the day, able eventually to listen to music (impossible at first), eat dinner, rest.  And then phone early the next morning to see how he was overnight, and it would then all start over again.

Now however, he is back at work, and my brave (possibly), unheralded and amazingly unrivalled blog can continue.  If you are new here – hello!  I hope you like it and have time to catch up with what I have written already.  And if you have read it before, you know how it goes...

It just so happens that I left off at a place very few people want to be stranded in – The Fog.  Or, if you are a psychogeographer, the liminal period.  Late 1974 was confusing and contentious - the Glam Slam era was virtually over, and disco had yet to really catch on.  Naturally it was a time (as ever) when record companies wanted hits, they wanted something catchy and oh well who cared what the lyrics were about as long it had a decent chorus and some good hooks.  The sexual revolution?  Who upstairs approved of that though?

Leave it to the Canadians, as always, to inadvertently push things forward.  Bachman-Turner Overdrive, the prairie kings of HRS, were working on Not Fragile and someone from the company came along to see if there were any obvious singles from the album.  Nope.  Well what else do you have, guys?  They had a song they only used to play to warm up which no one saw as being anything great or even okay – it was just a crappy song to them.  The company man knew it would be a hit though, so “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” was duly recorded, deliberate stuttering put in by Randy as a tribute to his brother.  And so it was a hit, this song about a naive young man who has fallen in love with a more experienced woman, and hooee is he having fun.  The stuttering works as a way of showing his shock, his pleasure – and the simplicity of the cowbell-rockin’ song does too.  That it’s a song about a sexually assertive woman and a man most happy and even greedy (“I took what I could get” he says, after “any love is good love” which actually gives the song a risqué element beyond mere greed) is very quietly revolutionary.   He is not resentful or bitter or neurotic about being the one who has things to learn – quite the opposite.  This isn’t “Summer The First Time” – the implication, as much as BTO can be bothered, is that they are equals, save for this one thing. Listen to the bass and you will see how sexy and knowing the song is, without being tiresome.

 

Andy Kim’s “Rock Me Gently” is a similar song, though it was very much intended to be a single, one that Kim had to finance and release on his own label as no one else was interested in it.  It was a gamble so desperate that on the b-side there was no time for another song, just the instrumental part of the a-side.  That both were hits (the b-side got airplay on US R&B stations) shows how gambles can indeed pay off sometimes.

Kim – and I’ve had a lot of time to consider this – sounds a lot more experienced than the prairie-boy narrator from BTO.  He wears linen and good cologne; he knows about art and music and yet is not a boring hipster.  He is a together dude and thus when he comes across a woman he loves and she wants...something he’s a bit unfamiliar with, he can be generous and gracious.  He knows about liberated women, the sexual revolution, and he’s perfectly fine with it, as long as it’s a gentle one.  Polite.  Thoughtful.  Sends flowers.  That kind of revolution!  Which was happening now that the 70s was busy putting the 60s ideology into actual practice. The lyric “Don’t you know that I have never been loved like this before” is sung in a way that it could be just that, or you could hear a little smile in it, implying....whatever you think it means. 

Both of these songs went to #2 here in the UK, and #1 in the US; there is a sweetness and humility and generosity in these songs that are sexy, a counterpoint in the UK at least to the usual idea of this era being something scary and most certainly macho.  

 

Now then, I should note that I have skipped some songs as I didn't really *feel* the need to write about them - "Wombling Merry Christmas" being one, "Far Far Away" by Slade being another and there's a Rollers song in there too - and of course "Killer Queen" by Queen I wrote about over at Then Play Long.  This is so I can better focus on the wonders of 1975, which I will be doing as usual but with the addition of the odd album or two* when needed to give a greater context to what was an exciting time musically (unlike some people who were just bored by music at the time).  Those of you who know what 1975 meant in UK terms will be waiting for June; in some ways we are living in the opposite of that time, when the UK said yes.

 

Up next:  a hunky folksinger takes you on a tour.

 

 

*Not in a TPL sort of way, but more as a sidebar, as such.

Searching For Light: Jimmy Ruffin: "What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted"

"I'm outspoken, I wasn't part of the clique." - Jimmy Ruffin


You may well be wondering what a Motown song from 1966 is doing in the 1974 chart, but as it stands, British radio has had its struggles with Motown for some time. 

In 1966, "What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted" got to #10, at the point late in the year where the tide for new, interesting music was turning from the UK and back to the US; just months before the pirate stations were to close, and Radio One was to begin.  In the late 60s a reissue series of Motown singles that were never big hits when they were first issued began via Dave Godin*, who worked for the distribution arm for Motown in the UK; and Tony Blackburn and Alan Freeman were only too happy to play these alongside the fresh Motown songs, in a belief that these songs deserved more airplay, sales and general respect.**

This song was rereleased (possibly by Godin; I am not sure of this) and got to #2 on the Luxembourg chart, #4 on the UK chart.  Which is only right for such a (and I don't use this word loosely) majestic song. 

And yet it has, as I keep thinking, something a bit rough about it too.  Ruffin grew up poor, singing in the church alongside his brother David, and went into the army for a time, then worked in a factory, and after an injury took up work at Motown, singing for sessions, doing singles that were on the Motown subsidiary Miracle, while his brother joined The Temptations (a job he had turned down).  He heard this song, written by William Witherspoon, Paul Riser and James Dean, and heard The Spinners were to record it - the song resonated with him, and he managed to convince them that he should record it instead. 

Though not on the single version, there is a spoken introduction:

A world filled with love is a wonderful sight.

Being in love is one's heart's delight.

But that look of love isn't on my face.

That enchanted feeling has been replaced.

 

The song was produced by Smokey Robinson, and Ruffin's voice is dignified, direct, unironic.  And the Andantes and Originals are there too, because this is one man's witness to a crowd, a congregation; though it is not a protest song explicitly, there is an inescapable sense that what he has suffered has been suffered by others, due to the many voices, voices who have growing needs but only experience is of an "unhappy ending."  Ruffin didn't want to be part of a group, and his tenor voice is too distinctive to blend in happily.  It is a voice of a man who is average, but outspoken; a man who went to the UK and Europe to work when things dried up in the US. 

The misery in this song is absolute - he is "cold and alone" and while he sees love growing everywhere for others, it does not exist for him.  There are The Andantes and The Originals testifying to this, and there they are encouraging him to keep going, to keep searching in the darkness for light;  the song's title, which is something of a question, is that the brokenhearted either give up to the bleakness or they have the faith (have to have it) to find a way out, to find someone who will care.  He is a seer; he has visions; and at first these are troubling, but he also walks towards something positive, even if he can't see it, he knows it's there.

Was this a hit in the UK of 1974 as people wanted to feel acknowledged in their hapless sense of "always moving but going nowhere"? Well, we are in the time of The Fog and the bewilderment many must have felt is echoed in this song. But the narrator is not going to "make do and mend" or "keep calm and carry on" or anything like that; he is restless, he is in pain, and passive suffering is of no use to him.  Though he may be anguished, he is active; as active as the opposite Motown song of the time, "Reach Out I'll Be There."

That this song would be covered by Dave Stewart and Colin Blunstone*** in 1981 as an anti-Thatcher protest and be a hit (I like to think Ruffin appreciated this; it was his favorite cover version) is one thing to note; that Ruffin did a version of it in Italian called "Se Decidi Cosi"**** is another.  It was made a hit all over again for Paul Young in 1991, and memorably performed in the 2002 Motown doc Standing In The Shadows Of Motown by Joan Osborne. 

But what of Motown on British radio now?  (By this I mean 60s Motown, of course.)  Tony Blackburn does a "soul and Motown" show on digital radio and it is mixed up with random 80s soul and he no doubt plays some on his other shows (he has so many now and Motown is always a part of them).  But where else does it get played?  Is it doomed simply to be comfort food radio for those who remember being young at the time?  (Always with the idea, looming in the background, that everything has gotten worse since, including the music?) 

As the 60s disappear from the radio*****, Motown persists, but it is only as a sound, not as a meaning or as anything other than "the hits."  Northern Soul still gets played, I suppose, but what of Deep Soul, that of which Dave Godin was most proud?  That is perhaps too much for UK radio, and as so much US music tends to be, left to specialist broadcasters, while regular radio clings for dear life to the chart, as if to keep utter chaos from breaking out.  So much fine music being missed out, yet again; and what will become of it?

As for Jimmy Ruffin, he sang on miner's strike benefit single "Soul Deep" by the Council Collective as he knew about the struggles of the working man; and he would have had another hit with Stock, Aitken & Waterman's "Roadblock" but his vocal was left off to make it more mysterious.  But this is the song that has persisted; and whatever the cause, I am glad it got a second chance in the UK, much as Ruffin did.

Next up:  back to Canada.



*Dave Godin also coined the terms Northern Soul and Deep Soul, more on which anon.

**"Dancing In The Street" originally got to #28 in the UK in 1964 (when "Little Red Rooster" by The Rolling Stones was #1 - Dave Godin didn't think much of that, I bet); but with the push of Godin et. al., it got to #4 in 1969, for example.

***It was originally supposed to be Robert Wyatt, but he was busy working with Scritti Politti at the time. 

****"So If You Decide"

*****Radio Two's Sounds of the 60s now comes on at 6am on Saturday and is determinedly upbeat cheery stuff, as presented by Tony Blackburn.  The previous host, Brian Matthew, was dismissed only a few weeks ago and recently was taken to hospital, and mistakenly reported as dead by the BBC.  As of this writing he is still alive.