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

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."

Baffled Dancers: Cat Stevens: "Matthew And Son"

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.

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

"...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...

Right Hand, Left Hand: Pat Boone: "Speedy Gonzales"

The world of music, as we have seen so far, can be a puzzling and wondrous thing to behold; voices, concepts and ideas get passed back and forth, noises and mistakes and casual asides become more, not less, important over time. A success for one person of a certain...persuasion can be funneled to make something else entirely different happen, without much public knowledge.

And so it is here; a song wherein the singer is upstaged by a far more interesting and charismatic cartoon character (Speedy sounds more human, weirdly, than Boone does), a song bought by and large by kids and summer-crazed parents of kids (it was number two for a good while) generated enough funds (along, to be fair, with all of Boone's other hits) to start Impulse! jazz label. To put it mildly, I do not think Boone's children had any idea - how could they? - of what their pence and ha'pennys were helping to create; but there it is.

Let me be personal for a moment here - I grew up in a jazz household, so I grew up as a little girl looking at Impulse! spines with their warm orange glow attracting me to look at their vivid covers; and even then I could sense that these were all albums worth my parents' time and mine as well, if I ever got around to them. I feel that the one area of music from this time (by August of '62 they had been married for two and a half years or so and I still wasn't a glint in either of their eyes) that simply trumps most popular music is jazz; whether it's Gil Evans & Orchestra, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus Charlie Hayden and the Liberation Music Orchestra, Yusef Lateef, Pharoah Sanders....in short, if it was avant garde jazz you wanted in the 60s, Impulse! was the label to watch.

There are probably some who think that taking the money raised by Boone and starting a label (done in 1960, but by the time of "Speedy Gonzales" it was starting to make a name for itself) was simply poetic justice - this is the man who took the punctum out of "Tutti Frutti", after all; and now the yang was merely catching up with the yin, so to speak. It is also a reminder that if something - here it is the 50s and all it stands for - is waning (this is the last time I write about Boone) then something else will not exactly takeits place, but a new vehicle will be built so that those who want to escape from the bossy, square Boone and into more interesting spaces and dimensions can do so. The 60s will start to flood in soon, after the hot summer of '62 recedes; and about to enter the chart is a song (I will mention it when I get to the number two it stops) that would give even John Coltrane a sense that not all in the charts was sophomoric or dull; the future is indeed here, orbiting the globe.

A Small Break To (Re)Introduce Some Basic Ideas

I am now going to take a wee break in the proceedings here to tidy up a few things – in short, to mention some things that have been rattling around in my mind.

One of them is to say very directly that the reason the songs on this blog don’t have marks – x number of stars, a grade, a mark out of ten – is that these songs have already been saddled (if I can put it that way) with a number. That is more than enough. When I was growing up, I read Creem magazine and I wish I’d copied out & memorized the late great Rick Johnson’s reasoning against giving out marks; he basically thought they were useless and that the writing should be the thing. I realize this goes against the numbers-obsessed world of music writing, and that grades are fun to argue about…but when I listen to a song, I am not a judge in an Olympic sense, let alone a dog show one or even one at a local fair, where pies and cakes are put into competition. Derek Bailey once was interviewed (in)famously for The Wire's Invisible Jukebox and his comments on how “recording’s fine if it wasn’t for fucking records” really hit home – his basic approval of all records on the list as okay, coupled with his greater interest in playing and messing around, put all records into perspective for me. I will be enthusiastic (none of the songs so far has really grabbed me, I’ll admit) and I will protest (I’ve done that already), but the main thing here is to look at these songs and give them some time and space in which to live, and giving them yet another number won’t help them do that.

My mentioning of New Pop has prompted me to also give notice that since I want to write a book about it, I should give it time once in a while as well, in this case, the very beginnings of any musical idea – the grounds from which it sprang, figuratively and literally. When the charts began (can it be a coincidence? Hmm) the future movers and shakers of New Pop started to be born. However, a few were born beforehand – specifically, Robin Scott, Mike Chapman (both spring of ’47), not to mention fellow producers Martin Rushent (’48) Martin Hannett (’48), Trevor Horn (’49) and the ever-wiki-elusive Alan Tarney, who was born under a rock in Adelaide some time in the early 50s. As all Smash Hits fans know, both Adam Ant and Neil Tennant were born in ’54, and Green Gartside and Phil Oakey were born in ’55…New Pop is well and truly on its way, even though most of those concerned so far are babies or children who grew up in a world before rock, but would be well-versed in both pop and rock by the time they wrote their first song or produced their first single.