Endless Quest: Charlie Rich: "The Most Beautiful Girl"

This is one of those songs that takes me back to a time – very roughly, when it was a big hit, a time I don’t recall that well, but this song crossed all kinds of boundaries on the radio, so the song’s easy for me to remember – and a more recent time, the 90s, when I was socially active with a bunch of good folks whose interests and obsessions and completist tendencies had almost nothing to do with mine.  I don’t talk about the Serial Diners much in my writing about music as I didn’t have a lot of experience with them that had a musical focus; they were collectively bound by a dining in a different restaurant every Friday night at 6 or so, and beyond that it was up to the group as to what would happen next.  A movie?  A games night?  A night where we’d just wander around, not up to much?  It all depended, but no two people’s musical tastes were really the same, so going to a concert was never on the agenda, not at even a small, affordable club on Queen St. West.  Why pay for fun when we could convene with a tape recorder and microphone and bell and do improv comedy at someone’s house? 

And so, within the group my own musical epiphanies and enthusiasms were mostly bottled up.  I had a Walkman and listened to CFNY by day and the easy-listening classical station at night to help me get to sleep, but found myself really isolated within the group, forever trying and failing to find common ground with anyone besides one person…and there were a lot of people in the Diners back then, men and women, older and younger than me.  I found myself at a loss once in being asked by one main member what made Jimi Hendrix so special; again at a loss when another one (who was courting me at the time, or about to) didn’t know who Al Green was; and long before I pretty much stopped attending the Diners on an even semi-regular basis (c. 1999) I was disheartened by an event that I will write about in the fullness of time*. 

 

This song I remember mentioning to yet another Diner and she didn’t know it and I attempted to sing it – my voice certainly isn’t like Rich’s – and she still didn’t know it.  I was a little puzzled**, since the song hits the bullseye for American music in so many ways – and it was a #1 hit in the US and Canada, obviously a number two in the UK, too – I remember hearing it on a jazz station at the time.  Rich’s ‘countrypolitan’ music finally saw him succeed in the charts after two decades in the business. . 

Rich was a jazz and r&b guy who wasn’t considered ‘bad’ enough for Sam Phillips at Sun Records, so he worked there as a session musician and songwriter, instead of being one of the Big Five – Elvis, Jerry Lee, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins  and Johnny Cash.  He had the odd hit here and there on one label and another, including at Phillips (“Lonely Weekends”) and at another with “Mohair Sam.”  He considered himself a jazz pianist at heart and wasn’t really getting anywhere*** until producer Billy Sherrill (who helped Rich to write this, along with Rory Michael Bourke and Norris Wilson) turned him into a country crooner, a man with clear experience in his voice, a man who’d been there and back and didn’t need a damn souvenir.  His success came when, as “The Silver Fox” this (and other songs, notably “Behind Closed Doors”) were hits not just in the world of country music but in pop charts, too.

The story is just about the oldest one in pop; he said something he shouldn't have, she leaves, he wakes up in the dawn to the knowledge he's wrong and is looking for her, his "sun" - the one thing he has worth having in the world.  His casualness (starting a song with "Hey") isn't far from The Chi-Lites' "Have You Seen Her" though you get the idea that Rich isn't about to go asking anyone who hasn't had the same experience themselves.  He's not about to talk to kids in the park about her; this is one guy speaking to another in a bar, a truckstop, the laundromat.  He asks if she's crying (not because she misses him too, but because he caused her such pain - this narrator knows he's in the wrong) - and that if she has been spotted, this intermediary should go and tell her that he needs her.  That's it, but the solemnity and maturity back it up, and I can imagine many a man hearing this song and maybe realizing, before it's too late, just how brutal and cold being alone is, that this song is one long exercise in hopeful hopelessness, that being without her is much, much worse than being with her.

As a girl when I heard this I didn't really understand how someone could be the "most" beautiful; someone either was beautiful or she wasn't.  How could he ever find her if there are so many beautiful women, I thought, this man is on a long, long quest.  And knowing now that beauty is also in the eye of the beholder, his quest seems even more hapless, that short of being like The Bee Gees and having a literal picture of her to show to others, or phoning the cops, he's never going to find her.  But the real story is the terrible gulf between the cold morning of his loss and the warmth she brings, as if there were no spring or fall in his life, just summer or winter.  And for his sins, he'll spend the rest of time asking for her, trying to describe the indescribable...

Next up:  the return of Glam Slam, football and the Fog.  

   

*It wasn’t the night I couldn’t go to the 8th  anniversary of the Diners as the guy who didn’t know about Al Green and I had an arrangement wherein I’d miss the dinner but get to hang out afterwards.  I did show up, feeling…odd, and when I asked the Diners if anyone knew anything about Stereolab, no one did.  It was 1997, and I’d just discovered them via a tv commercial for the new VW Bug, so it wasn’t like I was all that hip.  But it was alienating, nevertheless.  Something  much, much worse, however,  had already happened years before…and I will get to it on Then Play Long. 

 **There were plenty of times I'm sure she was puzzled by my musical knowledge (or lack of it) too.

***His exhaustion at being an outsider for so long can be heard in the b-side of this single, "I Feel Like Goin' Home"; this is the demo version.

A Man's Got To Do What A Man's Got To Do: Frankie Laine: "Where The Winds Blow" and "Blowing Wild"

Though these two are not chronologically exactly the next two in line, I felt it imperative to put them together as two songs that were both follow-ups to "I Believe" that show the other side of Frankie Laine - not one that is strong and confident, always, but still passionate and (somewhat) doomed.

"Where The Winds Blow" is an outlaw song, only we have no idea what the outlaw has done, just that the sherriff is after him and will 'bind him' to an oak and dangle him low - why? Did he kill someone? We have no idea, but if it's a hanging offence then no wonder he has to keep going through the rain and snow into the hills, he can't even see his gal as he has no time to lose, and he doesn't want her to go with him. He is seriously on the run and his fate is to keep wandering until he can get out of town, out of the county, maybe even out of the state. Will he run and run, or hide? Even he doesn't know. He has to be brave as he has no choice, and he doesn't want to be pushing up any daffodils anytime soon. The music is slow, the background singers give it a sense of gravity and awe - because it's Laine singing it, it's hard to believe he has done something wrong - surely someone so noble is innocent? Westerns often turn on the smallest of moments, but there are always clear good guys vs. bad guys. It's hard to think of Laine as being bad.

"Blowing Wild" is the name of a movie about oil and desperation (all movies about oil tend to also be about desperation, if not insanity). Marina is the name of the woman who has trapped our noble singer in a web and while he once escaped her, here she is again, and he wants to be free - free, as far as I can tell, from not just her but the black gold as well. If Laine sounded determined before, now he is nearly manic, cursed and pleading and the backing singers sound like they are trying to give a strong notion of the hero's slim grasp on sanity, going up and down vertiginously - as if the singer's life were at stake. 1953 was Laine's year; I am guessing both of these songs were successful in part due to coming in the wake of "I Believe" but they show how haunted and blunt he could be.

One more thing: rock and roll (which still doesn't exist) often likes to laud the lonely, the brave - in short, the outlaw. But here we have two songs full of angst and longing, by men who have no way out. They are proud, they have their dignity (just), but there is none of the rock arrogance about these men. They have done what they had to do, and will have the nerve and nobility to continue, no matter what, even if it means death. Such four-square solidity can only be admired, but not envied.