Ka-Boom!: The Sweet: "Hell Raiser"

And now we return to The Sweet - the band that came up through bubblegum and wanted to be a rock band and found themselves, at this time, with one metaphorical foot in each camp.  Unlike Slade, David Bowie or T. Rex, The Sweet didn't write their own songs and thus were at the mercy of the fairly new songwriting team of Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman.  As I previously wrote about them, they had to do songs like "Funny Funny" and "Co-Co" and probably felt like adults trying to ride tricycles; but clearly Chinn & Chapman sensed in the band's harmonies and attitude something a bit...de trop.  Something a bit beyond the aggressive workingman's pride of Slade or regal foppery of T. Rex - The Sweet were inherently silly because of their split circumstances, and that awkwardness feeds into their best songs. 

"Hell Raiser" was their next single after their own hysterical "Block Buster!" - and of course it's loud, starting out with a fiery yell of lust and going out for blood afterwards.  This isn't exactly Black Sabbath, but damned if it doesn't sound like punk rock as well (I can only wonder what the future Joey Ramone made of it).  The song is about a girl who is nothing but trouble (she sounds as if she is a one-woman riot, nearly) who has "ultra sonic eyes" and who is a literal bombshell, a "natural born raver" - a huge female that the singer is scared of, as much as attracted to.  "Look OUT!" Brian Connelly yells at the start, as if the girl is indeed about to send her own special shockwaves out, stunning all the men as she shakes her "ooh."

That the lyrics have the narrator telling his mom (who wants him to get this girl) that whenever she touches him it feels like he's "burning in the fires of hell."  Thus this whole song is him trying to explain how intense this girl is and how in turn he feels; this isn't so much a song about thinking as much as feeling, the ferocity of the song matching all this lust-fear-lust stopping-and-starting.  The song leaps out at you in the best Glam Slam tradition, singing directly to those boys who know a girl just like this (or maybe wish they did).  The song ends with an explosion, which could stand for so many things (I will let you, dear reader, figure out what it means).  Chinn and Chapman and The Sweet, with this song, balanced the rock and bubblegum perfectly - the hysteria of the song melds with the supersonic speed and they sing sincerely - well, as sincerely as possible, all things considered.  (It certainly sounds more grounded in reality than the song which kept it off the top - the breakdown-inducing "Tie A Yellow Ribbon" by Tony Orlando and Dawn.) 

When I next return to The Sweet, the song won't be about a girl who is a riot - it will be about a riot.  Well, it is the early 70s.

Next up:  we are all one, man.

Hang Up Heartbreak: Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show: "Sylvia's Mother"

This is a song of desperation; a song of communication that has broken down so much that the narrator, desperate as he is, really has no idea if anything he is trying to get across is getting through. 

You don't have to be Marshall McLuhan to figure out how frustrating this is, and the narrator is practically driven to a nervous breakdown in just trying to say something to one Sylvia Avery, a woman he has loved and lost, presumably to the man who "lives down Galveston way."  There is no deeper indication in Shel Silverstein's lyrics as to why Sylvia is leaving so quickly, only that she is - packing up, getting her umbrella, off in time to catch the train, all while the hapless narrator is singing.  The operator (who is yet another stumbling block in the narrator's way) keeps demanding money, which means he's in a phone booth somewhere, feeding yet more dimes as he tries to at least say goodbye.  But he doesn't get to do that; Sylvia's mom doesn't let him talk to Sylvia as she might start crying and thinking she should stay, and there's simply no time for that.  I can see Sylvia's mom - perhaps a little old lady type, very nice but distracted; but overall protective of her daughter's happiness. That Sylvia is happy is the first stab in the narrator's heart; perhaps he knows she is with someone else, is engaged, or maybe has found out that she is leaving home and wants to say goodbye, and then the learns the news - he's history.  There can be no rekindling here, no second chance.  He asks and asks to have Sylvia hear his goodbye, to no avail - she's too busy.  And so he gets her mom; a nice lady, nice enough - and this is the last straw I feel, for the narrator - to tell him that he can phone again when he likes, though it is highly unlikely he ever will.  His whole purpose in life is this girl, this Sylvia, and she is disappearing from it, at great haste. 

Anyone who has ever dumped someone will know how Sylvia feels.  She is happy, and that happiness is so big that talking to her ex is literally too small a thing for her to do; she is washed clean of him and does not need his goodbye.  Indeed even if it was the other way around, her new happiness eclipses any sorrow she may have felt, and his wanting to start anything up again would be met by a pity, a pity that only now, when he is losing her, is he trying to get her back.  In any case she is eager to get to her new life and love as soon as she can, and has no time to be persuaded, to maybe feel different.  There was a time for that, but it has passed; and so the hapless narrator (who has run out of change, or so I always think, by the end of the song) is left to cry and hang up the phone, walking out into that same rain, not even knowing if Sylvia herself knows or cares that he called.  That he can't go see her in person - or didn't - is maybe an indication that seeing her again would be too much; the breakup wound is still too raw for him to handle.  And now this.  It is hard not to feel for him, and anyone who has called to get someone's mom or dad explaining that their son or daughter is with someone else will know the emptiness and scant consolation in that conversation.  The narrator is desperate for one last word, but he gets the wrong female of the house; and so his hopes are dashed. 

I will return to Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show in a few years - sadly with a song unlike this, but I will discuss that one when it comes.  I should say that the songs I know by them best are the ones I heard growing up listening to Dr. Demento - "Freakin' at the Freakers Ball" and "The Cover of the Rolling Stone" - also songs by Silverstein and much more indicative of the band's genial strangeness and good humor, to be a kind of post-hippie band for the generation of those who were to grow up to be not yuppies but those determined to keep something of the 60s alive, however they could.  That they would have their greatest successes once they lost their wackiness shows that the post-hippie generation somehow either mellowed out or began to focus on something else, something or someone more meaningful.  (Even though Dr. Hook & The Medicine show were based in New Jersey, I think of that post-hippie crowd and Chez Panisse and Alice Waters come immediately to mind.)  But for now, with Silverstein's songs, they are one facet of the early 70s, one that doesn't take itself too seriously, though with this song, they show they have heart; generations may come and go, but the pain of being too late to even say goodbye is a constant agony.           

Next up:  we like to be beside the seaside.

I Am Woman: Paul McCartney: "Another Day"

Now we turn from the eternal to the quotidian; as the 60s comedown continues, the idea of doing small, ordinary songs – songs that hail not revolution but regular life – start to crop up.  It’s only natural that this should happen, as a reaction to the Big Statements of the 60s, to want to scale down a little, to perhaps even admit that despite all the ideals heralded then, life continues on, doggedly, the joys few and far between.  The grimness of the 70s is imminent.

McCartney wrote this song while he was still in The Beatles, one of many that he kept for himself (including “Maybe I’m Amazed”) – and now, a little less than a year after they broke up, Harrison’s had a number one and McCartney nearly gets one, with a song that is about, primarily, sadness.  The narrator looks on with sympathy as she goes to work, drinking coffee to stay alive, her whole life centering around her man, who spends only the night with her; no reason is given, it’s just the way things are.  She cries with loneliness; she wonders why she is alive.  Despite his “dee do do do do dos” and the oddly Latin feel to the song (as if, somehow, “every day” was a bull she has to face in the ring), this is not a happy tune.  It is the midway point between “Lady Madonna” and “Eleanor Rigby” with the added bonus of Linda, his wife, helping out with the song.  How much she contributed I don’t know, but the realism of the song is utterly female – the wet towel, the raincoat, that extra cup of coffee, the existential despair.  Still, the woman of the song lives to face yet another day, overcoming her sadness in one way or another, and it is this day-to-day life that McCartney wants to describe and honor. 

That John Lennon mentioned it specifically in his song “How Do You Sleep?” shows how little Lennon really understood what McCartney was trying to do; the big-eyed visionary with slogans isn’t necessarily going to get a song about Everywoman’s heartaches and regular routines.  Maybe Lennon wanted him to write something more political, more of a protest; but in just showing what a single woman’s life is like, giving her her due, McCartney is being far more subversive than Lennon, his empathy with her crying and angst somehow more touching than any slogans he could have come up with.  McCartney is trying, in his own way, to raise consciousness; to show that there are those out there who may be superficially coping but are alone, going from habit to routine almost as a way of staving off misery itself.  That she keeps going somehow is a victory, a victory many women who hear this song understand intimately. 

Next up:  yet another female take on regular life. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If You Get The Notion: Little Eva: "The Locomotion"

In the fall of 1962 the world was at a crisis point; it in just such circumstances that people either take music very, very seriously or throw themselves into one craze or another, if only to distract themselves for a few moments from what is actually taking place. Enter one young girl, a babysitter who could sing, who was fortunate enough to work for two young songwriters at the Brill Building; add also a new dance craze (so new it was actually created by the song, which somehow I think is a first) and lots of oohing and hand clapping and horns like trains in the back and here you have it - "The Locomotion". If only music was as simple as that! But the more I think about it, the more I find here - not just another song signifying the innocent US swinging and chugging towards (possible) oblivion - but the start of something big.

This is the first song in this blog both sung and (co-)written by a woman, and also therefore represents the tip of the rather large iceberg known as the Girl Groups, a phenomenon that sadly I hardly get to write about here, as much as I love it. (Can anyone vouch for the greatness of this box set? I intend to get it, now that we live somewhere big enough to store it.) After the big titan men of rock seemingly disappeared, it was in part these girls who kept it all going, Little Eva included. As unlikely as it seems, not is this song the historical first for women for this blog, but in its own way as a kind of...civil rights song. Not an anthem, maybe, but you don't call someone Little Eva and have her sing about (underground) railroad trains without some forethought - and there is something powerful in this song, a kind of "Let's make a chain NOW!" exuberance and vitality that doesn't just speak to the dance floor but to something in US/UK culture; a need to distract yourself by choo-chooing away, maybe, but also a sense that a release of energy is in itself energizing.

It is not just a commonplace to note that the 50s were a time of pent-up feelings and notions and that the 60s gradually saw a lot of the formality of the 50s evaporate - you can hear it happening here, a song heard 'round the world as tensions grew more and more. That it was a babysitter who sang this call to rise and march (as I interpret it, anyway) is amazing - having been a nanny myself once, I can only imagine the gulf between her old life and new one, not that she got to sing for so long. But as vital as this song is, Little Eva is immortal, a warm, encouraging voice in the impending nuclear darkness.

A Young Woman Ascends: Frank Chacksfield: "Terry's Theme"

As I go through the fifties I must stress to you, my readers, that I wasn't around back then and what perspective I have on it is through one young American woman who has yet to arrive in England - there are definite eerie parallels going on here, but I will only comment on them when the time arrives.   In the meantime, I have not seen Limelight and so am at somewhat of a disadvantage here.  Romantic, slightly sad, feminine – all attributes ballerinas have, whether they are suicidal or not – is what Chaplin wrote for his movie, and Frank Chacksfield does a great job in giving the song the delicacy it needs, as it sounds like something lovely but near lifeless coming back to life, gaining strength – as much native strength as it can have.

I don’t know if Limelight was a hit or if the audience somehow could sense themselves in Claire Bloom’s character – it is set in the distant-but-still-memorable past of 1914, the world about to haplessly enter a ‘war to end all wars’ (though whether the war itself is intimated in the movie, I don’t know). Chaplin is able to save her, and through doing so is able to save himself, enough to become a stage performer once more (paired up with his old partner, played by Buster Keaton) – so in the end it is a story of sustaining life and purpose, in perhaps finding meaning in a world that had none, continuing to dance and be grateful and take to the stage. For the British people, the comparison between the death of their monarch in 1952 and the ascension to the throne of a new one (the young Elizabeth II) just as this became a hit – – must have been inevitable. The old makes way for the new, the new gives love and respect to the old.