If You Want To Defeat Your Enemy: The Strawbs: "Part Of The Union"

There are few, if any, entries here that I sense you, dear readers, are more interested in than this one;  though now thoroughly in The Void, it most certainly is remembered and even cherished as a song with extraordinary meaning.

I do remember hearing this, sometime in the fall of '73 perhaps, sitting at my place at the dining table, which meant I was facing the stereo itself.  I imagine the CBC were playing it as part of a news report, maybe something about unions in the UK exercising their right to strike.  Though I was just six-and-a-half years old, I could sense something a bit odd about the song; I didn't like it.

Of course, had I known that the songwriters were Tories then my gut reaction would have been reinforced*.  Until now I had assumed (wrongly) that there were no Tories in the folk movement...but here we are, the once-named Strawberry Hill Boys who had worked with Sandy Denny and Rick Wakeman were by 1972 a harder-edged band once Dave Lambert became their lead singer and guitarist.  He didn't write this song though: Richard Hudson and John Ford did, with the latter doing the lead singing in this case.

What to make of this song, which makes fun of the power in a union?  Why did I frown, if only to my girlhood self, when I heard it back then?  The whole 1973-1974 period was one of strike after strike, mining disaster after mining disaster, the effects of the oil crisis, inflation and so on.  I wasn't aware of any of this at the time; I think I just noticed the trace of smugness in the singer's voice, the ugly stompy-stompy nature of the melody, the assumption that the (wo)man with the union card was immune to anything and anyone, superior - almost like Superman! - to the interests of Scotland Yard, contemptuous of the factory bosses and factory laws, loyal only to the union, where s/he was always guaranteed higher pay and if something didn't suit the union, why, they'd strike.  That's what they'd do.  If I could tell this at six-and-a-half, I am pretty sure those old enough to buy this single could tell...that this was a pro-union sounding song that was in fact making fun of them.

Well now.

But a funny thing happened during this time leading up to and including three-day weeks and no tv after 10:30 at night; the unions themselves - the miners I'd guess, but others too - took this song as their own.  The miners worked to rule; an election was called and eventually (after a result leading to a hung parliament) the Tory government was replaced by a Labour one in 1974.  These were, as some of you readers know, a decisive and divisive times, when the nerve of the unions and their leaders was up against the government's brinkmanship; a literally dark time, and in dark times people need songs to give them energy and purpose.  This song - with the bitterest of ironies - became that song for the unions, by which time Hudson and Ford had left the Strawbs to form their own group, Hudson Ford (later they made fun of punks with their band The Monks - enough said).   These two thought they could put down a noble and necessary thing - union power - and get away with it; but they didn't.  Folk music is music that belongs to the people, after all; and here the people sang the song back to the group, effectively reversing its power and meaning.  I wonder if this sort of thing could ever happen again?

Next up: Honey, let's quit this town.    

*I am, as you might expect, a Democrat; my parents were, as were theirs...
 

High Expectations: Wings: "Hi Hi Hi/C Moon"

When I think of Paul McCartney, I tend to remember two things first:  both of them immediate and heartfelt reactions.  One was during the Oscars back in '02 when he was performing the title song of Vanilla Sky and a friend yelled at the tv set, in exasperation, "You used to be a BEATLE!"

The other reaction was from my best friend, Gemma, who was taken by her then boyfriend around 1990 to see McCartney in concert.  Her review was mixed, at best; she didn't (and still doesn't) hate the man per se, but the show went on for so very long, and it was fine when he was doing Beatles songs...but his own...

In the 70s people had the right to expect the same levels of genius from the now ex-Beatles as they did when they were still a group; that they all devolved into their constituent parts is one of those letdowns the 70s were so very, very good at.  Lennon cut his losses, as such, by just stopping altogether in 1975; no one expected much from Ringo and thus he didn't make out all that badly; and George kept going, though more and more of his attention was towards making movies, namely in helping to produce them, than trying to have hit singles.

McCartney though, on evidence, really needed to keep himself busy churning out single after single; he was, according to Dellio and Woods, "a Top Forty automaton, a three-minute warlord in an LP combat zone, a human jukebox run amok."  From what I gather in Fab by Howard Sounes, McCartney is the kind of musician who most definitely needs someone who could talk back to him, or else what he would record would be, to put it kindly, not very good.  A George Martin or Lennon to say "No."  McCartney sadly didn't have this in Wings (Denny Laine?  Linda*?  Anyone else?) and thus he would do songs like this one, a song Sounes calls, frankly, "stupid**."  I can only agree, and note that it only did well in the UK as it was banned for clearly being about drugs.  (It is here as it got to #2 on the Radio Luxembourg chart.)  McCartney had recently had a problem with the law about pot plants found on his Scottish farm; and this rockin' tune man is a "So what, I'm still Paul MF McCartney, suck it" sort of reaction that probably sounded like a good idea at the time***, but has no more impact than pushing over an outhouse while someone's in it and running away.  Our Macca, I can hear his fans say, no one tells him what to do!

That it was a hit shows how many adolescents sympathized with him, wanted to own a sh-sh banned single, and maybe how this mild nyah-nyahing was easier to absorb into pop culture than tougher songs which were sold in the wrong shops.  In McCartney's view, it was another hit, proof (sad proof, I'd say) that the public were perfectly happy with the post-Beatle letdown, or that maybe they didn't think they had that right to genius after all.  If "Hi Hi Hi" is bad, then "C Moon" is the kind of genial inanity that he does very well; a kind of reggae-ish love song that lilts and glides along, the sort of thing I imagine McCartney can do in his sleep, practically.  It was played on the BBC instead of the a-side (which was played on Luxembourg); both of these songs have, as far as I can tell, fallen into The Void, which is rare for McCartney but understandable; his big ballad "My Love" came next, followed by the crazed (and Martin-produced) "Live And Let Die."  Those were both songs I'm sure Gemma heard back in the day, and songs he likely still performs; "Hi Hi Hi" is the kind of song that quietly was shelved once the counterculture 70s were gone, and McCartney had grown up.  A little...

I will return to Wings in the fullness of time, with a song that by them that I actually like, believe it or not.   

Next up:  gossip girl.


*Is it just me or was it somehow mean for Paul to make Linda join the band?  Did he really feel so embattled by the end of The Beatles that he needed his wife to be there in the studio with him? 

**Get you ready for my polygon" is enough to make me say "Block that metaphor!"

***I know I don't need to say it, but once you're on drugs so many, many things do seem like good ideas; seem is the key word here.

The Number Two Thing

An alert reader has let me know that BBC's Radio 2 has a poll running for the nation's favorite #2 hits (though you don't have to live in the UK to vote).  The 'panel of experts' chose over 100 #2s from the Official Charts (no NME chart #2s post-'60 alas).  Now in theory I should be happy about this, but as usual there is something to bother me, not least of which is the...ordinariness of the songs.  I know it's Radio 2 and all, but someone seems to have thought that all Britpop songs had to be there, not to mention all Elvis Presley songs, including one that actually was never a #2 to begin with*...and then there's the matter of songs like, oh, "Last Christmas" which is rather sour grapes to complain about not getting to #1, seeing as how it's like the biggest-selling #2 of all time, behind this bothersome trifle called "Do They Know It's Christmas?"

And to top it all off, someone from the Official Charts is going to come in and give the winner of this poll 'an honorary number one.'  This totally misunderstands the nature of music and the nature of charts; a nature I hope I have been able to trace so far in this blog.  Songs get to #2 in many ways; in the old days, it was a simple case of being popular but not that popular; latterly it is songs that debut at #2 and then slowly fall in the chart, or perhaps they rise and fall, becoming much bigger songs in the public's psyche than the #1s that come and go.  The number two is a natural opposition placement; the official opposition, if you like, to the top spot.  Giving a song an 'honorary' status makes a mess of that, and not a good and fruitful one, either.  It is also a poll that seems to sneer at the fact that these songs were stopped by uniformly awful #1s, which isn't the case; but it also manages to ignore that these songs have fended very well for themselves, and that in the end the public has awarded them with classic status, where chart placements and such don't mean very much. 

And no, they didn't include me in their panel of experts.  If they had, you would see these nominees at least - "O Superman" - "I.O.U." - "Lovefool" - "One More Time" - "Antmusic" - "Funkytown" - "Magic Fly" - "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" and "Excerpt From 'A Teenage Opera'" - all of which are at least good, and sometimes great, if not amazing songs.  Alas, there is no write-in vote...     

Still, I feel compelled to vote, and wish they had asked me for advice at least; but for which song, dear readers?

*"Don't Be Cruel"; it ought to be "Don't" of course.

Death Is Not The End: Don McLean: "American Pie"

There are some songs which I grew up hearing on the radio in an uncritical way (for the first few years I simply listened to everything I could and soaked it all up like a sponge, without much of an opinion most of the time) that I understood, and others I would learn to understand…and then there’s this song.

I suspect that you, dear readers, either love or loathe this song; that it somehow either makes some grand sense or that it is a load of old whiffle and not worth much examination.  Well, this here blog exists in part to look at these old DJ-favorite warhorse songs, the ones that purport to say something - about not just the singer’s psyche but a whole generation’s psyche – and who knows how much brain time has already been dedicated to figuring out what this song means, over the decades. 

Now, I’m not sure if I have the stamina to go through every single line of the song* but I figure that if Don McLean is trying to tell us something, then it’s worth trying to decode what it is, and maybe root around a little deeper to figure out what is really going on here.  This is a folk song, lest we forget, about rock ‘n ‘ roll; it is about one day, and everything after.

“A long, long time ago-“ Ok, now, hold it there.  A long, long time ago?  Are we going back to some pre-WWI time when jazz was invented?  Hm, what?  1959?  That’s not a long time ago!  That is (from 1972’s terms) just over a decade or so!  Since when is that a long time ago?  Already McLean is messing with our minds, trying to yank listeners out of their own inner chronology.  This is his 1959 he’s talking about; that cold day, the day that the music died. 

Well, Jesus H. Christ on a skateboard, the music died?  Or maybe I should write it as The Music died?  At the time I first heard this, I knew nothing of Buddy Holly, so the rest of the song made little sense, besides the general puzzle of why anyone would have “drove my Chevy to the levee” upon hearing the news**.  Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper and Richie Valens died in a plane crash in early February 1959, the day (Rock) Music died.  This much is known, and that is where this song resides – with the “Good ol’ boys” who sit around drinking and pretty much figure that’s it, as far as music is concerned***.  Already we are in the corner of a rather narrow room, so to speak, and then McLean gives us the rest of the story, full of sock hops and pickup trucks, none of which could really help him cope with Holly’s death.  And then…

Then we get a potted history of rock music in the 60s.  It is fairly obvious that this is a song by a Baby Boomer for other Baby Boomers; indeed one of the reasons it did so well in the first place is that it became an anthem for them, was #1 in the US for a month, in fact.  Now, I can’t do much about being from this generation or that; but what I can say is that this song represents to them (or at least a lot of them; I hate to generalize) a certain truth.  An emotional truth, but not really a factual one, but rock ‘n’ roll is long on myth and sentiment and short on facts.  Thus, in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll the piece on Buddy Holly refers to McLean’s song without attribution early on; and there’s a strange denial of events by Greil Marcus, who should really know better, as to what was exciting in music – in his essay on The Beatles, he says that before they arrived “Rock and roll – the radio – felt dull and stupid, a dead end.”  This after writing a piece on girl groups where he says:  “If you were looking for rock and roll between Elvis and The Beatles, girl groups gave you the genuine article.”  Well, which is it?  In truth, there was an awful lot happening between Elvis and The Beatles, and you, dear readers, pretty much already know the roll call:  The Beach Boys, The Four Seasons, Sam Cooke, James Brown, the rise and rise of Motown, Phil Spector, surf rock, the Impressions – the list goes on and on, and yet I can still sense Marcus’ tut-tutting of a lot of this.  Holly’s death was a symbolic one for a loss of innocence; he died, guilty of nothing more than wanting to travel warmly, and the rest of the original rock ‘n’ rollers either joined the Army or got into girl trouble, to put it mildly.  The music kept right on coming, as it always does. 

And now, back to the song.  The middle part, as I said before, is something of a history, and when I was in my sponge mode I would always space out a bit here, as I had very few clues as to what he was going on about.  The King and Queen, for instance.  I didn’t grow up in a household where Elvis was talked about at all, so I had no idea he was the King, and I still have no idea who the Queen is.  The Jester is Bob Dylan**** who somehow steals the King’s “thorny crown”, though just how this happened in real life I have yet to figure out.  People have thankfully given up calling anyone the new Dylan, but Dylan was not then the new Elvis – Elvis was Elvis, and that was that.  (That Dylan sings in a voice “that came from you and me” is a bit much; unless he’s saying that his literal voice is more like the public’s than, oh, Bobby Darin’s, for instance.)  Then there’s a trial (?), then Lenin and Marx are thrown in as signifiers and maybe puns as The Beatles show up, and The Byrds somehow get involved in a football game (“the players tried for a forward pass”:  do any of The Byrds look athletic to you?) while Dylan is injured, and The Beatles return with Sgt. Pepper during half-time; they refuse to leave the field so the players can get on with the game, so I guess the game is called off.  The Rolling Stones (in case you were wondering where they were) turn up as the bad guys, making the narrator oh so angry.  “Fire is the Devil’s only friend*****” he says, out of nowhere.  “Satan laughs in delight” as Altamont and so forth (funny how Woodstock, the ur-Baby Boomer event if there ever was one, isn’t mentioned) happen and the decade ends…

…and there is our narrator, asking a girl who sings the blues for happy news (completely unsure about who this might be; Joni Mitchell perhaps?  Laura Nyro?  No clue) and he goes to the “sacred store” where the man who works there says most pathetically that “the music wouldn’t play” as if all the turntables in the world were now possessed by the devil himself and would only work backwards, or something.  Then the “three men” he admires the most – “the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost” also disappear.  At the time I first was getting to know this song, I had utterly no idea what that meant, either in the original or in the tortured metaphors of the song.  Albert Ayler once said that “Trane was the Father, Pharoah is the Son and I am the Holy Ghost”; apparently here it’s Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin.  And thus the music has died all over again, rock and roll is effectively finished, and the folk singer is here to say, I guess, that those awful Rolling Stones and in a way The Beatles did the deed.  They killed it, and the good ol’ boys go down to the levee to perhaps throw themselves in, but it’s dry, so they just get drunk themselves.  A silent rust has set in; the sing-a-long quality of the song – and really, this is a kid’s song gussied up for grown-ups – coerces that death out and out, until all that seems to happen is that “the music” dies repeatedly, whether it is by actual deaths of musicians or the death of certain scenes.  The world is now a cold and quiet place, the narrator implies; and rock and roll is indeed gone.

And yet, and yet.  If I go back to this year for a moment where I can clearly remember things, it is this one:  I am with my aunt Debbie.  She has driven me over to her new place – I can still remember the wicker things in the bathroom – and while we’re in the car the radio is on; the engine is quiet enough and the radio is loud enough so I can hear the song.  It’s “Superfly” by Curtis Mayfield.  I know immediately without question it is a great song (it would take me a whole post here to explain why) and if anyone had told me at that moment that “the music wouldn’t play” I would have looked at them blankly, as if they were crazy.  And when I heard this song for the first time about six years later, it would seem to me that this is someone else’s story; that trying to shoehorn in Christianity into this story was awkward at best and inexplicable at worst; and I knew from my upbringing that there was plenty of good music from the 60s that had nothing to do with rock and roll, so what is the point? 

I suppose McLean was trying to sum up the experiences of a generation, those who were so utterly hopeful in the early 60s and then found themselves “lost in space” as he says (oddly enough, Vietnam isn’t mentioned in the song either – then again, it was still happening).  But the generalization that somehow turns every listener into those “good ol’ boys” even if they’re girls – that “we” are all supposed to remember things “we” learned, all went over my head.  I could tell he didn’t like The Rolling Stones but as they were favorites of my mom, well, what about that?  That both Dylan and Elvis make comebacks at the end of the decade is forgotten – gets in the way of the plotline, I suppose – and for someone who claims “I dig those rhythm and blues” the death of Otis Redding is strangely avoided. 

But back to Mayfield:  “Superfly” was just one song of many that started to appear after the epochal Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On album (crucially “Family Affair” was #1 before “American Pie”), ones where some truths about life were starting to be told.  In the UK some of these songs charted, though a lot of them sold in “specialist” shops, so the sales were not included in the regular charts; you can imagine my puzzlement as I looked for Mayfield’s hit only to draw a blank.  "American Pie" is a melodramatic look back at something; it virtually asks its listeners to wallow in the past.  It is retrograde where Mayfield is singing of the now, and now is where music lives.   

In the UK I suppose “American Pie” is taken as given as a song of Americana; Holly kept having hits in the UK long after the US, and in a way didn’t figuratively “die” here in quite the same way. (The whole British Invasion is based in part on Holly’s music, which I like to think would have pleased and surprised him.)  In a way I am not the audience for this song; I never was, even as a kid.  As a history lesson it is flawed at best; I can never forget while listening that I am not part of the “we” and the communal loss of innocence is not something I can share directly, unless I look towards my own experiences of loss – and as I recall at at least one time, it didn’t touch half my friends the way it touched me.  Mass mourning of musicians still happens, but it’s more fragmented now; harder to put into words, let alone a mix-up of religion and football.  And always I trust the musician directly as opposed to someone singing about them******; one can only wonder what Dylan or The Byrds or indeed The Rolling Stones think of this song, for instance.  (Or The Crickets, for that matter – they kept playing, the music didn’t die for them.)  Lamenting the death of a musician is fine, remembering them is fine, but trying to fit in a potted history is asking too much – like too many different flowers in a bouquet.  The best way to remember is to listen; to pay tribute and play the music and know that it will live on.               

*This isn’t The Explicator, at least not the last time I looked.

**I will get back to this in a bit, don’t worry.

***In the UK these people are Teddy boys; there is no equivalent of them in the US, as such, besides the umbrella term “good ol’ boys” (who generally speaking like country music, anyway).

****As things go, Dylan played piano the day after Holly’s death at the scheduled concert; Bobby Vee filled in for Holly.  Even in that literal sense, “the music” didn’t die; it just got played by different musicians.

*****As my husband’s first wife Laura said out loud upon hearing this:  “Fucking godhead shite!” and quite right, too.

******If you want to hear an album about a musican’s impending death that is lovely and beautiful and heartbreakingly great, it’s J Dilla’s Donuts.  That he is an inspiration to everyone coming out of Detroit is also a fitting tribute, I feel.

Laugh Until You Cry: Bobby Goldsboro: "Honey"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

I'll Be Blooming Happy When I'm Dead: Pat Boone: "A Wonderful Time Up There"

The history of music and the history of religion are pretty much hand in hand, as far as I can figure out; people have been singing & chanting for this and that to happen since anyone had the first idea, which I am guessing is a very long time ago. The songs were to strengthen the spirit, to be sure, but also they were supposed to be heard by the Big Guy/Gal Upstairs who was supposed to, the logic goes, hear it and be moved in someway by it. All good religious music has that element of gravity to it; the singer(s) are down here and want to manifest something - even if it's just a sense of calm and peace - in their souls down here. It has other ascending qualities as well, which only makes sense - not all songs are downbeat in the least.

But this song is nothing but a boppy, chirpy and ultimately annoying song that talks about the Book of Revelations as if it's a tourist guidebook and the ultimate raising of the dead therein is a big party by the pool. It doesn't have any gravity, it is all 'cheer up dead people who aren't dead yet, one day you won't be dead' and the narrator is spreading this news while tapping his figurative toes in the diner after having had his chocolate malt and hamburger. If you ever meet anyone who was alive in the late 50s they will likely shudder when you mention Pat Boone's name, and this song is one of the many, many reasons why. As for how it got to #2, I cannot figure that out except to say that after all these rather sexy ones as of late, a more Victorian song was bound to pop up. I'm most sorry to say it was this one, and we aren't done with Mr. Boone yet. (It will be a few years from now, with an unexpected happy ending.)