Time and Again: Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood: "Did You Ever"

And now, with a knowing glance or two, we are back in the world of grown-up love; the kind that is casual, deliberately so, where the fresh-faced adoration of The New Seekers has become something else - an acceptance of love lost and yet still remaining.  This is love, or a kind of love, the easygoing kind that has behind it a kind of regret or nostalgia that things cannot be as they once were; neither Nancy nor Lee is giving much away here plotwise, other than that she is with someone now, not that her father (always a loaded term here; it's Frank, after all) knows...yet. This song is full of warmth and humor and tenderness, all undercut by Nancy's audibly raised eyebrow and Lee's drawl, suggesting he is content with just seeing her again and getting the lowdown on what is really going on in her lovelife.  How has she been?  The "8 or 9" shows that he is well aware that she's been up to something, is playing the field - was he the first?  The third?  It doesn't matter, but now she has met the one, perhaps, younger and handsomer than him, "in his prime."  (This is something she may or may not be proud to relate; it also makes me wonder just how far back these two go.)  There is a wryness here, along with the warmth; they both know nothing is going to happen, but "it" - and besides the obvious, who knows what that "it" really is.  They do it "all the time" - especially him - but maybe they are content to think about it more than actually do anything; this is probably tougher on him than on her (from the sounds of it, he's stopped by her place en route to somewhere else, unless the bus at the end is an excuse). 

The joy of the song is that they are both happy - I think - with their situations as they are; nothing else needs to happen in order for us to know anything - there is no "next" here, just the contentment of hearing two people with a past, who maybe were a couple for a while, until she moved on...and they are just catching up now, missing each other but without that strong magnetic pull they once had, orbiting each other and parting, lazily flirty and perhaps saying things with their eyes that we, the listeners, can only imagine.  That she's found someone new but is still interested in him - genuinely interested (this would be a very mean song if she didn't care for him anymore) maybe shows that they have a future; there he is in his jeans and checked shirt, there she is wearing a halter top and maxiskirt, and they are still half in love, the longing still there, the fondness still evident. 

Maybe this song isn't just about a couple but about the complex relationship the public at large has to the 60s; still attached but obviously separated, never able to go back and have things the way they once were.  Too much has happened.  Do folks think about the 60s and what was possible then - and might still be possible now - all the time?  Remember how many were still attached, who were still idealistic and optimistic and also a little lost, as if the neat paths had just disappeared and they found themselves in wilderness, literally or figuratively.  "Back to the garden" Joni sang, and so folks tried to get back, only to find there was no there there, so to speak.  Nancy and Lee know this already, but also know that there is satisfaction in just thinking and longing, remembering what was and - who knows? - what may or may not happen again.  He can live on that hope, and she may just have found her man...or not.  The choices are still open, their love is still free, the complex and gorgeous world has so much to offer. 

Next up:  a history lesson for the kids. 

Songs of the South: The Rolling Stones: "Brown Sugar/Bitch/Let It Rock"

And now, some of you might be thinking, we get back to the real thing; the real and sometimes awkward thing known as rock ‘n’ roll.  Certainly The Rolling Stones have discovered, since last I wrote about them, that the 60s are definitively over (the death of Brian Jones in July ’69 was their own sad part in that scene) and the early 70s are busy wiping out whatever else was left.  This was a group at its peak; this was also a group so notorious that they weren’t allowed to record in any Los Angeles studios, a bunch of young men who simply ran with bohemianism after their first manager had hyped them as bad boys.  Sex, dope, freedom; well, probably yes to the first two, but absolute freedom, no.  Sure, they got their own mobile studio so they didn’t have to worry about unions or organizations, but the success of Sticky Fingers (where the first two songs here begin each side, respectively) meant exile, estrangement and exhaustion.  Sometimes being modest, keeping things small and hidden, is the best strategy; live a bourgeois life and then make shocking music, to paraphrase Flaubert.  But, due to circumstances and personality, that wasn’t an option.  If you’re going to be the baddest bunch of badasses around, to really be bohemian artists, movement and some measure of desperation are crucial. 

Time is also of the essence; “Brown Sugar” was recorded very quickly at Muscle Shoals, in Alabama, where almost no one knew who they were.  It’s Jagger’s song, lyrics and music (Richards cleaned up the music a little, he says) and while Marsha Hunt says it’s in part about her, it is a straight-out-of-the-unconscious song about the roots of rock, about young girls and house boys, about slavery and money, about Africa and America.  Jagger is still (at this stage!) saying “I’m no school boy but I know what I like” (hmm) as if he really needs to tell us he’s down for whatever; the sugar may be a girl, a drug, music, or the whole thing altogether.  His question is rhetorical; or is it?  Certainly the music is a rave-up, the guitar and horns and Jagger’s “whoo”s making it sound like some kind of houseparty, and everyone in the song seems to be having fun, save for the poor women being whipped at the beginning (and in the murk of this song, you can only imagine what the hell’s happening afterward, or how much fun the man in question is having at any given time).  It’s always the midnight hour in this song, the culmination one day and start of the next; a time when anything is possible.  So much of this noisy song points towards sounds that aren’t there – the whipcracks, the grunts and groans, the chains, the oohs and aahs, wading into that deep water where rock and roll isn’t just a metaphor anymore, but real.  Jagger is audibly strutting here and the band is eagerly jumping in, licking and savouring the whole thing with relish, as if to say, well, yeah, the roots of rock ‘n’ roll are kinda umm, unpleasant, but hey, look what we got now! We’re in Alabama, dammit, right down here in a damn shack across the street from (somehow appropriately) a cemetery.  Ghosts abound, unnerving ones, and this is one big whistle to say, we aren’t afraid, we can look at pain and degradation and find sex and exultation even in that. 

Is this an ugly song, at its heart?  Is Jagger’s wondering just where all this pleasure is coming from kind of obvious?  Or is there something just so raw here that even he can only really allude to it? The oomph of the song sweeps a lot of these questions away, and certainly most who bought it in the US and UK wouldn’t care too much about them.  It rocks, it’s the Stones, it sounds rough and sexy, and so of course it’s a hit.  The group isn’t so much testing its audience here as more or less slapping them in the face, the violence of the song somehow seeping out to an audience willing to share it.  That they played this song for the first time at Altamont is eerie, to say the least.

“Bitch” is a simpler affair; love is blue, as Paul Mariat has it, but for Jagger and Richards it’s just a bitch, making you weak, insatiable, sloppy, destroying any and all willpower.  I can’t say I remember these songs when they came out (I was only four at the time) but I remember hearing this only too well in a used bookstore in Washington D.C. in the hot summer of ’99.  I had gone down there to stay with my godmother while I was visiting/hanging out with a guy I’d gotten to know very well indeed  online (emails every day, that sort of thing); he had dumped me asap (the day after I’d arrived) and in hearing this I could certainly sympathize with Jagger’s complaints.  I couldn’t sleep or think straight on the way down, I felt possessed; even after the dumping, there was only one thing on my mind, besides the incredible heat and humidity, and that was the possibility of hearing from him in some way.  I had gone into the thing wholeheartedly and had to reach out to anything and anyone who could help me through my empty days.  Even though he’s in a relationship, it’s a drain; the “yeah yeah yeah”s here are affirmations, high-fives from him to me, that excitement is confounding and frustrating, that even if the relationship is good, it still can have you at its mercy, that love is unapologetic and nothing can replace it – everything else, sleep, food, everything else is secondary. The horns stab at him like prongs here, the guitar winks, the whole song is a huge agitation, swishing this way and that, relentless, just as love is.  The big bass drum pounds along with his heart, and I remember getting some solace from this, that love possesses and takes over, and the poor physical body just has to put up with it, in the hopes that something more peaceful might develop out of it all.  Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t.

And now, finally, welcome everyone, to the man who started it all.  The only rock ‘n’ roller my father could abide; the one who will likely outlive all others, God willing.  Chuck Berry.  Rock ‘n’ roll is his thing and everyone else is more or less just winging it from there.  To say the Stones owe a lot to him is a massive understatement; even after having a rough time of it playing with him, Richards had to forgive Berry, because he is the fount of all of this, this mixture of country and r&b, sounding so natural at this time but so radical in the 50s.  Berry's “Let It Rock*” (the title’s never mentioned in the song) is about railroad workers in Alabama finishing up building some track, waiting to be paid for the week, resting, playing games or just hanging out, when the foreman rushes to them, nearly breathless, telling them there’s an unscheduled train coming this way, so clear out, get off the tracks.  They do, moving bodies and teepees and equipment, the song ending with them safe and a train about to appear; whether it stops in time (after all, there’s no more track for it) is hard to say, but the propulsive rhythm suggests that the train can’t stop now, it’s too late, and whatever happens next is anyone’s guess.  The Stones play it faithfully enough, and again metaphors abound; the South and the heat; the unstoppable thing that is rock; the longing for freedom from strife and search for pleasure; the sudden chaos and unpredictability of life itself.  One minute you’re throwing dice and the next you’re running around like crazy, trying to avoid injury or even death.  Like so many Berry songs it says so much while being so simple, so elemental, both musically and lyrically.  The future is here, the train is coming; the men who are helping it to happen live in danger, but pioneers always do. 

The Stones were familiar with hairy situations, but like these workers they too would have to scatter fast, be resourceful and somehow still retain those bohemian roots, as well.  (“Bitch” was recorded in London, “Let It Rock” live in Leeds; is this the only triple-a-side where recorded in three different places?  I think so.)  All this running around takes its toll, as they would find out; the complaints of “Bitch” could just as equally apply to a love affair or with (to a certain extent) the love of music itself, a love that equally cannot be faked. 

The roughness and honesty of these songs – the fountains and the source, if you like – are admirable, disturbing, itchy.  The rave-up is about sex and slavery; the rocker is about the pains, not pleasures, of love; but here at the end is a wake-up call to live, to prize life above everything else, to lose your blues in brand new shoes.  The Stones tried to do this, but after a while they settled for the bourgeois life without that much rawness seeping out; there are only so many ways to be bad, genuinely bad, before it begins to pall.  (The always elegant and ever-slightly-sarcastic drumming of Charlie Watts is like a constant rejoinder here that rock ‘n’ roll may be all well and good, but jazz came before it and hovers above it like an open umbrella.)  Chuck Berry is the winner here, if there’s to be a contest, and really, there is no contest; it’s his world and the Stones roll around in it, now and then reflecting on where it all started, on where rock ‘n’ roll got its name in the first place.  Rock is coming of age**, just teetering on being respectable, whether it wants to be or not.  That this was stopped from going to #1 by a song that is genuinely more creepy (“Knock Three Times”) shows that pop is somehow always able to smuggle the most dreadful things and have no one notice, whereas rock has to try harder and harder to do what it once did:  shock. 

Next up:  what if freedom is sacrificed for something greater?      

*In a few months a fashion boutique/hangout in Chelsea’s World’s End area will also be named Let It Rock; it will reach back to the 50s at first, but then will turn into a place where the future will be shaped.  Its proprietors:  Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood.

**If it started in ’55, it’s now in its own “sweet sixteen” phase.

The Grace of a Boy: The Kinks: "Lola"

1970 is a crossroads year, as so many first years of decades are – some things are bubbling up from under, some are signposts, others are the usual flotsam and jetsam after the wreckage of the previous ten years. This is different though; and while I sense that its writer doesn’t want me to take it too seriously, I can’t help but say that I’ve always been made a bit uneasy by this song. Why? I’m not sure myself; it could be that the song is named after a woman but no woman appears in the song, only a man who walks like one. The boy – he’d only left home a week before – somehow ends up in Soho and finds himself in a club with a transvestite. If I was a certain female prof from the US I would say that this is a song about the feminine, about femininity so strong that the ‘female’ is in all ways stronger than the male (a strength he seems to lack, as he says, so he appreciates it in another) – that even though Lola is a man he is female too, because that’s what the boy wants/needs; he is learning a lot on this night, for sure…

…and he’s glad he’s a man now, clearly weaker than the supposedly weaker sex. I guess. Half-drunk (that’s why he falls to the floor – all that champagne that tastes like “cherry cola” as the BBC-censored version goes) and on Lola’s knee, or kneeling, he is learning a lot, but I guess my problem is how will he cope with women after this? I mean actual women, not ones taller or stronger than him. (Unless, like Betjeman's young man, he goes for the sporty jolly-tennis-playing type.) He has survived a night in old Soho, but as a resident Londoner I can say with some authority that Soho is small and London is large. I think my itch here is – is this a pro-feminist song? Does the appearance of the female as a strong female count as a real one? Or is this just another step in the world of a certain kind of British male, who goes to a male-only school and knows nothing about women, and is directed (how does someone like this end up in Soho anyway?) to this place for, um, further education? Couldn’t he just go find a real woman somewhere instead? Is this a song that doesn’t really concern women at all (including listeners)?

I don’t know, but it has always left me a bit uneasy, despite the banjos and Davies’ wolfish smile, that the boys’ club of rock – that seems to be obliquely mocked here, the hero being not a passionate dude as with the previous song but something of a naïf – is still a boys’ club, that Lola is a man and the men and boys hearing this song are somehow ‘safe’ from involving themselves with someone so changeable and variable as an actual female. Things are beginning to get mixed up, notes the hero, but Lola is the exception, the odd one out that proves the rule. The shaking up of gender roles in rock continues, to be sure (remember how The Beatles’ haircuts were seen as being girly) but when will any actual women get to show their masculine side? In the meantime, Lola dances by electric candlelight and the real women are perhaps still too much for the hero, and so he repeats her name…enthralled to the feminine, if not the female.

We Are All Together: The Beatles: Magical Mystery Tour EP

When an artistic movement helps to define an era, the era can – and often does – supersede the movement, leaving whoever is participating in it to their own devices until they can regain their bearings. The haze of ’67 was brought on in large part by The Beatles with “Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever” and Sgt. Pepper, and celebrated by “All You Need Is Love.” The Beatles didn’t invent psychedelic music, but without their success with it other bands wouldn’t have recorded some of the songs I have written about/mentioned recently.

Ian MacDonald describes the summer of ’67 as something of an egalitarian free-fall, a time when the movement was starting to show its cracks. The Rolling Stones were framed and put on trial and sentenced, pirate radio all but disappeared; The Man plc had had enough of the fun times, the party was over. If Charles Shaar Murray could write a piece about the public abuse of The Sex Pistols and call it “This Sure Ain’t The Summer of Love” then I should say that the Summer of Love itself wasn’t all that loving in the first place (and hence the worldwide rebellions of 1968 didn’t come out of nowhere).

For The Beatles it was as if they had been elevated to a status that made them godlike, which is pleasant enough if all is well. The artistic highs – writing and recording one of the greatest, if not the greatest single of all time, album ditto – led to a dual anxiety and laxness, neither of which are helpful in making music. Add to this the death of Brian Epstein in late August and you can see how Magical Mystery Tour was more or less going to be patchy, and if you factor in drugs and their lingering side effects then it is a wonder the thing – soundtrack and movie – were done at all. Most groups would take a good break and think things out before proceeding, but as pioneers The Beatles were naïve in their way; they had to keep going in order to keep existing at all, and had already begun the project when Epstein died. In a way it was griefwork, and if it sounds distracted then that’s a good reason why.

I should also mention the collapse of the SMiLE project of The Beach Boys, due to the pressures Brian Wilson had as he tried to get his recalcitrant band to work on something utterly different while fighting Capitol Records’ legal team at the same time. The sessions were legendary from the get-go, and The Beatles (because the two groups had the same publicist, Derek Taylor) must have heard some of them, though just what they heard I don’t know*. If SMiLE had been released in January of ’67 as planned then so much would have been different, but it wasn’t and The Beatles, in effect, had no competition**. This added to their laissez-faire attitude, one which didn’t really suit them. (They also of course had stopped touring – something no group would normally do unless they were about to break up or were taking a breather. They had a right to stop, but it took the fresh air out of the group, and in the long run I think they suffered for it.)

If the public – or at least a good section of it – turned away from psychedelia, it was because they could hear in it – even if the words made little sense – a rejection of the world as it stood, and unless they were also were part of the counterculture, that rejection would include themselves. That psychedelia did matter to many as not just meaning drugs but an embracing of such things as the I Ching, Tarot cards and so on as guides and symbols shows the longing for another order of things altogether, a sensing even that behind the modern world of new-fangled things was an older order that would feed the soul…that randomness was a way of making art as well, what with everything – every symbol, every card – meaning something, after all…

Before '67 for The Beatles, this randomness was a tool to inspire new songs; but now it became for them a way to just get things done, an end in itself. The I Ching is a profound work, however and not one to be taken lightly; the Tarot can be used to present situations and suggest the obstacles and solutions to them, rather than just being a series of medieval symbols that are pretty. I don’t know if they used either of these in their work, but it was in the air, and as with anything the more attention and care given to them, the more you get back. Again, laxness and anxiety are not helpful in harnessing these random (or some would say not-so-random) sources, when what is needed is calmness and concentration.

Magical Mystery Tour the tv movie was shown on Boxing Day; this EP preceded it by a few weeks. It has six songs, each one a little more strange than the previous – “Magical Mystery Tour” itself sounds like a tv show theme, hectic, full of brass, echoes, desperate for attention and winning it, because they are “DYING to take you away.” It is as if The Beatles are more or less kidnapping their audience, promising strangeness and beauty and whatever else they need in return. If it’s “an invitation” then it is one of the most demanding ones of all time; the audience has a right to feel uneasy.

Then, from the menacing “coming to TAKE YOU AWAY” it goes quiet and still; “The Fool On The Hill” observes the spinning world, oblivious to public opinion, simple in his way but wise as well. I don’t know if this comes (as IMac guesses) from The Fool in the Tarot, but if you know anything about that card you know he is going along his business, dog nipping at his heels – far from the lonely figure McCartney sings about. It is a gently sad song – is the fool a pitiable figure, or is he at one with the world, centred, while everyone else is mad? He is there perpetually, “day after day” and his naive and childlike nature are admirable but also kind of unnerving. No one seems to know him, like him, care for what he says – so I, anyway, tend to find this song a little off-putting, though lovely as well. (The recorder and other instruments suggest the medieval Tarot-like vibe of the song, far more than the lyrics.)

“Flying” is a mellow instrumental ; it sounds uncannily like Stax, reminding me of Booker T & the MGs’ McLemore Avenue, which is their own laid-back take on Abbey Road. This sounds as if it is an homage to that label to me, with added mellotron; weightless as the title suggests, and proof that all the Beatles together could indeed write a song.

“Blue Jay Way” is a song that Harrison wrote while in Los Angeles, waiting for Derek Taylor; he may have been listening to the SMiLEsessions before writing this, if only because the tempo changes are of the same sort. It is - like all of Harrison's songs at this time - based on Indian music, but instead of being enlightening, it sounds as if he is just being whiny, unable to just go to sleep when he wants to. This is what I mean by the chance element - being stuck waiting for someone - might seem like a good idea at the time for a song, but in reality it's not. Maybe he should have just meditated, gone to sleep, called someone up? But MMT needed songs, and so this was included...

“Your Mother Should Know” may not seem very intimidating or strange, but the fact that it’s an unfinished song (musically it just meanders along pleasantly enough) adds to the unease that has been steadily building up. The idea of dancing to an old song – a song from “a long, long time ago” (the WWI era, perhaps?) verges on the vintagizing effect. This sounds cute – to throw away the present for the past – but as a song it lacks knowingness that The Beatles usually kept in their collective back pockets. Is it anti-Modern? Has time stopped? Are The Beatles now like Hamlet, in a world out of joint? I am not sure, but I do know that while they were recording this Brian Epstein dropped by to see how they were doing – the last time they were all together. The old world is gone, there is nothing new and so why not celebrate the past? Things are getting more and more confusing, and I can’t blame the UK audience for finding this a less than satisfactory ending for the movie.

None of these songs could prepare the listener for the next song, however; in it a threshold is crossed, and the palpable underlying dissatisfaction in so many psychedelic songs utterly explodes.

“I Am The Walrus” is the point at which The Beatles justify this entire exercise. To say that it’s monumental is barely adequate; it is such a big song that as it ends you aren’t in the same place as when it started, and hence pop music isn’t in the same place, either. It warps and changes and surrounds the listener, inducing (I’m sure, because I feel it) in more delicate listeners dizziness and slight nausea. There is simply nowhere to hide. The lyrics are deliberate nonsense (Lennon wrote them to frustrate any hapless interpreters, so I am going to leave them alone) and they are sung with such disgust and venom that they cannot help but be scary. (Not as scary as the Blue Meanies, but pretty close.) Every key is hit here, every target Lennon can think of is included, and this howl is more than matched by Steve Race (orchestration) and George Martin in the slowly vertiginous alternating keys and general claustrophobic feeling. (The only thing that breaks up that is the pause for “Sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun” which inspired Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne no end in Birmingham***.) The closest thing I’ve heard to it is “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow” from SMiLE– that same repetitive churning, the same loudness, reflecting a world in chaos. Another small link is Lennon’s high “I’m CRYING” with Wilson’s “too tough to cry” in “Surf’s Up” – the nonsense of Lennon comes out of frustration/repression, whereas Van Dyke Parks’ lyrics are an expression of a collective memory, one where the child is father to the man. For better or for worse, Lennon spoke only for himself. (Another generation would bring their own energy to the song, of course.)

This was not pop music as usual and in a song that cries out against everything, some novelty – something new – must come to take its place. Lennon had caught up with McCartney on the avant-garde art front (thanks to Yoko Ono) and thus Lennon & McCartney then up the ante towards the end by baffling/assaulting the listener with the Mike Sammes Singers yelling, like cue-carded Village residents on drugs, “EveryBODY’s GOT ONE!” repeatedly while a live radio feed of King Lear is put into the mix, a record is scratched (the first time this happens on a single, I think – hello rap) and the cellos and horns keep blaring away. Gradually it fades away, as a whole world is falling apart. That this wasn't the last song in the movie makes sense, but on the EP it could only be at the end; because in more than one way, it is the end.

Out of the death of Brian Epstein came forth MMT, much like the unwanted liberation of Julie Vignon in Bleu - her husband's death eventually leads to her being discovered as a composer in her own right. The Beatles had already been in the process of finding their own voices, but with Epstein's death this was accelerated, with the attendant artistic egos coming out of what was once a gang bent on taking over the world. So the MMT stands as the last time The Beatles were indeed The Beatles; after this they began their lives as solo artists, the cover of their next album being blank, representing the effective clean slate they had been given, whether they wanted it or not.

So Magical Mystery Tour EP is a record of how they were caught up in the haze of '67, the death of Epstein, their own naivety that they could do anything and because they were The Beatles, it would be good. The grief and whimsy sit uneasily together, though, auguries of what is to come, just as in a couple of months another (overlapping?) tv audience will be outraged by this ending, one that includes "All You Need Is Love" and may or may not have the group itself as cameo masked figures. (They wanted McGoohan to direct MMT but he was too busy with The Prisoner to do so, and rightly figured they'd probably take over directing anyway.) Other groups would have done one more album to tie things up and then called it a day; but The Beatles had no leader (McCartney was their ringleader, as such, but there was no one outside the group to herd them) and thus lacked focus; they still had plenty of music to make, but after the movement, what was left for them? The times would now determine them, as much as the reverse; and the Magical Mystery Tour EP would be an indicator of everything to come, good, bad or indifferent.

Here we leave 1967 temporally, but it will come back, as ever when least expected, multi-colored and kaleidoscopic and celebratory. Why? In part because it is the year of the 60s when all held promise and so much was expected; expected in part because so many things had already happened. The intense flood of emotion and drama to come are the result of the feelings of being let down; of being betrayed. Maybe The Beatles continued on because others looked to them for The Answer; 1968 gives answers all right, but not the ones people wanted.

In a way that starts here too - MMT the movie was not praised in the UK at the time and people felt as if the Fab Four had let them down. Just the cultural weight of that alone would bring a new spin to '68 as if to say: the gods have clay feet. No one is perfect; better to enjoy the here-and-now-roughness of life than dream of an ideal world. So say we, The Beatles would have answered, born again, squinting in the new world's light; so say we.






*Paul McCartney visited Brian Wilson in April and played him “She’s Leaving Home” and guest-chomped on “Vega-Tables,” and generally encouraged him to “keep up.” The Beach Boys were able to salvage the SMiLE sessions and get Smiley Smile out of them, and then recorded Wild Honey in the same time The Beatles did Magical Mystery Tour. It seems unfair to compare the two groups, as ever, but these days Wild Honey gets a lot more love than MMT.

**The Rolling Stones were in disarray and both The Who and The Kinks were in states of transition from being Shel Talmy-vestibule-inhabiting loud rockers to being more thoughtful and rock-operatic.

***John Lennon once remarked that if The Beatles had continued they would have ended up like ELO, little knowing that once he’d died Jeff Lynne would produce “Free As A Bird.” There is no winning, sometimes…

The Boy Can't Help It: The Hollies: "Stop, Stop, Stop"

Okay, what the hell is going on here?!? I mean, DDDBM&T and The Troggs are expected to perform songs that are suggestive (hell, suggestive - they practically give instructions) and now these nice boys from Manchester (not London - what did that guy think) are singing about...sexual obsession?

He's sweaty, the belly-dancer's sweaty, he's getting excited and there is no way this is going to end well. If anybody wanted to know what the 'male gaze' is about, it's all right here - she enters the room, the spotlight is on her - even if he wants to look away, he can't. Even more than The Troggs though, he is nervous; he compares her to a snake - alluring and strange - and he can barely breathe. The dancer dances on, unaware of him, doing her job, tapping her cymbals and rolling along, gyrating to and fro...

...and then he's there, onstage with her! Standing in the light, stock still I'd guess, but then just as suddenly he grabs her and they tussle, falling into the crowd and knocking down drinks. He wants her and he wants her now; who knows anything beyond that, even himself? It "happens every week" (for how long now?) and he of course gets thrown out, which may or may not also happen every week. The sparkling harmonies and high ringing banjo are very typically Hollies, but this song (by the band's composers) goes beyond just wanting and needing to obsessing and taking (or trying to take) the girl. That he keeps pleading for the dancing to stop could mean he knows what he feels is wrong, he knows darn well what's going to happen, but his desire for her is so strong that it drowns out that more sensible side of himself. On the one hand, he's a jerk; on the other, a man who really should know better but- in a different way from The Troggs - can't control himself.

Who could have expected this from The Hollies? What the heck was going on with pop in general? Here Clarke and Nash talk about what pop is and how much things have changed in a few years. The kids have moved on, a new crop of girls scream for them, and presumably the older kids want something different now. I'm not sure if this song is for those older kids (it's a strange song for The Hollies, after all) or if the older kids are now getting into...rock?

There is a shift here, something is indubitably happening and all the bands must sense it, and the old restlessness is returning. The kids of '63 who went crazy for Merseybeat are nearly four years older now and can handle psychological complexities and weirdness - as long has a good beat and they can dance to it. Just how a song about - let's face it - attempted rape/abduction got on the airwaves I don't know, save for The Hollies' general good reputation, and the brightness of the song itself. But that they - Graham Nash in particular I sense - want to keep pushing limits just as much as anyone else means something seriously is up, and if this is acceptable then all hell's going to break loose*, if it hasn't already.



*Beyond the intensely sexual side of the charts in late '66, there's also the freakout of "Good Vibrations" (talk about people staring a radios wondering what that was) and "Painter Man" which is allied with The Who's taking-art-to-the-masses idea quite literally. Happenings, where the action was part of the art - and participants could become part of the work-in-progress - knocked down the idea that art was special, even as The Creation lamented the life of the artist.

You Can't Play That On The BBC part 1: The Who: "I'm a Boy"

Away from the pastoral sweep of The Beach Boys, now, and back to the UK, where something was most definitely happening, though for just now there are only glints of it on the pop charts. That something is the division between pop and rock, easily seen by the differences between album and singles charts. For now they remain more or less the same, but this state will only last for a couple more years, at best. The word 'art' comes back naturally with The Who, lead by the self-consciously audacious Pete Townsend, who wanted more- more than just regular pop songs as provided by everyone else. Other groups did too, of course (the Rolling Stones always being hip to trends, and The Beatles personified restlessness) but Townsend's sincerity makes this song (from an abandoned project about a world of gender-selected babies called "Quads") stand out.

There is no overt menace here, just a refusal (because she wanted another daughter) of a mother to accept that she has a son, which makes Bill into a "headcase" - dying to escape from the world of femininity to one of cricket, mud and bicycles and blood - but who "gets it" if he does. This goes beyond the Stones' dressing up in women's clothing for "Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, Standing in the Shadows" (a different way of defying norms and testing of their audience; the song stalled at #5).

"I'm a Boy" wins out because it seems to be leading the listener into something, something different and interesting, unless you are a light programme devotee and songs about gender differences and incipient madness make you...uncomfortable. The song is full of harmonies (influenced by Pet Sounds, I'd guess) and sung as prettily as possible, as well, by both Townsend and Daltrey. It is nearly weightless (anticipating "I Can See For Miles") and the anger comes out in Moon's drumming as usual, but the two harmonize at the end, lamenting and asserting the boy's point of view, one that can't be denied forever...

...it is a good point to ponder the role of pirate radio at this time, mainly because it would play what the BBC would not - songs such as the ones mentioned here. The pirates - from what I can tell - created the utterly free climate for bands and songwriters to do whatever they wanted, within reason, and then to see just how much they could get away with. Would they have been as daring without the pirates? Just how closely did people then listen to lyrics? Part of pop - or rock, if you will - is to push limits, to say the previously unsayable, to give the outcasts and freaks and geeks a voice - a voice that was needed and at present able to be heard, though by now objections to pirate radio were getting louder and louder, much like the music itself.

Townsend would eventually write longer and longer pieces about confusion and alienation and the search for some kind of resolution; this song is the start towards Tommy and Quadrophenia as well, rock as art (as opposed to art rock, which this blog will reach in time). In the meantime a whole new crop of bands would appear, blowing the minds of some listeners and driving others (more timid ones, perhaps) to the more standard fare of love songs and cheery uptempo toe tappers. Pop is the girl and rock is the boy? If only it were as simple as that; but once the door is open then anything can happen, and the idea that a song has to be anything will be tested during this time, until something breaks.

The promise of this song is that the boy can sing at all (unlike Tommy he's not dumb) and he will go on singing, even to himself. Another singer/songwriter heard this and was perhaps encouraged to write his own song, one that would be too much for even pirate radio. Something was happening, indeed.

Folk Explosion No. 2: The Lovin' Spoonful: "Daydream"

And now we are in New York City with its folk rock heroes, The Lovin' Spoonful. There is something utterly American about this - the slackerly speed, the whistling, the idea that if you want to just zone out on somebody's lawn, hey, go ahead - you'll either be with someone you love or dreaming about him/her, and the experience may lead to you dreaming "for a thousand years". Time itself becomes flexible in this song, incidental really, as the dreaming takes hold...yes there are dues to pay, but that is for tomorrow, man. What matters is now.

I don't know if this is the first 'drug' song I've written about here, but it certainly points to that state of mind drugs create, that warm safe feeling that nothing bad can happen and what do you know, maybe something will happen - something in fact that only could happen to you in an altered state. The anguish of "Bang Bang" - a distressed lasagna of a song - is far away, as this is more an amble down to a peaceful spot, even if it's your neighbor's backyard. It's a beautiful day...why not?

I remember such a day in Kingston, Ontario in the late summer of '93 and walking right by Chez Piggy, which was Zal Yanovsky's restaurant - he who was the Lovin' Spoonful's co-founder along with John Sebastian. He was caught in a marijuana possession dilemma in '67 about either being deported back to Canada (he was born in Toronto) or ratting out his dealer...and since he ratted out his dealer, that made him MOST uncool and he ended up going back to Canada anyway. Considering some foods are practically drugs in and of themselves, this makes perfect sense; the sweet sensuality of this song can from a contented stomach as much as a elevated mind, after all.

The next entry here is the other side of joy, folk taken to another level altogether - the intensity of the Sixties comes to its next peak, unexpectedly.

The Word 'Love': Russ Hamilton: "We Will Make Love"

It almost goes without saying - but I will say it anyway - that language is a soft, squishy and supremely malleable thing, particularly the English language. It is a ravenous, ever-changing beast which, in the words of a future subject of MSBWT, may well be a virus from outer space.

Music has been part of this viral experience, of course. "What did s/he just say/sing?!?" is a subject of debate, confusion and disbelief for some time now. (Even when lyrics can be deciphered, they still may not make any sense, of course; one of my favorite lyricists, Stephen Malkmus, has a way of making the commonplace...not so common, to say the least.)

Then there's of course the way you sing something. Russ Hamilton, at first glance, has got a pretty four-square ahem ahem title here. But the song - and particularly the way he sings it - is as fresh and pure as the first day of spring. You just know that when he and his girl (clearly they are young sweethearts) go to that secluded place they are going to do something, but not anything that will lead to a hasty trip down the aisle. Making love here sounds warm and cosy and reassuring, in part to the golden syrup-voiced Hamilton and in part to the gently swaying music, which is close to a waltz, if it isn't one already.

The drama in the song comes from the fact that the narrator has to go away - he asks his beloved to be faithful, with the promise that they will once again make love in a place far away from where they live, a place they have always dreamed about, "in the clouds up above." I still cannot figure out whether this means he is going away (for the regulation stay in the National Service, perhaps) or something a lot stranger. The music doesn't have any odd key changes or anything that would signify other worldliness, so I can only guess it means they're going to go on some exotic vacation once he returns. But he makes it sound so much like they will be in heaven that the mere act of making love sounds almost redundant. And yet that is what the song is about! Love is clearly not sex here, but some kind of aura that is almost impossible to describe, something so big it transcends the merely physical world and may even last beyond death itself, ultimately.

And so we have our first lesson in love from a Liverpudlian. There will be others, but none will be quite as quietly supernatural as this one.