Remembering the Forgotten: Ralph McTell: "Streets of London"

We have now arrived at the end of 1974; we are about to enter the then to-some scary area known as 1975.  A time of big decisions and already there's a sense that whatever will become of this decade will be worked out now.  The Nixon era has already ended and the Vietnam War is drawing to a close.  In the UK there’s the growing sense of unease coupled with two events that are responses to that unease.  This unease continues to this day and in fact its crushing and terrible logic is attempting to be worked out even as I write this.  There is hope however; there is always hope....

 

"Streets of London" is the sort of song that sticks; McTell is not singing of any general sense of loneliness but about specific people and to a specific person - a friend of his who was a heroin addict.  It is the realistic loneliness that stands quite opposite to the song which kept it at #2, Mud's "Lonely This Christmas."  It is a gentle, near classical song with a touch of folk; country blues, even.  The power of it is the musical simplicity which acts as a welcoming warm hug of a frame around the four people depicted, all of them alone, all desolate.

McTell's voice is warm too, familiar, as opposed to the (at this point) recently departed Nick Drake, who was more unworldly and yes, seductive.  McTell is taking the listener by the hand into the streets of London, starting at the Surrey Street Market in Croydon (where he was raised), ending on the Thames by the Seaman's Mission with a veteran (WWI? WWII?) who has been cast aside, just as the bag lady and the T.S. Eliot/Beckettian figure who does nothing but drink tea all night to pass the time.  These are all people who are alive but whom society does not want to recognize, who are yesterday's news. The addict is gently shown those who are lost, in darkness, wandering and sadly friendless.  I would like to think that some heard this song and it opened their hearts, or as McTell wanted to do, changed their minds.  Not through preaching but through the powerful examples that especially at Christmastime are a reminder to look out for others and to be more considerate.  That is the real meaning of the season as it happens.

That it took three times, three different recordings, to make this song a hit shows how sometimes a song just has to appear at the right time (and in the right way) to make its impact.  It has become a standard folk song (recorded first in '69, produced by Gus Dudgeon) so much so that punk (ah yes punk - we'll get to that in enough time) band the Anti-Nowhere League did their own cover, with altered lyrics (mais oui) "Let me grab you by the hair and drag you through the streets of London, I'll show you something that'll really make you sick" was heartily approved of by McTell himself. The song is McTell's main legacy, one he has accepted as his gift to the world, even as he continues to write and record albums to this day.  Can the world change because of a song?  Can it have an impact beyond itself? The answer is, as always, with the listener.

 

Next up:  Lord have mercy!

We Are All Together: Medicine Head: "One and One is One"

It may come as a surprise, dear readers, that anything that isn't either Glam or Teen Idol material can show up here - in competitive, who-can-wear-the-most-outrageous-outfit-on-TOTP-this-week 1973, and yet here we are with...hippies. 

Just because the 60s ended technically didn't mean hippies disappeared; at this point, in fact, they are slowly but surely the cause of all sorts of things to come, things that don't really exist at this point but eventually will (everything from organic food to recycling to flotation tanks and crystal healing; some of these will prove more popular than others).  Hippies, as I understand/imagine it, may well have given up buying singles altogether in favor of albums; but this got in the chart, an anomaly to say the least, and an NME #2, as well.   

For those of you who might think that maybe this song is proof hippies can't do math, well, man, it's all about how love puts two together so they are one, dig? (Hippie declarations of love are of course the lower octave, as they'd say at the Omega Centre, of the higher octave of universal love, man*.)  Far from being a pompous blowhard-type declaration, this is as easygoing as a Sunday and may well be the first appearance of a jew's harp on MSBWT, if I'm not mistaken.  Medicine Head were a blues band, mostly, but this is pure pop, the lyrics all love-eagerness (more phone talk, "little darling") - if anything this is what a more lively Dire Straits would sound like, had they existed yet.  (The guitar here sounds a bit like the guitar on "So Far Away" and there are little organ blips and bleeps too, less frenetic than those on "Industrial Disease.")  The vocals are laid back, so much so they're almost spoken word, and it is a shame that the band (signed in the 60s to John Peel's Dandelion label) didn't get to build on this success; perhaps they were too offhand and hippie to compete in the Glam Rock/Big Important Album dichotomy of the time, and end up, effectively, as the kind of band only people (pardon me, "heads") from back in the day remember at all.  This song is thus part of The Void - I have yet to hear it on UK radio - drowned out by its noisy neighbors in the chart, from Suzi Quatro to 10cc, Wizzard to Wings.  There were other laid-back songs on the chart, of course, but none as lo-fi as this. 

Next up:  Did someone say hippie?   

*I'm not sure if the term "New Age" was being used in '73, but the Omega Centre is a New Age place in Toronto, in case you're wondering - in Yorkville, where people would go in the late 60s to make fun of hippies.  Things have changed...

Let Yourself Go: David Bowie: "The Jean Genie"

Suddenly - though he has been making music for years by this point - we have stumbled across a vital figure in music; not that I would have known about him, at the time.  By now I am six years old, in kindergarten, learning the alphabet and colors and numbers, not to mention tetherball* and the restorative powers of a cup of milk, a graham cracker and a nap.  In kindergarten we had to dress up like our ancestors, so I dressed like a little Mennonite girl one day; in sober black and white, no doubt the most sober of any outfits that day.

I don't remember much in the way of music in kindergarten; indeed for this year I have a kind of vacuum where music is concerned - other than Sesame Street songs, I don't recall learning very much, though I did have a toy piano, given to me in the hopes that I would somehow take to it, but it sounded like a toy piano, not a real one, and I was much more interested in actual music, not toy music.  Thus, I am not sure how I would have reacted to hearing David Bowie; I don't remember him from the time itself, obviously, and seeing him on our little black and white tv wouldn't have given me the full spectacle of the man; a sense that the 70s had well and truly begun.

By the time I got back to Los Angeles in '77 (yes, I leave, later in '73 - I'll explain when we get there) and I was in Grade 6, I got to know a tall, dark girl called Joy who said to me that she liked David Bowie; she said this proudly, and as if to mark a difference between her and the girls who all liked Andy Gibb or Shaun Cassidy.  Bowie was for those, I inferred, who liked music first and foremost, those who wanted something of substance.  I was impressed, though at the time I didn't know much beyond his big US #1 singles and if I was told that he and Iggy Pop (who? I would have politely asked) used to hang around L.A. and helped to create, just by their presence, the punk/new wave scene of right that minute, I wouldn't have known what you were talking about.

And so we come to this song, which Bowie wrote while hanging out with Cyrinda Foxe, one of the Warhol set, and what seems so complex in reality is so simple; he wrote it to impress her.  The subject is your average American guy, inspired by his friend Iggy Pop, though not directly about him.  It is a straight-up blues rock, a la The Yardbirds, but if you'd just heard it and not seen him perform it with his band, you'd miss how Bowie was taking the ordinary and the extraordinary and mixing them up to create a new thing - a song that was rock, inspired by another rock musician, that was cool and warm and distanced and intimate somehow all at the same time.  This is the solid gold easy action that Bolan was looking for.  The man - Jean Genie (a pun on Jean Genet, not a great one but I'm sure that the kids who got the pun would have enjoyed it) is one who screams and bawls, who is simple-minded (hence, Simple Minds got their name from this song), who sounds almost more like some kind of wild animal than a person; but it was that kind of wildness that must have attracted Bowie to the US in the first place - the kind of place that could produce an Iggy Pop or Lou Reed was something to be admired, and it doesn't surprise me that Bowie has lived in the US for some time now, the energy and possibilities of New York City and thus all of the country being an inspiration for him.

This song comes from Aladdin Sane, which Bowie describes as "Ziggy goes to America"; it is hard to know how much of David Bowie's life at this time was given to being Ziggy Stardust, but no one had ever created a persona in rock and had it more or less take over his life in such a way that he had to just stop - as he did six months after now - and finish being Ziggy.  We will back get to him before this happens, but it's important to note again how with this persona Bowie somehow inspires and liberates so many kids, in the UK and the US as well, to become musicians, and his affection for Jean Genie and even pity for him - he is so powerful and yet so powerless at the same time - makes this bluesy stomp quite different from HRS or Bolan; sure if you're a kid you can pretend you're Bowie or guitar foil/mate Mick Ronson, his yang to Bowie's yin, but somehow something big has happened; I'll get to what that might be soon, with another song from Aladdin Sane.    

 

*From what I can tell tetherball doesn't exist in the UK, which is too bad as it is excellent for hand-eye coordination, the fun of hitting things, and it rewards those who are good at jumping/who are tall anyway.  Play it badly and you get hit in the head, so you learn to wise up pretty quickly.

Pitching In: Canned Heat: "Let's Work Together"

And now we stand on the very threshold of the 70s; we are close enough to press our ear to the wall, hold our breath, and hear what it portends. It portends a great deal, but the first sound that can be made out is...boogie.

No other decade owns this word quite as much as the 70s. It is only fitting that the kickstart here comes straight outta the blues, the bluesmen being from Los Angeles, all having knocked around the scene, starting as collectors of blues sides and then deciding to make some music themselves, in their own way.

Canned Heat brought the boogie far and wide, like blues birds, from Newport to Monterey, Woodstock to their own home town. Hippies loved them, blues fans and blues musicians loved them, and there's a good reason for that; they did this song but only released it after Wilbert Harrison's version (which was a reworking of his own "Let's Stick Together from '62) had had its time in the charts. The song is a crunchy blues that evokes blue collar workers, granola, long hard hours of searching for blues records in dusty shops, and a worldwide call to arms to get up and do something and to do it together, as the power of the collective (as opposed to the individual) was something hippies and others could equally grasp.

After so many sad songs, this blunt and friendly song essentially says that no matter who you are, you've got to do your part, however small it may seem; there's no point in just sitting around, you've got to have something to do. Even if it's for "two or three hours" (clearly Canned Heat understand how tiring picking up litter/writing polite but firm letters to politicians/planning or going on demonstrations is) it is worth it, and just as the blues is for everyone, so is the effort. There is something tough and indomitable about boogie, after all, something humble as well, that says "Hey, this isn't so hard, once you start doing it - you might even find it calming, enjoyable and worth doing again."

Thus the 70s are about to start with a request to make another smile and laugh, to pitch in, to quit feeling sorry for yourself and the last decade and make something new right now. Boogie doesn't care about hipness, it cares about the groove, and respects those who created the boogie groove in the first place, but boogie can't continue on its own; the blues requires dedication, sure, but that dedication is automatic and lifelong, and is like good bread - nourishing, crusty on the outside, comforting and absolutely essential*. And at bottom, utterly simple - and simplicity is what the overwrought late 60s needed, as much as anything else.

Though the band would lose members (most tragically, Alan "Blind Owl" Wilson, who sings lead on "On The Road Again**" - Bob "The Bear" Hite sings lead here - died in September of 1970, weeks before Hendrix), they are still around - still playing for those who remember this period as one of seemingly endless boogie shuffles, good times and good-natured determination to make a difference and "make life worthwhile."

As this gruff cheer fades away, there is a pause; something that has been in the works for some time - like an elaborate fireworks display, perhaps, or a spectacular painting - is about to be heard, and the world, a bit tired and bleary still, is about to be amazed.



* Dr. Atkins, I would guess, was not a blues fan, nor a man sustained by boogie. Too bad.

** Later covered by Sloan on their epochal Live At A Sloan Party! EP, merging perfectly with Stereolab's "Transona Five" - yes, even French Marxist-Situationists can get down with the boogie. I wonder if Canned Heat have ever heard this...