A Road That Sometimes Bends: The Stylistics: "You Make Me Feel Brand New"

First, a short explanation as to why there has been a pause here – apart from various holidays and birthdays, there was the rather traumatic Saturday when I came home from work, to find Marcello agitated.  By now I am used to the misery and agitation upon the announcement of a death of a musician, and a song produced by Thom Bell was playing in the background, so I naturally assumed the worst, only to be told no, Mr. Bell was very much alive.  It was only after a bit of prodding that he told me that a man who had been inspired to blog (in part) due to Marcello’s own blogging had died the previous day, by his own hand.  That man was Mark Fisher, a man I had only met once, and then only briefly, at that.  I had attended the Deep Listening Club, noting coolly that I was the only woman there, and was nearly the only woman another gathering where I half-whimsically suggested the next Deep Listening Club be Charles Spearin’s The HappinessProject. 

There was no second Deep Listening Club though.  I can relate only a few impressions of what he was like here:  nervous, enthusiastic, sensitive.  I got the idea he had his own tastes and views that had very little to do with my own (I am not especially interested in the eerie or weird, for instance).  His creating the website Dissensus and then leaving it behind are both noble gestures however, and unlike others in the circles he was in he was not “one of us” in the sense that he went to a public school, Oxbridge and/or “just happened to be” related to someone of money and importance.*

 If you live in a culture like this day in and day out, you have to be extremely careful, distanced, self-aware and self-protective.  I could not tell, from just meeting him once, how good Fisher was at this, or whether he was capable of it.  This in part is why his loss is so tough.  Marcello decided right then to end Then Play Long, for many different reasons, including the general sense that the "one of us" types have no interest in it whatsoever.

Music Sounds Better With Two, however, has never been about wanting or even really needing too much acceptance for me; it is something I do mostly (though not wholly) for my own understanding of things, with the hopeful by-product of helping others to learn things as well.   

 

And so, we return to the number two song behind “When Will I See You Again”:  “You Make Me Feel Brand New” by The Stylistics. 

Here we are in August 1974 and for many reasons, which (if you’re an American, especially) the Long National Nightmares are over, or nearly so.  The Fog still exists in the UK however, but look how the charts have shifted.  The Glam Slam is fading away (to be replaced by Queen in the popularity stakes, though Slade and Mud and the chart-observant Rubettes still around), and dance music – of the sort that is now apparently immovable from the Radio Two schedule – is taking over.  The word disco has yet to really become known, but it is well on its way  The beginning of the 70s is over; the Fog still exists as I said, but there are welcoming beams of something else coming from Philadelphia....

To help explain Thom Bell and why he is a genius, you have to understand that he was classically trained and indeed wanted to become a concert pianist/conductor.  He went to New York City with this ambition only to be rejected and told to go to Harlem and the Apollo and find work there.  This was a disappointing turn of events (there were black conductors in the US, but as ever one or two were seen as being “enough” by the Man) and so he went back to Philadelphia and worked as a conductor for Chubby Checker.  After tiring of the Twist, he got to work with a group he refashioned as The Delfonics, writing songs for them as the ones he tried to get for them from labels were so bad, he figured he could do better himself; so he taught himself composition, straight from books.  He had some small successes at first, but with “La-La (Means I Love You)” he had a huge hit**, and became a known figure, winning a Grammy and (along with his friends and work associates Gamble and Huff) began to define the Philadelphia sound. 

After producing and writing for the The Delfonics he then in 1971 moved along to The Stylistics, who he accepted as the voice of Russell Thompkins Jr. was (and is) so strikingly high and distinctive – pure and naive and sharp all at the same time.  And he constructed the near-classical pieces to feature that voice ,though on “You Make Me Feel Brand New” you also hear the voice of Airrion Love.  It is the great contrast between the two that in part makes the song so special.  It is a song of two voices– to have it sung by only one voice seems odd (Mick Hucknall tried and failed, spectacularly).  It is also a song of vulnerability and gratitude, utterly calm and even if Linda Creed does rhyme “friend” with “friend” this just adds to the realism.  That a sitar is in the mix should not be seen as anything other than Bell’s own determination to make his songs sound different (and he knew about the sitar from way before the Beatles made them famous; his West Indies background and experience with exchange students at an early age gave him a musical knowledge others didn’t have). 

This moment of calm and vaguely exotic and strikingly modern bliss was a number two hit on both sides of the Atlantic; it feels utterly grounded in a way and yet soars (due to the two voices) and both Love and Thompkins take it slowly, not showily, somehow fitting in as voices in the general palette but also instruments.  It is a hymn; solemn,  stately and melodic enough to have a reggae cover version (I can only imagine there is one). 

Thom Bell won the very first Producer of the Year Grammy award in 1974 - and I am sure whoever has won it since has looked up to him in some way.***  His genius was to keep pushing ahead and teach himself things when others wouldn't, and to know what he wanted and with the lyrics of Linda Creed in this case, bring a delicate and genuine moment to the charts.  The Stylistics suffered once Bell left them to Hugo & Luigi and worked with The Spinners instead; but along with Charles Stepney (a very different producer, but underrated I feel****) and Maurice White he made some of the very best music of the 70s.  It is music that speaks to the spirit and to the heart.  

Next:  we go back to go forward, so to speak.

 

And:  thanks for waiting, everyone!

 

*It may be obvious, but it needs stating:  the “one of us” types who feel entitled to everything have pretty much ruined the UK and everything good about it.  The worst ones are those who act as if they are not “one of us” but actually very much are. 

**He won a Grammy but was only able to see this in person as somehow he wangled his way to get a seat in the room – he wasn’t invited.  The president of the company, not him, accepted the award.  He hasn’t been to a Grammy ceremony since.

 

*** I can just imagine the temper tantrums in certain quarters when (cough) certain big-headed producers didn't get the award, and weren't even thought of to give it to first. 

 

****Even if Stepney had only produced this, he would be one of the greatest of all time (also co-wrote it, of course):  Rotary Connection's "I Am The Black Gold Of The Sun."

Genuine Imitation: Waldo de los Rios: "Mozart Symphony No. 40 in G Minor"

When I was growing up, still a little girl in Los Angeles, there were three kinds of music I’d hear on a regular basis.  One was rock; one was jazz; and one was classical.  I would say that of all three classical has the deepest influence on what I hear and how I hear it; and the composers I heard formed my idea of what music should be like.  They weren’t the big names like Bach, Beethoven and Brahms; they were Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Mussorgsky for the Russian side (big music, fearless and emotional) and Satie, Saint-Saens, Debussy and especially Ravel on the French one (more delicate, playful, elegant and yet also emotional).  Add Aaron Copland and Iannis Xenakis to all that and it's what I grew up on; fairly mainstream stuff, but overwhelmingly Romantic/Modern (as opposed to the really old school composers whose work is more genuinely 'classical' as such).  I did not hear opera as my parents just didn’t care for it; only in the 90s did I really become aware of any other classical composers, past or present*. This music went to places the other two kinds of music couldn’t quite reach, sublime places where out and out awe was the only response, beauty and life were celebrated in stirring ways.  Classical music has gotten me through more than one terrible time, in part because of its power and in part because I associate this large swathe of it with my parents; I respond to these composers as I would to early sights and smells, with instant familiarity.

And so I come to Waldo de los Rios’ “Mozart 40” with some ambivalence.  I have no deep attachments to Mozart, as such; but I imagine that he means as much as Satie or Mussorgsky do to me, and I can only wonder what those people would make of this.  A symphony reduced to a nice melody in a light pop format?  This must smack them as a kind of Muzakization of Mozart, a simplified version for those who like him well enough but don’t have the time to actually listen to the real thing.  Well, I can hear them say, maybe this might lead them to the real thing, or maybe it will just become background music on sports shows on tv.  The patisserie delicateness of the melody – it floats like a feather in the breeze – gets an acoustic guitar and drums added on, just to make foot tapping easier, I suppose. 

De los Rios wanted to bring this (perceived) old music up to date, which I guess is admirable enough, but something about it makes me uneasy.  Something as inherently pleasant and undemanding as the Mozart’s 40 lends itself to pop treatment, but apart from hapless visions of canapé hell at dinner parties where de los Rios’ album Symphonies for the 70s was most surely played, I don’t really know anyone who would actually want to hear this on anything like a daily basis.  Mozart doesn’t really need to be updated; the surge of popularity he got with Amadeus (an admirable movie, if not really that accurate) didn’t suddenly see people running off to buy this; they wanted the real thing, because they had an emotional attachment to it – understood what Mozart’s life was like – and responded.  Walter Murphy’s “A Fifth of Beethoven” (1976) was also a one-off hit, a novelty, the sort of thing that was done because it could be done, as much as anything else; and I’m afraid that is where “Mozart 40” also belongs.  It’s modern, it’s ingenious, it brings Mozart into the same chart as (amongst others) Frank Sinatra, the Delfonics, Deep Purple and T.Rex; what he would have made of this I will leave to your imagination. 

For a moment in the spring of ’71 a song based on a symphony made it to #2 in the NME; de los Rios gained fame outside of his native Argentina**, and continued on for a few more years before succumbing to depression in ’77.  He was a composer of original works as well, it should be noted; but this was his biggest hit.  Like so many things in the 70s, it’s an update that must have sounded hip at the time, but the novelty and hipness wore off as the decades have progressed.  Like the previous song it was far more successful in the UK than in the US, which points to something – I’m not sure what- in the differences between the two nations***.  In the US I imagine folks would have prided themselves on liking the original version, thank you very much; in the UK it was a pleasant change, a nice arrangement to listen to while driving or cooking, adding a touch of class to the proceedings. 

As an American I have to side with the former opinion – yes it is earnest and “classicist” but as nice and at-the-time cool as this is, I can’t like it as much as I like the original, and if de los Rios ever did anything based on works I know and love well, I don’t want to hear them.  This may sound harsh, but when Rush Limbaugh is the only one to champion your work in the US (he featured this on his show in 2010 and it had a brief surge in popularity) it makes me wonder if this version – or any of his other works -  was ever necessary at all.  A cover of a previous hit song is one thing, but trying to update something that doesn’t need to be updated is bound to be a folly; pleasant enough to some, but not to others.

Next up:  the roots of rock, explained.      

*Mainly due to the excellent movie Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, and its equally great soundtrack, which I would heartily encourage you to listen to if you haven’t already.  As for early 70s composers, this is when Steve Reich and Philip Glass begin to get some attention.

**I should add that fellow Argentinian Gato Barbieri was finishing up his contribution to Escalator Over The Hill at this time and was about to start composing the music to Last Tango In Paris.  De los Rios also did scores for movies, but mostly did this neo-classical work.

***The two singles charts are growing further and further apart; by the time glam truly hits it big, they will have almost nothing in common at all.

The Heroic Kludge: The Moody Blues: "Question"

As 1970 unfolds, the various odd strands that make up music are showing up, some more prominent than others. This song stands not just for The Moody Blues themselves but the whole progressive rock movement, which produced, to quote from I Wanna Be Sedated by Phil Dellio and Scott Woods on Yes, “true seventies classics, exhibiting a musical sophistication and intellectual prowess that left Three Dog Night and Bobby Sherman fans dumbfounded.”

Some may have questioned rock’s need to progress, but as the 60s wound down it emerged, and The Moody Blues were right there in ’67 to stupefy the world with Days of Future Passed, a far cry from their piano-pounding days when the Brumbeat sound was rumbling and rolling as loud as it could. Once Denny Laine left – he who sang on the band’s only #1 their cover of “Go Now” – Lonnie Donegan and Marty Wilde protégé Justin Hayward stepped in, to keen and croon and cry along with the symphonic folk melodies and pastoral romps on that album. (I’m not sure if there wasn’t something in the Birmingham water that made Jeff Lynne and Roy Wood want to get classical instruments into their music, but they proceeded to put them together in a different way, making cellos rock out, etc.) By this time they were the most popular prog rock group in part because they could do songs like this one and actually make them work.

Kludging – the art of sticking two things together and making them function – is accepted in prog rock and indeed almost necessary, as tempos and moods and so on shift as the songs/movements/ideas alter and build up. The Beatles kludged, and so everyone did, when needed; and “Question” is obviously two songs stuck together to become one. The song starts at a Richie Havens-strumming-acoustically intense pace, and there’s the band, and Justin, crying about injustice and why the "thousand million" questions of “hate and death and war” (lest we forget Vietnam is ongoing) are never answered. The knocked-upon door never opens, and the world burns in its greed, as quickly as the song – which sounds like a horse bounding along at top speed* - goes. And then love is mentioned, and the song slows down…

…and the “we” of the first part becomes a confessional, “I’m looking for a miracle in my life” – and clearly the narrator has suffered, but has he found someone? Who is doing “those things” (ah, vagueness) to him? Will she be the one to change his life? Because he cannot just live life like anyone else; he is ambitious – all that door-knocking and idealism is exhausting – and needs someone to change his life, to touch his very soul. That’s a big order, but prog rock is never about mundane life and regular needs. It’s BIG and extravagant and symphonic, as the sudden explosion takes us back to the beginning, the knight off again on his self-appointed mission to get an answer, mellotrons as his sidekicks. The kludging works as in the middle he is in a way asking a question as well, asking this Other of his to become that miracle (once something like that is said it’s hard to ignore), to make his life better. It is slightly absurd that the song is all about the seeking and not finding, but then most of The Moodies’ music is about seeking (or learning to see) and then becoming enlightened, or at least reaching a higher state of understanding, if only for now.

Justin Hayward’s voice is warm and terribly noble – it’s impossible to think of him ever being sly or ironic – and this goes with the folk/rock/orchestral sweep of their music, which has none of the weirdness found elsewhere in prog rock (at this point King Crimson were their main rivals, though Yes were about to take center stage and do what Dellio and Woods mentioned). The Moodies themselves wore themselves out with recording and touring (there are only so many ways you can implore others to “open your eyes, look up to the skies and see” as Queen will eventually put it) but returned chipper and idealistic as ever in 1981, and got yet another US #1 album from the faithful who needed their warmth and optimism in the cold reality of the dawning of the Reagan era. (To put it another way, there were a lot of Baby Boomers who turned to their college-days heroes in their time of need.)

As dumbfounding as prog rock – popping up here as a single, but usually sold by the (double or triple sometimes) album – could be, The Moody Blues bring an urgency and eloquence that may sound silly to some but to a lot at the time made perfect sense. A new decade is taking shape and while some are going to cast off the 60s like so many unfashionable garments, there are those who are going to keep dreaming and questioning and longing for something more; as naïve as this song can be (hate and death and war are not new things, after all) it is a protest song, a song that can barely keep still, pushing the limits of what a single can be. The Moody Blues are making rebellious music for the suburbs, and later in the 70s the suburbs will produce rebellion that is just as heartfelt, if lacking in acoustic guitars and mellotrons.


*The Moodies' popularity in the US was due to their constant touring and the Romantic aspects of their work; there's a lot of Anglophiles who like to think the UK is full of such chivalrous and heroic figures, or at least want music that sounds like what they presume the UK used to be like. That, and they can understand Justin Hayward's voice a lot better than future bands like Slade, who sounded fine on the rocking-out level but speaking as an American I still can't make heads or tails of half of what he sings.

BOO!: The Move: "Night of Fear"

And appropriately, we have left the warm, hazy sunshine and stumbled into what seems to be its opposite - it's dark, it's windy, something - who knows what - is causing chills and hallucinations. What on earth has happened?

The Move came out of the tough Birmingham scene (whence previous MSBWT subject The Fortunes ["You've Got Your Troubles"] also came) and they wore their freak flags high. If you sense that these men - Roy Wood, Carl Wayne and later Jeff Lynne - were interested in bringing classical music into rock, you'd be absolutely right. In this case it's nothing less than Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, in specific the culminating part (best known to Americans as when the fireworks happen at Independence Day concerts). The Move had originally been a covers group (doing The Byrds, Motown, 50s rock 'n' roll - whatever appealed to them and their audience) and were already known for being outrageous onstage and off, with various things getting the literal axe, including a television, a Cadillac and a bust of Hitler. Their manager encouraged Roy Wood to write songs, and then they started to have hits, including this one.

What is happening here, clearly, is a bad trip. Paranoia is one of the natural side effects of mind-altering drugs, and with good reason. If you can't perceive what is going on around you accurately, then anything can become...anything, with possibly more than just scary consequences. Green and purple lights, cold blood and howling winds would make any ordinary night a night of fear, but there is nevertheless a jauntiness here that comes as a kind of security blanket, as if the band are saying that yes, some trips are going to be bad but you will survive them. How many heard the warning and understood it I am not sure; it could also serve as a general come-down song after the explosion of energies from '64-'66, that the past (represented by Tchaikovsky) can either be a hindrance or a comforting reminder, depending on how you hear it. Musicians are now listening to others and bringing their work in, and here we have a past master being dropped into the present, helping to jolly along a song about sheer terror.

Already the crossroads are present, confusing and misleading those who try to read the signs too quickly. Whimsy mixed with menace: the sinuous "Sunshine Superman" turns into the night when hobgoblins all too easily become apparent, Halloween happening way too soon. Psychedelia was starting to open up and reveal all kinds of things, good and bad. But could this fear be better than something else?