You've Come A Long Way: "Rock Me Gently" and "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet"

Now then, where was I?....

You may or indeed may not know that I have had a long break from this blog as my husband was diagnosed and tested and then finally operated on last year.  It was a big and rarely-done operation and was, thank goodness, a success.  I spent a lot of last year either at work, shopping or in the process of visiting him in hospital, which I did nearly daily until I knew he was okay physically and mentally.  2018 was a hot summer; a summer of record; but I was blanked out by the end of the day, able eventually to listen to music (impossible at first), eat dinner, rest.  And then phone early the next morning to see how he was overnight, and it would then all start over again.

Now however, he is back at work, and my brave (possibly), unheralded and amazingly unrivalled blog can continue.  If you are new here – hello!  I hope you like it and have time to catch up with what I have written already.  And if you have read it before, you know how it goes...

It just so happens that I left off at a place very few people want to be stranded in – The Fog.  Or, if you are a psychogeographer, the liminal period.  Late 1974 was confusing and contentious - the Glam Slam era was virtually over, and disco had yet to really catch on.  Naturally it was a time (as ever) when record companies wanted hits, they wanted something catchy and oh well who cared what the lyrics were about as long it had a decent chorus and some good hooks.  The sexual revolution?  Who upstairs approved of that though?

Leave it to the Canadians, as always, to inadvertently push things forward.  Bachman-Turner Overdrive, the prairie kings of HRS, were working on Not Fragile and someone from the company came along to see if there were any obvious singles from the album.  Nope.  Well what else do you have, guys?  They had a song they only used to play to warm up which no one saw as being anything great or even okay – it was just a crappy song to them.  The company man knew it would be a hit though, so “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” was duly recorded, deliberate stuttering put in by Randy as a tribute to his brother.  And so it was a hit, this song about a naive young man who has fallen in love with a more experienced woman, and hooee is he having fun.  The stuttering works as a way of showing his shock, his pleasure – and the simplicity of the cowbell-rockin’ song does too.  That it’s a song about a sexually assertive woman and a man most happy and even greedy (“I took what I could get” he says, after “any love is good love” which actually gives the song a risqué element beyond mere greed) is very quietly revolutionary.   He is not resentful or bitter or neurotic about being the one who has things to learn – quite the opposite.  This isn’t “Summer The First Time” – the implication, as much as BTO can be bothered, is that they are equals, save for this one thing. Listen to the bass and you will see how sexy and knowing the song is, without being tiresome.

 

Andy Kim’s “Rock Me Gently” is a similar song, though it was very much intended to be a single, one that Kim had to finance and release on his own label as no one else was interested in it.  It was a gamble so desperate that on the b-side there was no time for another song, just the instrumental part of the a-side.  That both were hits (the b-side got airplay on US R&B stations) shows how gambles can indeed pay off sometimes.

Kim – and I’ve had a lot of time to consider this – sounds a lot more experienced than the prairie-boy narrator from BTO.  He wears linen and good cologne; he knows about art and music and yet is not a boring hipster.  He is a together dude and thus when he comes across a woman he loves and she wants...something he’s a bit unfamiliar with, he can be generous and gracious.  He knows about liberated women, the sexual revolution, and he’s perfectly fine with it, as long as it’s a gentle one.  Polite.  Thoughtful.  Sends flowers.  That kind of revolution!  Which was happening now that the 70s was busy putting the 60s ideology into actual practice. The lyric “Don’t you know that I have never been loved like this before” is sung in a way that it could be just that, or you could hear a little smile in it, implying....whatever you think it means. 

Both of these songs went to #2 here in the UK, and #1 in the US; there is a sweetness and humility and generosity in these songs that are sexy, a counterpoint in the UK at least to the usual idea of this era being something scary and most certainly macho.  

 

Now then, I should note that I have skipped some songs as I didn't really *feel* the need to write about them - "Wombling Merry Christmas" being one, "Far Far Away" by Slade being another and there's a Rollers song in there too - and of course "Killer Queen" by Queen I wrote about over at Then Play Long.  This is so I can better focus on the wonders of 1975, which I will be doing as usual but with the addition of the odd album or two* when needed to give a greater context to what was an exciting time musically (unlike some people who were just bored by music at the time).  Those of you who know what 1975 meant in UK terms will be waiting for June; in some ways we are living in the opposite of that time, when the UK said yes.

 

Up next:  a hunky folksinger takes you on a tour.

 

 

*Not in a TPL sort of way, but more as a sidebar, as such.

Big Talk: Tom Jones: "Till"

And now we turn from the effective end of the 60s to the more timeless world of the Housewives of Valium Court.  They are still there - a little older, a little wiser, maybe making some progress, maybe just treading water. I like to think that they are at least safe and secure, though the waves of marriage are about to get a bit choppier in the 70s.  Some will survive that figurative storm, mainly because they keep their emotional feet on the ground, so to speak. 

In love, it is easy to say and do big things; it is harder to keep that feeling going once the honeymoon has become a memory, when big things come by not on a lover's whim but on a partner's obligation.  In love one has to give of one's self, one's whole self, daily (I have just read a book [Blood, Bones and Butter] where a couple court and then marry and the two seemingly never get to know one another, they have children and eventually get divorced; the whole thing is based on a bad combination of necessity and fantasy) or else no real foundation can ever be built.

Meanwhile, it's not 1968 anymore, and Jones' positively stentorian promises and vows of loyalty and eternal love are touching, but there is something a bit clammy-hand-inducing about them as well.  Jones is always either on the run, about to be executed or desperate to come back home - and here he is, presumably back home and promising he will be good, an uneasy flashback to the florid and hyperdramatic late 60s.  I get this odd feeling that he is singing to no one; he is ready to commit, but there is no one left to commit to, as she has given up, is tired of the drama, the opera. 

No, this is a song meant for a man to buy as a single and give to his girlfriend/wife, perhaps even one of our Housewives, and if she is in accord with him, it will work.  It is a very public declaration, and Jones sounds as if he and the whole band are on a rooftop, playing it to the world.

Jones himself might have done this song as he figured it could be a hit, and lucky for him it was; but I cannot help but notice that what he really wanted to do - soul music, not operatic arias like this one - was starting to change, to become less a joyous shout and more quiet, intimate (how much would he have liked to have sung Al Green's current hit of the time, "Tired Of Being Alone") or more urgent and badass (Isaac Hayes' "Theme from 'Shaft'" will appear soon) or just plain realer (the profoundly moving "Family Affair" by Sly and the Family Stone, from their beyond-important album, There's A Riot Goin' On).  I can imagine Jones hearing all those records and digging them and feeling that there's only so many songs he can do, so many pink-shirt-and-ties he can wear, before he becomes a walking anachronism of  "the mid-to-late 60s" in the flesh.  It's the 70s now, things are indeed changing rapidly, though for now he is still content to be the Housewives' favorite, that cannot last.  Jones sings of what is real, but that soaring voice and those metaphors can only go on for so long; something more substantial and close has to come in to bolster them up. 

And so it is with the 70s; the promises of the 60s echo and haunt, either as memories or as some workable form of progress. 

Next up:  mentioning the unmentionable, part one.                  

Apexes, Real and Imagined: The Crystals: "Then He Kissed Me"

"Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children."

"The Munich Mannequins" Sylvia Plath


"That is the irony of it all - the irony that distinguishes great literature - it is all so ordinary."

Kenneth Rexroth, introduction to More Classics Revisited



The story is simple; the narrative, straightforward. He and she meet; they dance; he kisses her; she lets him know she loves him, after a time, and he says he loves her too; she is accepted by his parents, they get married, he kisses her again. The End.

The song circles around, like the thump-ka-thump of the heart, building in intensity as the courting dance begins; this could be another century, as she looks at him and decides to give him a chance. The sky is dark, the stars are bright, everything is in focus and yet blurry at the same time; there is a ghostly quality about this record which is in part due to an accident in the studio (making it more echo-laden than it was supposed to be)...

...and that odd quality is only really apparent upon re-hearing the song and realizing it's sung from a wife's point of view. This is not a girl group staple, per se; usually the girl is massively crushing on or missing her guy, with the occasional foray into anticipating The Big Day when she and he will be actually married. (And there are of course the many songs wherein she loves him but he doesn't love her but OH she will make him see.) But a song from a wife's point of view - even a newlywed one - is rare. The drama of the song is that he kisses her, but the bravado of it is that she is the first to say "I love you" and just from this one piece of the story we know that they will be happy. La La Brooks sings it as if she has lived it, or perhaps as if she is telling this story to girls as if to say, you see, it can be done. But the production is, as Nik Cohn put it, a "heroic combustion" - "Through multitracking, he (Spector) made his rhythm section sound like armies, turned the beat into a murderous massed cannonade." Why such apocalyptic noise for what is an utterly normal story? Is it just the drama of being a teenager finally reflected in music, the zinging pounding insomniac blood of the courtship itself?

I wish I could say that this song (written by Spector, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich) was art, but it is Art; that is because it isn't just about love, but about death.

Now, I am not saying there is anything deathly in this song; but the main riff is somehow both optimistic and settled, and no amount of production can deter its comfortable if slightly unsettling repetition. No, the death is in the woman's life; for in the girl group world (which is, to say, the real world), once you are married then your life is by definition set; set as in matched, paired, and ultimately fixed. There is no more story, just as there is no more story after any fairy tale's happy details of weddings and contentment. Whether this is exactly positive or not I am not sure, but in 1963 the second wave of feminism was only just beginning, and the debate about just what being a wife means is probably as old as the custom (if I can put it that way) of marriage itself. The plain upshot of all this is that the woman who sings here so happily and fondly has no more to sing, her tale is done, at the end she remembers the kiss as if it was the beginning and the end, as if it was an infinity of kisses (which she hopes will continue; again the explosive production bolsters this hope, as if it would ever dare not to come true).

In all this I have been trying to invoke within me Larkin's Law, the one that says look at the work, not the man. Phil Spector was at the apex, the top, when he produced this, a bigshot at 22 and not at all shy about it; to read about him in Cohn's piece it seems as if he is taking revenge on the world by making the loudest and densest music this side of Wagner, the wall of sound both pleasingly and overwhelmingly there and at other times near-oppressive, as if there is no way you could escape it, even if you tried. I am trying hard to concentrate on that and not the perfectionist personality who would construct it, why he would construct it and for that matter what happened long after the apex; though I shouldn't say 'long after' as Spector fell victim to The Beatles' runaway success as much as anyone (he did end up producing them in the end in such a way that Paul left after hearing his song having had sonic golden-syrup-with-cream topping put on "The Long and Winding Road" and really, who can blame him). Ordinarily I would pity him but I cannot do that; Spector should have lived a very different life in the post-Beatles world, but he too was fixed, set in his ways, too used to bodyguards and guns and life apart from the real, pulsing world where the ordinary was elevated to Art by him and others.

As with all Art there is indeed something almost instantaneous about this song, as if it has always existed and only now is being sung. It spirals up and up like two birds in spring and then simply disappears, the screen going black as the picture fades out...only to, unexpectedly, come back in at the end of this song, as if to say, this may be the end but this is how it began, and who knows, the seeds of rebirth may be sown here too, just as she once could not wait to see him again, to be with him, to hear those bells and be kissed. That she knows that that moment is not the apex, but the beginning of her new life is the true happiness here, and elsewhere.

A Simple Question: Bruce Channel: "Hey! Baby"

In our slow approach to the great event of the 60s; or at least one of them - there are little signs of what is to come, signs that are not always obvious at first, upon first listen; after all, the subject matter here is as old as song itself - a man's simple attraction/curiosity to a girl he sees somewhere. Even by 1962 this is rather old hat for pop, but pop forever renews itself by doing something, anything, new. The simple introduction of the Delbert McClinton's harmonica as a lead instrument (as opposed to something cheerfully winking in the background) and the elongated "Heeeyyyyyyyyyyyyy" are enough to take this utterly simple song and make it something of a blueprint of what is to come, not least for four young men who have yet to step into a recording studio and all their Merseyside brethren.

But this song should not just be seen as a marker towards something greater; there is something to be said for a song sung by a man who sounds...normal. Regular. Just this guy who is thinking aloud in a song about a girl he sees on the street. I have no doubts that this song was a standard for all beginning singers and proof comes with this song, a song by another guy called Bruce that is perhaps more elaborate lyrically but says the same thing; and Channel is quoted directly at the end...some may argue that pop is forever eating its own tail, but that reassuring sameness is what makes it moving for so many people; it changes but does not change.

We Love You Cliff, Oh Yes We Do: Cliff Richard And The Shadows: "Fall In Love With You"

If there is one dynamic in popular culture that can always be relied upon, it is that of the teen idol. Young, shiny, handsome/pretty, unthreatening - a teen idol is by necessity accessible (yet slightly mysterious), humble and obliging, one of those obligations being that they take up only so much time and trouble in popular culture. Teen idols can grow up and continue to be successful in what they do, mainly because they change as their audience changes; or they can break up (if a band) or wander off into other things, such as politics, business or other arts. However I am guessing many teen idols either go on as they believe they can serve the industry or they are a little tired of being screamed at and retreat and are able to reinvent themselves.

Cliff Richard was a genuine teen idol in the UK in '60, singing directly to the girls in the audience here about how this was his first romance and how easily he could fall in love - though of course the song was objectively about young longings and hopes in general, especially on that crucial first date. I don't want to say that Richard was directly courting his audience here, but his coolness and silkiness - a kind of cat's eyes sound to his voice - certainly doesn't hurt.

My one question here is about teen idols in general - why did so many spring up at this time? Was it just because of sheer generational pressure - all the baby boomers hitting those crucial Tiger Beat times of lots of wall/locker space with so much room for posters? I suppose so - that mass media makes celebrities sounds like such an obvious answer that I am almost suspicious of it. Young people, girls in particular, have always had adolescent crushes of all kinds: royalty, movie stars, characters in books, portraits...all standing in for the real thing, helping them get to the stage where they are, in fact, ready for the real thing.

I guess my real question is: why Cliff? It comes down to the UK sensibility I suppose (at this time he was trying to break the US but didn't spend enough time there to really have an impact), the UK preferring their own nice boy to the rougher types, including one man I have yet to reach who was simply The Man when it came to rock 'n' roll at this time, a man so legendary that the Beatles (then called the Silver Beatles) tried and failed to be his backing band. Once you hear him, the original man in gold lame, the unfairness of Richard's success compared to his (at least on this blog) is inexplicable. But that is the teen idol business for you: the girls want who they want, and a pleasant vanilla milkshake was preferred over the crunchy tin roof sundae nearly every time.

When I'm Out In The Street I Just Feel All Right: Max Bygraves: "Meet Me On The Corner"

Courting: it’s not a word that gets used much these days, but in the 50s I can well imagine it was still the term used when a couple were getting to know each other, the one actively pursuing the other, forever needing and wanting some kind of special place and moment and above all, privacy. In a Britain that was still in utilitarian mode, where everyone (save for those who could move out and students living in residence) lived at home. (Come to think of it, even at Oxford or Cambridge there were strict rules about who could visit, and when.) Thus, the easy appeal of this song – the only way to have any real time to yourself with someone else is to – paradoxically – go out at night and meet the loved one under a lamp post, once the streets were quiet, perchance to go to the fish & chip shop, the cinema, the record store – or maybe just walk slowly down a street nearby, window-shopping and talking moonily about this and that. All the free or near-free pleasures of urban life are implied in this song, as well as freedom, at least for a short while, from home and work. Bygraves, in the break (where he sounds like a certain American we'll be hearing from soon), tries his best to sound like something else – some major smooching – might also be in store; his voice is a little too jovial to believe anything more is going to happen, and the tenor of the song implies that nothing else is expected of him, or her. Courtship is a delicate process of give and take, moments of gradual learning and compassion; none of those can really breathe unless there is a certain place and space to be yourself, free to walk and talk as you please. Not all had this freedom in ’55 (it could be the couple just meets at the corner and doesn’t go anywhere, after all), but you can sense even through the Bygraves' imperturable shield of happiness that a new generation is itching to get out and be free, in all ways.