Maximal to Minimal: Minnie Riperton: "Lovin You"

Now I feel we have reached a song that divides people to this day – is it good? Is it unbearably twee and girly and yuck? Certainly the latter was my reaction to it once I had grown up a bit, had my own radio and so on. For all I know this is how some still respond to it, because of Riperton’s high voice, because of the birds tweeting away, because they think music (particularly by women) must somehow involve suffering, and there is no suffering here. There is no struggle here, no abandonment, no imminent collapse or mourning. It is all love, optimism and joy.

I listen to this now and carefully note that this is a heroic tugboat of a song. Happiness with a strong voice (a coloratura voice with four octaves) gliding along emphatically as well as gracefully. She looks forward to the future, knowing in her heart it will always be springtime, there will always be birds chirping and sunshine and and....

Let me back up a bit in Minnie’s story. She met Richard Rudolph as a young woman in the group Rotary Connection, a band on the Chess label which had Charles Stepney producing and (rests gracefully on sadly non-existent chaise longue) among their albums there was one of covers from 1969 called Songs which kludged rock and soul together in a way that still sounds startling. Then two years later came Hello Love and the abundanza of “I Am The Black Gold Of The Sun.” Stepney really should have been nominated for Producer of the Year because WHAT WITH THE WHAT NOW and IT CAN BE DONE BUT ONLY I CAN DO IT reasons. But Producer of the Year didn’t exist then (Thom Bell was the first to win one in 1975).

In between these albums her first solo album, Come Into My Garden, was released in 1970 (produced by Stepney). Rotary Connection had had some bad luck (declining Woodstock, for instance, as it was too far away – instead they opened for The Stooges closer to home) and Stepney was determined to get Riperton’s voice heard. He tried, with the amazing “Les Fleur” but the label she was on (a subsidiary of Chess) was floundering and eventually everyone left for Los Angeles to make a fresh start of things, save for Riperton, who basically needed a rest and wanted to settle down, moving to Florida with Rudolph in 1972. However, Riperton was coaxed into getting back into music a year later (lured inevitably to Los Angeles).

Riperton started to work with Stevie Wonder as a backing singer, and then he produced her album Perfect Angel, where “Lovin’ You” appears. After the ornate and sometimes flat-out overwhelming Stepney productions, Wonder made things simple – just a few birds to add to the perpetual springtime of the song, with Riperton’s voice front and center, as opposed to being part of a chorus. It’s an easy song that Rudolph and Riperton wrote, a kind of lullaby to their baby Maya (you can hear Riperton sing her name at the end).

Is there something guileless about this song? I’m not sure there is, though it certainly can seem that way to hipsters who disdain open sentiment. The remarkable thing is what happened after this was a hit – she made more albums, continued to perform and at the same time had to live with the diagnosis of breast cancer, which doctors told her at first was going to end her life in six months. She had a double mastectomy and kept right on going, becoming a spokeswoman for breast cancer awareness and even recorded her last album while in great pain – presumably at her own insistence.

She died at the age of 31 in 1979, an indomitable force and an inspiration to many musicians (Mariah Carey, Kate Bush and of course Stevie Wonder) and the women who were also dealing with cancer at the time – not a taboo subject these days, but one hardly mentioned in the mid-70s. This song is a song of love, a heroic and happy song of the mother and wife, ultimately a song about being alive itself as a joy.

Next: There’s looking backwards and then there’s taking stock.

 

*Could someone at Ace Records do a Charles Stepney compilation please? It’s way overdue and there are all sorts of music he did while at Chess. Thanks!

 

Osmondmania: Little Jimmy: "Tweedle Dee," The Osmonds: "Let Me In," Marie: "Paper Roses," Donny and Marie: "I'm Leaving It (All) Up To You"

There are few phenomenons so closely linked to the 70s that have fallen quite solidly into The Void as the Osmondmania that gripped the globe in the first half of that nostalgic decade.  And in hearing all these songs, that is what strikes me most - we are technically in the '73-'74 period, but the Osmonds are going backwards. 

The group, as you know, were first discovered at Disneyland after having been rejected from the Lawrence Welk show; they worked for and with Disney for a while, and then were on the Andy Williams show for a few years.  Then Mike Curb came along and saw potential in them beyond mere harmony singing; he booked them in at Muscle Shoals in the fall of '70, where Rick Hall figured out how to make their sound a lot more contemporary.  It worked:  "One Bad Apple" was recorded there and went to #1 in the US, and Osmondmania was born.

Osmondmania spread around the globe, striking particularly hard in the UK; by this time, the spring of '73, it was a genuine mania, with seemingly any family member able to get a big hit...even Little Jimmy Osmond, who is about to turn ten and does stuff that is...well...cute.  I think the whole point of Little Jimmy was to be cute, although some might just think of him as bothersome or even a cause for minor despair.  The Osmonds were and are an industrious bunch and they all had to do something;  if growling and singing like a miniature Jimmy Durante (the song is from 1954) was going to charm the grannies in Arbroath, well, so be it.  (It wasn't a hit in the US, however; such rinky-dinkism was where the line was drawn, so to speak.)  It got to #2 on the Luxembourg chart, as a follow up to his also rather unnecessary but popular "Long Haired Lover From Liverpool" got to #1, earlier this year. 

The smooth sound of the Osmonds - such a toothy and together family, four square and utterly undisturbing or threatening - was just what girls wanted; I was far too young to know about them at the time, so their appeal isn't really something I can understand, save for there will always be nice boys for good and not-so-good girls to go utterly crazy over, and the Osmonds were those boys at this time.  (They were rivals with the Partridge Family, specifically David Cassidy, about now, as we shall see.)  "Let Me In" is a song that the band wrote itself for their progressive rock album The Plan; by now they were ambitious enough to want to join the ranks of Yes, Pink Floyd etc. and while it may indeed be a head trip, this song sounds anything but far-out; it is a very typical love song, with Merrill doing the lead vocals and the rest coming in for a warm, gentle barbershop-ish harmony.  It screams "I'm a nice guy and you don't have to worry with me, oh please love me" that would of course have girls flocking to their local record emporium to buy the single, if not the album.  (The Plan was a hit of course, though it too has fallen into The Void; I doubt if Radio 2 will ever have a show featuring it as a 'classic' album.)  "Let Me In" was #2 behind...the older and more introspective David Cassidy, who did get a number one album as well (Dreams Are Nothin' More Than Wishes) and whose own fanatical fans would overwhelm him; the Osmonds had power and faith in numbers that got them through some utterly insane times.  (How insane?  Girls tried to mail themselves to the Osmonds.) 

In the midst of all this boyband hysteria came Marie Osmond; the second-youngest and still just thirteen when she recorded "Paper Roses" - a song of maturity and knowledge, a song of disappointment, that maybe other girls...understood?  I am always wary of songs of such world-weariness being sung by girls who probably haven't even had a boyfriend yet, but here we are, it's the 70s and a girl born in 1959 is singing a song from 1960, originally a hit for well-known-for-many-things Anita Bryant.  Seeing her do it, made up to look a lot older than her age, makes me wonder just who did buy this, beyond country fans, Osmond maniacs and...?

By now, it must have seemed to the UK public that the Osmonds would not go away, would never in fact stop having hits; and I am sure those ideas filled some with happiness and others with angst.  However, there is only one more #2 hit for the family to discuss here; and that is the even more confusing/disturbing "I'm Leaving It (All) Up To You" - a hit for Donny and Marie in '74.  It's disturbing because...are a brother and sister supposed to be singing a song like this to each other?  And to those who remember the song from 1963, when it was a #1 in the US...well, it was #1 just before the Kennedy assassination*.  There is something odd in bringing back these memories, though I imagine most of the girls buying this single had no idea about its first sorry fate. 

I think you can see, dear readers, that apart from their own works the songs here are all from the pre-Beatles era; effectively, before those awful 60s happened, when things were nice and serene and uncomplicated.  An awful lot of the early 70s is caught up, one way or another, with nostalgia for this time, a time before not just The Beatles but Dylan, hippies, miniskirts, and all kinds of other moral outrages that middle America (the Osmonds are from Utah, that state where Bill Bryson, in The Lost Continent, finds his utopian nice USA town, or comes closest to it) never had much time for**.  The Osmonds are miles away from any genderbending glam platform progress, and yet were just as popular during the Glam Slam era, causing hordes of female fans to scream so loud that they had to play louder than anybody outside of The Who to be heard.  But the screaming pretty much ended in '75 for The Osmonds; Donny and Marie had a variety tv show starting in '76 and the rest worked on the show with them, behind the scenes. 

That so many girls and guys loved the Osmonds and that they have effectively been written out of UK pop radio (save for chart countdown shows) is a shame; they were the well-scrubbed conservative face of US pop, to be sure, but they were just as much part of this time as anyone; and nowadays it is Glam that gets the respect and museum exhibitions, while the nice Osmonds, with their Mormon concept album and puppy-doggish charms are consigned to the "you had to be there" whitebread nostalgia corner, alongside the Patridge Family and so on.  But it's hard to feel too much nostalgia for songs that were themselves covers of songs from before things got messy.  I can sense the UK's lasting preference for Glam over the US family-style pop is due to Glam's being British and therefore tough and ridiculous and ironic - and in effect more masculine, as opposed to the sweet feminine "girly" US pop of the time.  And I can imagine girls waiting for the Osmonds to appear on TOTP, just as the guys were waiting for...well...you know...

Next up:  popcorn double feature.                 


*And it's not just these songs; think of Donny's solo hits, all of them from the early 60s/50s, from "Young Love" to "The Twelfth of Never."  I have no idea if these songs were picked for their nostalgia factor, or just because Donny could sing them.  The Osmonds were a kind of smiley-face-button of pop, albeit one that tugged heartstrings pretty mercilessly, particularly ones of young girls. 

**Dale and Grace were in Dallas that day, young and in love with a number one single, and a few moments after having waved to the President & First Lady everything changed; radio went silent for days, their single was obviously no longer popular, and they broke up a few months later, instantly outdated by the arrival of The Beatles.  

Family First and Last: O.C. Smith: "Son of Hickory Holler's Tramp"

In music, as in life, there is no greater figure of importance than the mother; and especially in music from the South, whether it be folk, country or soul. This is not apologetic or high falutin music; it says what it says as if to say that this is reality, as opposed to the often idealistic/nihilistic edges of rock. Mother is the bedrock of everything; there can be no criticism, because criticizing her is tantamount to criticizing everything else that surrounds you, and ultimately, yourself.

So when O.C. Smith tells the story of how his mother got to be a woman of the night, however exaggerated the tale (how could there be fourteen children who didn't understand adults' gossip?), it is at heart more a song about the pride of the family - the mother and the children - than any factual details. It's a pride that is defiant; the father is feckless, a drunk, who leaves them nothing (and unlike a future song, the children here don't ask about him) and having so many children to look after, she hangs up her "scarlet lamp" and brings them all up, on "chicken dumplings" and "goodnight kisses." Trying to figure out the logistics of how all this works is not the point; the mother loves her children and vice versa, and she dies (no indication how or why; since there's none I'm guessing old age/illness) and is remembered fondly by all of them. (Since they have a farm I guess some of the kids farm, but again that's not mentioned.) The song is about a boy who grows up and returns to his childhood home, defiant in his own way, but not looking to provoke a fight. He is proud - no one helped the family when he was growing up, and so I imagine it became like a military unit, self-sufficient and wary of outsiders. But again, there is no fuss; justified self-satisfaction is due, just as the roses on the mother's grave are due.

That this song was written by Dallas Frazier (who also wrote "Alley-Oop" and "Elvira"), a country songwriter, and done in a soul style seals the link between the two musics - blurs them really, as this song was also a hit for Kenny Rogers. There is, unlike "Honey," no pathos here, no clammy uneasiness; there is some grief that what happened had to happen, but it is not dwelled upon. That this song is at rock bottom about doing what you have to do in order to survive, a mother's sacrifice - well, no one is unfamiliar with that, no matter where you live, in the country or the city.

This song was a hit during a time when the charts could - and did - have just about anything and everything in them, from avant-MOR to easy listening to soul to rock to bubblegum; 1968 in singles was a swirling and sometimes (as we've seen) morbid look at life, life often seen in extremes, as if regular life was somehow not big enough to contain the feelings and tendencies of the time. Apart from all the strangeness, a song like this is like walking barefoot on grass; a reaffirmation of the fundamentals of life, even if that life is lived as the narrator's mother had to live hers. It also feeds into the 'back to basics' movement that had its rock counterpart in The Band, whose first album* caused a whole wave of prominent musicians to take a step back from psychedelic heaviness and get into something more subtle, acoustic and, well, soulful**.

Next up: a song about Cupid, because there have always been songs about him, thank goodness.



*The Band had no doubt played in many of the places O.C. Smith had played and knew both country and r&b intimately.

**There is a whole other wave of musicians in the UK who are coming up via the blues, but I will get to them in time.

Flower Power: Vince Hill: "Edelweiss"

And so we wander from a back garden in Liverpool to...Austria? For a song about a...flower?

See, I told you this was a different kind of year.

The Sound of Music was by far the biggest phenomenon of the mid-60s moviewise; starting as a musical in 1959, it was made into a movie in 1965 and the soundtrack was the album of the time, taking the top spot for months and bobbing up now and again whenever it was a slow week. By early 1967, its songs were already common parlance...except in my house. As I wrote, I grew up in a household more interested in The Doors and Charles Mingus than musicals; unlike virtually everyone else in my generation, I didn't grow up with a copy of this in our record collection, nor did my parents watch it when it was on tv. I first encountered it live in Los Angeles at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion (so glamourous - it's where the Oscars were held!) with none other than Florence Henderson, a.k.a. Mrs. Brady, in the lead role. My aunt Debbie took me. I must have thought it was okay, but at eleven I was maybe a bit too young to get this song.

"Edelweiss" comes near the very end of the story; the Von Trapps know they have to flee before the Nazis capture them. You might think that a man about to take his family on a treacherous journey over hill and dale would have other things to sing about, but The Sound of Music is in part a paean to the natural world, a world that is free from man-made things like politics. In the movie it is sung twice - once by the Captain to his children (he has been distant from them, but due to his love for Maria, he has become warm and loving to them again) and then by the whole family at the Salzburg Festival, as an audience sing-a-long. Thus it is a uniting song, a song that exaults the national flower of Austria and a flower that represents family love. Though they had to flee, the Von Trapps sing what is in effect a song of defiance right in the Nazis' faces; what seems to be on the record a gentle tune has a tougher side (Vince Hill's butter-rich voice does it justice, I think; it is supposed to go down easy, in part to mask its defiance).

There is a sadness to this song of course; sadness in that they have to flee the land they love, symbolized by the flower, and then there's the sadness that this was the last song written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II; Hammerstein died less than a year after writing this, not long after the musical opened on Broadway. They wrote the song while the show was in rehearsals in Boston, feeling the Captain should have a song at the end, and so convincing was their composition that "Edelweiss" was taken by many to be a native folk song of Austria instead of another Broadway show tune. (Ronald Reagan thought it was the national anthem, and I'm sure he wasn't alone there.)

Now, I know that some - like Pauline Kael - would think the songs from this musical are "sickly, goody-goody*"; in which case I think it's only right to say that having attachments and feelings for a place is part of what makes people, for better or for worse, human. She may have objected to the sentimentality of the songs (even this one), but as the title reminds us, the show is about Music, and the ways music can uplift and transcend even the most horrible of situations, such as forced evacuation of not just your home but your home country.

The humble, small flower is happy and makes its beholder happy; and so a man sees his family, his nation. We know it and they will pull through, finding strength through this humility, this beauty, however square that might seem to some. As Light Programme as this is, there is a bite to it, a reminder that beauty has power, too.



*Presumably she never heard this; this is as close as I got to the musical growing up.

It's A Boy!: Guy Mitchell: "Feet Up"

The beginning of any enterprise is due to be somewhat mysterious and yet also a cause for joy.  Mysterious because the reasons for anything happening are ultimately hard to know; songs, as much as has been documented, sometimes just come out of nowhere.  Charts, for that matter, also seem to come out of nowhere.  In the fall of 1952 (why then?) it was decided that there should be a way of seeing what songs were popular, in what order, and whether said songs were going up, going down or staying put.  They would be ranked and counted down on the radio, once or perhaps twice a week.  The compelling story of what would succeed and what wouldn't apparently worked, as the charts continue to this day to enthrall and sometimes more than befuddle anyone who pays attention to them.

It's the fall of 1952.  In London, a year after the huge Come On Britain Chin Up of the 1951 Exhibition, killer fogs (the word 'smog' was coined to describe them) are the latest plague to hit London.  The war, though over for years, is still very much felt, as rationing continues and people slowly recover from their own private wounds, whether physical, psychic or emotional.  It's a time of reconstruction and renewal, but it is still a raw time, the decade still new, the Cold War freshly minted, and no sooner does The Chart begin as we have our first number two song:  Guy Mitchell's "Feet Up."

"Feet Up" is like a splash of cold water in the face of a bedraggled and tired nation.  A man sings, with pride, of his new son, his darling wife, his previous life of drunkenness and wanton women - all that is gone, as he goes out to tell the world of his handsome son who will be a 'ladykiller' like his dad.  The song's title literally comes from seeing his son being born, feet-first, patted on his po-po (his behind) and then hearing him cry, as babies do...the music is as unselfconsciously buoyant and square and confident as you might expect, very much the song of many fathers of the time who perhaps lived fast lives in the 40s but were now content to settle down with their own Rosie and have lots more kids, as the first one is so good-looking.  (Lest we forget the baby boom is in full swing by this time.)  

I should add here that in 1952, rock as such did not exist in the UK, nor did teenagers.  Thus, while this song might apply to your average 30-year-old today, having survived his wild twenties to finally mature and settle down, in 1952 this song could well apply to anyone over 20, since by then you had presumably lived a riotous life and were ready for the altar and the crib, in more or less that order.  Considering the relief and joy  in Guy's voice as he veritably strides down the candy-colored street of this song, it is no wonder so many children were born - especially in the US, where Guy Mitchell was from!