DO IT!: Van McCoy: "The Hustle"

 

There is nothing quite like waking up to frankly miserable weather/news only to hear about it and then be thrown by an overly upbeat announcer telling you to cheer up and dance and get moving and DANCE ---

Disco is a fine thing, but like everything it does have its place.  It has been more than suggested that it is the popular music everyone likes and the one music which people turn to when things are relentlessly tiresome or numbing.  But it wasn’t music for just anyone at the beginning; in fact it was music for those who liked to dance and also a refuge for those who were not exactly welcome elsewhere. 

In early 1975 Van McCoy was working on an album to be called (of course) Disco Baby.  In need of some inspiration information, he sent his business partner Charles Kipps to a disco to see if he could pick up any moves or grooves, and he brought back two dancers from the Adam’s Apple.  McCoy watched these dancers do the Hustle right there and then and was stunned and a little puzzled, but fell hard.  The next day (yes, the next day) “The Hustle” was recorded, and the rest is history.  We have, inadvertently, reached the second half of the 70s, the disco half.  The fog has lifted and the sun is shining and all is elegant and glamorous and exciting, emotional even.  A dance that came up from the Bronx gangs, the Latin Hustle (close to salsa) has bumped into some very seasoned studio musicians and a composer who clearly wants to write the disco song. 

Make no mistake:  this song is just one of many varieties of Hustle, but it takes OFF.  It’s catchy, simple, sweet –  kind of like Philadelphia International, but lighter and determinedly open somehow.  It is an anthem, an ode to the spirit of New York City, which was bankrupt but continued nevertheless.  It bumps and soars and sweeps and entreats you to join in and dance, never exactly telling you how to do the Hustle, but just to do it.  It is the little engine that could's triumphant lap.  It's emotional because McCoy had been in the music business for so long as a writer and producer and this dance appears one night and YYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAH "The Hustle" comes to him, as if in a fairy tale, and the joy he has had in creating it is right there in the music.  It is devotional music in a way, a tribute, and all it asks is that you dance however you want to and voila - you are doing the Hustle.  (It is significant that it's a dance for two people, though I always imagine the housewife in Des Moines dancing in her kitchen, as well as professional dancers in Hustle contests across New York City.)  

McCoy lived to see disco thrive and prosper, and was working on a 12" version of "The Hustle" when he died in 1979 - DJs wanted a 12" of it, which goes to show you what an instant classic it became.  That no one expected the song to do very much business is the cherry; it was merely supposed to be filler.  Thus I cannot claim McCoy to be a prophet but he inadvertently set the second half of the 70s agenda and there were those who (in the fullness of time, not now) bitterly resented him and disco in general.  But I don't think these people deserve my writing about them.  The happiness here erases all that, supercedes it, has already gone past it.  There is no looking back for disco now, and those who insist on playing it at 7am are, as irritating as they can be, doing everyone a favor by reminding people to dance, the Hustle or otherwise.

Next up:  the umbrella underneath which all other musics stand.

                                                                                                                    

 

 

 

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!

 

It Just Wouldn’t Go Away: Mud: “The Cat Crept In”

It can be a bit disturbing, listening to the BBC sometimes; as the writer of this blog especially I can wonder just what is going on.

By this I mean that while I have written about nothing but popular songs, some have fallen into The Void.  That’s to be expected; some of them are what I can say are “of their time.”  But can a whole genre date? 

The Glam Slam era can seem like a mirage by current radio standards.  Apart from a few “curated”* artists such as Roxy Music, David Bowie and T. Rex, the actual Glam Slam era gets an exceedingly short shrift on the radio.  There are reasons for this, of course.

I think there is a nostalgia problem; maybe that’s the wrong word.  “False memory syndrome” seems more apt.  A certain version of the70s is being pushed on these stations (I mean 6 Music and Radio 2 in particular) – a version that comforts and flatters.  It is not fully reflective of the decade – anything that is deemed too much in one way or another has been edited out.  It ends up being a lot like the older (and presumably) cooler older brother/sister throwing out all the singles and albums that made the 70s fun and grimly insisting that unless you listen to Philadelphia International and The Eagles/ABBA/Blondie (R2 version) or Kraftwerk/The Clash/Led Zeppelin (6 Music) you are hopelessly naff and probably suspect, in some way.  Radio 2 in particular will seemingly play any old song, however awful (“Howzat” by Sherbet and “Little Does She Know” by the Kursaal Flyers stand out here) rather than play anything by Wizzard, Suzi Quatro, Slade, Sweet, the hapless Glitter Band or Mud. **

Now, before I get to this hit I have to mention – as I am pretty sure I have before – that there are two kinds of nostalgia.  One is personal and specific and can be hard to translate into words at times, relying as it does on touch, smell, sight and taste; that one moment where I was so bowled over by a painting that I actually got a stomach ache and had to lie down, for instance.  (This was just a modest version of something that would happen to me two decades later.)  I can show you the painting, I can tell you about the expensive fruit salad my father reluctantly ordered for me later, but my intense reaction is my own.  (If you live in Cleveland, it was at your art museum; I don’t know if there’s a huge Monet still hanging there – a water lilies one I think –  but look at it, lie down, and then go have some fruit salad.  You are entitled to swear.  I hadn’t learned how to swear yet at the time.)  

The other is a generalized nostalgia which Douglas Coupland calls “legislated” and it can be unnerving to witness.  You are asked to remember things you don’t recall, celebrate things that don’t belong to you, to join in at all times with what the mass is supposed to feel, supposed to think, and if you don’t then you are odd, different, not one of “us.”  This stretches (in the UK) from the perpetual  remembrances of WWII***  (as I write a Glenn Miller compilation is in the Top 40 album chart and when was the last time he was so popular? – oh yes, 1976) to the aforementioned edit of the 70s on the radio to any time you see a “we” or “us” in a headline or in the speech of someone who isn’t an editor or the Queen.   The BBC in short is eager to get its listeners to become a hivemind (Glastonbury!  John Peel worship!  Vinyl vinyl vinyl!) and the existence of this and other blogs where music is looked at with care and consideration is seen as being funny or weird.  They jar against the received wisdom that only one version – theirs – of the past really exists.    


But to the song!****  This is old school rock 'n' roll - all about a bad girl, don't you know -"She ain't superstitious but she's hanging on to life number nine/Well, you may not show it but she hides in the light/And she may not show it but this cat can bite" - yes, another sexy dame mapped out by Chinn and Chapman, and who doesn't like a little played-behind-my-head guitar?  Mud did so well because they were fun, energetic, didn't take themselves too seriously - all the things that now mean that the radio barely play them - or any of the Glam Slam folks - unless it's Christmas (itself the most Glam of holidays).  Certainly this is an oppositional number two behind "Seasons In The Sun" and a lot cheerier, to say the least, than another song in the Top Ten at the time - the near embodiment of The Fog, Hot Chocolate's "Emma."

As shunned as Mud are these days, the vibe of the song wasn't lost completely - the seeds of a future, ground-breaking MSBWT song are here - Adam And The Ants' "Antmusic."  And once that song's life on the radio was more or less over, along came Rob Davis of Mud to write and play on Rachel Stevens' hit "I Said Never Again" - there are references to this hit and "Antmusic" in there, and just like the Glam Slam folks, does La Stevens (or Spice Girls, Sugababes, Girls Aloud, All Saints) get much airplay these days?  It is as if there is an embargo on all this fun and girly music (dare I say also working class music as well).  Hmm.  The cat keeps coming back, no matter what The Man tries to do.

Next up:  the Glam Slam continues!    

* I have to roll my eyes when I hear this; as someone who grew up being led around by my parents in any number of galleries, museums, etc. I have known what “to curate” means for a long time.  And it has nothing to do with music.  I roll my eyes a lot these days.  

**The Bay City Rollers are also a victim here – they weren’t part of the Glam Slam itself but became popular at the same time, and their Tartan Edinburgh sweetness was their big plus and minus.  They aren’t played on these stations and one broadcaster I can think of in particular, who only plays 70s music, refuses to play them.  He’d rather play The Sex Pistols, who were only based in part on The Rollers.  Rockism, in other words, lives.

***The never-ending reruns of Dad’s Army on television and radio point to something very disturbing in the British psyche.

****Not to be confused with the classic NFB animated short "The Cat Came Back."

Bridging The Gap: David Bowie: "Life On Mars?"

And we have now come, dear readers, to a song that is predictive of many things; and even then, not so much predictive as descriptive. 

I do wonder, sometimes, if people who love music, love it enough to understand it well enough when they are, say, 22, can somehow hold on to that understanding as they age.  Not just hold on to their original understanding, though, but grow wise with age and know that if they remain loyal to music itself, music will always offer them something new; but if they cut themselves off from music, then it will all just seem like so much noise, in whatever format it appears in.

I am moved to think about this by this song, a song that was written compulsively in one day, the writer so moved that he got off the bus and walked back home to do so.  And that is because he is mentioned in two different pieces of writing by the same person…

“So long as rock ‘n’ roll carries its own caste system, so long as there is an ‘intelligence’ structure, so long as there is snobbery insisting that whatever David Bowie does is automatically more valid than the tomfoolery of Earth, Wind and Fire, then I shall feel irritated enough to bore you by holding up the value of rock’s less pretentious, less concerned, ‘poor’ relations.” – Danny Baker, NME, 1979

“No wonder we make so much fuss about Bowie’s TOTP in 72 if this is today’s sensation.”

“I am guessing that 98% of this “amazing” Glastonbury will be digitally filed away and not seen as culturally valuable as 70s Bowie.” –Danny Baker on Twitter, June 29, 2013

The caste system, by the looks of these contrasting pieces, remains doggedly the same.  Bowie is still held up as the peak of what is “culturally valuable” and the new thing, which in this case is Example, is indeed seen as a ‘poor’ relation, so much “tomfoolery” that Bowie cannot help but be seen as “automatically more valid.”  The author clearly considers himself (and is considered by many, many others) to be part of the ‘intelligence’ that deems itself more than capable of deciding who belongs where in the caste system; there are many others out there, as everyone knows.  A kind of received wisdom percolates throughout music media, a stubborn set of opinions that, as shown here, will be scoffed at but then eventually obeyed, as if it was itself the law.  What happened 40+ years ago is far more valuable than anything happening now; my youth, in essence, trumps your youth every single time.

I wish I could look at all this and simply see it as grumpiness, but I can’t – it’s too consistent, too persistent.*  This binary way of hearing music goes against music itself I feel, and leads to ugliness.  I don’t know what to do about it, save to note that I try to hear the best of everything in my own modest way – the ocean of sound (as David Toop puts it) or planet of sound (as The Pixies put it) is far greater than can almost be comprehended, but as long as you keep swimming or walking or moving somehow, not just staying in your area but venturing out once in a while to others (different eras, styles, methods, languages) then you can have a much healthier and – dare I say it? – much more intense relationship with music itself. (Indeed, this is what I am hoping this blog is doing, amongst many other things.) 

I am reminded of all these things as this song by David Bowie is a dramatic, swooping song about culture itself, and what happens in the gulf between the performer and audience.  The girl is having a “godawful small affair” – the smallness is presented quietly, and (in the first echo) she leaves home, at least for now, yelled at by her parents.  That she has “mousy hair” and doesn’t even have a good boy/friend with her in her hour of need makes her vulnerable; so she goes to the movie by herself.  Here she looks for escape (“hooked” to the silver screen, as if it was a drug to take her out of her own “sunken dream” of a life), but finds just the same old thing – and she doesn’t like it, but stays anyhow…long enough to see the sailors, the lawman “beating up the wrong guy” – and the music comes to life with the movie, soaring to wonder if anyone on screen knows they are in the “best selling show” – if the figures on the screen have any real consciousness, or if they are just abstracts, literal projections of want and desire and nothing else.  And then the octave leap up to “Is there life on Mars?” as if this planet is too much, and another planet is necessary for true escape…

…and then the calm news, as the music peaks and then comes back down…”Amerika’s” Mickey Mouse is in trouble, turned into a cow; there are other “mice” in their “million hordes”  who gather on vacation in Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads - meanwhile “the workers have struck for fame” because “Lennon’s on sale again.”  Suddenly we are away from the solitary girl and the bigger picture has appeared, surreal to some in its hugeness – and from this perspective it seems as if Bowie is predicting his and Lennon’s “Fame” a few years hence, though unthinkable to the Bowie of ’71.  (This song, I should note, is here as it is a Luxembourg #2 and was re-released to capitalize on his Ziggy-era stardom, a persona he ended around the time this was a hit.)  The orchestral swoops are done by Mick Ronson (who also plays guitar) and the piano is Rick Wakeman, who made his part more classical, thus making this song a bridge between the old and the new; Bowie himself intended it as a tribute to Frank Sinatra, though what Frank would have sounded like singing “To my mother, my dog and clowns” I’m not sure.

And then Bowie the Friendly Forebear appears, stepping on to the stage after the movie is over, admitting that he is the one who has written this “saddening bore” of a story, and “it’s about to be writ again” as he asks you – you, not the girl – to witness the sailors, the lawmen, the “freakiest show” – “look at those cavemen go” – as real life steps in as the main attraction.  The dream is over, the day in the life is here, the wrong men are being beaten up, the lawman’s crooked, and is there life on Mars?  It is Bowie asking you the listener to understand what spectacle is, and crucially, not to divide yourself from the girl who is disdainful but nevertheless hooked to images, ones that help her escape her distressed life.  In effect the song puts you into her place, even if you thought you were above her or separate from her in some way; and it also neatly says that what is escape for some is simply life for others, and that no one, not even you the listener, are able to escape that, even on Mars. 

This could be a downbeat song, but the music is breathtakingly emotional and dramatic, building and moving in ways that seem encouraging, warm, empathetic. Even the end, where the main theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey is quoted, is a nod to the cinema, and the piano comes back quietly, ending just as a phone rings, the two moments balancing each other very nicely. The video is a simple one, with Bowie in a powder blue suit, Ziggy hair and dark blue eyeshadow against a white background singing the song as if he would on a tv show – simply, minimally – and cuts once in while to the teenage girls at his show, ones who have arms outstretched, who are crying, who are clearly trying themselves to escape their own “small” lives and are intensely in need – almost ghostly figures in the dark of the audience. And there is Bowie, separate, away from them…distant and not responding to this audience in anyway, just another figure on a screen to ponder and be “hooked” on, but never know. It is as if he is acknowledging that he has screaming, pleading fans but doesn’t want to have anything to do with them, save to note that they do exist…just as he talks about the mousy-haired girl in the first place, and maybe somewhere admits that he is completely self-aware that he is “the freakiest show” and he doesn’t have to “wonder if he’ll ever know.”

In short, this song is one of Bowie’s best (to some I know it is his best) as it looks at the whole gulf between what is wanted and what happens; and then Bowie himself comes in, and the song is no  longer a simple story of escape but one of politics, the once and future Beatles, the act of creation vs. the actual simple act of paying attention.  Its empathy is what strikes me the most – I don’t sense he looks down on the girl, on the hordes.  If he is drawing up a caste system it’s not one based on age or number, “tomfoolery” or what is “culturally valuable.”  That lawman beating up the wrong guy on the screen merely reflects real injustices; art reflects life, and the artist may know s/he is repeating life again and again, but that is the function of art, to give back to life something – like this song. 

I have saved one last thing here – that may be a key to this whole thing.  The original quote is from a review Baker wrote about Chic’s Risque; and the tweets are about Example.  Now, both the Chic Organization and (of course) Example played at Glastonbury, and they each represent dance music in their own way; and in his original piece Baker calls dance music (disco, what have you) “less pretentious, less concerned”…less concerned about what, though?  It is as if he is saying that those who make dance music are less concerned with…artistic statements?  Political commentary?  Clever wordplay?  Being well-regarded by their peers and fans?  Bernard Edwards wept.  Is this not what Chic were doing, even at the time of Baker’s review?  Even here I can sense that he feels as if dance music is just about kids buying singles they heard in the club and that the songs themselves are merely for dancing, that songs such as “Everybody Dance” or “Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah)” or “Good Times” are not “concerned” about anything other than getting their listeners on the dance floor.  That lyrics and musical quotes aren’t meaningful; or rather they are, but only in the cases of Bowie, Ian Dury, Roxy Music, etc. (to name other artists who he feels are part of that caste, so to speak).  And with Example (who I will take here as but part of the huge UK dance scene in general) there is certainly concern, not just with having fun but also with commentary.  How many listened to the chart of August 27 2011 to hear “Heaven” by Emeli Sande  and “Don’t Go” by Wretch 32 and Josh Kumra and felt as if these songs were active responses to the riots – many, I’d suggest.**

Musicians are musicians, and maybe some are less concerned than others, but to me musicians across all time are trying to express something – even if it is oblique or self-referential, quoting other songs or styles, each song is indelibly woven into another, joined as invisibly and mysteriously as the world is itself.  It is all valuable.

 

*Baker also wrote this:  “Jagger will be 70 in a few weeks.  Incredible.  In generations to come they will have to recreate this.  We are seeing him now. #Mozart”  Really?  Have to? 

**How well I remember Baker, a few days after the riots ended, looking at the current #1 (“Swagger Jagger” by Cher Lloyd) and considering it part of the whole malaise of the time – a symptom, if you will, of the whole situation.  I don’t recall him saying much about “Heaven” or “Don’t Go” however.  

Boogie Transfer: Ringo Starr: "Back Off Boogaloo"

It happened one night:  Ringo Starr had Marc Bolan over for dinner - by this time they were friends (who knows when they had met, but Starr like all the ex-Beatles loved T. Rex's music).  Starr was inspired by Bolan's own burbling language at the table - including the word 'boogaloo' - and while about to go to sleep this song came to him.  He managed to record it on tape and then recorded it with George Harrison both producing and playing lead guitar.  Such an event was rare in Starr's life - he isn't a very prolific songwriter - but Bolan's energy and prescence were enough to get Starr to write a song all by himself, one that is a rough shambling boogie, a kind of proclamation. 

Unlike Lennon or McCartney it's hard to figure out what 'message' might be here - besides a general wake-up call to this mysterious figure who has "wallpaper shoes" and who has been pretending to be dead.  Was it a song aimed at McCartney?  The subconscious sometimes says things that can be interpreted any which way, and McCartney may be the target, but it's far more Bolan-influenced than anything else, and a general call to all musicians to get their act together, and realize something new is happening.   

Indeed at this time T.Rex were the biggest band in the UK and by far the most inspiring; David Bowie and Elton John, also friends of his, were to write songs about him as well (Bowie's was "The Prettiest Star" from Aladdin Sane and Elton's was "I'm Gonna Be A Teenage Idol" from Don't Shoot Me, I'm Only The Piano Player both from 1973).  Who knows how many future musicians would see T. Rex in person or on Top of the Pops and instantly want to get onstage with a guitar to do some boogalooing of their own?  This song is just part of the "TRextasy" that existed at this time*.  The boys and the girls were united here as they were divided elsewhere; T.Rex's success would help others to get to glam stardom as well, but none of the groups or individuals who came after were quite like T.Rex.  Those who saw him sensed that this was an apotheosis of rock, this is what it must have been like in the 50s to hear something on the radio and know it was yours, it was new, and that it was righteous.  T.Rex somehow had that elegance and balance down, a sexuality that was both airy and groovy at the same time.  Bolan could give Starr the confidence to write a song, and while Bowie and Elton were already fully-formed personalities of their own, I like to think that they also picked up something from him, as well.  This gift was instantaneous; a fresh breeze blowing all the old 60s dust away.  What would happen next in this raw and charged atmosphere?  Suddenly,it seemed anything could happen, and T.Rex and Marc Bolan in particular are the main reason for that. 

Next up:  Greece is the word.     


*Born To Boogie is a movie by Ringo Starr about T.Rex and features them in concert at Wembley, marking the peak of T.Rex's fame.  Elton John also appears in it, and don't worry dear readers, we will be getting to him soon.    

Being Bold: T. Rex: "Jeepster"

And now, dear readers, we have reached the end of 1971; some may rue this, but some may not, knowing full well what is to come.  The brown suede maxi-skirtedness of this year, loved by some, is about to be replaced by a new year, and to see us into this different time is…T. Rex.  Yes, they started out ’71 and here they are to finish it, with a boogie so simple and even off-handed that the band didn’t want it put out as a single, didn’t even considerate single material, but the label felt otherwise, mainly because by this time T. Rex were huge.  I cannot even begin to imagine the legions of kids and pre-teens who latched on to T.Rex, real fans, ones who were not about to be conned into thinking anyone else really mattered.  T.Rex inspired them, many of them becoming musicians as a result, all going their very different paths but all starting here. 

T. Rex by this time, lest we forget, had already had two number one singles, a number one album with Electric Warrior , and one of those singles was even a hit in the US (I grew up knowing it as “Bang A Gong”); all this with a style that went right back to the essence of what rock ‘n’ roll was about – cars, girls, boogie with an extra added sense that Bolan was not quite like everyone else.  Not superhuman, just different, glamorous – as glamorous as the vampire he is at the end of this song, wanting to “Ssssssss-suck ya!” (apply own metaphor of your choice).

But the beat for me is the primal thing – just off-kilter, not quite the Bo Diddley beat but not that far away from the clave either; a seductive waltz of sorts, a kind of roughness that sounds paradoxically smooth as well, due to the long notes both sung and played in the song*.  The total effect is a knockout:  Bolan could be singing anything here and it would be a smash, but his lyrics are the icing – from the title on down.  The elegance of “I’ll call you jaguar if I may be so bold” – (Bolan considered this song to be “very funky” and a step above general love song lyrics**) must have had some effect as well, if only to show that rock/pop did not have to be predictable, clichéd, generic.  The self-consciousness that rock/pop has about itself now – one that will be dramatized in this blog in the coming year – is best dealt with by just making good music, and Bolan was writing songs that he hoped would last.

Number two hits are often in opposition to the number ones, and this one is a fine example, for many reasons.  Benny Hill had the Christmas number one with a song that was silly and full of double meanings (as you’d expect) – strictly for the kids, kids too young to need or understand the grooviness of T.Rex, the importance of Bolan’s hair, the glamor.  Hill went right for the obvious, Bolan took the obvious and made it fresh, made it new. 

Rock ’n’ roll has lasted long enough to be considered its own art form; regular pop, for lack of a better term, continues right alongside the fall-and-rise drama to come, as rock increasingly is albums-only stuff and pop, which, if I can put it this way, is the essence of the whole thing, (the beating heart, as Huey Lewis sort-of sings later) has to figure out what the hell to do with itself.  T.Rex stand as the inspiration to not just another generation but to other musicians and songwriters, who figure this glamor thing doesn’t just belong to elves, but belongs to everyone.  The battle coming up is between those who rue the past and those too busy looking for a new costume to think about anything else; in the meantime, T.Rex remind everyone just what it is they are fighting about, in the first place. 

Next up:  when in doubt, get your own tv show.   

*It is more than possible that he picked up some of this from the Os Mutantes hit “A Minha Menina”; Bolan spent a lot of time and money buying and listening to records, when he wasn’t busy writing and recording his own.

**Bolan goes back to Gene Vincent, as he says, for “The wild winds blow/upon your cheek/the way you flip your hip/always leaves me weak.”

Sweet Escape: Neil Diamond: "Cracklin' Rosie"

You might be wondering by now where on earth regular love songs have gotten to in the charts; are they all hiding away?  It has been a strange year, with lovers, when they show up at all, pleading rather than praising, and even “Can’t Help Falling In Love” comes across, the way Williams does it, as a joyous complaint.  (The #1s don’t concern themselves much with love either, besides “Love Grows [Where My Rosemary Goes]” on the one hand and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” on the other*.)  So here we are, alone, looking for fun.  Hmm, what to do?

Console yourself the way Neil Diamond does, with some nice wine, that’s what.  By far the most sparkling (ahem) song in a while, Diamond sings and writes a song full of baba-ba-ba-ba-bas and optimism, the strength and sweetness of the song balanced by his lyrics, which come from…Canada!  Yes, or rather YES as Diamond would sing it.  He visited a tribe there – which one I don’t know, as there are many** – and found that there were more men than women there, so the men without women would sit around and drink Cracklin’ Rosie – have ‘her’ as their date, so to speak.  If there is any pathos in this, it comes early, the "twilight train" part is gruffly sung, his temporary sorrow leading him to a state of near-rebellious joy where the wine is appreciated and celebrated, the “store-bought woman” makes him sing and perhaps brings him to a near-euphoric state – “Play it now!” he sings, as if he is becoming the music itself as he is drinking.  He may not have a woman, but the wine is bringing him inspiration, is his muse; his consolation for being alone.  Diamond goes quiet and sings to the bottle itself, “you got the way to make me happy” as if it was a woman; no wonder it would be easy to mishear this song and think it was actually about one.  Together they are going to “set the world right” and make problems go away; and after this rough year, who can blame him for wanting to escape with some wine? 

To say this is a memorable song is an understatement; Diamond needed a hit and wrote something with so many hooks that it could not help but be a hit everywhere, including being his first real hit – as an artist and performer – in the UK***.  The warmth and realism in the song – the sudden stops and starts in it, the exhortations, are like those of someone who has already been drinking, someone who has been in this position before and doesn’t actually mind it that much.  The guitar hums and plays, the night is long but he is most definitely not alone.  This is a song of relief, joy, community even; things may not be perfect, but upon reflection – and a glass or two – they really aren’t all that bad either.  This is the most wholehearted love song this year, one of satisfaction and need, a kind of reassurance that a lot of people, in tribes or elsewhere, could relate to:  wine as a source of joy and comfort, a kind of companion.  This is, again, an ancient kind of joy, and as long as the drinking doesn’t get out of hand, an honourable one. 

Next up:  the year expires, so to speak.

*Yes, I know Elvis’ “The Wonder of You” should count, but this is him singing to his audience about how much they love him; and Dana’s “All Kinds of Everything” is a Eurovision rehash of “My Favorite Things.” (One I like, by the way.) "In The Summertime" is about looking for a woman, which isn't quite the same thing.   

**My guess is that they are in Ontario, perhaps Six Nations; if they are making the wine themselves then they have to live somewhere grapes can grow, as they do in southern Ontario.  (To this day when I hear the phrase “six nations” I don’t think of rugby, I think of Canada.)

***From Tap Root Manuscript, wherein Diamond does that world music thing before it became hip; the second side is a suite of Africa-inspired songs.  (I should add this is an NME #2.) 

If At First: Desmond Dekker: "You Can Get It If You Really Want"

If there was anyone able to sing about the virtues of patience and hard work at this time, it was Desmond (nee Dacres) Dekker.  By this time he was one of reggae’s biggest stars, due to a combination of streetwise ‘rude boy’ anthems ("Tougher Than Tough" and “[007] Shanty Town” being the first) and more pious songs (“Honour Your Mother and Father” which started his career back in ’63).  He had to wait two years for his producer, Leslie Kong, to find the right song for him – and it was his fellow welders who encouraged him to take up singing in 1961 in the first place.  At first he was only known in Jamaica, but once the rude boy anthems started to appear, his popularity everywhere else increased (Mods, in particular, took to him faithfully and he moved to the UK correspondingly).  Before Bob Marley, there was, among others, Desmond Dekker*.

This song was written by Jimmy Cliff and produced by Leslie Kong; from what I can figure out Dekker recorded it first, and Cliff then did his own version for the soundtrack of The Harder They Come in ’72.  (It is a measure of how quickly this decade shifts that by then the song sounds naïve; it’s the first song on the soundtrack, when the hero has aspirations to make it in the music business.)  But for now it is a mixture of that toughness in Dekker’s voice – he knows very well how hard you have to wait, how many times you have to try (he had been rejected twice by the major producers before Kong accepted him) and how it is a relief when you succeed, the efforts to reaching that success – the energy expended – being almost more important than the success itself.  The song is mid-tempo, reasonable, rational almost; not cold rationalist though, as Dekker smiles as he sings “try, try and try” as he knows how hard things can be, how the struggle can seem endless…

By this time Dekker was living in the UK and reggae was getting into the charts more and more (Jimmy Cliff’s "Wild World" and Horace Faith’s "Black Pearl" are in the same chart as Dekker) and in half a year one of the best #1s of the 70s, "Double Barrel" by Dave and Ansil Collins will show that this is reggae’s time, a special time when – and I know I am being idealistic here – the music from one island is appreciated by another, when the appreciation of this music crosses all sorts of lines – particularly in the UK, which of course had a huge influx of immigrants from the Caribbean in the late 50s – though it crossed lines in different ways, of course**.   Dekker remained in the UK, recorded and toured with UK musicians and even though he only had one hit after this – “Sing A Little Song” in 1975 – by now he had more than done his part in bringing reggae to prominence in the UK and his sharp, compassionate singing is part of the joyful realism of this time – a new decade is here, new ideas and enterprises can start, but as always, success does not come overnight. 

This song sounds like a sturdy but young plant, determined to make it no matter what; and that determination is exactly what will be needed in the years to come.  Persecution, rejection, slow starts – these are the roots of victory, Dekker sings, and because he knows this, he extends a metaphorical hand to the listener to encourage, to help, to cheer up.  Reggae has well and truly broken through, and is only going to get bigger as the decade continues, and in effect this is reggae’s own anthem to itself, put on record.

Up next:  metal with a sense of humor and history.

*”Desmond has a barrow in the marketplace” from “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” is a reference to him,  and if The Beatles knew about him then, everyone else caught up with him in ’69 for the epochal single “The Israelites.”

**”In Jamaica, where reggae originated, it served as the soundtrack to a tense political climate.  In England, reggae was a profound inspiration to punk rockers.  Here in North America, inspired by innovators like Bobby Bloom (“Montego Bay”) and the Guess Who (“Follow Your Daughter Home,” 1973), reggae was a kindred spirit to Fleetwood Mac and Pablo Cruise – perfect beach-volleyball music.” (I Wanna Be Sedated, Phil Dellio & Scott Woods.) (Note:  “Montego Bay” was also in the top ten at this time in the UK.)

Nothing Left to Lose: The Animals: "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place"

The promise of rock 'n' roll - and of all music in general - is that it can liberate the individual. Rock in particular is the ultimate democratic music in that just about anyone with some skill can play it and music lessons are not strictly necessary. Thus it is that people can free themselves just by having the guts to go onstage and play, play and play until they get heard. If you want freedom enough you will go through just about anything to get it, and the same goes for rock*. Who knows how many dubious parents watched as their sons and daughters set off for musical glory, though I am guessing they were mostly supportive as well, since music is like a bug - it cannot be helped, and the need to play and sing is as strong as other primal urges...

...all of which is to say here we are in Newcastle, with a band who undoubtedly had music as their one way out; it surprised me to find out they didn't write this song, as it is so much their story. And yet once heard it became everyone's song, from the UK to the US to soldiers in Vietnam, for whom this was an anthem. The imperative to break the chains and start up fresh and GET OUT are fuelled by the tense, rough vibe of the song and Burdon's compassionate and loud pleas. Can things really go on as they are? Can a young man go off to join the Freedom Riders, only to come back and find his girl's parents watching The Black & White Minstrel Show? Generations were slamming into each other all over the place and the intractability of the older generation was threatening to smother the younger - they simply HAD to break free, because 1965 wasn't 1945 or even 1955 (how much of UK culture refuses to comprehend this, I wonder).

Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil wrote this for the Righteous Brothers; then Mann was going to record it himself, only to have this come out first (due to Allen Klein's giving a copy of the demo to Mickie Most). From New York to Newcastle the message was sent and received, and heard and understood worldwide. In the above clip the Animals seem to be in a post-Shindig!-riot Victorian museum - bad boys they may have been, but freedom perceived and freedom not-quite-within-reach could make anyone angry. And one way or another this song spoke to many everywhere yearning for escape, even if they had no real expectation of it, just kids with transistor radios under their pillows, listening and biding their time. Freedom is there, you just have to be determined enough to take it. How to escape, though; that's the thing.



*There is a wide manly sentimental streak in rock that forgives and tolerates a great deal; in the Sixties the liberation was on all fronts, which of course caused some to overdo it. The repercussions of those excesses caught up with some faster than others.