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.

                                                                                                                    

 

 

 

Here Comes Everybody: T. Rex: "20th Century Boy"

Lately I have been reading Rob Sheffield’s Talking To Girls About Duran Duran, and in it he discusses how girls respond differently than music in their fandom than boys; that girls, fickle as they can be, are hugely loyal to artists and bands they love – that love, even if slightly ironized by time, never really goes away.  (This kind of love can verge on the possessive; certainly in the 50s and 60s it did.)  Sheffield’s book concerns itself with the 80s, so I have no idea how loyal T. Rex’s female fans were, or even if they had many female fans – I am guessing they did, or how else would “Trextasy” happen?  If fandom is like an addiction - it needs new singles all the time to feed it and keep it going – then this was the last ecstatic song, one that was rock enough for the boys (more on them in a minute) and feline enough for the girls.  (Of course, many girls were caught up in this time in the David vs. Donny brouhaha, and I will be addressing the latter’s whole family in the next entry.) 

“I walk like a rat, crawl like a cat, sting like a bee*” he claims, and while I am not sure any girl would be interested in someone even remotely like a rat, but there is such swagger in the song that it doesn’t matter; the growling guitar announces itself immediately, and the band and backing singers (including a very audible Gloria Jones) make a wall of noise that could break down anyone’s resistance.  Is he trying too hard?  It can seem that way (to those who prefer the more laidback T.Rex of yore) but this is not a song that could be done with subtlety.  Who the friends are who are saying “it’s just like Robin Hood” are or just what is like Robin Hood is beyond me – and doesn’t it sound like he’s saying “rock ‘n’ roll” almost, instead?  This is about as pagan as Bolan gets here – after all, the song is about the 20^th century, it’s about being a “toy”** - an object of fun and desire, created for mischief (maybe this is where Robin Hood fits in).  If he is screaming at the end, he ends it by drawling the lyrics, as if he is Elvis and for sure this time he’ll get to the top spot…only to be confounded by little girls who want a nice ballad on one hand, and boys who want to make noise on the other.  (This was an NME #2.)  But the older girls needed that pure adrenaline wave of a hit, and this song - which is like an essence of T. Rex - was more than enough, for now... 

But the boys who were his fans were loyal, perhaps more loyal than the girls; an amazing number of them went on to form bands, as if imprinted by Bolan at some important stage in their development.  What they went on to do varied from Goth (Peter Murphy) to Socialist Pop (Dr. Robert), from Stadium Rock (U2) to Indie Subversives (Mark E. Smith, Johnny Marr) to Punk itself (practically everyone).  Glam was a movement as such, but there always has to be a heart of a movement, someone who can appeal to girls and boys, who can epitomize what it’s all about – and this song for me is at the center of it all, of the whole Glam Slam. 

Serious, funny, sexy – this song has been covered all over the place, even by good ol’ 80s Canadian band Chalk Circle, a band who were usually quite serious but here they cut loose - well, as loose as they were ever going to get.  Even if you make fun of the whole rock ‘n’ roll concept (and Chalk Circle certainly know this is an Elvis song, through and through) it’s still an effortless song, with the kind of swagger that can be heard right down to Suede and Oasis. 

But for now this is one for the girls; even if they’re not screaming anymore, this song was theirs once too, and not just the dreamy boys who would go on to make a very different noise to come.

Next up:  just a normal family from Utah, that’s all.

*Or is it “Crawl like a rat, talk like a cat”?  That’s what I think he’s singing, but since he switches it around, I’m not sure. 

**I just realized what this song is leading to, but we won’t get to that song for some time.  That song was at the center of a whole other movement, which I will be discussing in a while over at Then Play Long.    

Songs of the South: The Rolling Stones: "Brown Sugar/Bitch/Let It Rock"

And now, some of you might be thinking, we get back to the real thing; the real and sometimes awkward thing known as rock ‘n’ roll.  Certainly The Rolling Stones have discovered, since last I wrote about them, that the 60s are definitively over (the death of Brian Jones in July ’69 was their own sad part in that scene) and the early 70s are busy wiping out whatever else was left.  This was a group at its peak; this was also a group so notorious that they weren’t allowed to record in any Los Angeles studios, a bunch of young men who simply ran with bohemianism after their first manager had hyped them as bad boys.  Sex, dope, freedom; well, probably yes to the first two, but absolute freedom, no.  Sure, they got their own mobile studio so they didn’t have to worry about unions or organizations, but the success of Sticky Fingers (where the first two songs here begin each side, respectively) meant exile, estrangement and exhaustion.  Sometimes being modest, keeping things small and hidden, is the best strategy; live a bourgeois life and then make shocking music, to paraphrase Flaubert.  But, due to circumstances and personality, that wasn’t an option.  If you’re going to be the baddest bunch of badasses around, to really be bohemian artists, movement and some measure of desperation are crucial. 

Time is also of the essence; “Brown Sugar” was recorded very quickly at Muscle Shoals, in Alabama, where almost no one knew who they were.  It’s Jagger’s song, lyrics and music (Richards cleaned up the music a little, he says) and while Marsha Hunt says it’s in part about her, it is a straight-out-of-the-unconscious song about the roots of rock, about young girls and house boys, about slavery and money, about Africa and America.  Jagger is still (at this stage!) saying “I’m no school boy but I know what I like” (hmm) as if he really needs to tell us he’s down for whatever; the sugar may be a girl, a drug, music, or the whole thing altogether.  His question is rhetorical; or is it?  Certainly the music is a rave-up, the guitar and horns and Jagger’s “whoo”s making it sound like some kind of houseparty, and everyone in the song seems to be having fun, save for the poor women being whipped at the beginning (and in the murk of this song, you can only imagine what the hell’s happening afterward, or how much fun the man in question is having at any given time).  It’s always the midnight hour in this song, the culmination one day and start of the next; a time when anything is possible.  So much of this noisy song points towards sounds that aren’t there – the whipcracks, the grunts and groans, the chains, the oohs and aahs, wading into that deep water where rock and roll isn’t just a metaphor anymore, but real.  Jagger is audibly strutting here and the band is eagerly jumping in, licking and savouring the whole thing with relish, as if to say, well, yeah, the roots of rock ‘n’ roll are kinda umm, unpleasant, but hey, look what we got now! We’re in Alabama, dammit, right down here in a damn shack across the street from (somehow appropriately) a cemetery.  Ghosts abound, unnerving ones, and this is one big whistle to say, we aren’t afraid, we can look at pain and degradation and find sex and exultation even in that. 

Is this an ugly song, at its heart?  Is Jagger’s wondering just where all this pleasure is coming from kind of obvious?  Or is there something just so raw here that even he can only really allude to it? The oomph of the song sweeps a lot of these questions away, and certainly most who bought it in the US and UK wouldn’t care too much about them.  It rocks, it’s the Stones, it sounds rough and sexy, and so of course it’s a hit.  The group isn’t so much testing its audience here as more or less slapping them in the face, the violence of the song somehow seeping out to an audience willing to share it.  That they played this song for the first time at Altamont is eerie, to say the least.

“Bitch” is a simpler affair; love is blue, as Paul Mariat has it, but for Jagger and Richards it’s just a bitch, making you weak, insatiable, sloppy, destroying any and all willpower.  I can’t say I remember these songs when they came out (I was only four at the time) but I remember hearing this only too well in a used bookstore in Washington D.C. in the hot summer of ’99.  I had gone down there to stay with my godmother while I was visiting/hanging out with a guy I’d gotten to know very well indeed  online (emails every day, that sort of thing); he had dumped me asap (the day after I’d arrived) and in hearing this I could certainly sympathize with Jagger’s complaints.  I couldn’t sleep or think straight on the way down, I felt possessed; even after the dumping, there was only one thing on my mind, besides the incredible heat and humidity, and that was the possibility of hearing from him in some way.  I had gone into the thing wholeheartedly and had to reach out to anything and anyone who could help me through my empty days.  Even though he’s in a relationship, it’s a drain; the “yeah yeah yeah”s here are affirmations, high-fives from him to me, that excitement is confounding and frustrating, that even if the relationship is good, it still can have you at its mercy, that love is unapologetic and nothing can replace it – everything else, sleep, food, everything else is secondary. The horns stab at him like prongs here, the guitar winks, the whole song is a huge agitation, swishing this way and that, relentless, just as love is.  The big bass drum pounds along with his heart, and I remember getting some solace from this, that love possesses and takes over, and the poor physical body just has to put up with it, in the hopes that something more peaceful might develop out of it all.  Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t.

And now, finally, welcome everyone, to the man who started it all.  The only rock ‘n’ roller my father could abide; the one who will likely outlive all others, God willing.  Chuck Berry.  Rock ‘n’ roll is his thing and everyone else is more or less just winging it from there.  To say the Stones owe a lot to him is a massive understatement; even after having a rough time of it playing with him, Richards had to forgive Berry, because he is the fount of all of this, this mixture of country and r&b, sounding so natural at this time but so radical in the 50s.  Berry's “Let It Rock*” (the title’s never mentioned in the song) is about railroad workers in Alabama finishing up building some track, waiting to be paid for the week, resting, playing games or just hanging out, when the foreman rushes to them, nearly breathless, telling them there’s an unscheduled train coming this way, so clear out, get off the tracks.  They do, moving bodies and teepees and equipment, the song ending with them safe and a train about to appear; whether it stops in time (after all, there’s no more track for it) is hard to say, but the propulsive rhythm suggests that the train can’t stop now, it’s too late, and whatever happens next is anyone’s guess.  The Stones play it faithfully enough, and again metaphors abound; the South and the heat; the unstoppable thing that is rock; the longing for freedom from strife and search for pleasure; the sudden chaos and unpredictability of life itself.  One minute you’re throwing dice and the next you’re running around like crazy, trying to avoid injury or even death.  Like so many Berry songs it says so much while being so simple, so elemental, both musically and lyrically.  The future is here, the train is coming; the men who are helping it to happen live in danger, but pioneers always do. 

The Stones were familiar with hairy situations, but like these workers they too would have to scatter fast, be resourceful and somehow still retain those bohemian roots, as well.  (“Bitch” was recorded in London, “Let It Rock” live in Leeds; is this the only triple-a-side where recorded in three different places?  I think so.)  All this running around takes its toll, as they would find out; the complaints of “Bitch” could just as equally apply to a love affair or with (to a certain extent) the love of music itself, a love that equally cannot be faked. 

The roughness and honesty of these songs – the fountains and the source, if you like – are admirable, disturbing, itchy.  The rave-up is about sex and slavery; the rocker is about the pains, not pleasures, of love; but here at the end is a wake-up call to live, to prize life above everything else, to lose your blues in brand new shoes.  The Stones tried to do this, but after a while they settled for the bourgeois life without that much rawness seeping out; there are only so many ways to be bad, genuinely bad, before it begins to pall.  (The always elegant and ever-slightly-sarcastic drumming of Charlie Watts is like a constant rejoinder here that rock ‘n’ roll may be all well and good, but jazz came before it and hovers above it like an open umbrella.)  Chuck Berry is the winner here, if there’s to be a contest, and really, there is no contest; it’s his world and the Stones roll around in it, now and then reflecting on where it all started, on where rock ‘n’ roll got its name in the first place.  Rock is coming of age**, just teetering on being respectable, whether it wants to be or not.  That this was stopped from going to #1 by a song that is genuinely more creepy (“Knock Three Times”) shows that pop is somehow always able to smuggle the most dreadful things and have no one notice, whereas rock has to try harder and harder to do what it once did:  shock. 

Next up:  what if freedom is sacrificed for something greater?      

*In a few months a fashion boutique/hangout in Chelsea’s World’s End area will also be named Let It Rock; it will reach back to the 50s at first, but then will turn into a place where the future will be shaped.  Its proprietors:  Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood.

**If it started in ’55, it’s now in its own “sweet sixteen” phase.

Just You Wait: Ashton, Gardner and Dyke: "The Resurrection Shuffle"

As the 60s turned into the 70s, there were a lot of musicians who had been working as sidemen that decided to take their own shot at fame, however transient that would be.  Some were more successful than others; at this point there’s more than a few who are gearing up, waiting in the wings, or are cult figures, yet to break out into the mainstream.  In a way the 70s are open country as the dominant band of the previous decade – The Beatles – have gone their separate ways, have broken into their constituent parts.  Something new is forming, but has yet to really jell, and in the free-for-all atmosphere one-hit wonders are bound to happen, even more than usual. 

Ashton, Gardner and Dyke were all experienced musicians – two of them worked with George Harrison on Wonderwall – and after a flop first single, they came up with this song (an NME #2), which itself sounds like a grab bag of hip signifiers of the time, V-signs, blown kisses and backbones slipping.  I’m not sure what ‘heavy leather’ has to do with anything, but this is a warm-up, in its way, for what is to come.  It’s loud, fast, defiant, masculine – horns and piano lead the way here.  It’s a rave-up reveille for the new troops of bands to come, all hey-now jiving and dancing.  (Tom Jones covered it, of course.) 

After the psychedelic haze of the late 60s, rock is going back to its early 50s basics – get up, have fun, the lyrics say, and come alive again*.  So it is a pity that these guys never got another hit, though they kept going for another year or so.  Something this upbeat and salutary can’t really be repeated, though, but I can’t help but think of this as a kind of blueprint for a lot of what is about to come.  There comes a point, I should add, when rock dramatically dies and then comes back to life; and this is a prediction of that, more than anything else.  It’s a portent, and in this time when no one really knows what is happening, a good one.

Next up:  did someone say pre-rock? 

*I doubt if resurrection is being used here in its Christian sense.  Though rock music was starting to get hip to Christianity (or is that the other way around?) at this time, a far cry from Jerry Lee Lewis having to be talked into doing “Great Balls of Fire.” 

Hard Rock Calling: Free: "All Right Now"

And now we step, dear readers, away from the dance floor and into…the arena, if not the rock festival, amongst blokes, dudes, the kind of guys who are unequivocally guys, who were there when Free rocked the Isle of Wight and have been hard rock adherents (note – not heavy metal, that’s for kids, son)ever since. Even if they were teenagers at the time (and it should be noted that Free were all teenagers when they started in ’68) they were still dudes, really. (As Dellio and Woods state: “Probably no two songs [Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen” being the other] in rock history have inspired as much ritualistic grunting among males between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five*.”)

Wherefore all this grunting? I can just imagine a kid in his bedroom playing air guitar to this (why is it that I think of air guitar as a 70s thing?), trying his best to be Paul Kossoff, laid back as hell but still razor sharp. Or perhaps he’s trying to be Paul Rodgers, a gruff Middlesborough-born singer who fled to London to participate in the blues boom, who co-wrote this song with Andy Fraser, the bassist. Youth and young manhood; grunting; an early dedication to rockin’ and boogie and then more rockin’. There can hardly be a more blokey song than this (fear not readers, I do get to others – the looming beast called pub rock is in the works), a song wherein a young woman’s fears are heard out (which by hard rock’s terms is almost gallant) and then shushed away.

Quite how a woman can smile “from her head to her feet” remains a mystery, but clearly she’s interested in him, he’s interested in her (enough to ask her name, take her home in his car – you might think he’d take her somewhere else, but hard rock’s not interested in superfluous things like dating). Once they are presumably ensconced on his sofa, he watches her like a hawk; you’d think he would have thought of doing that a bit earlier, in the car maybe, but perhaps he was too busy grunting along to the car radio. No matter. Now she starts to get suspicious (for someone who was all smiles a minute ago, oddly) and wonders if he’s “trying to put me in shame.” He reassures her he doesn’t want to move too fast (well, thank goodness for that) and asks the poignant question “Don’t you think that love can last?” Again she suspects he wants love, that he is all but Pluto, springing his trap on poor hapless Persephone. The song takes a lot of time – a whole lot of title singing – to reassure her that things aren’t like that, when to any rational observer they most certainly are. Why are they at his place when they could be anywhere else? Why is she so suspicious all of a sudden? All of this concern is batted away by the easy-going jazzy riffs, the smile in Rodgers’ voice, the sense that maybe he just wants to get high with her while listening to Wheels Of Fire. Who knows?

One obvious thing was that this was an instant hit, catapulting these young men into stardom, stardom that they weren’t quite prepared for. Kossoff had drug problems that eventually led the band to split up, reform and then split again for good in ’73; this was their big hit, their figurative moment in the sun. They effectively became a one-hit wonder and this must have been frustrating as well. But that is how music works sometimes – you work in clubs and gig all over the place, have your one satisfying moment and it gets so cemented in the public’s minds that a second hit is hard to get, the first one is so stuck there. (Yes, I know they had a second hit – “Wishing Well” – but never heard it growing up, just this.) Kossoff died in 1976, by which time Rodgers and drummer Simon Kirke had started up Bad Company, picking right up where they left off, effectively.

But now, in 1970, this stuff (which Dellio and Woods dub Hard Rockin’ Shit, for obvious reasons) was new and carried the rock flag proudly, wearing denim, rockin’ out whenever and wherever possible, and taking an easy – maybe too easy – attitude towards women, women who are smart to men’s tricks, tricks men barely see as that’s the way they roll, baby, whether you like it or not. Give in, the song seems to say, I’m not that bad, am I? No reason to hesitate if the moment is right, and in HRS the moment is always right. Young, eager men have been agreeing wholeheartedly ever since, grunting and singing along, a whole genre summed up pretty much in one song.

Next up: what if she’s not a, um, she?


*”What Winston Churchill would have looked like in Sumo wrestling garb, that’s what “All Right Now” sounded like.” Really, is there anyone better than Dellio and Woods, folks?

The Man Can't Stop Our Music: The Rolling Stones: "Let's Spend The Night Together"

"Nineteen sixty-seven was the watershed year, the year the seams gave way...There was a tension in the air. It's like negative and positive ions before a storm, you get that breathlessness that something's got to break."

Keith Richards, Life


Though technically we are now in mid-February '67, I want to go back a month, specifically to January 15th. On that night this song was performed live on the Ed Sullivan Show with an altered title - the more modest "Let's Spend Some Time Together" - with Mick rolling his eyes every time he had to sing the bowdlerized lyric. Afterwards the band then went backstage and changed into Nazi uniforms (not sure where those came from, the episode is not mentioned in Life) and Sullivan told them to change back into their regular stage clothes; the band refused and left and never appeared on the show again. For any other band this would have been a disaster, but for The Rolling Stones this more or less cemented their bad-boy status. The rest of the year for them included the "stitch-up" bust, trial, imprisonment, bail, a psychedelic album that was "flimflam" to Richards. But back to the song...

The song (an NME-only #2, by the way) is about as straightforward as the Stones ever get, both musically and lyrically; it's simply a demand/request from the hard-of-dancing Mick to his new love, Marianne Faithfull, who he had met not long ago. That she was a mom and wife didn't seem to matter to him (nor to her) and I wonder if Sullivan knew this was about more than just a mere lusty crush. It is shameless, in all senses of the word, and just changing the title barely disguises what is going on - "I'm going red and my tongue's getting tied/I'm off my head and my mouth's getting dry" - put that together with the pumping music and the way the words and music seem to be coupling themselves and there you have it.

However far-out music is getting, here are the Stones to kindly remind everyone what rock 'n' roll actually means and if Mick is a bit of a clown here, well, all for the better. That they get sidetracked by psychedelia just shows what purists they are, or perhaps how what they want to do (and do best) has very little to do with fashion, and more with an obsession over sounds, textures, moods. Here it's heart-pounding, nearly unbearable excitement, pure and simple. (It was banned when they went to China a few years back, but having matured as a band, they simply played other hits instead.)

The day after the Rolling Stones were banned from Ed Sullivan's show, I was born. It was also the day after the weekend of the Human Be-In in San Francisco, where some of the hipper people already had copies of The Doors' first album. The Rolling Stones, whether they knew it or not, were now a part of the counterculture, the ones who said 'no' to straight society and would thereafter have to deal with the outside world at increasingly desperate ways. When a lusty song is enough to rile the Establishment, you know they must be scared of something much bigger - namely, the breakdown of society altogether. The tensions Richards mentions are growing, this song is a (hapless) symbol of one generation's attempted censorship of another.

What comes next was not what anyone expected; it made the Stones look old-fashioned, practically Teds in context. The crossroads are going to become startlingly clear.

Someone Who'll Be There: Connie Francis: "Mama"/"Robot Man"

A double 'A' side is a strange thing to a North American (or, at least this one), but it is acceptably common in the UK; it is an odd thing to think of both sides of a piece of vinyl as being the 'main' one, but if this idea is strange then it also can lead to some pretty damn awesome works of art; and I propose that this one, the first one, is a good example of that.

"Mama"/"Robot Man" are the two quite different sides to a girl (Francis, nee Franconero, was all of 21 when they were recorded) who is just starting to feel the pulls between the past and the future, all while negotiating the sometimes turbulent now. "Mama" is a string-intensive ballad from the original Italian; it begins in English and then seamlessly goes into Italian (it is from her album Connie Francis Sings Italian Favorites). It is a heart wrenching song about missing one's mother, a song any daughter who misses her mom can understand in either language; here is the main part in Italian:

"Quanto ti voglio bene
Queste parole d'amore
Che ti sospira il mio cuore
Forse non si usano piu
Ah Mamma
Ma la canzone mia piu bella sei tu
Sei tu la vita e per la vita non ti lascio mai piu..."

I am sure that this got the okay from Francis' rather overprotective father, who forbade her marrying Bobby Darin to the point of chasing him out of his own house with a gun. (Who could dislike Bobby Darin?) Whether he approved of the other song is something to ponder, as it is almost entirely the opposite song, in that she is looking for a boy...no, erase that, a robot for a partner. "Robot Man" is the unlikely but true origin for all other songs wherein a woman longs for a steady and utterly loyal companion, from "Automatic Lover" by Dee D. Jackson to "Robot Song" by Margaret Berger. (Hmm, come to think of it, maybe Connie's dad would have preferred a robot to a real guy; but let's concentrate on the song.) Here, instead of her usual 'sobbing' style (a style hers & hers alone; a style that is perhaps symbolic of the whole young woman trapped in the 50s and yearning to get to the 60s, if only because the 60s must mean something different) she sings in a rough style about how she wants a man who is so nice "He'd never dance with anyone but me/I'd just have to wind him with a robot key" because she "Don't want a real live boy, they give me grief/Always make me cry into my ha-andkerchief/So it's a robot man I'm dreamin' of/Because I can depend upon a robot love, yeah!" Even though this is a song that is in jest, it feels only half in jest; you get the idea that Connie has had enough of scoundrels & cads and really would settle for a electronic hunk of metal.

The greatness of having these two songs as, in essence, one song is that the extreme longing for the past and the longing for an improbable future are in the balance; missing her mother (who may or may not be dead; it's hard to tell) and wishing for a man who has a similar reliability sans emotions is about as full a statement on the human condition as we, dear reader, have encountered here so far. Not only that, but they foreshadow a similar double a side that will be, for many, the apex of the 60s; two songs that also deal with the past as it was and perhaps never was and never could be.

Friendly Forebear #1: Marty Wilde: "A Teenager In Love"

We are now in the summer of '59; the last summer of the 50s and a time when the charts were very slow...and also the time when the UK started to have its own idols battling for the hearts (and pocketbooks) of those new creatures, teenagers. They were powerful (so many of them!) and yet powerless; brave enough to fall in love, to cry, to sigh...and understandably myopic enough to have a song boldly empathize with their sometimes sorry plight. Being in love is hard work, Pomus and Shuman remind us, but the narrator in question is loyal and true, long-suffering and ultimately philosophical.

Why must he be in love? Is it to fight and make up, only to fight again? To learn to be more forgiving, perhaps? Love here is one big starry-eyed existentialist ordeal, and while Dion and the Belmonts* do a more than fine version of this song, Wilde's version is about as close to New Pop as the song could possibly get; his is the right proper way of saying all at once "this is a fine life alright, being a teenager, SIGH" and "you know this song is sort of meta, right?" His performance of this practically gives this away, his minimalism as striking as anything coming out of Swedish furniture design at the time. He makes Cliff look like the earnest worker bee that he was (and is). It should be no surprise, then, that Wilde is a literal father to New Pop (via his son Ricky and daughter Kim) as well as a friendly forebear of it here, looking like a cross between Edwyn Collins and Martin Fry, just barely moving and yet saying it all, just as teenagers always want to do.

*If anyone was wondering if I was able to fully appreciate the work of Phil Spector, well, I do! And not just for his work with girl groups, either. In 1975 he produced Dion's tremendously awesomesauce Born to Be With You, which deserves more praise and attention (such as it gets here).

The Big Men: The Four Preps: "Big Man"

When I arrived in London in the summer of '88, I was intrigued by two girls from my hometown - L.A. - who had moved, voluntarily and of their own accord, to London. They were Tracey Bryn and Melissa Brooke Belland, and they led a band called Voice of the Beehive. Despite moving they still had that Californian sunshine and indefagitability in their voices, as well as a way with hooks and sudden pleasurable shifts, and their album Let It Bee was one of my top ones for that year. Little did I know that one day I would encounter their father's music right here in London, as part of a much bigger picture I could have hardly imagined...

Bruce Belland is the leader of The Four Preps (who are still going to this day, though not in their original lineup). When I hear "Big Man" - a song about the aftermath of a lover's spat (you can just hear the "You can't dump me I am dumping you first!" dialogue), I hear the sisters' good cheer even in the midst of doubt and loneness. "I was a big man yesterday, but boy, you oughta see me now" they sing as if they do and don't really want to be seen. Their voices are smooth and in regular harmony, but there is a definite alone-at-the-end-of-the-hallness to it, from the church basement rumbling piano to the admitting that "the only thing that made me big was YOUUUU!" that climaxes the song. He wants her back, he knows he's done wrong; his life is "so empty now that half my life's walked out" that you have to wonder how much headdesking will occur and maybe worse if she won't even look at him again. The song fades as if the narrator is indeed becoming invisible, leaving soundlessly through the back door at the end of the hall, not to sob but to just hang his head low at how stupid he can be. And his daughters will sing thirty years later: "It's just a city/ And on night like this I feel small in this world/It's just a city and I am just a girl."

But the story of the Four Preps doesn't just stop with this song. Bruce Belland's story is here, but what of Ed Cobb, who wrote "Tainted Love" and "Every Little Bit Hurts" not to mention "Dirty Water"? What of Glen Larson, who produced the The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman and Knightrider, whose theme he also wrote, later on sampled by Jay-Z? There was a lot of talent in these young men from Hollywood, talent that reaches towards science fiction, garage rock, New Pop and Northern Soul, not forgetting Motown. Not at all bad for a group I have only come to appreciate now - YAY L.A.!

Whoops, I've Fallen Into The Pool: Jim Dale: "Be My Girl"

And now we come to a bellwether, a notable moment, a stopping place: this is the first #2 of the rock 'n' roll/pop era by someone from the UK. And how...appropriate that it be almost a perfect template of its time (semi-yelping big-eyed-puppy longing) and a past-is-prologue to everything that is to come. The high-pitched tinkly piano comes from Winifred Atwell and is still alive with Lily Allen; the backing singers are a little too polished to be the Jordanaires and thus may as well be the Mike Sammes Singers, minus the girls. The whole thing has the air of being well-rehearsed and yet just casually put together in that adorable slackerly way most (not all!) UK musicians have. Dale was going to be a pop idol but then found out that "his entry into the UK singles chart came about more by accident than design, for his ability to fall over without sustaining injury far outweighed his vocal skills" - and so the first time I ever saw him (looking like Davy Jones' uncle) was in Digby, the Biggest Dog in the World and not in a record collection of any of my friends' moms. Music turning to comedy; comedy informing and enriching music; this is the unlikely yet inevitable precursor to just about everything to come, either directly or inadvertently. (That he is the straight, loyal guy to the butterfly-like girl in the song only underlines all this, in case you were wondering about the narrative details, as such.)