Turn Around: Kenny Rogers And The First Edition: "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town"

She looks in the mirror, tousling her hair a little it, just to make sure it doesn't look too much like a helmet. She still does her hair, unlike those hippie girls; she's not one of them. She wears short skirts, sure, but everyone does by now; but she goes out wearing stockings and heels, not bare-legged with sandals. She is looking for a man - who he is, she's not sure yet, she'll know him when she sees him. She dresses this way once a week, doing her nails and powdering her face more regularly - he knows mainly by her hairdo where she is going. She has heard his protests before, is inured to them - but what is she supposed to do? Where is she supposed to go?

Her lipstick and nails match; her stockings are straight; she has chosen her necklace to go with her dress, and thence her earrings to go with all of that. She is young and needs attention - the kind of attention that he can't, or won't, give her any more. If only he understood. For him it's that he thinks she wants sex, but sex is only really part of it. There is so much that leads up to it, so much flirting and small talk and just the good feeling of being with someone who is paying attention to you. Doesn't he notice these romances don't really go anywhere? It's not like she has a lover, another man, in particular. And it's not like she does this every Saturday night, either, though lately...it's been that way.

It's familiar, this feeling. She feels as if she is two places at once. She knows she should be with him, that he really doesn't have long, and then she can do as she pleases. Perhaps she should stay home with him; she sees a vet on crutches going down the main road and has to stop and pause, because he's not alone - his woman's with him, and there they are, talking away, going to a movie or restaurant maybe. Sigh. It's his legs that make him want to stay home she thinks, and he can't really go anywhere in his wheelchair.

She pauses again and continues on, refusing to go back. She will sleep on it and resolve herself, give herself up for now, and quit acting like he doesn't exist. Like the war existed just to ruin their relationship, which was a good one. She will try to have a good time, though tonight her heart is in her mouth; that song is on the jukebox, the meanest one in town, but she will withstand its sting one more time, daring fate to give her a better man. If he turns up tonight, then that's that...if not, I'll live with him until he's gone. She is not one for giving up, but she cannot live without romance. Without that zing in the air, that fun. He's got to understand that, right?

He sits and waits. He's murderous; he's resigned - if she dies, then that will be on his conscience too. Doesn't she know he still loves her, still needs her around? Maybe tonight she'll change her mind, come back at a reasonable time, and not late and drunk. As long as she comes back early, he can stand it, just. One day he'll be dead and she'll be sorry, she's got to understand that. She is his soul; his living link to the rest of the world. Sure she can have fun, but he needs her far more than she can comprehend. Maybe tonight he'll tell her nicely, not get angry. Can he do that? He's tried before...he'll have to try again. There is nothing else he can do, and silently suffering is not for him. Neither is breaking up, there's no point.

******************************************

How hopeless they both are; how he said vs. she said are their views; how has this war and decade changed them both. The old world is slipping away, the madness of war has come into their own home. Both armed for battle, one way or another. She is silent, determined; he sounds older than his years, weary, vaguely threatening and scary. This is the anger of the decade bubbling up, a deathly decade that has to end. Maybe he will live longer than they said; maybe she will be faithful. Both will grow either tired of the same routine, or become like stone, unable to move, to grow, to evolve. Perhaps one day she will push him down the street, they will go out and begin to be a couple again. But that's for the spring, when it's warm enough and the flowers are out, the ones he once planted for her.

You Can't Play That On The BBC part 2: Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich: "Bend It!"

In the midst of all this it's important to remember that we are still in the Age of Meek, though the man himself was entangled in a lawsuit and increasingly (understandably) anguished over many things, he was still writing and producing songs. Not hits; Edinburgh's own The Buzz's epic "You're Holding Me Down" should have been a monster freakbeat hit of the first order, but it was just too much for The Man (talk about a song only playable on pirate radio). Meek was a producer who had his own technique and sound, stubborn, unable to just simply record a band and have a "live, off the floor" vibe that was the hallmark of others (The Who songs at this time all sound like they were recorded as is in a broom closet, for instance.)

How I wish I could say that this song was a Meek production, but songwriting team Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley (who had had success with Meek with this song, one so compressed it sounds like a singing baseball bat) had no luck with the band (then called Dave Dee and the Bostons) as Meek wanted them to play slowly, then speed them up on tape; the band just knew how to play the songs they had one way, and that was that - Meek stormed upstairs, and the band schlepped their equipment back down the stairs. Howard and Blaikley then not only were their songwriters and managers, but producers too. Part of Meek's anguish must have been knowing how successful they were, while his own songs were busy getting nowhere.

If The Who introduced gender confusion to pop, well, here comes DDDBM&T with something so utterly blatant that I am surprised anyone played it...but a cheery bit of "Zorba's Dance" makes this playful and you just know girls loved Dave Dee*, the sort of guy who could sing this with a smile and enjoy its campness without being camp himself in the least. It got played because it was naughty (so naughty that they had to re-record it with different lyrics for the US) and the fact that it was written by a gay songwriting team...did not seem to matter. (DDDBM&T's first chart hit was called "You Make It Move" - no kidding.) The slow-building excitement, the clapping, the insinuating melody - it's like a Greek dance meeting a late-night Blow Up-style freakout wherein everyone is having a good time and anything could happen afterwards, to the point beyond just flirting and dancing. This impending shagfest rave-up was too much for the BBC (who only played The Honeycombs after they had reached the Top 20), who still are reluctant to play it. It may seem embarrassing now, I suppose, but such insistent and scrunching rhythms were exactly what the grannies in Arboath/Iowa didn't approve of, bless them. Pop always needs a WTF song of one kind or another, and while this is the strangest of the bunch of '66, it is by far the last...

Alas, this is the only time I get to write about these colorful, winking and theatrical men (Howard & Blaikley and DDDBM&T) - Meek was growing ever more morbid, trying to record ghosts in graveyards...just as the 60s were at their most vivid and alive, just as the strangeness began to creep in, around the edges...things were only barely in check.


*Dave Dee was a policeman before he formed a band; he was called out to help at the crash that killed Eddie Cochran and injured Gene Vincent, a moment that may well have transferred some of Cochran's rebellious spirit into Dee. Who knows? I am sure Meek would have understood, and maybe even envied him for it.

Someone Somewhere Is Having A Good Time: Winifred Atwell: "Let's Have a Party" and Frankie Vaughan: "The Green Door"

And now, some more housekeeping. In the rush to get through 1953 I omitted an important number two, perhaps knowing somehow it would happily sip its figurative drink until I got to it years later.

We are now entering the Age of Meek; the boy from the Forest of Dean has been puzzling over recorded and transmitted sounds for 24 years now - and is an engineer, by occupation, though his energy is so strong that he is, in fact, a producer for both these songs. (This is certainly a good case for the number two songs being more representative of what was going on than the number ones.) Meek innovated, he obsessed, and with these records he did what he could to enchant and bend the ear of the listener.

Atwell's medley (side one: "If You Knew Suzie/The More We Are Together/That's My Weakness Now/Knees Up Mother Brown" side two: "Daisy Bell/Boomps a Daisy/She Was One of the Early Birds/Three O'Clock in the Morning") is a deliberate and giddy throwback to the saloons of old, her piano treated and thus altered as much as John Cage's were across the ocean. It sounds as if there is a drummer on the song but he just keeps time; the rest is Atwell's loose player-piano style, providing bass and guitar, in effect, if not voice. However a guitar does come in on the second side, sounding sor all the world not like a guitar at all but the bleeping bloops of a machine - a very primitive synth. If you ever wondered what the precedent was for the cantina scene in Star Wars, this is it. Atwell would have fit in fine there, just as she did in post-war UK.

Three years later and another party is being held: one, I suspect, even more avant-garde or off-limits than Atwell's come-one come-all shindig. With "The Green Door" we have a party we are not allowed to join, one maddeningly interesting (to the point that our hapless and excited narrator can't sleep) but mysteriously forbidding. There's a "hot piano" behind the door, and laughter, but there is a sense that these are just the start of the intrigue, and not the point. That "Joe" sent him is met with derision (a nice coincidence there and yes, ironic as can be, too) points to the fact that our narrator may not be as pitiable as you might think. He seems to enjoy the whole frustrating ordeal (whenever he sings "door" it's as "doo-orr-AAAH!" as if some vital part of his anatomy was being, um, squeezed). The song is quiet and swinging at first, then big band brassy, then quiet again as he is once more sleepless (does he live nearby? The green door in question seems to become more and more figurative as the song goes on). Then it ends abruptly with the cry "Green door!" in longing and happy frustration. There are no proto-synth moments in the song, but Meek - a gay man in a resolutely straight world, which in 1956 meant that he was, in effect, illegal (or to be more accurate, he could be who he was as long as The Man was ignorant of the fact) gave this version of the song an extra dose of oomph that goes beyond the va-va-voom recording itself. I am not a Meekologist, but I cannot help but see this as the first in many songs produced by him that are full of longing and anger; joyous here, but increasingly darker and deeper, far from the aroused insomnia of Vaughan.