A New Hope: Sparks: "This Town Ain't Big Enough For The Both Of Us"

And now we have, for all intents and purposes, the last (and in a way, first) great song of the Glam Slam era; I say last as outside of a couple of hits by Mud and Sweet that era is nearly done at MSBWT, and first as while all of these bands are - or aren't - going to continue, Sparks are just getting started.  To say there's no one really like them is an understatement; only this year has another band (Franz Ferdinand) been able to join them onstage as equals, and indeed record an entire album with them as FFS.

And wouldn't it be a couple of Americans - Ron and Russell Mael - who would be able to storm the charts (and, infamously, Top Of The Pops) and show up the scene as being over?  Not that I think this is a confrontational song in that way.  After all, it starts quietly, with that high nervous tinkle of piano and Russell Mael singing about, of all things, "zoo time" (yes, it's a romantic triangle that starts in a zoo - all those musky smells!) being "she and you time" and the song seems to come into focus as he mentions the "stampeding rhinos, elephants and tacky tigers" that then JUMP out into the song and are, as the guitars and drums come in, all but rampaging around, the gunshot like a trigger for their rebellion.  And our narrator is brave enough (though nervous, heartbeat increasing) to stay around....

...but this is no song of macho heroism, as that first nervous tinkle propels the song, pausing for breath at times (this always sounds like a song climbing and climbing, trying to avoid vertigo) and appropriately, the next verse sees our triangle in the air, she a stewardess and he is a bombardier and it's Hiroshima they are nearing - but still, the narrator won't leave.  All this on a domestic flight?  This is romantic anxiety that is blowing everything up, making it bigger than life, but it's not exaggeration if you're experiencing it.  And then it descends to a cafe, where he meets her each day, and the rival sees "twenty cannibals" there eating him - they've got to eat too, after all! - and suddenly the idea of Glam seems to fade, right here in front of us.  This is not good-time music per se, nor is it about romantic languor (HA) or some kind of dystopian world where the kids will be feral but all right (Bowie)*. 

This is sweaty palms, shallow breathing, sure, but also determination.  The narrator won't give in no matter how dangerous things are, and scenario after scenario is conjured up and defied.  The rival takes a shower ("you've got to look your best for her and be clean everywhere" - that's just not Glam lyricism, there) and in the rainy foreign town "the bullets" can't hit him - because he's too clean, too sleek?  And then the last scene, where a census (?!) shows there will be more girls in town, but still not enough - and the derring-do nerves come back once more, leaping up and down - "this town AIN'T big enough not BIG ENOUgh for the Both OF US" - and ends on a high ascending "I ain't gonna LEEAVE" and stops abruptly, so the audience can get used to what they've just heard. 

The narrator has more than made his case, if only in his own mind.  No wild animals, nuclear explosions, gunfights on deserted streets by cafes, no, nothing is going to stop our high-voiced narrator from getting the girl and defeating his rival.  Guitars wail, pianos pound (one Ron Mael stares into the camera and doesn't blink and this just adds to the steely determination of the song) and drums beat time that is Anglophile but somehow not - more fleet of foot, less teathered to "the blues" - Sparks are just different and I've seen them compared to Queen (um, NO) and 10cc (a bit closer, but still, no).  ("Amateur Hour" was their next hit, and is funny and sexy and yes, the girls did scream...) 

This is instinctive music, dramatic, playful - you get the idea that no genre of music is off limits to Sparks, no lyrical idea too weird.  (This song seems to come out of a musical, for instance.)  This song marks the real start, I feel, towards not punk so much as post-punk**; a kind of follow-your-own-path sense that prizes skill, sure, but also awkwardness, singularity, experimental-mindedness.  Compare this to the Glam-by-numbers of "Sugar Baby Love" and you can see how this song's increasing heartbeats are somehow truer to life than the 50s throwback at the top; it's more alive, it's rock music without being beholden to "rock" - it is the leap forward, forward to Glasgow, to London, to Dundee, to anywhere that longs for something new.  Just as The Beatles brought American music back to America, Sparks have brought British music back to the British; a big claim, but a valid one, I feel...

Next up:  There, and yet not.

*In case you were wondering, I was supposed to write about ChangesBowie over at Then Play Long, but the prospect of doing so gave me a literal headache.   

** Siouxie and the Banshees covered this on their Through The Looking Glass album in '87, which is when I first heard the song; Sparks have always been more popular in the UK than in their native land - and while she tries her best, she's too serious. This is a tough song to sing though, and she does get through it very well.                 

Postmodern "Love": David Bowie: "Drive-In Saturday (Seattle to Phoenix)"

Easter 1973 was perhaps the first one I remember; I had the chicken pox and was confined to my bed, while my father went off to this place called Canada for a job interview.  It was sunny and warm in L.A., I was hot and itchy and felt weird - weird to look at my skin, and weird that I knew that if he was successful, we would be moving pretty soon.  The undifferentiated chunk of my early formative life in Los Angeles, in Silverlake in particular, would be ending, the future unknown (not that I thought much about 'the future' as such back then).  When he came back, he brought me a concave plastic toy - shiny silver, with a green rubber ball suspended in the middle, so I could move it around and notice the reflections in the concavity...(my father wasn't much for presents). 

At the time I had no idea about David Bowie, as I've said before; but I can imagine there was a whole horde of kids in the UK who also felt weird, as if their own skin was strange, and who latched on to Bowie with that same feverishness I felt; if following T.Rex was like an ecstatic experience, then Bowie was more a contagion, something that took you over and left its marks, for good or bad.  This song (#2 on the Luxembourg chart) from Aladdin Sane has the strangeness of something you know is bad for you, maybe even corrupting; but it is done so well that hardly matters. 

It is hard, especially in these renewed days of Bowie fever, to cast any light on this song that hasn't already been shone; save to say how even on a train from Seattle to Phoenix (he didn't like to fly - still doesn't I guess) he is still determinedly English; let Elton John and Bernie Taupin sing about America, Bowie guesses that the young creatures of the future are going to be Anglophiles into Mick Jagger and Twiggy, not Marilyn Monroe or Roy Rogers.  These young folks have to learn the arts of romance, so to speak; and thus go to see movies and learn how they are done.  Yes, in the dystopia to come, even normal instincts are lost; or perhaps the apocalypse has made them unnecessary, until now...I don't know if the love in this song is real or not; or perhaps the love for cinema is stronger than the actual 'love' made in and around the song itself.  This is a concave world folding in on itself, the music a complex doo-wop*, Bowie's voice climbing and noting, gaining footholds, sympathetic (I think) to these hapless ravers, who are bumbling in the dark, so naive they have to read books and consult friends.  That this is normal adolescent behavior and doesn't need a post-apocalyptic setting to work is the secret of this song; teenagers will be clueless no matter what fall out may be around.  It is the music that is the most strange thing; I suspect that is why Mott the Hoople turned it down - Bowie gave them first dibs - and their rejection of it upset Bowie.  I am not sure Ian Hunter would have liked singing about "Jung the foreman" or "Astronette 8" and would have no idea what "Sylvian**, The Bureau Supply for ageing men" meant.  (Hm, maybe it's the lyrics and the music together...)  The entire effect is one of a kind of decadence, wherein figures from the 60s are in a 70s-style doo-wop song sung from the point of view of someone looking back on a post-apocalyptic future adolescence.  Whew! 

This is audio pop-art, the kind I remember being full of noise, lights, machines with personalities; I remember seeing a show like this at the time and being alternately thrilled by it and a little scared too.  That is as close to my reaction to Bowie would have been at the time - that this was maybe a little too grown up for me, that there were a lot of symbols and ideas going right over my head, ones I wouldn't have a clue about one way or another.   In the spring of 1973 Bowie was, as the V&A show no doubt says, influencing people; asking them, with this song, to consider the eternal verities and warn them of nostalgia, of relying too much on Jagger and Twig the Wonder Kid for glamour - for propping a whole culture up on the 60s in essence, the effective continuation of life itself on a video or two. 

That people are clamoring for Bowie now at the V&A is ironic as far as this song is concerned; I think it is right to view the past in context, but the right context is to hear the whole chart for this time to note how utterly different Bowie (and T.Rex and Roxy Music) were to everything else; strange and thrilling and a little scary.  (The V&A show strikes me, who will probably never see it, as one of itchy idolatry - the overheated reaction to it and his new album show that the contagion still exists, a benevolent one of course, but one that leads to things like zig-zag earrings and "David Bowie Is Turning Us All Into Voyeurs***" buttons isn't always a good thing.)

Still, this is the tacky, awkward post-apocalypse of romance; teenagers are going to manage with whatever is left, the 50s/60s merging into a past that is only of some help.  For those who felt out of step, odd in their own skin, Bowie was there to reassure them; but for others, those who didn't have to rehearse any lines or read books because their hormones were on fire - well, that's what I'm getting to next.

  

*Add to this confusion a performer who is very much English trying to do an American style of music - in hearing this I wondered if Bowie had ever even been to a drive-in.  Methinks not.

**I have no idea if David Sylvian got his last name from this song, but then again he was 15 at the time, so he probably did, unless it was the New York Dolls' Sylvain Sylvain first. 

***Voyeurs of what?  "David Bowie Is Watching You" is the t-shirt for the show; all this watching, directly or surreptitiously, sounds like one ugly game of hide and seek.  It also makes me wonder how this figure of the future knows about what the kids are doing...why is he so interested?  Cough.
   

A Child Shall Lead Them: 1910 Fruitgum Company: "Simon Says"

And now we come - all of a sudden, like a sugar rush - to the wonderful world of bubblegum music, which was a haven for garage bands who liked to make music for drunk girls to dance to (to borrow from Franz Ferdinand) as opposed to far-out psychedelic blues jams for those who wanted to get high. One of the great joys of pop is the complete inanity of it, that it does not and really should not be taken so seriously; and as you can see there was a lack of cheery, perky songs around at this time.

So in come the bubblegum army to give the increasingly heavy late 60s a big lift. The biggest source of bubblegum was one Buddah Records, run by Neil Bogart (he who later gave the world KISS and The Village People) - he saw the success of the Monkees and wanted in on the action - luckily he met the producing powerhouse duo of Jerry Kasenetz and Steve Katz, who proceeded to work with the 1910 Fruitgum Company (an actual band from New Jersey, btw, and not just a pseudonym for themselves) to do this song. I cannot say much about it except that the various looks on the faces here show that while this may not be what the group first got together to do (the b-side is called, after all, "Reflections From the Looking Glass") but it was what the kids wanted and it was dumb fun and what is wrong with that? (This is yet perhaps another variation of the childlike qualities of psychedelia, with this game* winning out as little kids were simply too young for anything else.)

What was one way out of the 60s? Bubblegum was maybe not what the serious types would have thought up, but it persisted in the US and in the UK, feeding into and energizing other music to make this old thing called rock 'n' roll new again (bubblegum + rock = glam). As absolutely non-threatening as this song is, it helped to refocus some on what mattered - sweetness, youth and a lightness of touch that during this time in particular were sorely needed. It reassured people - even those who hated playing this game - that there was still a place for simplicity in music, if not out-and-out nonsense. This is playground stuff, but it's the roots for a lot of what is to come; in a way bubblegum is the roots of a lot of good things about the 70s, if by good you also mean silly, addictive, sweet and ridiculous. That's fine; in fact bubblegum may have even pushed the whole 'back to basics' '68 movement along in its own way, just as much as The Band. Who knows? Anything can happen when travelling back to square one.


*Whenever I had to play this game I did well until it got too fast and I invariably messed up; but this song never does speed up or play tricks. Bubblegum's too good-hearted for that.

Brian Wilson, Western Recorders, Los Angeles, California...the solar system, the universe, the mind of God: The Beach Boys: "God Only Knows"

"Listen to 'God Only Knows' - as beautiful as anything ever recorded, and Brian Wilson starts a love song with "I may not always love you" - that's nerve."

Martin Skidmore, March 6, 2002, ILM



Part One: Five Men in a Room

There are five men in one room; they are all sitting down, perhaps some more comfortably than others. They are about to listen to an album, an advanced copy of it no less, and there is a certain tension in the air, of excitement and uncertainty. The album title is odd, for starters. The eldest of the five puts the album on the turntable and the needle on the starting groove...

They look at each other with some nods and smiles at first; yes, this is exactly what we expected, but, but...it is as if there are new colors and textures emerging at any given moment and the effect is of strangeness, more than anything else. This is like a flower opening, a bird flying; amazing and fragile and utterly natural, all at the same time. The eldest listens very carefully; one of the others is cool to the sounds, the words, but the effect is building up, until it hits a plateau they have already heard, of course...

...and then the most affected of the five gets up and turns it over, beside himself to hear what comes next. The first song glides into the air, serene as a swan. He covers his face with his hands, knowing that this is it. IT. They all know this is what they will have to equal on their next record or they will have fallen behind, and they cannot possibly do that. Even what they are doing now - which is pretty amazing - is not nearly enough. The room is quiet when the album ends; the eldest takes the record off the turntable and says: "That is our next goal, boys. To equal that."



Part Two: Pray


"The sheer emotion that comes out of the speakers is TERRIFYING. It is the pause between your declaration of love and her response."

Joseph Cowart, July 9, 2005 ILM


"Carl and I were into prayer. We'd pray together, and we prayed for light and guidance through the album. We kind of made it a religious ceremony."

Brian Wilson on recording Pet Sounds

And so the brothers prayed before recording this song. When you pray you hope, you try to bring something into being, to manifest it in some way. To say what that is precisely or to be too demanding is not needed; just to have that right energy and feel is the thing. Like anything ecstatic, there is no real explanation for what happens. There is almost no describing it. There is a melody, a beat, musicians, instruments. The song unfolds as it should and yet does not settle down. It is pointing towards it (the root chord) without ever saying directly what it is. That is probably because it - what the song is about - is unnameable, impossible to describe...it exists, but can only be felt, not heard...

...to digress to the 90s, this is one of my favorite songs, one that wouldn't exist without this one. What is it about? Here are the lyrics; but beyond those is the music, which reminds me at one point of something I don't talk about very much, because music is the only part of it that I can relate to others, and that is my own mystical experience. The chorus of the song (in particular the solo organ, at 1:29 or so) is about the only equivalent I have for the experience*.

"God Only Knows" works the same way for me but on a far more essential basis than even that; it came out when my mom was pregnant with me and as a native Angeleno I cannot help associate it with that important time. Objectivity for me is nearly impossible, therefore, but from what I sense this song either hits people right where they live - uncomfortably, as Cowart and Skidmore remind us - and they either reject it or accept it. There is no dodging the difference in this song - not even Mike Love's part in the break (the low bah-bah-bah-bomp-BAHs) can give much of a connection to anything they have done before.

The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby/Yellow Submarine" was number one at the time: two songs about either being isolated from the rest of humanity or joyously attached; and as an unwitting riposte here were the Beach Boys writing one of the ultimate songs to the Other, with sublime music which circles around the point - the indescribable point - as opposed to the rather blunt Beatles ones. The lovin' vibes that Wilson wanted here are more than apparent, the psychedelic swirl of instruments (accordion, french horn, sleigh bells, string quartet) are homely** and clip-clop delicately, the front room piano is the ground out of which all of this - voices, instruments - rises...and there is the word God, the word which had never been used in a pop song (jazz or patriotic anthems at this point only) before, right there in the title and chorus. The song was easy enough to write, compared to others on Pet Sounds, but it was the one most worried about.

Prayer was not only needed for the singing, but perhaps to get God's OK for the song. If the song took a short time to write, then doing so might count as a mystical experience, one that Wilson and Asher may have been too busy to notice. Brian Wilson was going to sing it but then decided his brother Carl would sound better; and they prayed before singing it. And so it went into the world as a prayer of its own.



Part Three: Influence


Stereolab have already been mentioned here; I should also mention the High Llamas (there are links between the groups, namely Sean O'Hagan). The more immediate influence is all over the place though, including (yes) the Velvet Underground. They may have been led by uber-rocker Lou Reed but John Cale, a Beach Boys fan, snuck in this; (ah irony in the host saying it was the most influential album).

Pet Sounds is notoriously a musician's album, which means it crossed (as thence did this song) into all kinds of ears, from Keith Jarrett to Charles Lloyd (who worked with the Beach Boys because of this), to Carla Bley, who was influenced by Wilson's way of orchestrating and arranging. (This is the full overture to Escalator Over The Hill; when I first heard it I was immediately reminded of downtown Los Angeles - now I know why). Marvin Gaye heard it and it helped to shape how What's Going On sounds - miles away from the regular Motown sound, denser and overlapping, profoundly moving in and of itself. (This may just be a way to say Pet Sounds is a soul album, come to think of it.) And it also fed into how The Carpenters would sound, from melodies to gentle melancholy; Richard Carpenter is also a Frank Zappa fan (oh yeah - us Californians stick together, you see) and some of the musicians here also appear on The Mothers of Invention's Freak Out!, which came out at around the same time and was another album to give The Beatles a pause for thought***.

Those most influenced by it were The Beach Boys themselves; it was Wilson's project to write it as the rest toured Japan, and there were initial mixed feelings about this and the other songs - no cars, no surfing, no girls, no fun; but the band came around to it in the end. At this point work began on Smile, a "teenage symphony to God" (the spiritual mood clearly continuing). No one was more ambitious or having more fun than Wilson at this time, but alas along with that came the gnawing sense that others were out there trying to surpass him, and so they were; we will see how far they got soon enough. Suddenly the stakes are much higher, and that they are centered on a beautiful song makes the attendant ironies that much keener. 1967 is just around the corner...



*That I had yet to hear any Stereolab when I had the experience just makes it all the stranger, plus this song hadn't been recorded yet...

** I mean homely as in old-fashioned but also as uncanny. The song seems familiar even if you've never heard it before, Wilson taking from the Four Freshmen, Lovin' Spoonful, Gershwin, Ravel for all I know...the roots here are deep.

*** I may as well also mention the other groundbreaking band from L.A., The Byrds, who brought everything together in the most stunning and different way - this - breaks the sound barriers, if you will, of what a pop song can be.

Feed-Back, Metal, Sound, Wire, Wood: The Who: "My Generation"

"The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!"
Mikhail Bakunin, 1842



"The amplified sound of the auto-destructive process can be an element of the total conception."
Gustav Metzger, 1959



First, here is man destroying something inanimate. The man is Gustav Metzger, and he is an artist.

And now this; it's art too; art which in part wouldn't be possible without the above example. Nor would it be really possible without this artist, either.

Gustav Metzger wrote his manifesto Auto-Destructive Art in 1959; a few years later it would become a lecture that turned into a 'happening.' That year was 1964, when The Who formed, drummer Keith Moon asking to join and being accepted when he accidentally smashed up the drum kit during his audition. Townshend famously first destroyed a guitar accidentally as well, but since this got them some renown immediately (could you imagine the Stones or Yardbirds doing such a thing?), the band continued to auto-destruct, drums as well as guitar, for some time. That Townshend would go on to link it to Metzger's manifesto is no pose, as Townshend was an art school grad who knew very well what it meant, politically as well as artistically, to smash up instruments onstage.

But there is another collage here, one that we haven't heard explicitly before - and that is the influence of jazz on UK rock, specifically in drumming. There is no getting away from the fact that Elvin Jones' drumming was IT for Keith Moon (who also loved surf music, which also has a fast and relentless beat). Those who were in theory allergic to the idea of jazz and rock being mixed up together (which reminds me of this old ad, of course) had that notion demolished by this song - which in construction is just as much jazz as it is rock. (Yes, one of the most totemic of rock songs comes out of jazz.) The utter freedom of jazz - to take a simple melody and then just TAKE OFF with it - is just what was needed here, particularly by the Mods, who were fans of modernist jazz (as opposed to trad) and would have understood immediately that it was for them musically as well as lyrically.

That The Who are a precarious balance of elements is obvious with this song - Moon's explosion at the end balanced out by Entwistle's droll bass solo before it, just as Daltrey's nearly-swearing stuttering sneer balances out Townshend's straight-ahead playing, which is, as the song 'ends', literally detuned and then fuzzed up while huge chords bashed out between strings being grated like cheese - this is not a normal band. The Who are taking the idea of a pop band and altering that idea to the point where 'normal' and 'regular' are suddenly quaint notions. Whether the audience thought this was just a good song they could dance to or performance art hiding within a pop tune I don't know. As a song it has persisted way beyond what Townshend's aim was - to give voice to those who didn't fit in to naff, boring society they found themselves in, the kids who liked to go and have FUN, gathering their buds in May instead of sitting around politely, "barely daring to breathe or Achoo*."

The generation gap erupts again and again, but the gap is never between those who are older and younger but those who get it and those who don't. It wasn't a big hit at first in the US, but musicians & their audiences there have taken it as their own, from Patti Smith (who in one much later live version berates her own generation for having produced George W. Bush) to Green Day. In the UK everyone has done it from Iron Maiden to Oasis and The Sweet.

Destruction as art, transforming negative into positive energy, beauty in ugliness; not only are musical styles being mixed up here, but it as if art itself is being remade before our ears and eyes, that pop is symbolically and literally destroying itself in order to continue. The guitar has to be played because it is his instrument, but then it too seems not enough, music itself is not enough. Pop music carried on as usual, only some noticing the violence and different feeling in the air**. This is defence as attack, a "big sensation" which claims to be an ordinary night out, a concrete slab through the window of pop. Mod couldn't last long after this, commercialized and demonized as it was, but The Who made the point of performing this at Monterey, astonishing an audience that had thought it had seen everything. 1966 will prove that 'everything' is a relative concept.




*I should add here that poetry was reaching an apex of sorts in the mid-Sixties, as it also was now a forum for free speech (for those on both sides of the Cold War) and was a way of saying what ordinarily would be almost inexpressible. Ariel by Sylvia Plath (1965) was just as sensational at the time as The Who, making its own lasting impact. That Pete Townshend would later work with Ted Hughes makes me wonder if he read it at the time...


** The Beatles listened to and absorbed what The Who were doing, 'accidentally' putting feedback on their '64 Christmas hit "I Feel Fine" and then a year later doing a Mod-speed-rush on "Day Tripper" - one of their toughest songs yet.

The Teardrop Explodes: Teresa Brewer: "A Tear Fell"

The scene is set: the young woman is still in her party dress (something with tulle and and a big skirt, in a color between drab and vibrant) and is sitting in a chair, slumped a little, looking into space. She has recently been unceremoniously dumped by a man she thought was ‘the one’ and has in fact been out to see who he was with at the dance, in a move somewhere between masochism and vain bravery. She stood there watching him, crying large teardrops, teardrops that fell on the floor and that he danced on, as he swirled with his new girl, fixated on her and oblivious to the woman he has left behind.

The room the young woman is sitting in is so vividly colorful and yet she is so grey and lost; but the melodrama she is in is real, hyperreal. Brewer sings in a way that sounds like a crane carefully walking along, placing one leg in front of the other just so; she has her dignity, even as she sings about what a fool she is, even as the huge tears explode from her eyes, for her ex-boyfriend to dance over…

…the young woman may as well be in a cartoon; or should I say, a collage – not unlike the one Richard Hamilton made in ’56 entitled Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (I will not go so far to say that Brewer makes Bryan Ferry possible…but Original Pop songs such as this are not that far from “Don’t Stop The Dance” – the wetness there being from ‘stormy weather’ and not crying. That said, the super-sexualized figures Hamilton shows are va-va-vooming all over the place, with the big bang, so to speak, just around the corner.)

The young woman in the chair may well believe that she has to snag the right man or else; but also probably believes that the man is always right, in the end. (In her 50s memoir Manhattan, when I was young, Mary Cantwell eventually marries a man because he gives her an ultimatium – get married or break up – and instead of seeing this as a forecast of what’s to come, she gives in.) Our heroine doesn’t fight her fate but is a sad witness, full of the ingrained stoicism the average listener, but who is the average listener? And do they all experience being dumped this way?

(I should note that “A Tear Fell” was written in 1956 and immediately covered by all kinds of singers, in the UK and the US. I doubt if anyone’s version sounds so noble and precise as Brewer’s, complete with a harp glissando every time her tear falls; the young woman in the party dress as sad angel.)