The Big Takeover: Sweet: “Teenage Rampage”

Or, whatever happened to the Glam Slam?  It’s still here (the previous song was from the RAK factory, after all) but it seems to be slowing down somewhat.  This song isn’t so much about Glamour as it is about Politics.  And yet Politics is glamourous for some; almost all politicians, no matter their stripe, have something of a high when they win and take power, much, I suppose, like the honeymoon period of a marriage.  Sweet don’t concern themselves too much with that here – it’s the kids – teenagers! – who are going on a rampage and taking over with their rules, their choices, their own constitution.  (Yes, the kids are going to form committees and hash out their rule -  democratically!)  Say “teenage rampage” now and people think of a melee, a riot, looting, cats and dogs in the street, COMPLETE CHAOS.  And yet that is not really happening here.  The music is by-the-book glam; the delirium documented, however, is real.  The Baby Boom peaked in the late 50s/early 60s, which is in part why so many songs at this time had the word “teenage” in them (“Teenage Dream” by T. Rex and “Teenage Lament ‘74” being the main ones, though as a rule the Glam Slam was all about teenagers, more or less).  Of course there is the fact that this song  (stopped only by the biggest song of the year, Mud’s “Tiger Feet”) appeared just as the effects of the three-day week were really kicking in – more freedom for parents, more freedom for the kids?  Or more chances to seize power, to do whatever they want, to discard the present and think up a future.  Their time is coming, and in looking around who can blame them for wanting to take over? 

Just about everybody who would become major figures in punk and post-punk were teenagers at this time, and I can well imagine some of them are already getting into music that is more adventurous than this; and they were to make music that held to no constitution or united scene whatsoever.  The Sweet had another Chinn-Chapman hit on their hands here, but in the end it sounds more like what would speak to, oh, Tony Blair more than John Lydon (though the Glam Slam got a free pass from the punks – how could something so shiny and unpretentious be bad)?

Next up:  Face to face with…who? 

No There There: The Sweet: "The Ballroom Blitz"

There is a point to all the recent questions of direction and what on earth is going on that have appeared here; amid all the impending eerie conditions, all hell is breaking loose and yes, even - especially even - in Glam can this be felt.  It's not quite what the song does (it rocks, obviously, with one of the best introductions ever, the beat solid and danceable, Brian Connolly asking everyone if they are ready - of course they are) as how it does it that makes this a Friendly Forebear of a single, a song that is about a Sweet gig which turned chaotic (in Kilmarnock, where they were bottled off the stage), what with deadly winking girls, men with red eyes (so much of this song is about seeing and looking) - the whole thing is a passionate hoedown of a song, pausing and jumping and swinging... 

That it has two sides isn't something I realized until now; the loud, camp "OOHHH YEAAAHHH" exclamations and "she thinks SHE's the passionate one" side, and the quieter one.  The loud side is the addictive one, the vamping up of basic rock 'n' roll, but the quiet side has been hard for me to hear - or I should say, understand, until now*.  This is a rave up, sure, but what to make of lines like "It's been getting so hard living with the things you do to me" or "Reaching out for something - touching nothing's all I ever do"?  Or the last Connolly near-mumbled line, "I softly call you over - when you appear there's nothing left of you." With these lyrics The Sweet (or rather Chinn/Chapman) are jumping right into the nothingness, only to find that there's no safety net and that something - more scarily, someone - is disappearing.  The Sweet know darn well The Fog is coming, they've reached out to find...nothing and something is breaking down, beyond just a bad show in Scotland.  There is no gloom or terror in this song; just an acknowledgement that things are getting bad - you have to listen close to hear how bad, though.   The Glam Slam era isn't quite over yet, but there is a sense here that while The Sweet are trying their best to make the best of a bad situation, that bad situation is going to remain and stagnate, the whoo-hoo good times becoming harder to find. 

And how important is this, that it is about the audience?  The relationship of those onstage and those in the audience is always a fraught one, at the best of times - and in the combative 70s the audience, I sense, wants a different relationship to those onstage.  The gig this song talks about sounds like a punk one, where there is little sense of division between the band and the audience - only this isn't the punk era, and that ethos of doing something just to break the tedium/cause a scene is not that common.  (Or was it?  I have no idea if this kind of thing was regular back then, to be distilled into the punk attitude, which was yet to happen.)  The Sweet get the last word here, which makes up for their misery, but in the future one of the key songs out of punk will be about being in an audience and not really knowing why you are there, and sensing that in the greater scheme of things, there's no "roots rock rebellion" happening anywhere - that The Clash are reaching for that rebellion and also grasping nothing shows that The Sweet, though not as political, obviously, are describing something that is happening and will continue throughout The Fog - a strong sense that what is really important isn't heard or seen, that entertainment in and of itself is going to have to change.  And it's not going to happen in the wink of an eye....

Next up: Trick or Treat?

*The mumbling coming from Elvis, as Connolly sings these lines in a kind of half-suggestive way, though once you find out what he's saying, you've got to wonder about what he's suggesting.

           

Vanishing Dreams: The Rolling Stones: "Angie"

It is a bit awkward to write about a song that is about the pain of separation - in this case, separation not from a person (though this is how the song is understood) but from a drug.  Keith Richards wrote this while in a brutal cold turkey treatment from his heroin addiction, the kind of experience that most people, thankfully, will never have to endure - "The whole body just sort of turns itself inside out and rejects itself for three days" as Richards says.  I have to say it's awkward as I am not an addictive personality by nature* and am quite sensitive to "morphine and his brothers" as an anesthesiologist once told me.  That it has to become a break-up song that seems to be saying goodbye to a lot more than one person is a last defence; a way to keep the weakened, sober and rather abject ex-junkie protected in a way, to keep that final awful pain private**.  (Contrast this with Jagger's rather unsympathetic view of addiction in "Mother's Little Helper" wherein the woman seems to be - or so he thinks - vainly trying to keep herself young.)  In this song all seems to be exhausted, over.  It is beautiful and sad and full of longing, and Jagger sings it as if he (how can he not?) knows what it's really about, and in some way I think that is audible.  I have never felt that this was as solid and believable a song as it wants to be, and that is because of the very necessary evasion of what it's actually about. When the rather irritating line about "no money in our coats" (i.e. how sorry can people be for a rich rock star?) comes up I have to remind myself that this is a song about a dead end, a terminus, a loss.

"No loving in our souls" just about describes it; this is a break-up with a drug personified, a woman who is incomparable, and who is weeping, crying over the loss just as the narrator keeps insisting that it's over, they have suffered too much together.  That a song about a woman/drug could be such a big hit (#1 in the US, an NME #2 in the UK) maybe shows that the long comedown from the 60s was now at its bottom; the strings and piano and beauty in this song giving that raw pain something to hang on to, the "ain't it good to be alive" line sung pathetically, as if both know this to be true and yet unbearable at the same time.  They tried; they tried and it just couldn't work, despite the sweetness.  That the narrator has no idea where to go, what to do, when the clouds will disappear, is uncannily like "Rock On" - where do we go from here?  Here at the bottom, where you-know-what is moving in on its little cat feet, making it very hard indeed to know what, if anything, to do.  Confusion abounds; what was once a routine is gone, a habit is gone, and as we know this song did not mark the end of Richards and heroin (he himself still doesn't know why he started it again).  The gorgeous slow country song meanders and stops to ponder itself, only to give up in the end, unable to answer its own questions.  At least with David Essex there was the conviction that the music itself would somehow help, but here there's only a desperate sadness, a goodbye that sounds very reluctant, a song written just as Richards' fingers were able to play the guitar again, just able to make his calm exhaustion into music.  And so an era passes; a generation hooked on a time and place and feeling, an oh incomparable feeling, have their own sad song to remember this by.  It portends a time that is uneasy, where the hidden prevails, and the glamour of evasiveness is hard to catch, but there.   

Next up:  Well, are you ready? 



*Which isn't to say I don't understand how it can be fun to be enthralled to a person/thing and have the whole cycle of euphoria, joy, and then the inevitable comedown as you realize the reality of the situation and indeed have that reality seem at first merely irritating and then ever-present, until the enthrallment is over and it's like the passing of a fever. 

**It is not just the best things that are hard to talk about, but the worst as well.  That heroin can be both to someone is obvious, and indeed it can be both at the same time, an experience that would mess anyone up.

Interlude #1: Fleetwood Mac: "Albatross"

While this blog is ostensibly about #2 songs in the UK chart (and the NME, and the Luxembourg...I am using them all to get a greater focus on what was happening and also to point out that a chart is a construct, just like time itself) I will occasionally be taking a little rest stop - as we did in the summer of '73 itself, to have grape juice and bologna sandwiches - and look at what is to come.

Now, this song was a #1 hit in 1969 and by all rights I shouldn't be talking about it here; but look, here it is again at #2, a woozy swoon of a song, part straight-up blues, part Shadows ease and gentleness.  And that's fine, I don't really have much else to say about it, save for the fact that Fleetwood Mac - not in this exact configuration - are on their way to becoming, I would argue, the defining band of the 70s.  Yes, I know that is a huge proclamation, but I feel it's true.  Other bands or musicians may also qualify here (I have written about one of them over at Then Play Long recently) but none has the punctum - for me, anyway - of Fleetwood Mac.  Perhaps that is because I am from California, and that just as I was leaving, they were arriving...

...or I should say, on their way to arriving.  If the 70s can be described as a period of comedown, struggle and then renewal and success, then Fleetwood Mac are indeed the defining band of the time.  In the summer of '73, when this was at #2 and people wondered if the band even existed any longer on TOTP, they might have been surprised (or...not) to hear that not one but two guitarists had left the group*, that a wayward American called Bob Welch had heard they needed help, and showed up, giving them direction and (un)wittingly predicting their future:  California.  Welch was from Los Angeles and sensed that Fleetwood Mac would do better there than in blokey-bluesy-UK, where the band could stretch out and perhaps find its feet.  This was for the future; right now Fleetwood Mac were still in the UK, though they were gaining popularity in the US and with Welch's influence were starting to sound more American as well.  About this time they were recording Mystery To Me (one of many, many albums of the 70s to have an awful cover**) which includes "Hypnotized" - a song Welch wrote that that got a lot of airplay without actually becoming a hit.  It shares a certain laid-back charm with "Albatross" but is far more jazzy than Shadowy; it paves the way for "Dreams" a few years later, and the general eerieness that hangs over the band in general.  It is also understated; the general received opinion of the L.A. band Haim is that they sound like Fleetwood Mac, but nobody ever seems to mention which one; let me be the first one (if I am the first one) to say they they remind me of the Bob Welch-era Mac, and it is a shame that Welch never got to hear them, as I think he would have liked them.  It is also a shame, depending on how much stock you put in it, that while Fleetwood Mac are in the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, Welch's heroic carrying of the band somehow didn't count - he's not included in the long list of band members.  He belongs with them all, and it is sad to see he's not there. 

In any case, like Fleetwood Mac my family were in transition; moving from Los Angeles to Canada, Oakville specifically.  It was a hot summer; the summer of Watergate hearings, of ex-Beatles at #1 in the US.  A time when a lot of people could sense that something had happened somewhere that was wrong, but couldn't do very much about it.  "Will It Go Round In Circles" sang Billy Preston, while Dr. John lamented that he was in the right place, but at the wrong time.  The Fog was dealt with in different ways in the US & the UK; the US tried to stick a happy face on it, or at least get it out, confessionally, into the open.  The UK put its faith in the Glam Slam, in the eternal party that is rock 'n' roll itself.  That will continue shortly, but next:  what?  A dog can't fly a plane!    



   

*Danny Kirwan and Jeremy Spencer had both left by now, Peter Green had already left before them.

**Truly, the music had to do the selling with this one.  A beast eating a birthday cake?  Huh?   

The Number Two Thing

An alert reader has let me know that BBC's Radio 2 has a poll running for the nation's favorite #2 hits (though you don't have to live in the UK to vote).  The 'panel of experts' chose over 100 #2s from the Official Charts (no NME chart #2s post-'60 alas).  Now in theory I should be happy about this, but as usual there is something to bother me, not least of which is the...ordinariness of the songs.  I know it's Radio 2 and all, but someone seems to have thought that all Britpop songs had to be there, not to mention all Elvis Presley songs, including one that actually was never a #2 to begin with*...and then there's the matter of songs like, oh, "Last Christmas" which is rather sour grapes to complain about not getting to #1, seeing as how it's like the biggest-selling #2 of all time, behind this bothersome trifle called "Do They Know It's Christmas?"

And to top it all off, someone from the Official Charts is going to come in and give the winner of this poll 'an honorary number one.'  This totally misunderstands the nature of music and the nature of charts; a nature I hope I have been able to trace so far in this blog.  Songs get to #2 in many ways; in the old days, it was a simple case of being popular but not that popular; latterly it is songs that debut at #2 and then slowly fall in the chart, or perhaps they rise and fall, becoming much bigger songs in the public's psyche than the #1s that come and go.  The number two is a natural opposition placement; the official opposition, if you like, to the top spot.  Giving a song an 'honorary' status makes a mess of that, and not a good and fruitful one, either.  It is also a poll that seems to sneer at the fact that these songs were stopped by uniformly awful #1s, which isn't the case; but it also manages to ignore that these songs have fended very well for themselves, and that in the end the public has awarded them with classic status, where chart placements and such don't mean very much. 

And no, they didn't include me in their panel of experts.  If they had, you would see these nominees at least - "O Superman" - "I.O.U." - "Lovefool" - "One More Time" - "Antmusic" - "Funkytown" - "Magic Fly" - "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" and "Excerpt From 'A Teenage Opera'" - all of which are at least good, and sometimes great, if not amazing songs.  Alas, there is no write-in vote...     

Still, I feel compelled to vote, and wish they had asked me for advice at least; but for which song, dear readers?

*"Don't Be Cruel"; it ought to be "Don't" of course.

The Bull In The Maze: Gary Glitter: "Rock 'n' Roll Pt. 2" to "Oh Yes! You're Beautiful"

And now we arrive, dear readers, at a point where things start to get more than a little complicated.  Appearing, as if out of nowhere comes a figure; he zooms nearly immediately to the near-top and becomes, at least for a time (a time spanning the songs I am going to attempt to describe here) very, very popular. 

There is a good reason that people, once the 70s were over, were quick to deride them, to put them down, to shake them off like so much dust and move on.  In fact, now that I consider it, those actions began even before the decade ended; I remember how eager I was for the 80s to finally begin, because there was something indelibly wrong about the 70s.

The 70s were, goodness knows, an open and earnest time, as we have already seen.  It was also a time of glamour and all the reasons for that rush to glamour;  the same glamour, though, could soon turn into a kind of decadence, where having a good time is the only reason to do anything, and things get ugly pretty quickly. 

Being a young girl in Los Angeles at the time I had no idea about Gary Glitter; I didn’t see him or hear him or grow up watching the procession of his performances on Top of the Pops, hosted by this-or-that DJ (all of them having faces for radio, so to speak); but I am pretty sure what I would have made of him, had I seen him.  I lived in a world of Sesame Street and other children’s shows, including Mr. Rogers, Captain Kangaroo, full of reassuring messages about how life might be a bit of a downer now and then, but if everyone behaved themselves, then all would be rewarded.  But it was also a time of consciousness-raising, of being aware of things.  We little kids were judged by our elders as mature enough to handle things that were maybe just too much for the previous generation.  They figured that if you weren’t part of the solution you were part of the problem, and the kids were going to have to be part of the solution, or the manifest ills of the time would never get straightened out.

Thus, even though I never saw Gary Glitter or knew about him as a kid, I think my reaction to him would have been puzzlement and a certain reluctance to be drawn in, a reaction not so much from the head but from the guts, and also the heart.  None of the music I was attracted to so far (that I remember, anyway) was quite so thud-thud heavy, so percussive, or so monosyllabic.  I grew up from the womb hearing jazz and pop, classical and rock, all in a mix from The Doors to Ravel to Donovan to The Modern Jazz Quartet, so I am pretty sure the nigh-primitive grunting and hollering wouldn’t have done much for me.  I liked pop art (my parents took me to museums and shows of all sorts when they could, again before I remember going) and understood intuitively what glories there were in the trash aesthetic, but in music I expected a bit more.  Mere ‘fun’ was not enough.  And even though I wouldn’t have known the word ‘crude’ that is what I would have called him; I think I might have even been offended in some way that there were no words.  No words!  The idea that somehow words were unnecessary would have made me suspicious.  I was just learning the alphabet, learning how to say the numbers and so forth, and here was a song that just said, the hell with all that.  And, I can’t stress this enough, there is/was nothing particularly cute about Gary Glitter; cuteness may be an American concept hard to translate into UK judgement, but it’s a quality that would have come high on my list:  not as in desirability but in sheer looks*.  Why is he wearing that clothing, I would have wondered, and why is his hair like that?  Not cute, no….

So as I am pretty sure this would have been my reaction, I can only say that it is a cultural shock for me (out of many, believe me) to see how Gary Glitter was embraced here, not as a one-hit wonder (as he was in the US) but as a star. 

My puzzlement now leads me back to a moment back in Los Angeles.  It was in someone’s backyard, probably a mom who also had a kid at the same nursery school as me.  It was a co-operative nursery school, meaning all the moms were from the same neighbourhood, had each other’s addresses and phone numbers and all got to know each other as we played.  As moms became friends, we kids would hang out at other kids’ houses now and then, and I think at some time there was a consciousness-raising group that came by to enlighten any of the moms who weren’t already enlightened.  I was there to hear them, though I don’t remember any of it; but I do recall this…

…in the backyard, a fervent mom (or was she one of the consciousness-raising group?  She seemed a little young for me to think of her as a mom) showed a few of us girls copies of Playboy – opened to the centrefolds – and told us about pornography.  How it demeans women, and basically was wrong, and this it is, here it is.  This was not done in a schoolmarmish way, but in that casual/concerned way that the 70s had, where us kids (how old was I?  Five or six at the most) were judged to be ready for this; that we had to be forewarned, in some way.  My reaction to what I saw was again puzzlement and a certain reluctance. 

All of which is to say that I find Gary Glitter to be kind of the same way – blank, wordless, and when there are words, they are as flat and brutal as those images.

In his time he was regarded – I think – as a novelty artist, but if so, it was as a consciously-worked-out novelty, not just something thrown together over a month or two.  I think if I had gone on to see his other songs (which I will get into detail about later) – “I Didn’t Know I Loved You (Till I Saw You Rock ‘n’ Roll,” “Do You Wanna Touch Me? (Oh Yeah!),”  “Hello! Hello! I’m Back Again,” “Remember Me This Way” and “Oh Yes! You’re Beautiful” at the time my idea of him would have remained the same, or even worsened, if possible. 

Some might think this is because I was in Southern California/Canada at the given times, and that I am missing out on some cultural difference, one that made a figure like Glitter popular, immediately understood within the general world of British entertainment.  Or maybe I was just too sophisticated as a little kid, or too much of a girl, in some way.  It wasn’t little girls at first that made “Rock ‘n’ Roll Pt. 2” a hit, after all; it was guys.  It’s obvious hoo-haa rah-rah usage in sports arenas is no coincidence; this is an aggressive Tarzanish call, not so much a mating call as one of dumb pride and whoo-hoo hey here we are, let’s go.  It’s the natural response to “American Pie” – the big joke that is rock ‘n’ roll is unkillable, too stoopid to be done in by a mere plane crash, at any time.  It may be anguishing to point out now, but this song basically marks the next wave of rock (glam) and gives it back to the kids; kids too young to know about The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, ones who had those bands handed down to them, kids who need their own rock ‘n’ roll.  If I know I wouldn’t have liked this, well, a lot of kids older than me did, on both sides of the Atlantic.

And so rock ‘n’ roll was saved, more or less; but by a figure who was supposedly a fantasy character, not real.  He would fit into the world of bubblegum easily enough, alongside all the other non-real figures of the time, but if you saw him performing at the time** you would have seen someone who was unashamedly physical.  There is no fourth wall when I watch Gary Glitter’s performances; I want to tell myself, oh, he’s doing that bump or that thing with his tongue because it’s an act, but I strongly sense in watching him that it wasn’t an act at all.  I am also pretty sure that once he got onstage, he knew he had an act to do – but that maybe his actual act, as such, was there was none.  Hair, makeup, costume – but beyond that...what I sense is a man who wants to be idolized (a quote from Paul Morley’s Ask:  The Chatter of Pop:  “Yeah, I enjoyed it.  It was lovely.  It was exactly what I wanted…It was what I wanted probably when I was 16 or 17.” Or:  “What I enjoyed…was the adoration of a lot of people, a lot of women.  I really did.  The only problem was I didn’t get a chance to enjoy it, if you know what I mean”) and he intended to get that adoration – first from the guys, then the girls (Morley again:  “The strange part of it was they all became terribly young, 13, 14, 15”) and take advantage of that situation, a situation many rock stars have taken advantage of; the sudden currency of money, fame, and all those young girls…naïve girls, who maybe didn’t get that he wasn’t really kidding when, in a number one hit, he was the man who put “the bang in gang.”

Which is to say, I don’t really think there is a persona here; there is Gary Glitter, period.  Perhaps this is because I can’t really separate who he is with what his music presents and says; it could be the case that the one follows the other as a matter of course, that what you see is very much what you get, and if you were a guy you got to be in Gary’s gang and if you were a girl…then you had better watch yourself. 

I am not about to get into any details about times when I was sexually harassed as a girl, except to say that I wasn’t in any real danger, and that my quick wit kept me out of it.  I wasn’t sassy – I could tell that just would have made things worse – but I wasn’t passive either, blaming myself for the situation which clearly wasn’t of my construction.  My consciousness was raised, after all; the Equal Rights Amendment was for sure going to be passed.  “I Am Woman” was a number one hit that resonated and Billie Jean King had beaten male chauvinist Bobby Riggs soundly.  Things were far from perfect, but things were changing, and there were symbols of this, successes, wherever a young girl like me looked, from the proliferation of TV shows based on women (The Mary Tyler Moore Show to The Bionic Woman, Alice to Maude) to Nadia Comanici’s perfect score at the Montreal Olympics.  To be a girl in North America in the 70s was to aspire, to be inspired, and young jerks and dirty old men were brushed off by me – perhaps I was nervous, being only 9 or 10.  But I won, in that nothing terrible happened.  What did happen, of course, was like a day at Disneyland compared to what other girls went through…

…including British ones.  I cannot stress how much feminism didn’t exist in 70s in the UK, and in some cases I feel still doesn’t really exist.  Girls are there, to be used and abused; in the end, they don’t count.  There was no equivalent preponderance of TV shows based around women, trying to show the lives of actual women, as there was in the US.  Women (still, I have to say, infuriatingly, referred to by callers to not just on LBC or Radio 2 but purportedly hipper 6 Music as “the wife” or “the missus***”) are still seen as girls (how many times I have cringed when Boots commercials use “Girls” by Sugababes for their ads clearly showing grown-up women, not girls).  I feel I am right in guessing that there were no consciousness-raising groups addressing actual little girls in the UK in 1972; and that if you were a teenager who just wanted to meet Gary Glitter – that’s all – you might have found yourself unable to comprehend the power dynamics of the situation, because a girl can forget she’s a girl sometimes, in her fandom.

The rock ‘n’ roll adoration that Glitter wanted he got; and yet this was not enough.  That he got caught and charged on possession of child porn in the UK, and later again on having underage sex abroad, isn’t proof that what he did back in ’72-’74 was bad music, but it cannot help but taint those songs, and the performances show all the signs of someone who…well, I’ll quote him again:  “When you’re young all you want to do is play music and get your leg over.  It’s the bit in between that’s the complication.”  (This interview was conducted in early 1981, when Glitter was 37 and still considered himself young:  “Of course I am.  I don’t want to hear the words middle-aged or old.  I’ve never bothered about age, thank God.  It doesn’t enter my vocabulary.  I thrive on youth, youth ideas, on changes…****”)

There is something all a bit mythic about this, a bit eerie.  I think of the Minotaur that compels youth sacrifice, sacrifice that is all the worse because the girls – groupies – are thinking they have made it by being with a star, instead of looking inwards and finding some self-worth there. I think of the girls who didn’t want to do something but were forced, coerced, into doing it.  All this to feed an ego, a desire that is creepily palpable in his performances of these songs.  If the Glam period of rock (which I will get to in this blog, song by song as they come) has suffered as a whole, it is because it was and is so closely associated with Glitter, and now that his music cannot be played or his name said, the other Glam bands don’t get much airplay either, save for Christmas.  In Morley’s time he was beginning to be hip again, no longer a novelty; he says that he is “funnier” in 1981 as he’s older, but that implies that he was supposed to be funny to begin with, which I don’t understand.  Does he mean he’s a parody?  Rock ‘n’ roll doesn’t take well to that (think The Barron Knights) and never will, for the most part.  When “Rock ‘n’ Roll Pt. 2” became a hit, the kazoo-compressed guitar and eerie yells were a warning that rock wasn’t dead and was just as dirty and grunty and lowdown as ever promised, and that Glitter wore clothes too tight, too sequined and too skimpy was further proof.

So then, the songs, I can hear you say.  Well, here they are, as such; I will try to be as fair to them as possible, under the circumstances. 

“Rock ‘n’ Roll Pts. 1 & 2” (July ’72):  Paul Oldfield in Monitor (Issue 4, October 1985) says of this:  “Glitter imagines an unyielding, uninflected, un-soul, MASCULINE performance, without ambiguity….all attack and no decay, all hard edges…”  It may well be the most male song ever recorded, so male it is ridiculous and was used by The Timelords for “Doctorin’ The Tardis” as a kind of stompy way of football chanting the Daleks into submission.  Need I point out again how male and TEENAGE this all is?  Sure, The Human League did this back in the day, as if to say, minimalism didn’t come from nowhere.  It’s lovable in its stupidity, but only in North America does it still get any attention, in sports arenas exclusively. 

“I Didn’t Know I Love You (Till I Saw You Rock ‘n’ Roll) (#2 NME December ’72): The harshness of this sound – mechanical and cold – makes any emotions Glitter has seem mechanical as well.  The minimalism takes away romance; this is just as MASCULINE as the previous song, making me think that Glitter is mysteriously trying too hard to prove he’s a man…and that there’s an awful lot of insecurity here. 

“Do You Wanna Touch Me? (Oh Yeah!)”(February ’73):  I first knew this song as done by Joan Jett on her still underrated pre-Blackhearts solo album from 1980, Bad Reputation.  Joan still does this in concert and can arguably say the song is hers, not Glitter’s, as she’s been out there doing it since she went solo after The Runaways broke up.  Oldfield again:  “In (this song) there is no intention to suggest, instead there is a specific need, “touch me…THERE THERE THERE THERE.”  How anyone could call a song this and be interpreted as not being suggestive is beyond me.  The song is a long drone, with the lyrics practically begging her to do something, anything*****.  The whole song is one brutal come-on, and Jett doesn’t mess around with it; hers was the second time I heard a woman yell “Fuck!” in a song, as she makes it even plainer and more American, somehow.  In the song he chides her for being shy and doing nothing beyond staring at him; maybe she’s got the right attitude about you, buddy.  Is this the biggest hit that could be construed as sexual harassment?

That this was also used in an episode of Glee, sung by Gwyneth Paltrow, of all people – shows that folks in the US don’t really care so much about Glitter’s personal life, and for all I know they think of this more as a Joan Jett song.  Songs can mutate over the years like that, and this song turns from harassment (as sung by a man) to liberation (as sung by a woman).  She’s confident and strong in her sexuality, and wants the guy to know she’s into him.  He just wants to get the girl drunk and berates her for being someone who wants to talk.  Hmmm….

“Hello! Hello! I’m Back Again” (April ’73):  And here is the clapping, the faster speed of glam; no grunting here as Glitter clearly sings to his fans, the girls who idolize him and the whole song is one huge call for that idolization:  the “naughty boy” rival of his is his only real worry, as she (i.e. the fans) are expected to kiss his poster and also hug and kiss their pillows at night, even though she couldn’t see him or kiss him for real, day and night.   If someone is this anxious – and the music is an unrelenting stomp that could flatten anyone’s actual feelings – wanting to know “Did you miss me?” so soon after their latest hit, then you can tell the pitch of hysteria has reached its peak here.  For someone so interested in non-communication or grunting, he sure is worried here.  But the main thing is that concern of his, that he is still going to be idolized.  In the previous song, he makes demands that are sexual; here he tries to come off as cuddly, but instead he’s just showing how desperate he is, which is never cool.  Idols (Idles?) aren’t supposed to interrogate their subjects like this.     

“Remember Me This Way” (#2 NME  April ’74):   I literally could not make it through a performance of this on YouTube; there is no bluster here, just puppy-dog balladry on the surface and a rather dull vocal, with Glitter’s sincerity colliding head-on with his lasciviousness.  It’s not pretty. Again, there is no fourth wall here, and it’s miles from any kind of hey-hey-hey masculinity.  It’s creepy, especially if you start wondering what “this way” actually stands for.

“Oh Yes! You’re Beautiful” (#2 December ’74):  The last hit here to concern us, and it has a slow sleaze to it that makes any sincerity on the part of Glitter seem, well, something of a front; if we take all these songs as a story of sorts, here he is afterwards, or perhaps still beforehand, reassuring the girl in question and trying to placate her, in a way.  The vowels are as stretched as the girl’s credulity; in the performance I watched, girls were holding scarves aloft, stretched out, back and forth to the song.  The Glam period hasn’t ended quite yet, but the rah-rah aspect remains, slowed down to a crawl here.

I have been wondering lately whether Glam has anything camp about it.  Certainly it tried to distract an increasingly nervous and edgy nation that fun, cheap and flashy and silly, still existed; that rock wasn’t dead, and in fact the actual renaissance of rock ‘n’ roll was to come.  But there is no feeling now, I’m guessing, of sentiment towards Glam or the period, precisely because they were so intertwined; when you hear Ed “Stewpot” Stewart ask a bunch of kids if any of them are Gary Glitter fans (on Stewpot’s Pop Party album) it is not a quaint reminder of times gone by but a quiver of the curtain before it opens to a whole world of dubious behaviour on the part of ‘light’ entertainment figures – DJs, TV presenters, actors, musicians, and so on.  (As this essay points out clearly, the culture of abuse started long before the 70s; and Top of the Pops was in part a way to literally get the kids in the building [shades of the Minotaur again].)  The wrongness of this part of the 70s is ugly; the complacency so many have talked about in relation to it comes from the general shrug ‘n’ accept qualities of the British people themselves, I’m afraid.  That comes from so many different quarters that it would take a whole other essay to get a handle on them; Glitter’s songs make up only one part of the whole scene, the whole story.   

I write all this in the context, of course, of now; a now where Glitter was just released on bail, and one in which, for all I know, he may be tried and found guilty again.  The UK, though it may not know it, has reached an important time; a time when it might want to really sit back and examine its relationship to so-called ‘light’ entertainment, to the whole world of showbiz, and how it stems from something much deeper in society, a whole system that ends up with figures like Glitter who are seemingly unable to confront themselves, just as a fish doesn’t know it’s in water.  Can a man who once said of his performances:  “I can’t detach myself for long enough to fathom out what I’m all about” and “I’m so close to it myself that I could never see (its appeal) unless there was someone…to tell me” ever be trusted?  Especially someone who also said his music is “purely physical.  It’s vulgar. It’s crude. It’s raw”? How could something so simple be so difficult to understand, especially to its co-writer and performer?      

As best I can tell, it is indeed difficult; but that difficulty is no excuse.  Figures like Glitter are at the extreme end of what happened all the time in rock 'n' roll; so extreme that I had to write this essay instead of just write up the various songs as they happened to appear alongside the perfectly honest shlubs and geniuses that in part made/make the 70s a bearable time to write about.  It has not been easy for me to contemplate and then write any of this, and I think the British public have the same reaction as I do to him and his music, mixed with the denial/mortification that they ever liked him in the first place.  It is too easy to just say "It was the 70s" or claim that he is an exception to the rule; that so many couldn't perceive what was right in front of them - that there could be no interpretation, that this was what it was (which goes right back to Glitter's comparing "Rock 'n' Roll Pt. 2" to Last Tango In Paris)...well, I look forward to seeing what changes, if any, the British are willing to make in order to see that the past, which is so dearly beloved here, belongs in the past.  That rock 'n' roll deserves better than this.

 

            

*The “Aw Wee Choirboy” cuteness is the closest I can think of; the American version in the 70s took in everyone from Peter Frampton to John Travolta to even Jimmy Carter, for a time; cuteness has something to do with good looks and a kind of metaphysical rightness.

**For reasons that will become understandable, I am not going to link to any of them; the songs are all there on YouTube.

***As if they were possessions, like “the house” or “the car.”  I have never heard anyone call any male caller out on this usage, supposedly because it’s accepted slang or understood to be part of male British culture or something.  Imagine if a woman said “the husband” or “the Mister” and you can really feel the condescension I feel every time I hear it. 

****The first time I encountered Gary Glitter was in an ad for a British railway I saw in a magazine or music weekly; there he was, made-up, quifftastic, holding out his hand, in which was some kind of supposed wrinkle-remover.  The ad was for student train tickets, and Gary was being gently let down by the ad copy, explaining that no, even if he used the pink blob of stuff to look younger, he still wouldn’t qualify for a ticket.  I found this a little odd at the time – why would Glitter want to travel with the students?  Now it’s just awkward, and the railway probably regrets ever running it.  But this was in the 80s, what could they know?  (Or rather, what did they know but ignore at the time?)

***** The most specific he actually gets is “run your fingers through my hair,” though why anyone would actually want to do this remains a mystery.  Hell, if it was even possible for such a thing to happen remains a mystery.  Again, Joan wins here.

No Agony Please, We're British: Vicky Leandros: "Come What May (Apres Toi)"

And now to the winner of 1972's Eurovision, to a song that was sung originally in French as "Avec Toi" but was translated into English as "Come What May."  Leandros was born in Greece but was asked by Luxemburg to represent them at Eurovision in '68 (I have no idea how that would happen, by the way - perhaps it's because she was brought up in Germany?) where she placed a more than respectable fourth place; and so she returns again, with an anthem of love - all the typical tropes are here ("my life changed completely the moment I met you" and "yesterday is very far away" are the main messages of the song, beyond her loyalty and love for her Other).  Yes, this is an unabashed love song, of the kind that automatically gets versions sung in various languages, yet is immediately understandable even if you don't comprehend what she is singing.  The feeling of relief and triumph are here, a kind of stark testifying that might grip the hearts of the Housewives of Valium Court and remind them of their own decisions of the past, ones made with equal conviction and heroic quality.  The French lyrics, however, take the song to a more intimate corner, where she is comparing how she feels when she is with the Other and when she is not; she is singing to let her Other know that she has "les main vides, le coeur sans joie" and the song ends with the ambiguous but hopeful "je pourrai peut-etre/donner de ma tendresse/mais plus rien de mon amour."

All of which is to say that in English this is an utterly straightforward song, clear as can be; but in French (which was the basis of the other versions, I presume) it is more a song of experience and love that is typically Gallic in its sophistication, more heart-grabbing, more the kind of thing that properly translated could be sung by Scott Walker.  I feel as if the English-speaking audience is being cheated here, that a song that is about the many facets of love and loss is being ironed out into a rah-rah blunt statement of near-slavish devotion that is just plain embarrassing once the original lyrics are understood.  I am not sure who re-wrote the song, but s/he did the original version (co-written by Leandros' father, Leo) an injustice.  In French, she sings about living after him as the shadow of her Other's shadow; in English, she seems to give up everything for this man, not once telling him how things will be for her if he leaves her; and so a fine Eurovision winner is more than just lost in translation; it is simplified for an audience that is presumed to be too...something....for such a song to work.  What that something is, is in part what I am working towards here; the answer is not going to be pretty, I'm afraid.

Next up:  back to the 60s via a 70s pin-up. 

Then and Now: Middle of the Road: "Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum"

And now, dear readers, I have the pleasure of presenting to you one of the oddest of all songs to appear so far in this blog; strange as (to me, at least) it takes an event from history and places it, wittingly or unwittingly, right there in front of everyone.  It – the Glencoe massacre – wasn’t a pleasant event, to say the least; and yet here it is, centuries later, appearing in a pop song.

This has caused me to reflect on various things, including collective memory and what can be done with it.  People can decide to remember and mourn; people can hold a grudge, telling and retelling a story, exaggerating here or there, to keep the grudge fresh, as watering one does a houseplant.  Eventually enough space and distance from the original event makes even the most devoted militant give in, unless…

…something new happens.  Glencoe was about Protestants vs. Catholics; it was also about something even more primal than that – the betrayal of hospitality, an offence the ancient Greeks and Romans would have found hideous and just about the worst thing possible. 

So for Middle of the Road to take this – and knowingly make it into a hit record when the Troubles are sadly well underway – is one of two things.  It’s either them trying to take this event and somehow neutralize it (the way little kids who sing “Ring Around A Rosie” or “London Bridge” have no clue as to what they are singing about; it just sounds good) or they are perhaps – since it was a Scottish event and they’re a Scottish band – trying to gaily point out that going around killing someone else because their faith is different* was and is something that didn’t really work then and sure isn’t working now. 

Unlike the Schoolhouse Rock series of pop songs**  (albeit cheery ones like “No More Kings” or “The Shot Heard ‘Round The World”) where history is celebrated and passed on to the next generation in a fun and educational way, this song isn’t supposed to be anything but a fun pop song.  Whether little kids picked up anything here I don’t know, and that is the litmus test I suppose – do the kids know?  Should they?  Do lyrics matter that much, at any age, 7 to 70? Are there two audiences – ones that just want a tune to hum and like and those who like to delve further and get to the bottom of a song, memorize the lyrics and try to figure them out?

To be blunt, yes.  There will always be those happy enough to dogpaddle along in a song’s waters, and those who are going to get their snorkelling gear to see what’s really going on (if anything).  Middle of the Road are sneaky here, getting this song for kids heard by adults – or so they think.  But what if the adults don’t have much more of a clue than the kids?  Then the satisfaction is the group’s (for getting one over) and a different satisfaction is the public’s (for simply enjoying the song enough to buy it). 

Of course, there’s a reason the song is called what it is called.  Both Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum are, well, dumbasses, plain and simple.  Their fighting is stupid and yet they cannot stop fighting, mainly because they are almost – but not quite – the same.  (That ol’ narcissism again.)  Middle of the Road are saying what The Cranberries – two decades later, in a far more stentorian way – will simply say:  these guys are idiots.  They were dumb in the 17^th century and dumb in the 20^th and we are going to reduce them to Carroll’s sniping duo as in the end they are about as interesting and effective as them.  (In my mind these two figures merge with a 70s toy called the Weeble, which famously wobbled but never fell down; seemingly charming figures but actually kind of scary, not unlike the larger figures like them – were they clowns? – I came across elsewhere that could be pushed around but never fell over.)

Middle of the Road assume that we know the story, know that the tartans and claymores and piping and plots are all grand history, but – again – does this story have any meaning beyond some kind of anti-IRA slant***?  (Note the camouflage chic in the band’s clothing – I guess this means they are serious about all of this, right?) 

This may seem to be a lot of important questions asked of a song that wasn’t even written by those performing it; it can’t hold that much weight.  To serious folk musicians or progressive rock types the idea that this is as serious a “statement” as anything they are doing would seem laughable.  But in the 70s the growing issue was one of the audience’s reactions to songs, on whether the public in general “got” what was being said.  And that issue, I feel, starts right here, with an ugly historical event being used to make a point about current events.  How much can be said?  How much will the audience understand?  Does anyone really care what time it is (as Chicago immortally asked)?  Slowly but surely we will find out.

Next up:  the season of the witch begins.

*And, considering they’re both Christian faiths, not all that different (Freud’s “narcissism of small differences” applies here).

**It is interesting that there is no real UK equivalent to these songs, unless the basics of grammar, math, government and energy (not forgetting environmentalism and new math – this is the 70s, after all) were covered already in shows for 7-12 year-olds elsewhere. 

***In truth it’s more of an anti-war song, but I’m guessing the UK public’s sympathies were more with their troops than the IRA.  I could be wrong here, though.

Marching Into History: Blue Mink: "The Banner Man"

The main purpose – or at least one of the main purposes – of this blog is an educational one.  There are vast areas of UK culture that I don’t know or understand, and by writing about the number two singles I am at least patiently chipping away at my ignorance about popular music.  I have lived here long enough to notice, however, that this isn’t just a condition of outsiders like me, but natives as well. 

This blog is entering what I can only think of as The Void, a weird area that sees most chart hits being hits at the time but being more or less forgotten ever since, only played on the radio during chart countdown shows.  I suppose some of these songs also fit in the dreaded ‘guilty pleasures’ category, but only some.  Most songs in The Void are left to those who heard them in the first place, and are all but unknown to anyone now, for all sorts of reasons. 

“The Banner Man” is one such song.  Blue Mink were a group of studio musicians (co-writer Roger Cook and Madeline Bell among them; they also sing here, I believe) who figured they were good enough to become an actual band; and so in the late 60s they formed, having a hit with “Melting Pot” and then a second hit with “Good Morning Freedom.”  Those titles reflect a certain early 70s optimism, that special kind of righteousness that launched the 70s, a feeling – noted more ironically with The Rolling Stones – that anything can happen, and that this is a good thing, more or less…

But now here we are, in late June of 1971, and already the decade is in a lull; something clearly is going to happen, but no one quite knows what this is yet.  Times like this call for leaders, or at least someone charismatic; someone who can seem “ten feet tall” and inspire others, convert them if you will, to a cause.  If the previous songs were about general chaos, revenge and certain death, this song is about a joyous, loud parade up a hill, led by the banner man himself, who then saves a few souls and then goes back down the hill again, coronets and drums playing once again as he proudly marches on, the children (this song is written from a child’s perspective) watching in awe and joy.

If this song belongs to The Void it is due to its overwhelmingly quaint nature.  I am not sure just what the banner reads here, nor what is being preached, but would anyone hearing this song now under a certain age have any idea what it was about?  I do not know if the songwriters (Cook, Roger Greenaway and Herbie Flowers) saw the Salvation Army bands marching and preaching; the closest I’ve come to any Salvation Army sounds is the large hand bell rung at Christmastime by a member raising money for their cause.  This is what it is about, I suppose, but there’s another march that I have seen – a relatively small one, all things considered – that comes to mind. 

It was a rather hot and humid day in July, ’90 or ’91 perhaps, and I was walking through Queen’s Park in Toronto, en route to where I forget; I heard it before I saw it, the green lush trees obscuring my sight at first.  It was a marching band, a smallish one, all older men mostly.  I looked at the calendar once I got home and figured out it was the Old Order Orange march; Orangemen helped to found Toronto and there were still lodges here and there across the city, though their power and influence had waned in the last 60 years or so.  I don’t recall any spectators, besides me; they seemed to be marching as it was the done thing, and it was a reminder of times past.  And yes, there was someone holding a banner, perhaps even two people. 

I cannot ignore the fact that this was a hit (an NME #2) during marching season; that is one factor in its success, its celebration of the “glory, glory, glory” of the band and the message it brings.  That it is a simple, upbeat song sung from a child’s point of view also means kids bought it, too (just as kids would have bought “The Pushbike Song” for instance)*.  That this is a song that saves the world is just the sort of savior-is-here message needed at a time like this; the trouble (Troubles?) with saviors, however, is that they cannot do what they do alone.  For every person that might be convertible, there are those who are, for whatever reason, against conversion**. 

That this sounds like a product of a studio and not a live band doesn’t matter so much at this time (one when the song, not the singer(s), is the important thing) but the subject matter does.  The very things that made it successful then mark it for The Void now, including its religious element, its child’s angle, and its in-build old-fashioned four-square aura of a time that in ’71 – never mind now – would conjure up the Troubles and marching seasons that always cause trouble as opposed to a jolly little march to save souls in a town.  It is an innocent oompah-oompah of a song, done as professionally as you’d expect, but somehow it’s hard to hear it that way now, and may have even struck some as unpleasant then.  And so it has more or less disappeared…

Next up:  where the wild things (still) are.

*At this time the singles charts were dominated by songs either bought by kids or those definitely into adulthood, grandparents included; anyone who considered themselves at all "cool" were buying albums, not singles.       

**An Australian born around this time, now currently holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy, could say a lot about this.

The Real Rebels: Don Fardon: "Indian Reservation"

If you haven’t noticed already, this year is a rather uneasy one, one where the accumulated angst of a whole decade seems to be seeping out, one song at a time.  Liberation was the cry of the 70s, as the idealism of the 60s hardened from flowers and psychedelics – an altering of perception in order to conceive of that better world – to the less glamourous but necessary hard looks at what has been happening and how it can be changed in a practical way.  The personal was becoming the political, whether ordinary folks liked it or not. 

This is laudable, though it could (and as we know, did) lapse into narcissism and solipsistic thinking; the surest way to actually appreciate what you have is to think of others, particularly their history.  And here is a song of what happened to the Cherokee Nation, a century and a half before.  Migration was common back then, especially as (as taught to me in almost all my history classes) Europe was getting crowded and there was a whole new continent out there, sans monarchy and religious repression, waiting to be populated by anyone who showed up.  And as this had been happening since the 1770s or so, by the 1830s things were already starting to get crowded in the Atlantic states, and farmers were itching for new pastures, literally and figuratively.  The US government (who had been, shall we say, "kindly instructing" the Cherokee in how they should live – i.e. in the American way – for decades) basically kicked the Cherokee out of their homelands and drove them out, by force if necessary.  Manifest Destiny was the claim of the US; this act was one of many justified by it.  The fact that the Cherokee had been there for a very long time didn’t matter; from the American perspective they were in charge now, and that was pretty much that.  The Cherokee Nation continued the best it could, and even wanted their own state; a perfectly reasonable request, all things considered, that got nowhere in Washington D.C.  By the 1900s the Cherokee were segregated against just like African Americans, and by the time Don Fardon recorded this in 1968, they too benefitted from the civil rights movement and various laws passed just years before. 

Just what a freakbeat singer was doing recording this is less clear; it had been written by John D. Loudermilk in the 50s and recorded by Marvin Rainwater – himself ¼ Cherokee – but that recording (“The Pale Faced Indian”) in 1959 didn’t really get anywhere.  Perhaps he had heard about the Red Power movement; maybe he just liked the song.  Why it only got into the charts at this point is also a mystery, but it fits the general sense of unrest and injustice of 1970 better, I think, than the rather lachrymose charts of ’68, in general.  Fardon makes this a tough record; there is a freakbeat stompiness and menace in the horns at the start; the intensity that made his old band The Sorrows just a bit too much for the public is certainly here, his voice quiet, the song building up and building up to “War” like levels of disquiet.  A whole way of life is wiped out before the song ends, but the people stand strong, ready to return.  A guitar stings and “will return…will return….” comes back with horns loud and a lone drum skiddering off, as if to say, we will indeed return, and for that matter, we’re still here, dammit.  If rock 'n' roll is all about rebelling against The Man, well, there's nothing like a song where The Man's actions against not just one person but a whole people is catalogued.  That Fardon had no Native American roots to speak of may make some uneasy, but then neither (that I know of) did the song's writer, and rock always roots for the underdog, in any case.  Fardon sounds sincere, angry even; and the song was a big enough hit for Paul Revere and The Raiders to cover it and take it to #1 in the US in '71 (lead singer Mark Lindsay was part Cherokee himself; thus his interest). 

Historical perspective is a way of comprehending where we are now by looking at what happened then; the US was about to go through a turbulent decade wherein wrongs would be recognized and righted - through politics, through cultural shifts, through art itself. You cannot change things for the better if you don't know how they got messed up in the first place; that a UK singer brought this song back to the public's acclaim (it was an NME #2) and thence via a similar version to the US's attention is a good thing, almost a public declaration. Rock has grown up a lot here, able to make this a hit and become that public art that helps, if only in a small way, to give some perspective to what is really worth rebelling about, what is really at stake in life.

Next up:  who needs a loaf of bread or a thou?

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?

Who Is Who: Mary Hopkin: "Knock Knock Who's There?"

There are certain songs which are hits at the time and stay hits, and others which are typical of their time and yet somehow point towards the future; I can't say I knew this song before I heard it (it is yet another step in my understanding UK culture) and it is a song that seems to look back to the wide-eyed, expectant time before The Beatles and ahead to something quite different.

The narrator is eager, willing something to happen, even if it's just in her imagination and she knows nothing will really happen. Yet, when she closes her eyes, she gets the "strangest feeling" - a feeling that may be instinct, may be pleasant or unpleasant, though with Hopkin's voice it of course sounds as if it could only be a good thing, and she certainly sounds welcoming enough. (The song's writers, Geoff Stephens and John Carter, are the guys in tuxes in the back, as was the custom at Eurovision at the time.) John Carter's own demo of the song points up the fact that maybe the teardrop on the window and the strangest feeling are more disturbing and that to imagine someone knocking on the door is, come to think of it, kind of delusional. No one just knocks on a front door and steps in unless the person inside has invited them somehow; even if what the narrator is inviting in is an abstract - Love - well, that is equally odd, as Love rarely responds to such passiveness...

...so what is going to come in, what is really awaited? An actual person, romance, Love? The 70s themselves could be in this room already, with Hopkin as its voice, and her tremendous eagerness for something, anything to happen is as hopeful and naive as the new decade itself. Who knows what is going to happen? That something will comes through in the music, all curlicues and confident, swooping like a bird from note to note.

This same room will occur again (I know I've mentioned it before in conjunction with Hopkin, but this time it's even more pertinent) in 1977, a room where her voice comes back as that welcoming spirit to perhaps comfort a man who cannot leave his room, who is scared of what is outside and yet is waiting; waiting for a gift that is mysterious, one which doesn't come from a knock on the door but from the inside, from a place where that strange feeling starts. Hopkin longs for Love to come and relieve her from solitude, but here solitude is required, it seems, for anything to happen at all. That Hopkin is there may also point back to the optimistic delusion of this song, and Bowie sings more to himself, when he bothers to sing at all.

"Knock Knock Who's There?" got second place at Eurovision (as it does here) and for all I know it may have been some influence on Bowie at the time; it sounds like a much simpler and happier song than it really is. This is not a new thing in pop, but it will start to happen more frequently as something that is for now nameless begins to find its roots and slowly begins to grow, with Stephens and Carter two of its friendly forebears. The 70s has more of them in store, as pop begins to grow in two distinct ways - the dull and predictable, and the strange and lovely. This song belongs to the latter, all black and sparkling, contradictory and yet united.

Olympian Yelp: Andy Williams: "Can't Help Falling In Love"

And now we shift from the still grieving Beatles fans to a different segment of fans altogether - those who watched tv, and bought singles by those who had their own tv shows. As the 70s go on the power of television - both shows and commercials - grows stronger, and as you would expect, helps to mould what gets in the charts.

If you have your very own tv show of course you don't need commercials, you just have to perform the song and it will sell, depending on how your audience reacts to it; the whole thing is a neat circle, and since kids watch tv as much as adults do, anything that appeals to both generations - as this song surely did - will really work. Commercially, at least; but is this a good version of the Hugo & Luigi song?

Williams' best work - as noted here - is not where he has to shout to be heard, but where he can be more varied in his responses, from joyous to near-godlike. I say godlike as in absolute; Williams is not a man for holding back if it's not necessary, and his Olympian voice in this song strains the delicacy the melody and seductiveness of the lyrics. It is a hard song to sing with much emphasis or whooping joy, because it is at root a chanson, dozy and suggestive, slightly sinister and retrospectively overwhelming.

"Take my whole life too" is a big statement and Williams here is virtually throwing himself at his Other, with what sounds like the Love Affair in the background doing a variation on "Everlasting Love." He is going up and up when the whole song is about that river gently flowing into the sea, about inevitability, about fate itself. Perhaps Williams is taking his cue from the "fools rush in" part, but he doesn't sound as if his whole life is in someone else's hands, which is really the point of the song. He cannot help himself, he is vulnerable, but made strong by his love - strong enough to sing, at least. However, Williams seems to be proclaiming this helplessness as so the whole town can hear, shouting it from the rooftop - it's all at cross purposes, and feels like someone using a blowtorch to light a birthday candle.

This is what happens, though, when a song (an NME #2 by the way) is done in a style that will appeal to 'the kids' as well as the adults; the subtleties are lost in a new glossy finish that sounds 'hip' while still appealing to his main fans (Williams' show was at its peak in popularity at this time). It worked, clearly, but I can't say it's a good version of the song, just one that fits in with the general confusion of 1970, where the old and the new are beginning to get mixed up, and all kinds of strange things, as you dear readers will see, start to pop up, songs that come from all angles and places, some already laid-back, others (like this one) definitely not.

Next up: Back to Eurovision.

A Real Boy: The Jackson 5: "I Want You Back"

When I was a pre-schooler, probably still in nursery school, I was taken to see a movie. (This was before DVDs, before videos, when the only ways to see a movie were on tv or in a movie theatre; only rich cinephiles had home movie theatres, then.) My father’s job was as an animator, so of course he would take me to see animated movies, Fantasia being one that was (as was Disney’s wont) re-released for a new generation to enjoy. I got through that one just fine.

But Pinocchio? Like my mother, as I much later found out, I could not take it. I began crying – I forget at which part, it’s a distressing movie and so there could be many – and would not stop. My father, always respectful of the audience, led me out of the theatre, and we went home. If the part that started me crying had been one of suspense – something I’m not good at dealing with, in life or cinema – then that would make sense. But maybe I was more horrified at the idea of a little boy being made of wood, period. That, my crying, shocked self would have explained, if I’d been able to speak, is the worst thing. Death-in-life; a life given to others completely, who can do what they like with you, including throw you in a trunk if you don’t behave…how can he be real and not real at the same time? What horrors does he have to endure just to be a real boy?

Both of these were 1940 Disney classics, and I wonder if Michael Jackson saw either of them at the time – or perhaps as a superstar, he had other things to do. I was all of four when I saw it; Michael, had his parents taken him to see it, would have been thirteen. The very edge of adolescence, when the rigors of school, the absence or presence of any crushes, the whole bildungsroman of life starts out. Teenagers are supposed to be dumb, arrogant, passionate creatures that make mistakes. Even if you spent most of your adolescence either in school or at home doing homework, otherwise preoccupied with music and pop culture, that is more than enough to figure out a whole lot of things; add in friends, dances, movies, trips, and so on, and some kind of path will present itself, even one that says that staying true to yourself is not going to be easy, but that life (whatever it is) is a living death, as easy as it is for others to follow. It’s not yours, and no one is going to reward you with becoming ‘real’ at the end; you already are real, and it’s your main job to stay that way. (Michael, as you may already know, wasn't really allowed to make mistakes.)

But if you show signs of being gifted, then adults – the whopping majority of whom are talented perhaps but not ‘gifted’ – will treat you differently, with a kind of awe on one hand and impatience on the other. I was never regarded as ‘gifted’ myself; I and a few others got to skip Grade 4 as we were tested and judged able to do so, and we were a happy little flock the day we got our letters and told the good news. We still went to school just as usual, but had a year taken off, to stifle boredom, more than anything else. (In Grade 6 I wanted to know how to spell déjà vu and my teacher, Mrs. Myers, dutifully went to the classroom where the gifted children were being taught to find out. A year later I was in junior high, reading a learn-as-you-go book of French wishing I could take a class in it, and maybe wishing I was gifted.)

Michael Jackson’s gift was his voice, though; and as it was part of his body it was available to improve upon day and night. He had no chance to skip a year, to want to study something just because it was pleasurable, in and of itself. The voice is there, something that dominates a singer’s life, which they have to protect and train as best they can. Control over the voice becomes a big thing, using it to surprise others, to surprise yourself. But if you are a child and your gift is your voice, then you’re going to have adults – parents, coaches, any other interested parties – wanting you to become ready, skilled, and adept. In Jackson’s case he had a whole family to please, from his father on down, and multiply that awe and impatience several times and there’s Michael, having to learn fast, learn from his mistakes, to work hard and be the star of the Jackson 5, out there gigging and trying to get someone’s attention, and then being signed and groomed by Motown in 1968.

A child has some control over himself, but is still the ward of his parents; a gifted child is monitored hourly and as the gifts are honed and refined, possibilities become realities and what was first hailed as near-miraculous now has to be produced on a regular basis. I don’t know how much of this song could be called improvised or spontaneous, on the part of the performers or the songwriters (who went by the retrospectively kinda-creepy name The Corporation). Motown prided itself on being like a factory, the musicians working long hours, songwriters ditto, the whole thing very professional and demanding. So of course they would want these kids to rehearse and polish and rehearse some more, until they were ready and could do this complex song so easily, it sounds as if it just came to them, more or less.

That the whole thing kicks the 70s off is the least of the surprises – the backwards piano like curtains being flung open, the window opened to this most welcome dawn chorus, Michael leading the way, his four brothers harmonizing behind him, as he tells this story of love, which sounds awfully mature for someone who is only eleven. “When I had you to myself, I didn’t want you around” is adolescent arrogance, and his admitting he was wrong to dismiss her, blind to let her go. So many pretty girls, so little time, already. Trying to live without her is unbearable, and he wants to show her that “I know wrong from right.” (Even here Michael has to show that he is good and worthy, and his voice is as loud and insistent as a robin*.)

The song stops and starts and leaps all over the place, piano and strings in front, the song constructed so it has hope and determination and freshness built right in, along with anxiety and flat-out fear. Will he get her back? Can he convince her he’s changed? There is no resolution, just yelping and screaming of Michael at the end, after he climbs up the word “go” as if he is swooping up to the top of the tree, a feat that is astonishing in anyone so young and afterwards disconcerting. How did he learn about how to do this? What is he calling upon – beyond sheer talent – to get that desperate? His “hah” towards the end is more a signal that he has done what he wanted to get done singing than any real confidence that he can get the girl back. Because he hasn’t had time for even the most childish of romances, this song can’t help but feel premature, unbelievable – he sees his girl in another man’s arms? This is not playground love, hopscotching and jump-rope rhymes (though the music makes it seem that way) but adult stuff, or at least adolescent, but what can Michael know of this?

I don’t know, but day-in day-out rehearsing and training can make anything happen, can make a voice – obviously young, haplessly able to dominate, even if he doesn’t want to – do anything, if only for the time it takes to sing a song. (How many songs sound convincing that were sung with no real passion and in some cases utter dislike?) The care and consideration undertaken in launching the group with this song (which took a long time to write – well over a year) meant they could not fail, they could only succeed; and they did, taking over pop and launching Michael out like a satellite (he had his first #1 US hit in 1972 with a song about a boy’s love for a rat – who thought this was a good idea, exactly?) and yet keeping him close, still that gifted student who has to be hot housed on the one hand and forced to prove his worth on the other.

The pressures on Michael pushed him towards life faster than he could assimilate it, towards the 70s before they had even begun; this fresh breeze of a song knocks the late 60s out like a cartoon character, as if to say “I’m the 70s, get out of my way!” That a child who has been all but exploited is leading the way should give anyone pause, but cuteness and naiveté are disarming things, to say the least. Michael Jackson was five when his gift was apparent, and by now he’s a pro at twelve. How can he keep up this momentum without something going wrong? Will he ever get to be a real boy?



“A bird mostly sings to hold a territory, and most birds hold a territory only in spring when they breed; at other times of the year they adopt a different strategy. But the robin’s game plan is to hold a territory throughout the year: a place where he, or she, can feed and stay safe, and survive throughout the hard weather.” (A Bad Birdwatcher’s Companion, Simon Barnes, 2005.) It may seem odd to compare a child to a bird, but why else would he do “Rockin’ Robin”? Michael had to hold his territory all the time.