The Cheery Quiet: Bobby Darin: "Things"

The last time we heard from Mr. Darin (and how long ago does that seem now?), he was inviting us all to join him up a lazy river; he pounced and trounced and played with the song like a lion cub. He still has that "he's got savoir-faire because he's debonair" about him here, but note the differences; he has written this song himself. And he sits by his window, watching other couples go by.* He sees them cuddle and laugh and then remembers what they did; walking, kissing, going out and just hanging out listening to the jukebox and - most importantly - remembering 'the night we cried.' The song ambles along in a pop-country way, girls in the back singing as if they themselves are just mere representatives of her, the one he lost, the one causing him such heartaches.

The whole song is like a jaunty walk and smile, the person saying they are fine when really deep down they aren't; it is also yet another song wherein introspection (all he has to talk to are his own heartaches and they are, presumably, quite vocal) is starting to creep into the story - notice how here he doesn't even have a picture of the woman in question. But what happened on that night when they cried? Was it something to do with their lovers' vow? I feel that with song that the intensity of the 60s has just increased by that much, the cheery optimist still only just winning out over the profound void of being by oneself in total quiet. (One of the most important songs of the 60s, I feel - at least in this vein - comes along about a year from now, released as a b-side in the U.S. only, and it takes all of pop to a different place; a place that I would say culminates in Manchester in the late 70s.) If you compare these two songs, you can see how swiftly the 60s evolve and how the pressure to be not just good but great was already building up; also how the Rat Pack/Mad Men era was starting to slowly change despite itself, how showbiz was turning slowly from one thing into something else altogether. Mr. Darin smiles, stares out the window and resists crying - for now.


*For those of you who know the number two list already, there is another one that starts with this same premise but takes it to a different and radical conclusion. That's not for a few years yet, though.

Right Hand, Left Hand: Pat Boone: "Speedy Gonzales"

The world of music, as we have seen so far, can be a puzzling and wondrous thing to behold; voices, concepts and ideas get passed back and forth, noises and mistakes and casual asides become more, not less, important over time. A success for one person of a certain...persuasion can be funneled to make something else entirely different happen, without much public knowledge.

And so it is here; a song wherein the singer is upstaged by a far more interesting and charismatic cartoon character (Speedy sounds more human, weirdly, than Boone does), a song bought by and large by kids and summer-crazed parents of kids (it was number two for a good while) generated enough funds (along, to be fair, with all of Boone's other hits) to start Impulse! jazz label. To put it mildly, I do not think Boone's children had any idea - how could they? - of what their pence and ha'pennys were helping to create; but there it is.

Let me be personal for a moment here - I grew up in a jazz household, so I grew up as a little girl looking at Impulse! spines with their warm orange glow attracting me to look at their vivid covers; and even then I could sense that these were all albums worth my parents' time and mine as well, if I ever got around to them. I feel that the one area of music from this time (by August of '62 they had been married for two and a half years or so and I still wasn't a glint in either of their eyes) that simply trumps most popular music is jazz; whether it's Gil Evans & Orchestra, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus Charlie Hayden and the Liberation Music Orchestra, Yusef Lateef, Pharoah Sanders....in short, if it was avant garde jazz you wanted in the 60s, Impulse! was the label to watch.

There are probably some who think that taking the money raised by Boone and starting a label (done in 1960, but by the time of "Speedy Gonzales" it was starting to make a name for itself) was simply poetic justice - this is the man who took the punctum out of "Tutti Frutti", after all; and now the yang was merely catching up with the yin, so to speak. It is also a reminder that if something - here it is the 50s and all it stands for - is waning (this is the last time I write about Boone) then something else will not exactly takeits place, but a new vehicle will be built so that those who want to escape from the bossy, square Boone and into more interesting spaces and dimensions can do so. The 60s will start to flood in soon, after the hot summer of '62 recedes; and about to enter the chart is a song (I will mention it when I get to the number two it stops) that would give even John Coltrane a sense that not all in the charts was sophomoric or dull; the future is indeed here, orbiting the globe.

What Can He Do?: Joe Brown: "A Picture of You"

One of the many reasons I am writing this here blog - in case any of you were perhaps wondering - is to educate myself in the history of UK rock and pop, in some cases to find out that music does indeed run in families. (This makes me think that there must be a gene that gives music a boost, at the very least.) Back when I started to really buy music all the time (c. 1988), an album called Stop! came out by one Sam Brown; I bought it, just like I bought a lot of music that year in an attempt to understand and comprehend the world better after my father's death. Her acute pain was mine, just as the anger and energy of other albums gratified and encouraged me. Not that Stop! is all pain, but the title single is played to this day on 'easy-listening' radio stations, despite being anything but an 'easy-listening' song. I knew her father made music, but never had heard of him, until now...

...and again I can't help but think of how close families are in expressing themselves; how Joe's singing must have influenced Sam's, as well as (at least evidenced by this song) a kind of romantic helplessness. Once again there's just a nameless woman, seen and seen but never known, "all of the evening and most of the day" (such precision is a foreshadowing of the Bee Gees) and he is preoccupied by his heart and a photograph he took of her, after which she simply disappears. (The song this most reminds me of is "Photograph" by Def Leppard, oddly enough.) I am beginning to think that boys in 1962 simply & merely looked at at girls and dreamt about them, maybe approached them and maybe...didn't, as the picture began to take over the reality of the situation. He seems sanguine enough about it in the song, helpless like I said, but not upset or angry - how can he be? At least he has the picture, unlike, oh, in this song. (Again, I think of Roland Barthes and the image being more important than the actuality; maybe this picture Brown has of this woman is punctum enough for him.)

In any case, I want to honor both Browns here for making music that is powerful enough to be successful and just odd enough to make that success more than merely 'being in the chart'.

Last Breaths: Cliff Richard and the Shadows: "Do You Want To Dance/I'm Looking Out The Window"

This presents two rather different versions of the Cliff Richard Experience; an experience which is rooted in the 50s (those lock-steps that he does with the Shadows) and yet the same song, as done by the Beach Boys just a few later (I cannot help but mention my fellow Californians, particularly since Dennis is singing lead here) is a song that verily defies you not to dance; the Cliff Richard/Shadows version sounds as if maybe you'd want to do a brisk minuet or perhaps the stroll, at best. I know it is unfair to jump into the future here, but the future in 1962 was very close to appearing; in a way this seems like the last breath, the last relic before something is about to happen - something that Cliff and the Shadows will bravely live through and endure in their own ways. But in the meantime, here they are doing their dance and being the polite and lovable rockers that they are.

And now we have Cliff's future, and thus a way out - a gentle mourning hum, softly hoping and waiting, the Shadows like a beneficent sun on Cliff's focused pain. He sits in his suit (a suit he claims to wear every day, just in case - not visible here, just audible here, alas) and sings the words as if they were almost too awful to sing. How can he be second best? How can he have fallen for someone who treats him like this? The main problem here is that Richard is just, lest we forget, 21 and cannot really be suffering as much as he claims here; but again the poignancy of this is that he can see into his future, wherein he is always there, ready and well-dressed and waiting, but no one calls; at the time this may have been just a song, but songs have a way of becoming uneasy reality after a while. The girls presumably loved this one and rightly found Richard too beautiful to suffer; Cliff and the Shadows' dancing had everyone happily tapping their toes. However it is late June 1962, and while heavy smog descends once again on London, Algerians are about to gain their independence and the Port Huron statement is written, printed and distributed across the U.S.; the polite world that Cliff Richard and the Shadows represent is coming to a close, with rougher and wilder voices just edging in from the wilderness.

Raw Not Cooked: Del Shannon: "Hey! Little Girl"

By 1962, Roland Barthes was probably already working on the idea of the grain of the voice; the punctum of the voice, if you will. Some songs work because the lyrics are so good; others work because the voice that sings is so, well, grainy that there is no way to ignore it. Del Shannon's voice is one that sounds almost perpetually on the edge of being too rough and out-of-key for proper singing; unlike the operatic Orbison, he jumps over the idea of a 'normal' or 'average' voice that could be expected from a pop single. It's not a non-voice as such, or an anti-voice, but there is a certain punctum here that takes a song as nominally average as this one and makes it into a virtual short story. He is walking the street; he sees her crying; he remembers wanting her and not being able to talk to her, even to learn her name. His open and honest growls and cries makes his desperation more than credible (and makes him the godfather to emo, along the way) and his addressing this girl is far more intense and anguished than the easy-going Bruce Channel - suddenly with this song the story* here deepens, the plaintive tone that probably started in the chansons of yore has come back with a vengeance.

Otis Blackwell (the song's writer) must have been happy that this was a much bigger single here than in the US; and it almost goes without saying that a certain group still to be accepted by a record label must have listened to him with keen interest, their own directness coming in part from Shannon's brave example.


*The story of the 60s in this case; a decade that is about to change in ways that were unthinkable to most, including a lot of musicians who were unaware that something big was about to happen. Shannon wasn't one of them.

A Simple Question: Bruce Channel: "Hey! Baby"

In our slow approach to the great event of the 60s; or at least one of them - there are little signs of what is to come, signs that are not always obvious at first, upon first listen; after all, the subject matter here is as old as song itself - a man's simple attraction/curiosity to a girl he sees somewhere. Even by 1962 this is rather old hat for pop, but pop forever renews itself by doing something, anything, new. The simple introduction of the Delbert McClinton's harmonica as a lead instrument (as opposed to something cheerfully winking in the background) and the elongated "Heeeyyyyyyyyyyyyy" are enough to take this utterly simple song and make it something of a blueprint of what is to come, not least for four young men who have yet to step into a recording studio and all their Merseyside brethren.

But this song should not just be seen as a marker towards something greater; there is something to be said for a song sung by a man who sounds...normal. Regular. Just this guy who is thinking aloud in a song about a girl he sees on the street. I have no doubts that this song was a standard for all beginning singers and proof comes with this song, a song by another guy called Bruce that is perhaps more elaborate lyrically but says the same thing; and Channel is quoted directly at the end...some may argue that pop is forever eating its own tail, but that reassuring sameness is what makes it moving for so many people; it changes but does not change.

The One and Only: Roy Orbison: "Dream Baby"

The singer for once is happy. As happy as he will ever be? Perhaps. Once upon a time he wanted to give a song, to sell it, to Elvis, to the Everlys, but neither were in need of it, so he sang it himself; by the time this song was a hit, he was undoubtedly in his stride, a stride it took him a long time to find, just as sometimes the less showy but more beautiful flower will bloom after others have faded. If he has suffered before, if he will suffer again, he is exempt in this song; without sounding at all righteous or brave. He is dreaming night and day, you can see the clock's hands swing and become meaningless as he dreams; he sings as if he is enjoying dreaming about his beloved, his Other, as much as he undoubtedly loves her. At the same time, he knows she is dreaming too, maybe of him, maybe not, it doesn't matter (and what a relief, when at some times in his songs it seems as if the whole world rests on whether she will be his or no, right down to whether she even looks at him - there is nothing frivolous in Orbison's songs, they are practically Greek in their insistence on the essence of things). Still, how long must he dream? When will she make his dreams come true? His voice hangs between pure pleasure and the longing for the realization of that pleasure, and since Orbison is also earthy and direct (how many girls fell for him, glasses and all, just because of his voice?), his longing is getting to be overpowering, his dreams feverish in trying to keep up with them. The song grows more intense and crowded with other voices and instruments as it goes, echoing his need, and his knife-keen Tarzan call rises at the end, showing that perhaps his dreams will be fulfilled, that she will wake up and the dream will become a reality.

That Orbison was the last of the Sun label's boys to prosper makes sense, as he was the shyest and not given to much showbusiness action onstage; instead he found power in stillness, in writing songs to match the grain and grandeur of his voice, to literally give of himself in his singing without fanfare or references to others. (It's impossible to think of his doing a twist song, for instance.) Hearing him sing is like hearing a short story compacted even further, told from perfect memory with every feeling and nuance intact. With this song he might be looking at a girl, at a girl he knows or hopes to know; he gives us the power to enter into that world, to inhabit it, in an intimate way, not to mention an inspirational one. That he got a second chance to bring that vulnerable and noble voice to us is something of a miracle; the first being his faith in that voice and patience with it, over many years. Orbison died the same year my father did, and in some ways I see him as a father of rock to anyone who needs him, who needs to know someone else felt just this way, once.