Backyard Trip: Traffic: "Hole In My Shoe"

As many a group found out in the late 60s, the key to success in a group was having a stable and happy group dynamic. This doesn't sound very sexy, but when you consider the groups that kept on going as opposed to those that didn't, those that did were able to continue because everyone was - more or less - content with what their role in the band was. If you have three people in a band who work together on songs and a third who comes in with a song in hand, expecting the others to play it just so then there's going to be problems.

Traffic were such a group; Jim Capaldi, Steve Winwood and Chris Wood wrote songs together (the first two wrote the previously mentioned "Paper Sun") and Dave Mason tended to write songs on his own, like this one. The other three didn't like it but recorded it anyway; I can guess it was a bit too whimsical for them. (Traffic were made up of musicians who had gone out to the countryside, away from the industrial Midlands, to, as they said back then, "get their heads together.") It has all the hallmarks of something almost too typical of the time - sitar (played by Mason), flute, lyrics that once again focus on water (is water the most psychedelic of the elements?), a young girl's narration straight out of a fairytale. The "elephant's eye" harks back to Oklahoma!, the unreal fields (strawberry?) full of tin soldiers, the passive voice wherein everything seems to be happening to him - the only thing he is sure of is that pesky hole that is letting in water...

...this does seem a bit cliched, but then being on a trip at this time was likely the same as having a mystical experience way back when; there are similar experiences and vocabularies you use to explain what is otherwise hard to describe to anyone else. But there is a fine line between using language others can understand and using language everyone has heard before. The psychedelic experience here is fantastical ("bubblegum tree" Mason sings, as if foreseeing the bubblegum pop explosion to come) and disconcerting, and it is only the literal hole in his shoe that is grounding him, perhaps keeping him from floating off to this other world altogether.

So this is not a song about complete absorption, but that tingling sensation that can be an anchor through an otherwise strange experience - and he ends up on his back, his coat getting wet, waking up much like the narrator of "Flowers in the Rain" in that he's outside and communing with nature, not airborne like the child narrator on the albatross, off to a place where the music plays loud.

This is psychedelia as genteel escapism, as opposed to psychedelia that has something to say, per se: it is always awkward when something that seems meaningful to you personally has to be explained to the masses, so Mason must have been gratified (though it irked the others) that this was their biggest hit. They wanted something a bit tougher lyrically and musically, I'd expect; but in the late hazy days of '67 the single-buying public wanted to digest psychedelia as a pastoral thing that didn't threaten their lives but gave them a window to a world where having wet feet was the biggest problem.

What was startling in the winter of '67 was by the fall an accepted commonplace. Dave Mason came and went in Traffic as they themselves ebbed and waned (Winwood formed Blind Faith with Eric Clapton for a while when the ever-embattled Cream broke up in late '68). As the music indeed got louder, bands found themselves in a dilemma - whether to make light "pop" music like this song or go into more complex and tougher territory, leaving behind anyone who just wanted a nice tune to hum on the way to work. '67 was a year when bands could have it all, but many had problems being all things to all single & album fans, and they had to make their choices. (Some had theirs made for them, such as Pink Floyd, whose most "pop" member was Syd Barrett, who was sidelined in the band and then formally left in '68.) The pop scene was changing and rock was the new thing - pop being left for The Housewives of Valium Court and kids who were young enough to enjoy psychedelic pop without asking too much of it.

Yes, the dreaded-by-some 'classic rock era' has by now begun, leaving the singles charts open to almost anything, as we shall see.

Fantastic!: The Move: "Flowers In The Rain"

Imagine it's the early morning of September 30, 1967. It's 7am; you are just waking up when you hear this.

A whole world - save for rebellious Radio Caroline - has ended. The future - as brought to you by George Martin himself - has begun. Before I get to the main song here, I'm going to pause a bit and remember my own reaction to hearing Martin's piece...I must have first heard it in 2007, when I was haphazardly planning, along with Marcello's help, the music for our wedding. I wanted it to be launched with something dramatic, of my year, but also something warm and cozy. Something to say: a whole new world has been achieved, something that was a mere notion has grown into this - true love and hence, marriage. And I cried when I first heard it, so of course it was the only choice...

The first song played on the station was this one; thunder booms give way to a chirpy song which is about flowers, trees...and escaping the commitments of the world by immersing yourself in nature, even to the point of sleeping outdoors. Lost in fantasy, taking a break to realign priorities - all done to a typical march-beat that sounds anything but dreamy. In the video you can see them in their psychedelic finery, eating apples and reading comic books - there is something deliberately regressive going on here, another facet of the rebellious/childish part of UK 'hippie' music (as opposed to the more confrontational US version).

Or perhaps this nyah-nyah I'm going to watch flowers business is more rebellious than it seems? Perhaps some notions of a greater society will occur as the day passes? It is a huge leap to go from this to the current occupations across the UK - the only thing they have in common is their refusal to go 'indoors' and 'behave' normally. (Well, these ideas have to start somewhere.) But the group's manager promoted the single with a controversial postcard illustrated with a drawing of a naked Harold Wilson (then the Prime Minister) linking him to his secretary. The band were sued and forced to give their royalties from the song to charity, which shows that maybe egging The Man plc on isn't always the best idea. (To this day the group don't make any money from the song, which considering Wilson died in 1995 is kind of unfair.)

This, if you were to believe in omens, was a mixed one at best for Radio 1, and The Move themselves got rid of their manager and were shy to do anything quite so bold promotionally again. This song did give a certain young producer fresh from NYC - Tony Visconti - experience in arranging however (he did the woodwind and strings). And thus we take a step from the mid-60s to the late 60s and the increasing strangeness on one side of pop, just as the other becomes more and more uniform*. This got stuck behind new heartthrobs The Bee Gees' "Massachusetts" - the second record played that morning - and while it found friends in the chart ("Homburg" by Procol Harum, "From The Underworld" by The Herd) it must have seemed something of an understandable disappointment to the group, who (like so many 60s groups of this time) mutated away until The Move had a parallel band, Electric Light Orchestra, as a Wood side project. Psychedelia turned out to be much harder for groups to adapt than you might think - The Who didn't really 'go' psychedelic beyond clothes; The Rolling Stones' late '67 album wasn't...very...good...[though it has its champions]; The Kinks were busy with writing about English life in its strange normalcy.

The genteel oddballness of UK psychedelia is undoubtedly because the UK wasn't involved in Vietnam, and thus the listeners did not have the ugly fact of the war beyond news reports - whereas it was the daily life of every American, because of the draft and so on. (If you didn't know someone who was over there, chances were good you knew someone who did, and draft dodgers were rampant, as well.)

So a song about kipping in the garden and evading the requirements of daily life was all that was required or needed; sooner rather than later, though, the true cost of being on the outside of society was going to make for some astonishing music, music that more than lives up to the golden promise of "Theme One." The village of A Teenage Opera, the disturbing tidiness of "Penny Lane" suddenly come to life on tv, as if its creator was also creating his own psychedelic masterpiece, trying like Wilson, Wirtz or Wood to keep a handle on it, lest it suddenly gets scattered and lost...what, was that the sound of thunder again?


*"King Midas In Reverse" by The Hollies is a good example of this; it was Graham Nash's last stab at making the band more hip, but they - and their producer - weren't interested in getting further out, and so Nash left them the following year for the welcoming hippie world of Laurel Canyon.

Psychedelia Has A Right To Children: Keith West: " Excerpt From 'A Teenage Opera'"

Throughout the late summer a song has been steadily climbing up the charts, to rest at #2; it had the advantage of being played a lot (esp. on pirate radio) and being a narrative that could be understood by anyone - the sad passage of time, as experienced by not just one or two people, but a whole community. The sob stories that have just passed are merely personal - this is about a whole village losing its grocer.

How on earth could this have happened? Well, this is 1967 and we find ourselves at none other than Abbey Road with one Mark Wirtz, who had been hired by - remember him? - Norrie Paramor to work as an in-house producer for EMI. Wirtz was hip; he was responsible for Pink Floyd being signed by EMI and dug another underground group he saw playing at the same time - The In Crowd (soon to change its name to the even more underground Tomorrow), featuring guitarist Steve Howe and singer Keith West. He had had the musical idea of a teenage opera for some time and mentioned the Grocer Jack character to West, who promptly wrote the lyrics; the group recorded the song and it was a hit - (such a hit that for a while Keith West was a pin-up, much to his & Tomorrow's discomfort).

The song is as lush and orchestral and Beatles/Kinks inspired as you'd expect; West sings with compassion about an 82-year-old grocer who dies, the village's lack of food and the funeral, where the folks realize they should have been nicer to the old man. The most poignant and influential part of the song is the children's chorus - little girls who wonder where Grocer Jack is and want him back, even though their moms tell them he won't be back. I can't help it, their voices tug at me - the children are the voice of the village, missing Jack, helpless to change the way the whole village is going to have to operate. (The premise of the opera is that the songs are all sung to a young woman who must stay awake after a motorcycle accident; they are almost all songs about people in a village who are antiquated, about to disappear, if not gone already.)

That a song such as this did so well shows that the public maybe wasn't so scared of psychedelia as previously reported, if it's focused on an understandable narrative and has little kids singing on it. There was also the tantalizing idea of it being an 'excerpt' - that there was a lot to come and that a teenage opera was indeed possible. Wirtz found out, however, that the audience was maybe more fickle than expected (and he lost West's involvement, as he wanted to focus on Tomorrow), and while other singles appeared, none of them did that well and he soon stopped working on it in '68 to work on other things.

This is a pity, because had it been released (as it was in '96) it would have been the first real rock opera, complete with a whole cast of characters ("Auntie Mary's Dress Shop," "The Paranoiac Woodcutter," "[He's Our Dear Old] Weatherman," "Shy Boy*" to name a few). This year pretty much saw the flowering of the concept album - not to mention the album market in general, as the kids so happy to buy 45s in '63 had grown up and wanted something a bit more substantial. This - for all I know - would have done really well, but as Brian Wilson could have told Wirtz, doing something so concentrated and thematic is not easy. (The other lost album of 1967, The Beach Boys' SMiLE, surfaced first as bootlegs, then as a Brian Wilson album in 2004, and just now as an actual Beach Boys album.) A Teenage Opera was for some just as legendary - who knows what the talented Wirtz & Co. were getting up to at Abbey Road? (One Pete Townsend was certainly curious, and this in part inspired Tommy.)

What this song also cements is psychedelia's interest in and sympathy with children. This might seem a bit odd, but at heart it is the siding with the young instead of the old, the naive and hopeful as opposed to the tired and traditional. Children were to a point romanticized, but their spirit of adventurousness and tendency to blunt speech - then as now - meant they could at least be trusted, unlike the older generation who were - not to make a big point of it - square and didn't approve of anything the counterculture believed in, from pirate radio on down**.

There is also nostalgia; a whole world is disappearing and the spirit of the times is to reflect on this, to bring the old and new together in a mish-mash (think of the military-style jackets worn by The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix) that somehow liberates the culture from the past, even as it's being remembered (anti-vintagizing). The village is changing, old customs and ways are going, ones that may be going for good, for all anyone knows.

Rock 'n' roll has now split between pop and rock; avant-MOR as pioneered by Scott Walker is appearing, alongside a new station the BBC is putting together to play what the pirates did - sort of. Its name is Radio 1, and with it the chances of Wirtz' concept album took a dive, as its listeners weren't as adventurous as the pirate ones. What did they want? The answer is next.



*Done by Kippington Lodge, with the lead singer, one Nick Lowe, making his debut.

**A personal anecdote: When I was two-and-a-half I 'ran away' (the gate was open and I left to walk down the sidewalk). My mother predictably was concerned and called the cops, who found me not that far away being guarded as I walked by...some counterculture guy who was looking after me on my little escapade. No one famous, though this was in Hollywood, so you never know.

Loneliness Is Such A Drag: Tom Jones: "I'll Never Fall In Love Again"

Ah, and now to someone this here blogeuse will get to know only too well. Tom Jones was a star by this time, his anguished voice and more saucy demeanor a contrast to the more stolidly romantic Englebert. Jones is forever getting caught up in Drama, being deceived and luring other women into who knows what mischief in turn. Clearly here his girl has gone off with another man (how CAN she?) and he...sniff...knows he's never going to fall...in love...aggaainnnnn....a patently silly thing to sing, obviously, and the cheese that was in the fridge with Carr is plainly right on the table here for all to see.

That he had to drag himself through such songs was the secret misery of Jones' career; he wanted to be on Motown or Stax, he wanted to be the Welsh Solomon Burke, but The Man plc said there was hay to be made singing weepy ballads like this, which was written by...oh look who's here, it's Lonnie Donegan! Yes, this song marks the unexpected return of Donegan, who wrote and recorded this song in '62 and must have been delighted with Jones' hit version. Suddenly another facet of the complex world of music is revealed - Lonnie Donegan, inventor of punk rock, has this as a hit, in the US as well as in the UK. See? There is always an upside in the darkest of times; and late August '67 was the beginning of the last month of pirate radio, with the effective switchover being signalled by this song's great success (#2 for a month) as well as Englebert's next #1 - and there is hardly anything the Light Programme can't play in the Top Ten.

The Housewives of Valium Court are the audience that is being courted here, not the kids. The vivacity of the charts of just a few months ago has been swept away, and in that sweeping away the charts are confusing, the general tone is becoming more and more bleak...it is as if it's the end of an era and everyone knows it, and Jones is just carrying that sorrow, unwittingly, for all who thought that Love could conquer all. It is a bittersweet time, one of "Itchycoo Park," and "The Day I Met Marie" and "Burning of the Midnight Lamp"; wistful songs about how enchantment is either fleeting or already gone. The Summer of Love isn't over just yet, but it certainly hasn't been all that it was cracked up to be - or perhaps it could have happened, had more people been less scared and more adventurous? The Housewives sat back and got gently drunk as Tom sang his song of woe - ah women, he's giving up on them now, for sure...while station after station packed up and brought their ships ashore. What now?

Don't Touch That Dial: Vikki Carr: "It Must Be Him (Seul Son Sur Etoile)"

And now we step, seemingly simultaneously, into the swanky world of international hotels and the less elegant rooms of that most put-upon figures in pop music, single girls. It is alternately grand and hysterical, tough (what other song of the period uses the word "chump"?) and maudlin. Carr sings the song as best she can (it was originally a song by Gilbert Becaud and Maurice Vidalin; the English lyrics are by Mack David, Hal David's older brother), giving a three-alarm-fire performance of desperation that nearly stood alone in the Top Ten against the invasion of strangeness and beauty that was the Summer of Love. You might wonder how something that reeks (if I can put it that way) of obsessive-compulsive behavior and disdain for others (that "puppet on a string" reference, as if she's in a position to judge) could be so successful, while songs like "See Emily Play," "Strange Brew," and "Paper Sun" didn't get to #2?

The answer is, that as receptive to psychedelia as the some of the British public were, there was a large segment that found it kind of...scary. Not hide-behind-the-sofa scary, but disturbing and weird nevertheless. (It should also be noted that psychedelia's greatest audience, from Sgt. Pepper on down, was in albums, not singles.) What was left for those who didn't dig the new scene, and who weren't crazy for Motown/Stax? Songs like this one, where our heroine has a relationship with the nameless/characterless "him" that makes you think she's virtually a prisoner of her love, unable to see how maybe if she just didn't answer the phone once and got out and mixed things up a little - instead of being so available - he might actually take some real interest in her. It is as if the whole world consisted of nothing but her and him, and all her praying and subsequent dashed hopes and wailing, etc. are all that matters.

This is yet another in I don't know how many songs of the 60s where the woman suffers and suffers and the song succeeds (commercially I mean; it was a big hit in the US as well) and it walks that very fine line between telling like it is and masochism. This puts Carr in the same unfortunate boat as Janis Joplin, who had to live with guys getting off on the pain in her songs - different crowd, of course, but the same dynamic is in place, whether it's in the glamorous world of Carr or the freaked-out one Joplin inhabited. (Oddly enough, they're both from Texas, of the same generation and may well have known of each other. Who knows?)

What is clear is that there are those who like the experimental and those who would just as soon hear a song of woe sung with unironical conviction; these two audiences don't crossover and the latter is taking over the singles chart, just as the former is taking over the albums. For some the 60s were just fine until about now; for others, it's just getting started. The generation gap is clear, and by the time the next song appears, pirate radio will be illegal and stations will begin to disappear from the dial. This lowest-common-denominator everyone-can-relate song will persist in the charts, the single woman's tormented relationship with her phone will also continue...but it's the sob stories that make the Summer of Love a lot less cool than it could have been, and it's not ending here...

We've Got Something To Say: The Monkees: "Randy Scouse Git" (aka "Alternate Title")

And now, I feel, dear readers, that we have reached the crux of this year, the point where the let's-just-have-fun part of the 60s gives way to something more serious. That it comes from a 'manufactured' group that The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame still don't deem as legitimate is ironical to say the least, because nobody ever rebelled and wanted to be a band as much as they did.

By this time The Monkees (the band) and The Monkees (the show) were a big deal; recruited in '65 for a show about four young guys in a band who lived together and got into wacky trouble each week, their very theme song was a big HELLO to middle America, where guys with long hair and funny clothes were definitely suspect. The Monkees was a huge hit and yet the songs so integral to the show weren't theirs, for the most part. (The proto hip-hop "Mary, Mary" was by Nesmith, however.) Seeing as how two of them were musicians already (and the actors, not at all bad musicians who, ironically again, did almost all the singing) this was a situation bound to explode, with Dolenz, Jones, Nesmith and Tork demanding the right to write and perform their own songs. Artistic control - to stop being so many Pinocchios and be real musicians - was theirs, but the whole process was exhausting, as you can imagine.

This song is about that struggle, even if Dolenz is singing about meeting his future wife and The Beatles ("kings of EMI") on a short trip to London. The kettle drums and off-kilter piano set up the two sides, and the unpredictable hurriedness of the song explodes like a thunderstorm at the chorus: "Why don't you be like me?!/Why don't you stop and see?!/Why don't you hate who I hate, kill who I kill to be free!" Silence: then the kettle drums erupt again, with the piano nervously trembling, as if it's about to be smashed. This is no ordinary song. It is, in effect, the first real protest record on this blog, against a world that wants conformity and has no interest or sympathy with - and this is only a slight jump - the rebellious counterculture itself, who look at the world and see that its very straightness and conformity leads to social and political ugliness, if not corruption. Dolenz even gives The Man plc a voice: "Why don't you cut your hair?/Why don't you live up there?/Why don't you do what I do,/See what I feel when I care?*"

The struggle, as they say, continues. What do The Monkees have to do in order to get respected? They didn't play at Monterey for fear of getting booed; they took their artistic freedom as far as they could while still being tv stars; they begat, unintentionally, bubblegum pop; they toured happily with Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles liked them, in part because they took the pressure off them having to be The Beatles, in effect. Yes, The Monkees were anxious and uncertain - a fake 'band' turning into a real one is bound to cause that - and with this song all of that jittery instability comes to life. (There's even an argument for The Monkees being a model of sorts for all boybands to come, particularly a certain one I'll get to in the 70s.)

With this song, The Monkees break through that fourth wall - leap from being two-dimensional group into a living, breathing real one; there is no Don Kirshner telling them what to sing, no producer telling them they have to let the session pros do the job. They managed to do more music that is just as good as this, and while the tv show got predictably routine, they did manage a small coup: one Tim Buckley appeared on the show in '68, introducing him to who knows how many impressionable teenagers. So perhaps they did win in the end, even if their own creators killed them off the same year in the movie Head. Thus the singer-songwriter movement gets a push from a band that had to fight to be truly heard. There is something sweet about that, and it makes the sour Hall of Fame look even more as if it had just bit into a lemon.

Next up: something the Light Programme loved - it's the complete opposite of this, as the two sides of the radio stand. For now...


*"Randy Scouse Git" means, translated from the English, "a horny jerk from Liverpool" (or words to that effect) that he picked up from a tv show Dolenz saw while in the UK. (I think it starred Tony Booth - am I wrong here?) The record company, knowing this was not a polite name for a song, told him they needed an alternate title; thus the song charted as "Alternate Title."

This Is The End: Englebert Humperdinck: "There Goes My Everything"

There are certain historians of late who have tried to give a different spin on the 60s, on 1967 in particular; these are the sort who will point out the album sales of The Sound of Music were still going strong and that this man, Englebert Humperdinck (a stage name given to him, after the Hansel und Gretel composer) was the true star of the time. All else is hippy-hypey nonsense, so much florid ephemeral noise. The solid majority of folk did not want backwards guitars and baroque orchestration; they wanted a four-square song they could understand, with lyrics that are brief, lovesick and thus romantic. This is true enough; his first hit was on the charts for over a year, and this one stayed around for over six months. He had been working in the club circuit for years, honing his craft as an entertainer (a term he takes seriously) and his management thought that his way forward was to change his name (from the less exotic Jerry Dorsey) and give him some big ballads that would have women and girls a new idol to worship, more or less.

Idol worship is strange; reality shows that try to find one tend to come up trumps a lot of the time as idolatry is really either one of two things: temporary or permanent. It's also another thing: illogical. No Fullers or Cowells can ever really gauge what any given audience will want after a certain point, and the ones that are chosen who succeed tend to do so because they don't agree with their so-called masters. Cliff Richard still has his fans in part because he does what he wants, as does Englebert*. The "too beautiful to suffer" element is also here, of course; idols are adored and glamorized by women who feel they could be the one, if only in their dreams. (In his previous hit he wanted out of a relationship; in this one she's leaving him - how many adult listeners heard these songs as reflections of their own lives?)

And the narrator in this song is a pitiable creature, indeed. He hears her footsteps as she leaves, her last statement as she goes; clearly he has no energy to try to win her back, to plead or beg. That is all done. And so this song seems vast and empty, as if all the air has disappeared from the room. I could be all new age and say that it's not right for someone to be so utterly dependent on someone else (his only possession is her, he now has no reason to live) but again that would be our good friend logic talking. If you have been in the unfortunate situation the narrator is in, you would know better than to judge the absolute extreme he presents, because to him it's real. His heart is broken and there's nothing for him, he can't even speak. He can't move. It is as if a thick black line has been drawn, dividing him from...everything else.

This does seem terribly romantic, this waltzing misery, and yet there is a horrible realism to it, one that stands stoutly next to Procol Harum or Jimi Hendrix (who learned a thing or two about working a crowd from Englebert when he toured with him). The Summer of Love is here, but love is a risky thing that, like idolatry, is either temporary or permanent. Romantics are those in love with love, who maybe even enjoy a good wallow in despair once in a while; and if they can't sing, then they can listen to music that doesn't think they are backwards or old-fashioned, but instead puts them on a kind of eternal plane. (I'm not saying this is a timeless song though: referring to anyone as a 'possession' as if they were a car or house isn't very hip these days, and must have seemed positively Brontesque to some - not all - in '67**. Country songwriter Dallas Frazier wrote it, but then he also wrote "Alley Oop" and "Elvira" amongst many hits, so I can forgive him.)

The realism and romanticism appealed to women, who love him to this day; women who want a handsome man who has a handsome voice and seems to understand that life isn't always pleasant or fair. He may be an idol, but he is grown-up, laid-back, unlike Tom or Cliff or any of the others. 19th century by name, 19th century by nature? 1967 has opened a time warp wherein the past and the future are blending together, or where time has stopped making sense altogether...but then for romantics, Love is eternal...

Next: another bunch of romantics fight The Man plc in the name of Art. Oh yeah!



*Like Tom Jones, Englebert's son is his manager now, since his previous one turned down a chance to appear on a the Gorillaz album Plastic Beach without bothering to ask the singer first, which upset him greatly (as it would any right-thinking person). This gives me an excellent excuse to post this, of course. Maybe next time?

**Two of the musicians on this song - guitarist John McLaughlin and bassist Dave Holland - were a bit tired of playing such traditional music (as well-paying as it was) and not long after this they both joined (at his request) Miles Davis' group; thus they were liberated to play on In A Silent Way, a sublime album every jazz lover should own (if s/he doesn't have it already). They tried their best with this song, goodness knows, but some musicians just aren't cut out for standard country ballads.