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.

You Go, I Can't: Helen Shapiro: "Tell Me What He Said"

She is talking with her best friend, a confidante; the East London kitchen is warm and cozy, but she has been in grief over him - and now she has heard that he is going out with someone else. She sits on the edge of her seat when she asks, begs her friend to go to the party - there is no way she can go down to the party, not after what happened. She is down, in suspense, unable to eat or drink, longing to hear nothing but the report back the next day; today is the sabbat and she waits for the sun to go down, for the party to start, she longs to be at the party but cannot be there - she has a new dress, her hair is looking good, but it would come to nothing, she would just lock herself in the bathroom and cry if she went, or even worse, chicken out at the last moment and go all the way to Gospel Oak for nothing. So she sits in the kitchen as her friend leaves, the light slowly fading, playing this song over and over and wondering if she too is going to live or die, if HE will say what she wants him to, what she needs to hear, or whether he will be studiedly neutral. She knows it is silly to depend on just a few words, but she wants him back, wants some sign that he could even think about that. She gets some cold chicken out and makes a sandwich, sits and plays the song again. OH his voice; she knows it so well, and her confidante will hear it and not her. She is resolute; there is time, there is always time. She finishes her sandwich and looks out the window, to where he is, practically willing him to say something, to understand how she feels. She wants him back, she told her. She's sorry and needs to talk. Will you talk with her? She imagines his voice and his kind words, and this keeps her happy, for now.

Dance Craze Predicts Future: Chubby Checker: "Let's Twist Again"

There were, of course, those who didn't have much interest in jazz of either a death-defying or contemplative nature; which is to say, the angst of the early 60s was something easily avoided by a new dance craze: the Twist. Why think about possible nuclear war, the situation in South Africa, this new war in a place called Vietnam...when you could just move your body back and forth, with or without a partner? If there is any song that marks the definitive beginning of the 60s (at least in this blog's remit), here it is - sung by Checker as a long encore, as if it's the real beginning of a party that is maybe about to get way out of hand ("Is it a bird, is it a plane? It's a Twister!" he cries, as if sufficient twisting could make you fly) with no way down, no way out. And indeed at the time the dance spawned many others, but it mostly spread like a virus across all classes and nations, until it was pretty much the case that it was the new hip thing, for young and old, royalty and sweaty teenagers giving it their all despite parental disapproval. The twist was the first rock 'n' roll dance, a dance that came out of the famed Peppermint Lounge, which was a place to dance to records: a discotheque. Thus another craze was born on the side: going somewhere to dance to recorded music amongst any number of people, famous and infamous, to do the latest dances and hear the hot records. (Of course people danced to records before this; I always imagine kids going crazy around a jukebox, or even dancing in their car, should they be lucky enough to get a hold of one.)

The song itself is as basic as the dance, Checker is jolly and a little scary too (as if, if you don't dance, he will come over and make you dance); seeing as how there were at least two other twist songs in the chart at this time, I can imagine how some kids were probably wondering what on earth could be better than this; without giving much away I would argue that the very best twist song was the last big one, which acted as a springboard for a group we have yet to encounter. (Those of you who can't stand the suspense can click here.) Hello, 1960s, and hello, the future.