Boy Toy: The Foundations: "Build Me Up Buttercup"

And so we come to the end of 1968; it may have been a year for worldwide revolution, but for this blog it clearly has been a year of relationships, whether they are viewed nostalgically as with O’Connor or tormentingly, like Ryan. This song sits about halfway between those two extremes, in that the man clearly loves the woman but is disappointed by her actions, or rather inactions. He loves her but those inactions speak volumes about her attitude, which is decidedly blasé. There doesn’t seem to be much reason for him to still be attracted to her, and he himself questions why he needs her; he doesn’t understand himself, nor does he understand her, save that she thinks of him as a "toy." Perhaps it is because he is so desperate that she stands him up, forgets to call, and “mess(es) him around.” His aching “ooo-OOOH”s are as much about his pain as physical longing, and I don’t know if it is perverse of me to guess that maybe he secretly likes being in love with someone so unpredictable; someone who is very much like the butterfly girl in “Jesamine” who irritates and is yet still inherently lovable.

The song is upbeat, led by piano and horns, a radio staple to this day** as it is cheery, even though it depicts a man at the end of his proverbial rope, the singer almost screaming “WHY” at each chorus, maybe to her, maybe rhetorically as he stares at the clock*, runs to the door, looks imploringly at the phone...wondering about his fate and telling her how much he loves her.

He believes one day he will win her over, but I don’t know if this one-sided relationship has much of a chance; no matter how many “hey hey hey”s and no matter how loud he gets, this woman’s inability to commit, even to something as simple as a phone call, must mean there is either something about her he doesn’t know (not that he has any suspicions in the song) or that maybe, as the saying goes, she just isn’t that into him and he, poor sap, is trying to get pears from an oak tree. (I am not ignoring the obvious implications about her building up his expectations either; those yelps of his are from thwarted desire, and in between this and him not even knowing why he’s attracted to her, something awkward and unpleasant might just happen.)

The Foundations’ previous hit points to a sort of theme here of hapless pointless attachment (“Baby, Now That I’ve Found You”) and this need to be with someone – even if it’s not reciprocated – kind of hints at what is to come. If the Summer of Love was all about love as a universal solvent, then in ’68 love came back down to the dogged and irrational personal perspective, wherein men have feelings for women that don’t necessarily make a lot of sense, but they are true and genuine and that – that realness – is what counts. 1969 is going to take that realness all over the place, as the decade ends and everyone has their final say on what counts.



*Sloan do an excellent song on the bonus EP of One Chord To Another called “Stood Up,” all about a guy who is left in a café, watching the clock…

**If I sound a little...arms-length about this song, it's because I associate it with a compilation I heard way too much in a situation that I didn't exactly enjoy. As much as I try to be fair to songs, some have been drummed into me in a way that doesn't make me think of them with automatic enthusiasm. I should note that it was written by Mike d'Abo (lead singer with Manfred Mann) and Tony Macaulay, who helped to write "Baby, Now That I've Found You." I should also note that The Foundations were the first multi-racial group to hit it big in the UK, at a time when (inexplicable to me) The Black and White Minstrel Show was still on tv. The struggle was still definitely continuing...

How We Used To Live: Des O'Connor: "One Two Three O'Leary"

And now we return to the NME number twos for a song that was written by Barry Mason and Michael Carr, and performed by all-round entertainer (comedian, singer, tv chat show host) Des O'Connor. That something so utterly and completely sedate could jostle its way to the top amongst The Scaffold, The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and Love Sculpture just shows how fragmented the pop audience was, and how well a song like this could do.

It is a quiet song, a song about innocence and first love, harpsichord-led and gently going down memory lane, and it has nothing to do with liberation or freedom and everything to do with recalling a different time; a time when they were both young but also when the "wildwood" was theirs and everything seemed magical*.

To some this might seem a bit soppy, and O'Connor himself didn't think much of his singing, but pure, 100% proof nostalgia like this always does well in the holiday season, when thoughts turn to loved ones, and Mary here clearly is loved, even if it is so long ago that the narrator (if pressed - he isn't, here) doesn't know where she is now. Now is just a vantage point to then, and then is what is fixed in the narrator's mind. This song could appeal to anyone, I guess, but it is the generation just before the Housewives of Valium Court that it hits directly - those who remember life before & during WWII, those who suffered through it and take refuge in utterly peaceful and genteel music and find most rock too ugly and loud. (The harpsichord is what makes this a 'modern' sounding song, as baroque meets old guard pop.) As songs about love from this year go, this is thankfully free of death; an oasis of calm, even if it is a cul-de-sac.

From the rock vantage point O'Connor seems out of place; however, I should mention a much more 'hip' song that O'Connor did that he himself could stand: "Dick-A-Dum-Dum" is total London silliness as interpreted by Jim Dale, but shows more signs of life from O'Connor because of its humor. (And yes, whenever I hear 'the Buckingham beat' I think of Fleetwood Mac. I'm predictable that way.)

As '68 closes, we have more girl trouble ahead; beyond that, 1969 looms, the final year, as the 60s turns to look at itself.


*The game played in question is fully described here.

The Flesh Succeeds: Nina Simone: "Ain't Got No/I Got Life/Do What You Gotta Do"

After great grief, there has to be a stock-taking; a simple assertion of what and who you are. It is a painful thing to realize that you don't have things, that what you once had is gone; you have to rejoice in what you do have and make the most of it, while you can.

Nina Simone's recording of this song* came just a month or so after Dr. King's assassination, a time of anger, a time when a purpose that seemed unstoppable had to be buoyed up and sustained. Simone was no stranger to covering songs from musicals and besides the gospel-style music I am guessing she picked this one (actually a medley of two songs from the first act of HAIR) as it directly addresses the loss everyone was feeling...that they had nothing left - nothing external, not even a name. The eternal value of the person and his/her right - freedom - that was all that was left. It is like hearing a birth in reverse; everything, even the mother, is absent. Life is the main thing; it is the only thing. That no one can take away, though as the story in HAIR runs, even that is a debatable point...

But Simone's voice, astringent and fierce, makes it sound as if life is at the same time a base line from which to start and something that is hers, as if she had in fact created herself. The burden of not having anything becomes a blessing of a clean slate, again rejoicing in the physical body (HAIR is a very physical show, from its title on down) and the life all of these parts lead together to make up a human being (not unlike this song, which is also one of liberation). The body as a weapon; the body as an ultimate assertion of something that cannot be lost, unless there is death...and this is a song, ultimately, of life over death, of life over the "measly little world" (cf. Hendrix) that would tie it down. It is also an angry though - as if all these losses were unnecessary in the first place, robbings that have left the person with nothing more than themselves.

"Do What You Gotta Do" is a Jimmy Webb song, which is to say it's about freedom and love and how they clash. It is another song as well about how she knows she's hard to love and her heart is her own; this is self-possession on another level. If he has to be free, well, that seems inevitable; 'they' are against him and she loves him more than they ever will. Instead of being deadly fierce here Simone trembles and admits vulnerability, not as a virtue in and of itself but as a symbol, paradoxically, of strength; she is strong enough to love and let go and may never get to see him again...because there is something bigger out there that he has to do - follow his "dappled dreams" that she understands, even if no one else does.

In the first song, she asserts her freedom; in the second, she honors the freedom and needs of someone else. As the 60s come to a close, it seems freedom is the ultimate right and the ultimate gift; but there is another side to them, that wants a sense of belonging and attachment, a side that is less HAIRand more Grease. In the swirling and confusing late 60s, some basic truths have to will out first, and the toughness and quiet sorrow and acceptance here are and were the best ways for riding out a difficult period.

Simone strode in, better equipped than most to handle the situation; and Alan "Fluff" Freeman's support of this is how it got, improbably, into the UK chart in the first place**. Next we go back to the old guard, for a song about love and loss...




*The version I've posted isn't the single one that has applause from the April 7th concert mixed in, presumably to make it 'flow' as a total album ('Nuff Said!) I can only wonder if, years later, a certain producer remembered this and did his own live-to-studio tinkering for this classic (for all I know it was influenced by her; Elton certainly respected her, as anyone would).

**I am still puzzled as to how this, also a cover of a song from HAIR, only got to #11; I guess it was just the times. I still find it overwhelmingly moving...more evidence, I'm guessing, of my American childhood.

A Kind of Seizure: Barry Ryan: "Eloise"

We have had songs before where, clearly, a line was being drawn between the present and the past; songs which, once they get out into the general world of pop, charts and listeners' ears, prepare them for what is to come, and inspire a few to follow...this is one of those songs; it's a dangerous song, as well.

Songs like this usually come from bands that are already fairly well known (The Beatles did it several times) or from the most unexpected of corners, those who are brand new or are determined, to quote Ezra Pound, to make it new.

Avant-MOR, a term I've used enough, is simply taking regular middle-of-the-road balladry down a strange lane or two, until something like "MacArthur Park" or "Montague Terrace (In Blue)" - songs that take lyrical and emotional flight, whether they are anguished or secure. This takes guts - in a way it is too easy to just sing the same songs, essentially, over and over again - and the skill to pull it off. There is no halfway point here, no way to just say 'let's just be a little avant-garde' - this is unvarnished stuff emotionally despite the high production values.

Twins Paul and Barry Ryan were popstar pin-up types in the mid-60s; Paul suffered too much stress performing live, though, so the two decided that Paul would write the songs and Barry would sing them; in this way there is already a doubling effect, as if two men had one voice. Paul had heard and absorbed "MacArthur Park" and wanted to do something like it; not a neat song that would be something a mailman would hum, but a proper EPIC song that would unashamedly give voice to something far bigger and uncontrollable, that would gallop along, at first dramatically, then pause as if to recall reality, if only for a second or two, and then speed into a maelstrom that makes much of UK music in '68 sound as if it is asleep.

Which is to say, this is not baroque at all but romantic, the kind of romanticism where emotions are high-pitched to the point of hysteria; wild, as if she has loved him and spurned him but he will not give up, he cannot give up as he has no other point in living.

This is a dangerous song. I'll explain what I mean: we've had Cupid before, and The Casuals had that experience too, if a bit stronger, but I must go back to Joseph Campbell to explain the difference between those and "Eloise":

“The troubadours were the nobility of Provence and then later other parts of France and Europe. In Germany they’re known as the Minnesingers, the singers of love. Minne is the medieval German word for love. The period for the troubadours is the 12th century. The troubadours were very much interested in the psychology of love. And they’re the first ones in the West who really thought of love the way we do now — as a person-to-person relationship.

Before that, love was simply Eros, the god who excites you to sexual desire. This is not the experience of falling in love the way the troubadours understood it. Eros is much more impersonal than falling in love. You see, people didn’t know about Amor. Amor is something personal that the troubadours recognized.

The troubadours recognized Amor as the highest spiritual experience. With Amor we have a purely personal ideal. The kind of seizure that comes from the meeting of the eyes, as they say in the troubadour tradition, is a person-to-person experience. That’s completely contrary to everything the Church stood for (in medieval Europe).

You know, the usual marriage in traditional cultures was arranged for by the families. It wasn’t a person-to-person decision at all. In the Middle Ages, that was the kind of (impersonal) marriage that was sanctified by the Church. And so the troubadour idea of real person-to-person Amor was very dangerous.”

Or, as Bill Moyers summed it up: "The point of all these pioneers in love is that they decided to be the author and means of their own self-fulfillment, that the realization of love is to be nature’s noblest work, and that they were going to take their wisdom from their own experience and not from dogma, politics, or any current concepts of social good.”

Even if Barry Ryan didn't know it, Paul had written a troubadour's song for him, a song of obsession, which didn't care for taste, politeness or anything modest. People think of courtly love as being stuffy and formal, but once the true origins of it are recalled and understood, the whole notion of The Summer of Love as revolutionary begins to make sense. Love goes against everything here, including common sense and even sanity (at the end when he sings about not being "there" I am not sure if he means not with her or not in her heart). Ryan sings like there's pretty much no tomorrow, attacking the song and freaking out at the end, passionate and fierce, the go-faster guitars and AAAAHHHHs of the backing singers forever egging him on.

Because it was now nearly 1969 and with that finality ahead, there was nothing to lose. Revolution wasn't just in the air, it was the air; the cute, the maudlin, the merely okay were not enough now. Not when songs like this and this* were in the top ten at the same time; not when Hendrix was singing about a coming apocalypse.

"Eloise" was a huge hit not just in the UK but all across Europe, in part because it was so unhinged ("Kitsch" was a later hit for Ryan, it being "a beautiful word"), and its follow-up, "Love Is Love" goes beyond even this lyrically to sum up love so totally that it's almost embarrassing. But that was the point; to go beyond what had come before, and belatedly to inspire those to come. Years later a certain band, wanting to do something big and memorable themselves, would be inspired by "Eloise" to write their own EPIC tune that would not just stomp all over their rivals but become one of the best-loved UK songs of all time; which is how Queen got to "Bohemian Rhapsody," itself a song that drew a line neatly between old and new rock, not to mention deliberate kitsch. The only way in which it differs is that the narrator there claims that nothing really "matters" to him, whereas the narrator in "Eloise" is so utterly focused that nothing besides her matters to him.

The drama of this song cannot be ignored; the sense that something out of the ordinary is happening, the sense that in hearing it you are participating, sharing his desperate need. Certainly a couple of boys in Dundee heard and absorbed it, coming up with their own 'popera' years later, with songs such as this. Here, as with "Eloise" I can only feel awe: this is what music is, what it is capable of, something beautiful and fearless and intense. Music that comes from somewhere else.

In a way there is nothing after this, though as '68 comes to a close there are a few more songs, pointers this way and that. But with this the Ryans abruptly took UK pop into a different world, a world that others would and did find inspiring, and I thank them for that.



*The Motown resurgence was due to Tony Blackburn on Radio 1 and the saintly Dave Godin, who were determined to get as much Motown in the charts as possible.

Love's In Control: The Casuals: "Jesamine"

As common as they seem now, musicians have been going on tv to compete against each other for promising stardom and riches for some time; The Casuals won Opportunity Knocks three times in 1965 and got a recording contract, but the public enthusiasm for them, as it does for so many in these situations, did not translate into an instant hit for their first single. Sure, people liked them, but not the song. And so they moved to Italy and had a career there doing Italian covers of English-language hits (they did The Bee Gees' "Massachusetts" for example). Then they changed their label from Fontana to Decca and got this hit, a cover of a song by The Bystanders written by Friendly Forbear* Marty Wilde and Ronnie Scott, the Bystanders' manager.

It sounds as if it was written and performed almost anonymously; there were no stars in this hard-working band, and it sounds very much as if the old-fashioned beat of the 50s is combined with the "butterfly child" 60s vibe of a man in love with a girl who is life and death to him, who "makes his life a dream" but doesn't seem to know what effect she has on him. It is a wistful song with a sense that beauty like this is ephemeral and a hesitancy to do anything lest she fly away, forever. The music circles around this dilemma elegantly, the music itself slowly settling and then soaring, aching to break free but not really able to; not yet, anyway. The awfulness of how he is "not really living" without her is balanced by his adoration of her, her opening his eyes being her real gift, again one she may not know she is giving.

If the previous song had the feeling of "Gee, this what falling in love is like - gosh, I'd better get used to it" then this is much closer to the near narcotic state it can have, wiping the mind clean of anything but the Other, making the rest of the world seem irrelevant and the lover can find nothing and be nothing without the beloved. Again, this might seem extreme, but the songwriters - even if published this under psedonyms - are right to emphasize the Romantic here, which The Summer of Love tried to make universal. This presents a truer sense of what nobility and vulnerability there is in love (especially, as here, one-sided & maybe even unrequited love); the next song will go far beyond this, and far beyond anything I've written about so far in terms of love's intensity and all the desperation those arrows can cause.

This song, by the way, like Leapy Lee's was The Casuals' only real hit; not to get too meta here, but it is as if Love itself was propelling these artists into the charts, to right a certain wrong. With this next song, it certainly sounds as if Love has got the reins.



*The name I use to describe anyone who has anything to do with New Pop before it actually starts; in this case, Wilde is Kim Wilde's father, so he is a literal forbear!

This Won't Hurt A Bit: Leapy Lee: "Little Arrows"

The experience of falling in love is, to say the least, an interesting one. It is swoony, it is perpetual, it puzzlingly either seems to grow over months or happens seemingly within seconds (or even weirder, both of these occur). To those of you who have yet to fall in love, all I can say is you certainly will know when it happens - it is an overwhelming experience and an understandably confusing one, because the world is being newly refreshed all around you, and this renewal is constant and suddenly the Other is magically everywhere.

After so many songs of death, sacrifice and sorrow this song is a very welcome reminder that, even in the chaos of '68, Cupid is still hard at work, his arrows scattering everywhere. Here these arrows are as common as the twirling maple seeds in Toronto, getting into hair and clothes; not even armour can stop them, so powerful are they.

While Leapy Lee is not exactly the first name you think of when the word "punctum" comes to mind, the piercing quality of those arrows cannot be denied. Falling in love makes you wake up; it makes you vulnerable; and to a certain extent, you have to be ready for love in order to fall into it*. Those arrows may be little but their accumulative power is awesome, and Leapy Lee (dressed much like Cat Stevens was) makes it sound like fun, kind of like winning the lottery. I can only attribute this to the songwriters, Albert Hammond and Mike Hazelwood, who were country/pop writers and not opera composers after all - the lightheartedness here is a joy, a little inane to those who always take love Very Seriously, but a joy nonetheless. Because of its mythological basis this isn't bubblegum (bubblegum never presumes you know anything, or that you're over ten) but a kind of giddy, winking (though not knowing) embrace of Cupid, whose own character was naturally mischievous.

In a way this song is only for those who haven't fallen in love yet; it is fair warning for what is to come, though kind of a camouflage as well for what really happens, which feels less like being covered in arrows and more like a drug-like experience that doesn't let up...

Next up: more romance, courtesy of a Friendly Forbear.


*Erich Fromm says you have to know and respect yourself before you can love anyone else; not terribly romantic, but absolutely true.

Family First and Last: O.C. Smith: "Son of Hickory Holler's Tramp"

In music, as in life, there is no greater figure of importance than the mother; and especially in music from the South, whether it be folk, country or soul. This is not apologetic or high falutin music; it says what it says as if to say that this is reality, as opposed to the often idealistic/nihilistic edges of rock. Mother is the bedrock of everything; there can be no criticism, because criticizing her is tantamount to criticizing everything else that surrounds you, and ultimately, yourself.

So when O.C. Smith tells the story of how his mother got to be a woman of the night, however exaggerated the tale (how could there be fourteen children who didn't understand adults' gossip?), it is at heart more a song about the pride of the family - the mother and the children - than any factual details. It's a pride that is defiant; the father is feckless, a drunk, who leaves them nothing (and unlike a future song, the children here don't ask about him) and having so many children to look after, she hangs up her "scarlet lamp" and brings them all up, on "chicken dumplings" and "goodnight kisses." Trying to figure out the logistics of how all this works is not the point; the mother loves her children and vice versa, and she dies (no indication how or why; since there's none I'm guessing old age/illness) and is remembered fondly by all of them. (Since they have a farm I guess some of the kids farm, but again that's not mentioned.) The song is about a boy who grows up and returns to his childhood home, defiant in his own way, but not looking to provoke a fight. He is proud - no one helped the family when he was growing up, and so I imagine it became like a military unit, self-sufficient and wary of outsiders. But again, there is no fuss; justified self-satisfaction is due, just as the roses on the mother's grave are due.

That this song was written by Dallas Frazier (who also wrote "Alley-Oop" and "Elvira"), a country songwriter, and done in a soul style seals the link between the two musics - blurs them really, as this song was also a hit for Kenny Rogers. There is, unlike "Honey," no pathos here, no clammy uneasiness; there is some grief that what happened had to happen, but it is not dwelled upon. That this song is at rock bottom about doing what you have to do in order to survive, a mother's sacrifice - well, no one is unfamiliar with that, no matter where you live, in the country or the city.

This song was a hit during a time when the charts could - and did - have just about anything and everything in them, from avant-MOR to easy listening to soul to rock to bubblegum; 1968 in singles was a swirling and sometimes (as we've seen) morbid look at life, life often seen in extremes, as if regular life was somehow not big enough to contain the feelings and tendencies of the time. Apart from all the strangeness, a song like this is like walking barefoot on grass; a reaffirmation of the fundamentals of life, even if that life is lived as the narrator's mother had to live hers. It also feeds into the 'back to basics' movement that had its rock counterpart in The Band, whose first album* caused a whole wave of prominent musicians to take a step back from psychedelic heaviness and get into something more subtle, acoustic and, well, soulful**.

Next up: a song about Cupid, because there have always been songs about him, thank goodness.



*The Band had no doubt played in many of the places O.C. Smith had played and knew both country and r&b intimately.

**There is a whole other wave of musicians in the UK who are coming up via the blues, but I will get to them in time.