Posted on August 3rd, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs, 70s Survival.
I haven't been updating this often enough, so I'm going to try shorter, more frequent entries.
Charlie Rich, Behind Closed Doors
Namechecked by Rob in High Fidelity, though he implies it's about not talking about what goes on behind closed doors, while in fact the song is all about what happens behind closed doors: "She lets her hair hang down, and she makes me glad I'm a man," he allows, telling about as much about what goes on behind closed doors as a country song in 1973 can; he then inexplicably adds "No one knows what goes on behind closed doors." Dude, you just told us! And he praises her for her non-demonstrativeness in public, too, so we can infer that when she lets her hair down she sure makes up for it. Does your prim and proper lady know you're singing about her making you glad you're a man, Charlie? Anyway, nice tune.
New Seekers, I'd Like To Teach the World To Sing
Good melody, sweet harmonies, but impossible to separate in my head from the commercial that spawned it; I hear "it's the real thing, Coke is" whether I want to or not. So off the song goes after one play. Allmusic's writers can't agree whether the New Seekers recorded the original commercial or whether it was the Hillside Singers; the entry for the Hillside Singers makes a more convincing case, though.
Chairmen of the Board, Give Me Just a Little More Time
Clearly imitative of the Motown songwriting style. The lead singer sounds like his throat is being squeezed.
Joe Cocker, The Letter
To begin with, I can't fucking stand Joe Cocker and his vocal histrionics, so this never stood a chance with me. But I also love "The Letter", and Cocker messes with its perfect arrangement as well, so this rose straight to the top of my list of songs Joe Cocker pissed on the worst, to be displaced just a couple nights ago by hearing him vomit up "I Think It's Going To Rain Today", which was a good signal for us to leave the bar.
Vicki Sue Robinson, Turn the Beat Around
One of the many disco songs about disco music. The melody's more memorable than most; it's stuck in my head all these years. I never would have thought it was a candidate for a hit cover, though. Maybe Gloria Estefan liked the latin percussion in the original? Estefan's cover is so faithful I can't hear why it was worth doing.
Mac Davis, One Hell of a Woman
Opens exactly like "Satisfaction" -- and probably a thousand other songs. It's got a couple nice changes in the chorus. "She's one hell of a woman, young and strong and tan...." Well, it was the 1970s. Davis is probably best known for "Baby Don't Get Hooked on Me" and acting in North Dallas Forty, but he was a good songwriter for other people; he wrote "A Little Less Conversation" and "In the Ghetto" -- did you know the Cranberries covered "In the Ghetto"? I think I'd rather hear Sammy Davis Jr's version -- and "Something's Burnin'" and "I Believe in Music" and "Watching Scott Grow". He definitely had the cheesy touch. (Mind you, I am not putting down "A Little Less Conversation".)
Posted on July 17th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs, 70s Survival.
Jud Strunk, Daisy a Day
I don't remember hearing this before. Strunk was a Laugh-In regular, and died in a plane crash in 1977. "Daisy a Day" is one of those toothless, cheerful novelty songs that had their last hurrah in the mid-70s. I let it come up a second time, out of duty.
Paul McCartney & Wings, Helen Wheels
The most forgettable song on Band on the Run.
Charley Pride, Kiss an Angel Goodbye
Nice sentiment, dull song. "And the answer is in this song that I always sing" is the sound of a songwriter yawning (Ben Peters -- best known for writing "Before the Next Teardrop Falls" -- who wrote twelve number one country hits and won a Grammy for this one).
Kenny Rogers, The Gambler
It would be a lot more helpful if you would tell me when I ought to hold 'em and when I ought to fold 'em, you addlepated old-timer.
Apollo 100, Joy
I had forgotten this thing existed. "A Fifth of Beethoven" I can enjoy for its exuberant corniness and the chutzpah of inserting an original disco bridge into the tune; "Joy" is just straightforwardly, cheesily awful. I believe it's a genuine one-hit wonder (as opposed to a VH-1 one-hit wonder).
Mary MacGregor, Torn Between Two Lovers
A polyamorous lament. Jason Hare and his readers were astonished at the gall of the narrator in asking her lover to stay even though she acknowledged she was "breaking all the rules". I think it's a welcome twist to the usual predictable pop-song narrative, but I still don't want to hear the song anymore. Cowritten by Peter Yarrow, though not presumably about Paul and Mary.
Diana Ross, Ain't No Mountain High Enough
Ashford and Simpson were great melodicists but uninspired lyricists, and the melodramatic spoken vocals here don't do the lyrics any favors. Historically overshadowed by the Gaye/Terrell original, though Ross's was a much bigger hit.
Elvis Presley, The Wonder of You
I have a weakness for songs in 6/8, and the increasingly emphatic choral vocals during the guitar break and at the climax are good for a couple laughs. According to Wikipedia, "The song has been adopted by English Football team Port Vale F.C. who run out to the song at the start of their home matches. The song is also sung by the club's fans throughout their matches." O-kay.
Donna Fargo, Funny Face
Near the top of the list of forbidden rhymes: "leave me" and "believe me". Fargo's near-lisping of her s's is an annoying affectation. The verses are so perfunctory that they're clearly only there as a skeleton upon which to hang the long, luxurious chorus.. You don't hear much about Donna Fargo today -- she was born Yvonne Vaughn, should've kept the name -- but she was a major country star in the 70s, even had her own TV show for a season, and wrote most of her own hits, including this one.
Alice Cooper, You and Me
Cooper's descent into schmaltz was surprisingly successful for a while; this is one of at least three adult contemporary hits he had after making his mark as a schlock-rocker. None of them are awful musically, though one expects this kind of thing more from Kenny Nolan. Cooper's a pretty bad sensitive singer, though, and he trips over his cliches into bathos with every other line: "I wanna take you to heaven; that would make my day complete" is the silliest by a hair. The vocal melodic jump into the chorus is reasonably pretty, and the details of the piano and the lead guitar are nice in several places. The song fades on the verse, which is also nice. The break for the strings, though, is nauseating.
Posted on July 13th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs, 70s Survival.
Frankie Valli, My Eyes Adored You
The most irritating thing for me about 1970s pop is the omnipresent strings. Strings can be great, but they rarely were in the 1970s. Most of it is by-the-numbers coloring, filling up space for the purpose of filling up space. This song is an example; it's a nice melody, worthy of Frankie Valli, and it's a pretty good longing song. But the strings, and the occasional harp swooshes, are completely unnecessary, contributing nothing good that isn't there already. Also, jeez, those cliche key changes at the end, another 1970s overused tool.
B.B. King, The Thrill Is Gone
I don't hate it, but I don't need to hear it again.
Andy Gibb, (Our Love) Don't Throw It All Away
Typical expert Brothers Gibb popcraft, more subtle in its musical layering and backing vocals than a lot of their stuff in the late 1970s. It's just not one of their most arresting songs. The chorus is oddly limp.
Rod Stewart, Do Ya Think I'm Sexy
Making it through this once was deadly rough.
Mark Lindsay, Arizona
Gets ahold of a good vocal hook and works it to death (and does it no great service with the horns in the first place). Not fond of Mark Lindsay's Neil Diamond approach to phrasing, which is self-indulgent and more melodramatic than dramatic. Not that the words are any more charming:
Arizona, take off your rainbow shades
Arizona, have another look at the world, my, my
Arizona, cut off your Indian braids
Arizona, hey won't you go my way?
Mmm, Strip off your pride
You're acting like a teeny-bopper run away child
And scrape off the paint from the face of a little town saint
Arizona, take off your hobo shoes
Arizona, hey won't you go my way?
And after all that berating -- coming after "and all you can do is laugh at her", mind you -- he gives us this:
Follow me up to San Francisco
I will be guide, your way
I'll be the Count of Monte Cristo
You'll be the Countess May
Which has a kind of incoherent chutzpah. At least he's made it clear that condescension will be the cornerstone of the relationship.
Posted on July 12th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
Chris Butler is one of the most variously interesting figures in post-punk rock and roll. Describing him quickly gets out of hand. A non-comprehensive list of stuff he's done:
The song began as a mere five-minute version (included on the CD for the chronologically impaired), with a 12-chorus vamp at the end. As a gag, I started writing extra choruses, and three months later I had enough to fill an entire CD. After recording a backing track with vocals and an acoustic guitar, I passed out 3- to 4-minute chunks to musicians I have produced and/or played with, asking them to flesh-out the arrangement in anyway they saw fit. With 14 contributors in hand (including Freedy Johnston, Kramer, The Gefkens and even my Mom), ace engineer Scott Anthony digitally edited the whole thing together into one long, seamless tune...
I have the album; it's weird and fun. Butler now has bigger plans for the song:
Today, I am pleased to announce THE MAJOR GLITCH PROJECT! Thanks to the internet, it is now possible for ANYONE to create a 3-4 minute chunk that can be edited into the original, the goal being to create an online version that plays/streams for hours and hours.
Many years ago I wrote a whole bunch of fake choruses for "The Devil Glitch", but I don't think I ever archived them. I hope a bunch of folks contribute to this.
Posted on July 10th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
Velma and I are (perhaps a little too) fond of breaking into "Could It Be Magic" when Kenny at the piano bar plays "Wild World". Yesterday my mp3 player, still doing the 1970s shuffle, played those two songs back to back, making me laugh but also pointing out to me that the two songs really aren't that similar. It's just the one repeating passage in "Wild World" that makes me want to go "Baby I'm grieving, now, now, now and hold on fast..."
Posted on July 4th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
We heard two versions of "I Am Woman" in the course of the day -- neither of them the original. The first was deliberate: I got the reissue of Betty Wright's (of "Clean Up Woman" fame) Hard to Stop from the library, and it leads off with a lively and impassioned cover of "I Am Woman". The liner notes, naturally, sneer at the vocal on Helen Reddy's original -- never mind that Reddy wrote the song, which the sneerer doesn't bother to acknowledge, since after all the only thing that redeems the song is Wright's singing. I very much doubt that Wright held Reddy in the contempt that the hipster music hack does.
The second was a disco version in a movie Velma was watching because it had bit parts played by a couple of piano bar acquaintances. It also had a disco version of "Dream Weaver".
Posted on June 23rd, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs, 70s Survival.
The Four Tops, "Still Water (Love)"
Generic soft r&b with a weak hook built on a stock phrase with no twist. I don't believe this would have been a hit if it weren't sung by the Four Tops.
Clarence Carter, "Patches"
I don't think I have anything new to see about this bag of bathos. Except how the (very occasionally observed) demands of scansion turn "his deathbed" into "his dying bed".
John Denver, "I'm Sorry"
Not a bad song, but not really a single -- it was the flip side to "Calypso" -- and not a song that gains much being heard outside the context of other John Denver songs.
Joan Baez, "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down"
Again, better people than me long ago gave this song everything it deserved. I love the original, and the amusement value of Baez's misheard lyrics doesn't do much to compensate for her soulless reading.
Alice Cooper, "How You Gonna See Me Now"
The mature Alice Cooper, in this case ballading like Peter Frampton. It does introduce a key change between the first verse and the chorus, which I guess is kind of interesting. From Cooper's album about his recovery from alcoholism, a subject so personal it required assistance from Bernie Taupin to write most of the songs (including this one).
Lobo, "Don't Expect Me To Be Your Friend"
It's hard to be a mellow musician with something bitter to say. "I love you too much to ever start liking you / So let's just let the story kinda end." Ooooh, snap.
Elvis Presley, "Mama Liked the Roses"
This would fit easily on a song-poem anthology.
Robert John, "Lion Sleeps Tonight"
I can't hear any reason why I'd listen to this instead of the Tokens.
Bob Welch, "Ebony Eyes"
I actually find this song weirdly interesting, but got sick of it because it was inexplicably part of the mix of songs we heard on the overnight crew for two years. Like Steve Miller, Bob Welch sounds awkward to me, his songs sounding amateurish and sometimes plodding yet still somehow commanding attention. The hook of "Ebony Eyes" seems to me to be the brief guitar riff and synth sting that come between the verses. The verses themselves have a lifeless rhythm and stiff melody, and the chorus is just this weird melodic jump up to a repeated exclamation of "Ebony Eyes". It's . . . different.
The Partridge Family, "Doesn't Somebody Want To Be Wanted"
I could believe this was cut from a Badfinger album. It's not awful, not good. Except for the spoken interlude: that's awful.
The Jimmy Castor Bunch, "Troglodyte"
Yes, it's supposed to be stupid. It sure is stupid. Even when it isn't trying to be stupid ("let's go back into time"). The only part of it that interests me is that the music is the same groove all the way through -- which makes it, along with the novelty lyrics and delivery, a proto-King Missile song.
Debby Boone, "You Light Up My Life"
The first song to get cut after more than one play. I wanted to give it a fair chance, but damn it, it came back around again fast. Boone was as good a singer as many empty balladeers who have come since, but her career began and ended here.
Jaggerz, "The Rapper"
Almost has the groove of a Creedence song, but doesn't have the natural feel. I don't hate it, but don't need to hear it again.
Bob Seger, "We've Got Tonight"
Okay, this I hate. Seger is like the anti-Michael McDonald for me. There are a couple songs of his that will make it past one play, but this isn't one.
Olivia Newton-John, "If Not for You"
I have some tolerance for Newton-John, but this is a limp cover of a fine song.
Elton John, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"
I love the Beatles, but I've never loved this song -- especially the thump, thump, thump, way it goes into its mediocre chorus -- and I like Elton John, but this is far from one of his better arrangements or performances.
Barbra Streisand, "My Heart Belongs to Me"
Yurgh.
Diana Ross, "The Boss"
I feel like defending disco this week, but this isn't where I'm going to begin.
Kenny Nolan, "Love's Grown Deep"
It's hard not to want to punch the singer right at the beginning after he says "I love you. So much" before launching into the first verse. Nothing in the lyrics or arrangement or vocal redeems it at all, nor does the chorus rhyme of "Love's grown deep, deep into the heart of me / you've become a part of me", nor the ah-ah-ah! coda. It does have one of those dramatic bum, bum, bum-bum-bum drum fills leading into the chorus that always crack me up in mellow songs, like the drummer's been barely holding back his passion and can now let it out. I need to collect those fills. Are there names for different drum fills?
And, finally,
The Righteous Brothers, "Rock and Roll Heaven"
I don't remember this song, and I'm glad. This is another song that would find a friendly home on a song-poem compilation, for its shameless capitalizing on the sentiment people hold for dead musicians, and the ignorance and fatuousness with which it does so. The lyrics are offhand, like they were scribbled in half an hour after the songwriter -- the wretched Alan O'Day, in combination with someone named Johnny Stevenson -- came up with the idea, and they show no evidence of more than passing familiarity with the musicians being "honored", let alone any real feeling:
Jimi gave us rainbows
And Janis took a piece of our hearts
And Otis brought us all to the dock of a bay
Sing a song to light my fire
Remember Jim that way
They also apparently believe that Bobby Darin "brought us" Mack the Knife. But most hilarious by a fair bit is this:
Remember bad bad Leroy Brown
Hey Jimmy touched us with that song
Yeah, and we were all deeply moved by "You Don't Mess Around With Jim".
Posted on June 15th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs, 70s Survival.
The first batch of songs to fall:
1. "Star Wars/Cantina Band" by Meco
I'd rather listen to this than the John Williams theme, but I'd rather not listen to either one.
2. "You Take My Breath Away" by Rex Smith
A Heartthrob Hit. No reason to listen to this generic piece of wimpery again.
3. "I Found That Girl" by the Jackson 5
I think it's a measure of the Jackson 5's huge popularity that this b-side got radio play, because there's nothing distinctive about it (and I love their best songs).
4. "Monster Mash" by Bobby "Boris" Pickett
Even by the degraded standards of popular novelty songs, this song is too awful to waste words on.
5. "He Don't Love You (Like I Love You)" by Tony Orlando & Dawn
Fails even to rise to the catchy level of their best schlock.
6. "Dark Lady" by Cher
I'm surprised this doesn't get more consideration in lists of the worst pop songs of all time. It has ludicrous fake gypsy music, but is about a fortune teller in New Orleans. It has a cliched key change. It has an incredibly dumb melodramatic story, delivered with a poor simulacrum of earnestness by Cher. It has a revenge gundown. It has astonishingly bad lyrics. Here is a sampling, all grammar, bathos, triteness, and pointless wordspinning per the original:
On the backseat were scratches from/
The marks of men her fortune she had won[...]
I followed her to some darkened room/
She took my money, she said "I'll be with you soon"[...]
Dark Lady played back magic till the clock struck on the twelve/
She told me more about me than I knew myself[...]
Then she turned up a two-eyed jack/
My eyes saw red but the card still stayed black[...]
Then I remembered her strange perfume/
And how I smelled it was in my own room![...]
The next thing I knew they were dead on the floor/
Dark Lady would never turn a card up anymore
That's some of the worst writing in the history of pop music. It's not just bad, it's semi-literate. There is some amusement value to the song -- the way Cher sings "strange" and "perfume" and "caught her", for instance -- but not enough to make me want to sit through it again.
Posted on June 15th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
"Troglodyte" sounds like early King Missile after a blow to the head.
Posted on June 15th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
I think of "Rock On", "Chuck E.'s in Love", and "Is She Really Going Out with Him?" as a set: spare, slow, odd but groovy rhythms, underplaying their effects, and simple but expressive vocals; they all seem to me like longshots as hit singles, but they all were.
Posted on June 14th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs, 70s Survival.
A friend has given me discs including the Billboard Top 100 for every year since they began keeping the annual chart (it was top 30 for the first few years), from 1946 through 2004. Needless to say, this is a glorious present. Needless to say, I am obsessing over it. And I am embarking upon another silly Project:
I have loaded my mp3 with every song on the 1970s disc* (a bit over a thousand, since in some cases they included both sides of a single). I have set it on shuffle -- it's always on shuffle, actually -- and I'm playing Survival: as I get sick of songs, they come off the player. Every song must be listened to all the way through at least once. If it survives, the next time it comes around it must be listened to all the way through again. If that makes me wince, I know it's time to delete the song. I'm genuinely curious what ends up surviving to my final hundred, fifty, ten.
So far, through twelve songs, I'm finding that this has me listening closely to songs I've never paid much attention to, from ones I've always enjoyed ("For the Love of Money", "Cold as Ice") to ones I've always hated ("Tonight's the Night", "Spill the Wine"). In fact, I've found a good deal to admire in the ones I hated -- in the case of the two I just named, I think the hatred is so visceral that I can't articulate it, and is probably fundamentally not about music. I can see myself changing my mind about a lot of songs this way. And that's good -- I'd always rather be open minded and able to appreciate whatever is there to appreciate -- but it may make this project end up taking a lot longer than I had planned. At any rate, I'm on the thirteenth song now ("Our Love" by Natalie Cole) and I haven't ejected a song yet.
[addendum: song 14 -- "Star Wars Theme / Cantina Band" by Meco -- is the first one-and-done. Now that's a stinky cheese.]
*n.b.: I love 1970s pop and rock music. If you think the 1970s suck, I don't care. Especially if you think the 1960s were far, far superior.
Posted on May 24th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs, Lists.
Velma told me today that my name had come up at my old online home, The Well, when discussing XTC -- it was opined that Scraps would doubtless have a list of top 50 XTC songs. And so, of course, I do.
Top Fifty XTC songs:
The last few could easily be replaced by any of nine others.
Posted on May 18th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
A nice combination for a mix tape: Kirsty MacColl's "Us Amazonians" and the Magnetic Fields' "Queen of the Savages".
Posted on April 29th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
Song Project #16
"Hunker down, y'all! Wooooooo-hah!" "Rags and Bones" is my favorite punk song. Right from the start, the thick low guitar riff grabs the ears and doesn't let go; when you have a riff this strong, you might as well lead off with it and run with it. We hear it twice, then everyone else joins: a drum fill, a squalling guitar, and a grinning, warning yell; by the double-cymbal crash four bars into the song, it's clear that the band knows full well what a massive song they've got.
"Christ was married on the cross; my father was married to my mother," allows the singer. "And I am married to a cigarette butt, lying in the gutter." The second time he sings "cigarette butt" the drummer emphasizes it with hits on two off beats -- this is the message, pay attention. The guitarist jumps up to play a quick three note riff (I think) repeatedly over the four-four beat -- Donald, what's the word for that? -- for two bars, while the drummer continues to stress the off beat, then back to the main riff for two more bars, and the drummer -- one ha two ha three ha -- and the singer ("Oh, that's too bad!) propel us into the chorus, with the two guitars noisily intertwining while the drummer plays a stuttering beat: then back into that massive main riff for four bars, while the drummer plays a different fill each bar. Those four bars will be back twice more.
Back into the verse: "White man, you! you! you! you! you just startin' to get -- the blues!" The guitar jumps up for the secondary verse riff again, then briefly back to the main riff, then slamming back into the chorus with a snarled "Sing it!" I love the way the singer draws out "b-o-o-o-o-ones" with the tiny stops between each "oh". Then the four bars of the main riff with the drum fills again, and the climax of the song, which is actually the coda introduced halfway through: a (mostly) descending, angry guitar riff going one, two, three, four, five, one two three four five!, one two three four five six seven eight nine ten ten ten ten, BANG.
Now the first bridge (yes, there are two). The guitars stutter with the drums, vaguely like a Led Zeppelin song, and space in the song has opened up, pulling back a bit from the intensity that has carried the song through its first minute and a half. The intensity is slowly built back up through a developing call and response, changing every four bars till by the end of the bridge it's shouting in agony. Then those wonderful four bars of the main riff with the drum fills again, and then the third verse, the frustrated nihilism at the heart of the song: "If I could choose to believe or not to believe, you know I would choose not to. But I... can't... choose... not to!" This straining at despair is a microcosm of the song. It's angry, destructive, bleak; but not only is it inspired -- great riffs -- but it's inventive, with an energy put into the assembly of the song that belies its nihilism. The lyrics want not to believe, but the music can't choose not to.
Another chorus, this time with a couple of hup! hup! hup!s and a moaning ohhhhhhhh! from the backing vocalist, then the second bridge cuts in abruptly, the strangest part of the song. The lead vocalist is almost contemplative in his wondering while the backing vocalists sound quizzical (with one of them dit-dit-ditting), and while it's just the drummer and the vocalists it sounds like a lost bridge to XTC's "Melt the Guns". But when the lead singer repeats "Who would've thought?" that killer riff kicks in again (just the low guitar for the first four bars, then it jumps up and is joined by the other guitar), and then everyone gets together for a huge monolithic repetition of the riff, blasting into the climactic coda which (both times it appears) somehow manages to trump everything else in the song.
NoMeansNo have recorded a lot of great songs in their quarter-century career, but this is their towering achievement fusing their punk sensibility and their hard-rock instincts with a tireless inventiveness that sounds like it could go on all day. "Rags and Bones" is five minutes long, but it doesn't feel long, even for a punk song; nothing in it is wasted, nothing stays in one place too long, no part of it flags. It's as awesome to me now as it was when I first heard it nearly twenty years ago. I think it's one of the twenty -- ten -- best rock songs ever made.
Posted on April 10th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
I was tapping along with Steely Dan's "The Fez" on the subway this morning -- I am a compulsive beat-tapper -- and I realized the drums felt like a funk rhythm. I'm not sure I'd call the whole song funk, but I'm sure you could make a funk song out of it without changing too much.
What defines funk, anyway?
Posted on April 3rd, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
I just realized yesterday (with the benefit of headphones) that Sugar's "A Good Idea" sounds so much like a Pixies song in so many particulars that I'll bet it's deliberate. It's not as obviously Pixiesish as Modest Mouse's "Bury Me With It", but it's close enough that I can't believe I never noticed it before.
Posted on March 20th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
Song Project #15
I probably use the word "underrated" too much, and I'm likely to continue doing so throughout the Song Project. Even so, I try not to use it for musicians who are great but whose natural audience is small, through abstruseness or being ahead of their time or whatever, reserving the word for musicians whose lack of recognition baffles me, because they seem to be exactly the sort who ought to be popular.
Kirsty MacColl –- Ewan MacColl's daughter -- achieved a fair measure of success in her career, but odds are you don't know her work, especially if you're American. Yet she was a terrific pop singer with a distinctive voice, and a clever songwriter with a melodic gift. Things just never aligned for her quite right, I guess, and now she's dead, killed by a speedboat in the Gulf of Mexico (owned by one of the wealthiest men in Mexico, and driven in an area off-limits to speedboats; no one was ever charged). She'd been in the middle of a creative resurgence: her last album, 2001's Latin-saturated Tropical Brainstorm, is one of her two great albums, along with 1989's Kite.
As a songwriter, you probably know her best for the Tracy Ullman hit "They Don't Know" (though if you're a Bette Midler fan, you might know "In These Shoes?" better). As a singer, you'd most easily recognize her voice from her duet with the Pogues on that bar jukebox Christmas classic, "Fairy Tale of New York". Once you know her voice, you can pick her out easily as a backing vocalist, and she did a lot of singing on other people's stuff.
Though her career never took off big-time, she did have minor hits in the U.K., and in 1995 Virgin issued a retrospective called Galore (since superseded by the three-disc set From Croydon to Cuba). Galore included two original songs, and one of them (frustratingly for fans who already had virtually everything else) was one of the best songs she ever wrote.
This is "Caroline". (This is a poorer quality mp3 than I would like, but it's all I have available.)
MacColl has said that this song is Jolene's reply (if you don't know the Dolly Parton song, it's sung from a heartbroken and resigned woman to the woman who's taking her lover). I can't think of another song with the approach of "Caroline" –- it's saturated in guilt and shame, but the narrator is as resigned as the singer of "Jolene" is; the narrator knows she's wrong, and knows she's not going to give him back (if she even could). It puts the listener in an odd position: it's hard to sympathize, hard not to empathize with Caroline done wrong; but how many of us haven't been in the narrator's position, or somewhere near? And the anguish is sincere, the conflict summed up in one fine line: "God help this selfish heart of mine."
Melodically this is one of MacColl's most inspired songs, infectious and poppy. It sure sounds like a hit to me, but the landscape of 1995 American popular music was about the least fertile ground possible for it. It's expertly crafted, too. It has one of those hard-working choruses that change the lyrics each time over four choruses. The brief intro prefigures the chorus; then the verse breaks into two parts, each of them rising to a small hook ("if I'd seen you" "news like that"), and the chorus sings a different melodic progression for each of the first three lines –- the second one raising the tension, the third dropping down -– before the two-line up-down hook, with two gorgeous harmony lines sung (I'm pretty sure) by herself. The bridge keeps the momentum, and adds the high harmony on the last line as it bursts back into the chorus. Then a brief guitar break with wordless vocals. Then an abbreviated verse ("I'm so ashamed of myself but I still want you / What a terrible thing for a friend to do") that's just the last melodic part of the first verse, and then the chorus again, then the abbreviated verse again! –- the whole verse is only there the first time -– and out on the chorus, with one extra repetition of the hook (with a little vocal wiggle thrown in), and cold stop.
To me, this is a perfect pop song, married to a lyric expressing something universal yet not said by anyone else. She did songs that were musically more adventurous, and a lot of them are great -- she'll be back multiple times before I'm through with this project -- but "Caroline" is (most days) my favorite.
Posted on March 14th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
Song Project #14
Young readers may be only vaguely aware that there was a time when MTV not only played music videos, they played them all the time; what's more, they often played music that wasn't on the radio. They don't get special credit for this; not every popular musician was making videos yet, and MTV needed to fill their time; the obscure music MTV played was almost entirely major-label fare that had failed to get on the radio. Even so, MTV generated some hits that would never have succeeded without it -- "She Blinded Me With Science" comes to mind -- and they probably loosened up pop radio programming for a few years.
"Lunatic Fringe" was not a hit in the U.S., either before MTV or after (though it has achieved some measure of ear familiarity through those post-MTV song rescuers, movies and television, apparently having been featured in Vision Quest and Miami Vice [neither of which I've seen]). When I first saw "Lunatic Fringe" on MTV, I had only the fuzziest notion who Red Rider were (I'd stocked their records at the store I worked in), and didn't know it was an old song (from 1981, at least a couple years before I saw the video). I knew they were fronted by Tom Cochrane a decade before his solo breakthrough ("Life Is a Highway", 1992), but I didn't know until I looked it up yesterday that they were Canadian, and apparently very popular there (they even did a late album of their hits recorded with a symphony orchestra). (I'm trying to set a record for highest proportion of parenthetical phrases to sentences in one paragraph).
This is "Lunatic Fringe".
This song is lost in time, ten years too soon. It's pop-hard rock, and radio's always had room for that sound, but it's unrelentingly gloomy and disturbing. In the early nineties, it could have been an American hit. The "whoa-ooah, oh-oh" chorus could come straight from an Alice in Chains song. It doesn't grab and shake you, it insinuates, like a foreboding. It's hardly there at the beginning; it comes on quietly, but when that first guitar ta-chop-chop hits I am paying attention to nothing but that song. I love the noisy guitar slide down to the main riff. The two chords that the first part of the song switches between are good tension generators, and the vocal melody is a perfect complement; I love the way the jump up on "fringe" along with the guitar change sounds like a question. The next two chords in the verse strike a note of firm resolve, punctuated by the drum hit on “coming”. The low response vocal (“wise to you this time”) leads nicely into the chorus.
The rest of the song continues in the same vein. It’s a great marriage of mood and material. Red Rider never succumb to the temptation to oversell it. The synth on the bridge has an unfortunate bright eighties sound, but the notes it plays are appropriate to the mood. The guitar solo is clear and reverby and regrounds the sound; it sticks around and colors the rest of the song just enough. The bridge comes back around as a coda, and they throw in a neat extra couple beats a few bars before the cold stop.
A good, well-executed piece of restrained power that ought to be more remembered.
Posted on March 3rd, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs, Cartoons.
One of the many appealing things about the way Animaniacs was approached was the adherence to the Warner Brothers tradition of cartoon music. The music for Animaniacs was played by a 40-piece orchestra, coloring the cartoons in the old style, with many specific references for those who know the old stuff; it was even recorded in the same old soundstage, with the same piano.
Carl Stalling wrote most of the old Warner Brothers music, but of course a lot of it was borrowed from other sources, famous and otherwise; it's well known among aficionados that one of the best sources was the once obscure but now less so music of Raymond Scott. In particular, "Powerhouse" propelled many frenetic scenes.
But I don't think any of the old cartoons used "Powerhouse" for a whole cartoon. In volume two of the complete Animaniacs, at the very end of episode 50 (the second Christmas episode) there's a piece called "The Toy Terror" that is deliberately animated in the 1930s style, consisting almost entirely of a manic chase & destruction of a toy store by the Warners. The music throughout, with the exception of a few bars at a time of other musical references, is "Powerhouse": the whole song, in order, the first theme followed by the second theme (both of them would be familiar to old cartoon watchers whether they know Scott or not) and back to the first theme. (Here's a brief clip of both themes.) I thought it was terrific, but then I'm delighted just to see (and hear) it done at all.