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Friday, June 26, 2009
DON'T LET IT GET YOU DOWN
Michael Jackson
1973
Farewell My Summer Love
Motown : 1984
[Out of Print]
Not much to say, because there's so much to say. And if you said everything, would it still be enough? Hard to say.
Does anyone remember the first time they heard Michael Jackson? No one does. He was always there for all of us.
Does everyone remember trying to be Michael Jackson? Everyone under fifty does. Leather jackets with superfluous zippers were donned, often indoors. Moonwalks were practiced. High screams were imitated. Few people bothered with the glove. There was such a thing as going too far. But more people tried to be Michael Jackson than tried to be Bruce Springsteen, or Madonna, or Prince, and with less reason to believe that it could ever be possible. No one was like Michael Jackson, and no one could be, because no one had that life: a star as a child, an even bigger star as an adult, talented beyond compare, denied normalcy at every turn, driven mad by fame and ambition and personal demons, gentle but incapable of self-protection, brilliant, beloved, misused, dead.
The video for "Leave Me Alone," a bonus track from the CD version of Bad, will probably be the defining moment in his career, no matter that it will rarely be shown in the next week's countless retrospectives. In it, Jackson piles into a bullet-shaped craft and goes on a funhouse ride through the various rumors about his life: that he proposed marriage to Elizabeth Taylor,that he bought the elephant man's bones, that he slept in a hyperbaric chamber. Anyone with even a little extension into public life knows how painful it can be to be misunderstood or reviled, and how much worse that pain can be when it alternates with periods of unconditional adulation. So somewhere along the way, for reasons of his own -- and they were reasons only of his own, in the loneliest sense -- he started to try to undo it all. He undid part of his race, undid part of his gender, tried to undo the love that the world felt for him. He fell largely silent as a musician. He stopped performing. Almost no one really believed that he'd honor his commitment to play fifty shows in London beginning next month, or that he'd survive the run if he did.
Three pop icons were born in 1958, within months of each other: Prince, Madonna, Michael Jackson. For a few years there, particularly around the time of Purple Rain, Prince and Michael Jackson enjoyed a rivalry. Both were sexually ambiguous, or at least projected that image. Both were racially mixed, or at least projected that image. Both were prodigiously gifted. Both were rich. Both were famous. But even then, if you looked closely, it was clear that the one who was acting crazier was perfectly sane, and the one who was desperately trying to act normal was unravelling inside. In "I Would Die 4 U," Prince sang, "I'm not a woman / I'm not a man / I am something that you'll never understand." Was he talking about Michael Jackson? All three major points were on target. And, now, the fourth: the title.Labels: ben, michael jackson
posted by Ben
LINK |
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
SEASONS
Jeff Beck
Jeff
Epic : 2003
[Buy It]
I'm not much for the guitar gods. I've written before, in this space, about my lukewarm feelings for Jimi Hendrix: appreciation, of course, and occasional awe, but not really a deep emotional connection. That goes double for someone like Eric Clapton, or maybe triple, and I got most of my fill of Joe Satriani in my sophomore year of college. It's not as though I prefer my guitarists mediocre, but I tend to want them to plan in the service of the song, like Richard Thompson or Jimmy Page, and when even those guitarists embark upon noodling expeditions, I'm liable to tune them out.
The one exception to this rule is Jeff Beck. The first time I heard him, I'm pretty sure, was on the Yardbirds' "Over Under Sideways Down," played between two slices of indifferent heavy blues on some classic rock station. It's a showcase for Beck's playing, and particularly the ways in which his playing differed from (and trumped) that of Clapton and even Page, but it's also a relic, hard to separate from its time. Also a relic, though of a different time, is "Blow by Blow," the 1975 album in which he mixed together jazz, funk, rock, and soul, and played the hell out of songs like the Beatles' "She's a Woman" and Stevie Wonder's "Cause We've Ended as Lovers." (The Stevie Wonder connection was significant; Wonder originally wrote "Superstition" for Beck but rushed out his own recording first, and Beck supplied the heartbreaking solo on Wonder's "I Believe (When I Fall In Love With You It Will Be Forever).") As the seventies wound down, though, Beck wound down, too. He recorded infrequently in the eighties, though one of those recordings, a cover of "People Get Ready" with his former bandmate Rod Stewart on vocals, showed up frequently on MTV. Today, it sounds dated thanks to Nile Rodgers' production.
So, that was the work of most of two decades, lots of relics, many inspired. They were entered into the historical record, and Beck decided to keep to himself and worked on his collection of vintage cars. Then, in 1989, he released "Jeff Beck's Guitar Shop." This is the album I associate most with my love for Beck; it came out while I was in college, and we played it constantly for about a month, mostly because it's brilliant, unhinged album of rock instrumentals, sometimes with cut-and-paste vocals (in one, Bozzio reads from a guitar-equipment catalog), sometimes with no vocals at all.
Since the late nineties, Beck has recorded more regularly, showing off both his early-rock roots (he recorded Crazy Legs, a tribute album to Gene Vincent's guitarist Cliff Gallup) and his willingness to experiment further with electronica and world music (especially on his trio of recent records, Who Else!, You Had It Coming, and Jeff). His mercurial playing remains at the center of everything he does; "Seasons," from Jeff, is a phenomenally odd showcase of Beck's brilliance, as he careers from hard-rock riffing to speed jazz. I even like the noodling. Today is Beck's sixty-fifth birthday. Don't sing him "Happy Birthday." Try to play it with some death-defying descending pull-offs.
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, June 04, 2009
PEACE, AT LAST
Chas Jankel
Chas Jankel
Angel Air : 1980
[Buy It]
EVERYBODY WANTS TO FEEL LIKE YOU
John Prine
The Missing Years
Oh Boy : 1991
[Buy It]
GOOD TIMES
Sam Cooke
1964
Available on : The Man and His Music
RCA : 1986
[Buy It]
CRUEL STAGE
Graham Parker
12 Haunted Episodes
Razor & Tie : 1995
[Buy It]
Some weeks are filled with peace: peace in the weather, peace in the work, peace in the world. This wasn't one of them. It started with an illness that passed quickly but was severe enough to unsettle.
That was the first domino, and it fell over.
Then there were professional developments that, while essentially positive, were still destabilizing. I don't want to be vague, but I don't want to revisit them either. Suffice it to say that the same mechanisms that brings my work--the books, the essays, the journalism--to a broader audience brings that broader audience back to me, and while I like to know that readers are out there, sometimes I'm disturbed by how out there they are. Then I spent some time with a friend who is going through a hard time that seem to be half-psychological, half-somatic, if not all psycho-somatic. He will get better, I hope. Then I spent some time with another friend who is going through a hard time that seems to be half her own doing and half her undoing. She will get better, I hope. Then another friend got some disappointing news about a project she has been working on for years, and I spent too many hours on the telephone fighting the mortgage department of my bank over a dishonest escrow policy, and I encountered various forms of humorless mid-level bureaucratic stupefaction. Today I was at the end of the rope, and not the bottom end, either--I had climbed to the top with thoughts of leaping. Energy gone, patience gone with it, I then proceeded to have the worst day of the entire week, a dull afternoon growing frustrated with nonresponse from adults who should know better followed by an exhausting evening in which my younger son was impossible in all the ways that five year-olds are impossible. My older son tried to broker a peace, but I wasn't having any, and my wife, who is now in the grips of the illness that unsettled me at the beginning of the week, alternated between not reacting to any of it and overreacting to all of it. This is trivia, mostly, of course. It's the cost of doing business when the business is life. But this week, too, Dr. George Tiller was gunned down, in church of all places, and though I wrote a piece about that, my writing didn't make me feel any better about the cost of doing business when the business is death.
So I ended up here, now, looking for songs that produce peace. It took a while. The Chambers Brothers' "Love, Peace, and Happiness" makes promises, but it is too effortful to deliver fully on its title. Bob and Marcia's "Peace of Mind," a bit of Motown reggae with a little filip of a string arrangement, is closer, but Bob Andy's vocal is pushed too far forward in the mix to allow any listener to settle back comfortably. Cat Stevens' "Peace Train" and the Eagles' "Peaceful Easy Feeling" begin to create the desired effects, but they are cliches, and cliches turn themselves inside out.
I knew the songs were out there. I have Van Morrison on my iPod, and Caetano Veloso and Miles Davis and Mississippi John Hurt. Some people would try to find peace in the space between the songs, but some people are wrong. Still, the search itself was starting to become disruptive to my day, so I just put the thing on shuffle and gave up. Slowly, they started to come to me. First, was Chas Jankel's "Peace, At Last." Jankel, who played keyboards with Ian Dury and the Blockheads and was responsible for much of the songwriting, particularly the work that leaned out of pub-rock into funk and disco, released his first solo album in 1980; it included a few piano instrumentals, including this one.
After songs by the Beastie Boys, the Fall, and Bongwater--a triple shot of chaos--John Prine showed up. Prine has plenty of peace. I was thinking of him while I was searching actively, particularly "All the Best," from The Missing Years, which is a beautiful, simple song. What I got was even better: "Everybody Wants to Feel Like You," from the same record. While the lyric isn't the most generous he's ever written--it's a song to a woman who won't show him affection in the way he wants--the melody and the vocal are simple and magnetic, like a compass, and Prine's lyrics are always at once childlike and wise: Next time tell me that you want me
Put your little foot inside of my shoe
Next time tell me that you need me
Everybody wants to feel like you
They are also lovingly lickerish, which carries its own kind of peace:I used to love you so hard in the morning
I'd make you stutter and roll your eyes
I put your mind on a brief vacation
To the land of the lost surprise After Prine came the MC5, Iggy Pop, XTC, Grandmaster Flash, the Gun Club: not bad but not peaceful, and not welcome. Skip, skip, skip, skip, skip. Then I got Sam Cooke's "Good Times," which I was about to skip. I didn't. I hung in there. And I was rewarded, I think. "Good Times" is among the most misleading of soul songs. It's a song about pleasure, certainly, because it's a song that's built of pleasure: the swaying melody, Cooke's subtly soaring vocal. But the undercurrent of sadness is at least an undertow, and it threatens to take you back out with it. He's singing about a party, and it's ongoing, but he Cooke doesn't know for how long, or what pain will return when it dissipates. This is especially clear in the final stanza:It might be one o'clock and it might be three
Time don't mean that much to me
I haven't felt this good since I don't know when
And I might not feel this good again This felt hopeless, almost, so I was relieved when after another stretch of chaos (Stooges, Steinski, Sonny Boy Williamson's "Little Village"), the random hand of music landed on Graham Parker's "Cruel Stage." There are songs about coming out of the dark into the light, but few of them take responsibility to this degree, or do it with such a lovely, spiraling guitar part. It's almost a secular gospel:Take me for what I'm worth though it may not amount to much
Take me from this abyss and put me back in touch
Though I have strayed from you though I have fallen from grace
I am back on higher ground up from that lonely place
And I have found the going tough
But I will find the strength enough
And I am undoing this cruel stage
That I've been going through The people who should call won't. The friends who should pass through their difficulties might not. The occlusions may not dissolve, certainly won't dissolve all at once. The frustrations will keep on coming. But so will the songs.Labels: ben, folk, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
NEVER TELL YOUR MOTHER SHE'S OUT OF TUNE
Jack Bruce
Songs For a Tailor
Atco : 1969
[Buy It]
YOU SAY YOU TRUST YOUR MOTHER
Swamp Dogg
1972
Available on : Excellent Sides of Swamp Dogg, Vol. 2
S.D.E.G. : 2001
[Buy It]
MY MOTHER WAS A FRIEND OF THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE
Blurt
1980
Available on : The Best of Blurt Vol. 1: The Fish Needs a Bike
Salamander : 2004
[Buy It]
MAMA TOLD ME NOT TO COME
Randy Newman
12 Songs
Reprise : 1970
[Buy It]
MOTHER
John Lennon
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band
Capitol : 1970
[Buy It]
I DON'T WANNA BE A SOLDIER
John Lennon
Imagine
Capitol : 1971
[Buy It]
WHO PUTS ME IN MY LITTLE BED
Ada Jones
1913
Edison Blue Amberol
YONDER COMES MY MOTHER
Son House
1965
Father of the Delta Blues
Sony : 1992
[Buy It]
In the last week three friends of mine have had what I'll call non-productive moments with their mothers. This isn't the appropriate place for details, so I'll make some up. One friend wanted to go on a camping trip in the wilds of Alaska, and her mother, who once lost a sibling to a vicious Kodiak, overreacted to the plan. "No," she screamed. "You will be torn to pieces by that bear, my darling." Another friend told her mother she was planning on taking crack. "Whatever," her mother said. "Save me some." The woman was then incensed that her mother didn't care more for her. The third friend had given notice at her job, which her mother had never much liked, on account of the fact that her boss was a hardened criminal who bootlegged DVDs and carried a gun in the waistband of his pants. But some important wires crossed in her mother's head, and she became furious with her daughter for once again becoming, at the age of 41, unemployed.
The other day I saw the Albert Brooks movie "Mother," which I have been bothering my wife to rent. She went to every video store within walking distance of our house, and no one has the movie. I despaired for it. Then it turned up on HBO, and we watched about two-thirds of it. I don't usually talk about pop culture other than pop music here, but I urge everyone to see it. It has too much dime-store psychology, and it knows that, but it has a fantastic performance by Debbie Reynolds as the perky, practical, judgmental, loving mother. Brooks is great, because he's always great: when he is forced to eat the permafrost sherbet in his mother's freezer, he screws up his face and says that it "tastes like an orange foot." There are plenty of moments of inspired discomfort -- at one point Brooks taunts his younger brother by pretending that he and his mother are having a sexual relationship -- but the climactic scene, where Brooks, who is playing a successful but blocked sci-fi writer, discovers that his mother also harbored dreams of literary fame, is legitimately moving. Consider this a Moistworks two thumbs up, though both thumbs are mine.
In the last hour I have been working on a technology to beam that movie into my friends' minds. I want them to understand that most of what their mothers do is done from love, and that the poor execution should be forgiven if possible. I would also beam the movie into the mothers' minds and tell them to ease off, that their kids are smart and confident so long as they are permitted to be that way, and that they need not worry so industriously about the worst-case scenarios. Of course everyone already know all of this, but I want to agree. And while I perfected the technology about five minutes ago, now I'm having second thoughts, mainly because the three situations I heard about this week concern mothers and daughters, and the Albert Brooks movie, along with everything I personally know, concerns mothers and sons. I think we can all agree that mother-daughter business is significantly different from mother-son business. It's knottier. It persists. There are mirrors hung next to windows, which can be confusing and exhilarating. I'm not even sure that mother-son solutions can address mother-daughter problems except in the most hapless, generic sense. Oh well.
In the last ten seconds, I put the blueprints for the movie-beaming device into the top drawer of my desk and took out a series of songs about mothers. There's Jack Bruce's "Never Tell Your Mother She's Out of Tune," which is interesting advice if you consider it more broadly - Bruce seems to be saying you should just take the lumps from maternal scrutiny/sanction and move on. Unfortunately, all the reasoned thinking takes place in the title; the song, despite some nice guitar by George Harrison, is a collection of disjointed blues-inflected lyrics. There's a similar problem at the heart of Blurt's spiky, excellent, somewhat nonsensical "My Mother Was a Friend Of the Enemy of the People." For actual answers, it's useful to go elsewhere. Swamp Dogg's "You Say You Trust Your Mother" investigates what can happen when children no longer believe that their mothers are acting in their best interest. As usual with Swamp Dogg, the song is far more complex than it first appears; it's not just about biological mothers, but about nations and patriots, the dangers of unconditional trust and the toxic sadness of suspicion. Randy Newman's "Mama Told Me Not to Come," on the other hand, illustrates what can happen when children fail to heed their mothers' advice - what can happen, it seems, is that those children can grow up fast: The radio is blasting, someone's beating on the door
Our hostess is not lasting, she's out on the floor
I seen so many things here I ain't never seen before
I don't know what it is but I don't wanna see no more
Mama told me not to come
Mama told me not to come
Mama said that ain't no way to have fun So what is the way to have fun? To listen to your mother? To ignore her? To ignore her knowing that what she's saying is half-panic and half-wisdom? In the Albert Brooks movie, he is drawn back to his mother when he starts to believe that he is dysfunctional in life because he has failed to understand what lies at the root of the mother-child dynamic. But he cannot accept anything his mother says at face value: she's always prodding him, always provoking, never saying exactly what she means. If she told him not to go to a party, he'd go, just like the young man in Randy Newman's song - and like that young man, he might spend much of the party thinking of his mother's sound advice, and even missing her a little. One of the most famous mothers in rock and roll belongs to John Lennon, who lost her when he was seventeen; she surfaces explicitly in the Beatles "Julia" and then "Mother," from Lennon's first solo album. She may also be present, though more obliquely, in "I Don't Want to Be a Soldier," the ragged, anguished political broadside that closes side one of "Imagine":Well, I don't wanna be a soldier mama, I don't wanna die
Well, I don't wanna be a sailor mama, I don't wanna fly
Well, I don't wanna be a failure mama, I don't wanna cry
Well, I don't wanna be a soldier mama, I don't wanna die
Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no Is Lennon appealing back to the mother he lost for sanity? For safety? Or is "mama" more generic here? Is it a girlfriend? Is it womanhood in general, understood as protection against the ravages of war and male insecurity? Again, these are all mother-son situations, and not particularly helpful for mother-daughter dust-ups. Again, oh well. I did find one explicit mother-daughter song, from Ada Jones, from 1913, though it's sung from the perspective of a child dreaming of adult romance and complexity and coming back, every time, to the reliability of a mother's affection--and then, as punchline, to the harsher reality of a father's responsibility:I've had the measles and the mumps
The stomach ache and stomach pumps
My ma says she's afraid a cough
Some day will surely take me off
I get five cents each time I take cod liver oil, you see
And when I've got a dollar saved my ma buys more for me
Who puts me in my little bed?
My mama dear
Who hugs me when my prayers are said?
My mama dear
Who buys me every kind of pill
With sugar on to cure my ills?
But who pays all the doctor bills?
My dear old dad In the ninety-six years since the song was first released, it hasn't gotten any less creepy.
Mothers, children, conflicts, bonds: it all comes together and all comes apart in Son House's "Yonder Comes My Mother," which is rich with unanswerable questions of separation, emptiness, fullness, exhilaration, and fear. While most songs about mothers get caught up in domestic particulars or psychodrama, this one sees only the big picture, and this may be because it's mistitled, somewhat: this is Son House's version of the spiritual "When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder," which makes a case for accepting even the flawed among us, and for looking past shortcomings to the common thread that binds together all humans, even those who are already bound together. Wait, maybe it is about mothers and children, after all.Labels: ben, blues, rock and roll, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Friday, May 15, 2009
GET UP I FEEL LIKE BEING A SEX MACHINE
James Brown
Sex Machine
Polydor : 1970
[Buy It]
GET UP, GET INTO IT, AND GET INVOLVED
James Brown
1971
Available on : In the Jungle Groove
Polydor : 1986
[Buy It]
GET ON THE GOOD FOOT
James Brown
Get On the Good Foot
Polygram : 1972
[Buy It]
PEOPLE GET UP AND DRIVE THAT FUNKY SOUL
James Brown
Slaughter's Big Rip-Off
Polygram : 1973
[Buy It]
GET UP OFFA THAT THING
James Brown
Get Up Offa That Thing
Polydor : 1976
[Out of Print]
TAKE ME HIGHER AND GROOVE ME
James Brown
Mutha's Nature
Polydor: 1977
[Out of Print]
GET UP OFFA THAT THING (LIVE)
James Brown
Hot on the One
Polygram : 1980
[Buy It]
LET ME GET UP ON IT
Tom Waits
Bone Machine
Island : 1992
[Buy It]
As I have been touring behind my new book, I have been listening to lots of old funk music: Sly Stone, Curtis Mayfield, Parliament, Mandrill, the Bar-Kays, War, more.
I have two things to say about that paragraph, and I will say them in two separate paragraphs.
First, this: touring behind a book is a strange process. When you read a biography of a rock star, fully half of the pages are devoted to on-stage performances. When you read a biography of a writer, readings are rarely mentioned. Writing is a solitary and isolated process, as is reading, and the public component is either overrated, superfluous, or both. Still, you get to meet people. You press flesh. And there is something genuine about that process, something that appears to be beneath analysis but is in fact above it.
Second, this: I am quickly filling up with funk. I have to listen, because the book is about funk music, about a funk musician. It's like a boxer listening to "Mama Said Knock You Out" before stepping in the ring. Did you know that it's built on a Sly and the Family Stone sample? There I go again.
The other day I tried to counterprogram all this funk with the least funky music I could think of: Lefty Frizzell, Diamanda Galas, Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant, Bread, Yes, Beyonce. It worked for a little while. Then I spoke to a friend of mine who is feeling down. There were many reasons, but they dissolved into one large reason: she was feeling underappreciated. "Down happens," she said. We talked on the telephone for a little while. I delivered heartfelt advice that may not have been helpful; it consisted mostly of aggressive reminders about her abilities and attributes. When I went back to the music, I found that it had changed back to funk music: specifically, to the fundament of up, James Brown.
Brown's dead, but he's very much alive, especially when you're feeling like your life is a little deadened. In 1969, Brown recorded "Lowdown Popcorn," but that was the last bit of lowdown anything he'd be serving up for a while; by the next year, outfitted with the Collins brothers and well on his way into the heavy funk, he had entered a period of intense vertical ambition and relentless optimism. In 1970, he urged others to get up (on account of the fact that he was feeling like a sex machine) and also, after the machine had been operated to everyone's satisfaction, to get up, get into it, and get involved. In 1972, he focused his advice more specifically on the good foot, and while he spent a brief stretch down and out in New York City in 1973, things soon went back up with "People Get Up and Drive That Funky Soul" later that year, not to mention "Get Up Offa That Thing" in 1976 and "Take Me Higher and Groove Me" in 1977 (where he repeatedly sings "take me on up").
The upness of James Brown is of special interest in the late seventies, because it was a period where all signs pointed to downness. He was not the volcanic force he had been in the early part of the decade. Disco had stolen some of his heat and most of his light. I have a friend who saw him at a tiny club that he said "held fewer people than a taxicab," and it wasn't even full. But he kept on, not because there were great rewards in front of him, but because there was so much momentum behind him. In the process, he produced several fine albums: "Jam/1980's," "Nonstop!" and "The Original Disco Man." One of the finest was the 1980 live record "Hot on the One," in which Brown takes a set of songs, mostly old, and submits them to sweaty, tireless investigation. He finds new things in the material because he is reaching up to it, not stooping down. Perhaps not accidentally, the strongest performance is explicitly about upness: "Get Up Offa That Thing," which is even fiercer and sharper than it was in the studio four years earlier.
"Get Up Offa That Thing" has philosophy on its mind, to some degree, but it also has its mind in its pants -- the lyrics seem to be about getting off your derriere and dancing, but they're really about releasing the pressure on the lower level. In this sense, it returns Brown explicitly to the first time he was up, with "Sex Machine" a decade earlier. Getting up offa that thing, at the lowest (and highest) level, is a form of creating, if not exactly procreating. Libido can be desire for sex, sure, but it is also that more general energy available for defining and advancing the self. Jung knew it and James Brown did, too. He sang about it almost ceaselessly and embodied it as he did: it's hard to be down when you're rising up. There is something genuine about this process, too, something that appears to be beneath analysis but is in fact above it. Getting up certain keeps the dogs at bay: disaffection, destrudo, various other downs. This may be why Tom Waits, near the end of the difficult but rewarding Bone Machine, weighs in with a minute-long instrumental that is both worlds away from and pressed right up against James Brown. The Waits song makes a request that may be more like a demand (Get up, stay on the scene, like a bone machine?), and there's an implication that lingers: when the world isn't giving you what you want, you should remember that you can always turn things around by getting up to something.Labels: ben, funk, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN
Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin I
Atlantic : 1969
[Buy It]
I FOLLOW YOU
Amadou et Mariam
Welcome to Mali
Nonesuch : 2008
[Buy It]
TOO MANY BIRDS
Bill Callahan
Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle
Drag City : 2009
[Buy It]
Lately, everyone's talking about Twitter. Or is that twittering about talking? Regardless, the 140-character-limit monologue (mono-blog?) has gotten us all a flutter. It's the future of communication! The future of the written word! The future of the future!
If it's the future, then it has to be distinct from the past, right? By that standard, Twitter earns its stripes. We've probably always had some interest in endlessly self-indulgent pitter-patter, but now we finally have the tools to give constant shout outs to people--of course, they are essentially constant shout outs to ourselves. And who doesn't like a shout out? During my long, often thankless days gazing at the feeble beacon of my laptop screen, I must admit to the simple pleasure of digital attention. Instant messages. Blog comments. Facebook posts. All these notifications have become a meaningfully meaningless part of daily monotony - a sugar rush, sweet and fleeting.
When I first joined Twitter, I had the odd realization that communication had evolved away from the need for an exchange of information. The back and forth of dialogue was, finally, obsolete. Twitter didn't even pretend to be about adding friends, or making connections - instead it encouraged the one-sided wonder of following people. And as I decided who I should follow, I started thinking about what music would follow me. There aren't any songs specifically about Twitter, of course. No band has gone down that questionable path yet - though no doubt we'll eventually hear ditties about twenty-word errors ups and falling in love one status update at a time.
But plenty of songs are still topical. Take the famed Led Zeppelin song "Communication Breakdown," which has a fairly straightforward message:Hey babe, I got something I think you oughta know
Hey babe, I wanna tell you that I love you so. Indeed, that could easily fit into the short sentences of our digital age. But even in its simplicity there's a breakdown going on. Someone isn't getting that message, even though he's sending it loud and clear. This makes sense: we may be tech-savvy, but we will always be life-sloppy. As an advertising copywriter, I can compress complicated client briefs into headlines, long-winded arguments into pithy emails, and life into blog posts. But when it comes to getting emotion across in real-time, I go strangely mute. And though I have at least ten different ways of getting in touch, I always remain just out of reach.
I suppose to combat my inherent aloofness, I could take a page from Amadou and Mariam's book. In "I Follow You," the pretense of casual contact is completely discarded in favor of vocalizing unabashed determination.When you go to school, baby I follow you
When you go to work, baby I follow you
When you go downtown, baby I follow you
I think of you every day, every night
I think of you everytime, everywhere The word "follow" is a bit uneasy; it suggests a shadowy presence lurking a few steps behind. And yet, somehow this song takes that notion, and injects it with such earnest sentimentality, that there isn't anything disturbing in the urgency of the lyrics. The same is true of Twitter, hopefully: "following" and even "stalking" are common Internet verbs, stripped of their threat because they're kept apart from reality.
Which suits me just fine. I would never really want to admit to my surreptitious interest in those I follow online. I mean, if I were to be more vocal in my longings, what of my pride and reputation? Turns out modern gratification still goes hand in hand with good old-fashioned fear of rejection. After all, what happens if no one responds? If you write something on the Internet, and no one acknowledges it, does it even make a sound? It seems safer not to try. In the end, it's almost a relief to sink back into the anonymity of an online world where no one pays enough attention to know how much attention you're paying. In "Too Many Birds," Bill Callahan nails the wistful comfort of this technological wasteland:Too many birds in one tree
With no place to land It's true. We are all too many lonely souls flapping about aimlessly together on one site or another. All just looking for a place to land, a stand to take, or maybe just a place to be noticed and go unnoticed at the same time. I'm not sure if I'll ever really take to Twitter. Its staccato impermanence doesn't do enough for me--even my short attention span longs for something a little longer. Plus, the hope it peddles is mostly false. Twitter might change the way we communicate slightly, but the glorious insecurities of life and love will always be more than 140 characters or less can possibly capture.
Note: This post represents approximately 35 Tweets.Labels: madeleine, rock and roll
posted by mad
LINK |
Thursday, May 07, 2009
PLEASE STEP BACK
Swamp Dogg
2009
Available in : Please Step Back
Melville House : 2009
[Buy It]
I have been out of commission for a little while because I have been in commission elsewhere: on the West Coast, specifically, committing the unholy act of Book Touring. I don't know who invented the Book Tour, but it was probably someone with a sense of humor. Or absolutely no sense of humor. I've never quite understood why you would take a private act like reading and try to make it public in some artificial way. When you read biographies of rock stars, fully half of the narrative is concerned with touring. When you read biographies of authors, no one ever mentions readings in bookstores. Do you know why that is? Because readings in bookstores aren't even generally interesting enough to earn mention in books. With that said, it is also a great privilege and pleasure to tour a book around. I went to Los Angeles, to San Francisco, to Seattle, and to Portland. I met staff at several excellent bookstores, and signed stock, and talked to people who graciously agreed to come out and see me read. I don't have a quarrel with the process in concrete cases, only qualms about it in the abstract.
Oh yeah, the book. It's a new novel of mine called Please Step Back that is about Rock Foxx (born Robert Franklin), a funk-rock star of the late sixties and early seventies. To some degree, he's based on Sly Stone. To some degree, he's highly autobiographical. There are also elements of Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, Sam Cooke, and Ray Charles mixed in to the character. I don't have anything particularly wise to say about it, at least in this space, except that if you like writing or music or writing about music, you might like it. There is one interesting wrinkle: about a year before I finished the book, I befriended the cult funk legend Swamp Dogg. Well, befriended is an odd word. We became email correspondents as a result of a review of one of his records I had written for the New Yorker. He contacted me, I expressed disbelief that it was really him, and we went on from there. When I was wrapping up the book, I wrote him and asked him if he'd be interested in taking one of the fake songs I wrote for my fake funk star and turning into a real song by a real funk star: namely, him. To say that he responded enthusiastically is an understatement. We have released the song online and will continue to do so. In a special Moistworks moment, I am pleased to offer Swamp Dogg's "Please Step Back," which is based on original materials by Rock Foxx and the Foxxes. I will be discussing it in greater detail at next week's book launch event.
Oh yeah, the event. Next Tuesday (May 12) at Galapagos in DUMBO, I will be having a party for the book. Sasha Frere-Jones will be talking to me about funk music and literature. DJ Doc Delay will be DJ'ing. People are hereby officially invited to attend. Details are here. Bring friends. Bring enemies. Make more of both at the event. I will try to tell funny stories about the radio interview I did with Swamp Dogg last week.
Oh yeah, the interview. We were in a studio together in Los Angeles. He was great: very generous, very smart, very funny. He had good stories about his country music career, his daughter's time as a disco diva, and about the legendary cover of the early seventies album "Rat On," which is also at the top of the post, next to the cover of my new book. "People say it's one of the worst album covers of all time," he said, "but I kind of like it." I agree. Plus, I think he did a great job with the song.
Oh yeah, the song. My character, Rock Foxx, attains an incredible level of fame. His celebrity exceeds anything you could ever imagine, even if you are reading this and you are Prince. Then he falls on hard times, at least. He has one song he thinks will redeem him: maybe not morally, maybe not financially, but creatively. All his songs have been about highs and lows, both pharmaceutical and cultural and political, but this one is at once his most personal and most elusive statement. He obsesses about it. It is the key to the kingdom he hasn't yet built. That's the song Swamp Dogg recorded. The final verse, which I find very sad for reasons that I will be happy to explain but which may seem stupid to you, are below:Please step
Please step back
A peach out of reach
Never fails to attract
There goes a bird
Without a word
His song is so abstract
Oh, please step back See you at Galapagos, I hope.Labels: ben, funk, novel
posted by Ben
LINK |
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
HELP ME LIFT YOU UP
Mary Margaret O'Hara
Miss America
Koch : 1988
[Buy It]
THINK ABOUT YOUR TROUBLES
Harry Nilsson
The Point!
RCA : 1971
[Buy It]
HELP ME
Van Morrison
It's Too Late To Stop Now
Warner Bros. : 1974
[Buy It]
HELPING HAND
Fats Domino
1962
Available on: Out of New Orleans
Bear Family : 1993
[Buy It]
HELPING HAND (A THOUSAND MILES AWAY FROM HOME)
Snooks Eaglin
New Orleans Street Singer
Smithsonian Folkways : 1959
[Buy It]
'CAUSE I LOST MY HELPING HAND
Little Miss Cornshucks
1951
Available on: 1947-1951
Classics R&B : 2003
[Buy It]
MISTER, WOULD YOU PLEASE HELP MY PONY?
Ween
Chocolate and Cheese
Elektra : 1994
[Buy It]
The other night I had a dream. It was about the Somali pirates, which means that it probably wasn't about them at all. In the dream I was at home, watching the news. Most of the shots were aerial, footage of the captured boat and the captain with a gun to his head. A few of the shots seemed to be from the vantage of the boat; they showed helicopters with cameras bolted to their doors, zipping by in the afternoon sky. That was how the dream went: shot of boat, shot of sky, shot of boat, shot of sky. It started exciting, because it was a pirate dream -- avast, ye mateys! -- but it got boring fast.
Then after a while I noticed something in the background. It was a friend of mine. She was not on the boat. She was in the water, about fifty yards behind the boat, in a tiny white ring of a life preserver, the kind you see in movies. The air was perfectly clear, and I could see her expression. She looked peaceful. In real life, this friend is going through a series of intense experiences, some personal, some professional, some financial, some emotional. I wouldn't say I'm worried about her, exactly, because she's smart and capable and lands on her feet like a cat, but I have occasional twinges of worry, because I don't like her to be sad. Those occasional twinges displease me because I don't know what they're asking me, or even telling me, to do. Sometimes I give advice. Sometimes I back off and offer a sympathetic ear. Sometimes I tell her that if anyone crosses her during this difficult time I'm going to knock 'em out. But it's not an easy time for her, I don't think, and to be, on top of everything else, stranded in the ocean with only a bright white LifeSaver around her, well, that was just too much. She needed my help. In the dream, I called her and she answered. "Hi," she said.
"Hi?" I said. It seemed insufficiently dramatic. "I'm watching on TV and you're in the ocean behind the pirates. Are you okay?"
"Fine," she said. "The water's nice." She seemed unconcerned, like she was certain someone was on the way to rescue her.
"Okay," I said. I started to hang up, but something stopped me. "Wait a second," I said. "How come you're talking to me on the phone now, but in the picture onscreen, you're not on the phone?"
"Don't know," she said. "Maybe it's file footage." She coughed. "Did I just cough onscreen?"
"You're not even holding the phone," I said. "Anyway, I wanted to see how you are."
"Well, I have to go," she said. "Don't worry about me. I'm fine." At times, she has sounded under the weather when she has said these kinds of things, or under the gun. This time she sounded calm and confident. "Talk to you later." I hung up the phone and watched her on TV, there in the middle of the ocean. Her expression shifted -- to boredom, to anger, a flicker of fear, then to something I didn't recognize.
She had told me not to worry about her, but I did. I worried even after I hung up. I called the real-life friend and told her about the dream friend. At first, she didn't believe me. "Is that dream some kind of code?" she said.
"Dreams are always some kind of code," I said, as condescendingly as possible.
"You know what I mean," she said. "Did you really dream it, or are you just pretending as a way of telling me that you think I'm making a mistake about something?"
"Are you making a mistake about something?" I said, still condescending.
"Well, I have to go," she said. "Don't worry about me. I'm fine." Again, calm and confident. "Talk to you later."
We hung up uneasily. Or rather, I was uneasy. Telling me not to worry once, in a dream, was fine. It might have been some kind of code. But telling me not to worry twice, once in real life, was too much. I could take a hint. I wouldn't worry, which meant I wouldn't help. Instead, I went to listen to music, and specifically to songs about help. I listened to "Help!" and "Help Me, Rhonda" and "With a Little Help From My Friends." As forms of counsel regarding advice and assistance, they seemed pat, like songs you've heard hundreds of times. I dug deeper, through Elton John's "Yell Help" and Hasil Adkins' "Can't Help It Blues," until I reached Mary Margaret O'Hara's "Help Me Lift You Up." Mary Margaret O'Hara is often at the deepest reaches of any question. This song is deceptively simple, which means that it can lose its way among some of the knottier, deceptively complex songs on her "Miss America" album. When you separate it from the rest of the class, though, it excels, not only as a song about friendship and help, but as a song about dreams:I have a dream
It's very clear
You're all around
But never near As life preservers go, it's more substantial than my friend's simple white ring but also darker. The chorus, "Help me lift you up," is many things at once, a statement of mutual need, a paradox, a plea. It's selfless but not entirely so. The argument, at least of that one phrase, is that you'll never get lifted without my lift, but that I can't lift you unless you're not just letting me, but helping me. I need to lift you to feel lifted myself, and I need your help. That complex, co-extensive process can unfold over the course of a lifetime--it can nurture two people in parallel or even in intersection--but it has to begin somewhere: with a phone call, say.
And so I was determined not to call my friend. Why should I? I had offered assistance and my offer had been received but not embraced, not once but twice. That was fine. I could take a pair of hints. Still, I went through the morning in a little bit of a haze. The air wasn't perfectly clear. What was my role as a friend, exactly? Should I challenge her? Should I let time pass? Should I joke? Should I call? It wasn't my problem, really: if the emotional circumstances tanked, if the professional circumstances derailed, it wasn't my tank or my train. Maybe the best thing I could do was to let her think about her own troubles. In Harry Nilsson's "Think About Your Troubles," this leads, via a convoluted marine metaphor, to a renewed perspective.Sit down at the breakfast table
Think about your troubles
Pour yourself a cup of tea
Then think about the bubbles
You can take your teardrops
And drop 'em in a teacup
Take them down to the riverside
And throw them over the side
To be swept up by a current
Then taken to the ocean
To be eaten by some fishes
Who were eaten by some fishes
And swallowed by a whale
Who grew so old
He decomposed
He died and left his body
To the bottom of the ocean But I had my own marine metaphor, and it left me with my friend floating in a life preserver in the middle of a heartless expanse. Maybe it was unfair to leave her with her own troubles. Maybe this was one of those rare cases where rushing in was advisable. Thinking about it too much was proving unhelpful, so I left the house and went for a walk in my neighborhood. People were talking about the Somali pirates, though no one mentioned seeing my friend on the news. A new store was opening in my neighborhood. There were apples on a table. "Want one?" a woman said. "Help yourself."
The next day, I was done with the apples. There was a core in the garbage and another one in the sink. My friend was still helping herself, or at the very least hadn't asked for my help. I was curious about her situation but not curious enough to do anything about it; I was all around but never near. And so the songs kept coming: Liz Phair's "Help Me Mary," the Lyres' "Help Me Ann," Stevie Wonder's "Heaven Help Us All." I settled, this time, on Van Morrison's "Help Me," which is a live cover of a Sonny Boy Williamson song. There's a tension built into the center of the song: Morrison is asking for help, but he sounds so vital that it's hard to imagine that he needs it. And in fact, he's not asking for help so much as offering an entry-level (if you know what I mean) position that he means to fill one way or another:You got to help me
I can't do it all by myself
You got to help me, baby
I can't do it all by myself
You know if you don't help me darling
I'll have to find myself somebody else Other songs are more honest in their abjection, like Fats Domino's "Helping Hand":I'm a thousand miles away from home, sleeping in the rain
A thousand miles away from home, waiting for a train
Nobody seems to want me or give me a helping hand
I nevermore will roam again if I ever get home again That's where my friend was in my dream, a thousand miles away from everything. She bobbed on the surface of the water and while she'd answer the phone if you called, she wouldn't call you. The song, which was adapted from Jimmie Rodgers' "Waiting on a Train," was also recorded by Snooks Eaglin, whose version is sadder than Domino's and, paradoxically, less desperate. Eaglin seems aware enough of his confusion and loneliness that there's a good chance he'll grab onto whoever reaches out to help. Little Miss Cornshucks (the stage name of the R&B singer Mildred Cummings) demonstrates this principle even more sharply with "'Cause I Lost My Helping Hand"; she's so deep in the well that it seems certain someone will pull her out.
But certainty's a funny business. Once, long ago, as a kid, I was walking with a friend -- a different friend -- and came upon a dead dog on the side of the road. There was something shocking about the sight, and it wasn't the fact of it. Dogs die. Sometimes they are violent deaths. Sometimes they are peaceful. What was shocking about this dog was that he was neither. He had an expression that I would only recognize much later in life. He was waiting for help that never came. I thought about the dog's expression while I tried to remember my friend's expression in the dream, the final one that came after boredom and anger and fear. She floated on the water and wanted...what? nothing? a chance to make her own mistakes? time to prove that they were not mistakes? a fair shake in the sea of possibilities without interference from, say, me? I was available for help but also happy not to help. The dog's expression was branded on my brain. My friend was out there in the ocean. I had woken up from my dream but that didn't mean it wasn't also true.Labels: ben, blues, pop
posted by Ben
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Friday, March 27, 2009
COME RAIN OR COME SHINE
Sarah Vaughan
Sarah Vaughan in Hi-Fi
Sony : 1949
[Buy It]
COME RAIN OR COME SHINE
Billie Holiday
1954
Available on : Lady in Autumn: The Best of the Verve Years
Polygram : 1991
[Buy It]
PINKY
Sarah Vaughan
Sarah Vaughan in Hi-Fi
Sony : 1949
[Buy It]
DO U LIE?
Prince
Parade
Warner Bros. : 1986
[Buy It]
This week, Prince released two new albums.
Today is Sarah Vaughan's birthday.
We will bring these two things together soon.
Sarah Vaughan would have been eighty-five today. She's been dead since 1990, taken after a short but painful battle with lung cancer. According to more than a few published accounts, she expired at home, in bed, while watching a television movie starring her daughter.
Of the three women generally considered to be the triple pillar of American jazz singing, Vaughan is usually my least favorite. Billie Holiday comes in first, almost always, and Ella Fitzgerald comes in second. Vaughan is third: not distantly, but definitively. I realize that this is an idiotic exercise, to take three people with vast and important bodies of work and rank them top to bottom like I am filling out a March Madness bracket. I apologize to them, their families, their spirits.
Sarah Vaughan is always praised for her voice, which I suppose makes sense, though it makes less sense to me when I am listening to her. Her incredible control, her vast range, her box (or is it bag?) of improvisational tricks, they're all indisputably impressive, but for some reason they leave me cold, or have generally done so. If I listen to Billie Holiday's version of "Come Rain or Come Shine" and then hers, one moves me and the other doesn't. For a while, I thought it was because Vaughan was following Holiday's more powerful original, but in fact the reverse is true: Vaughan's was recorded a full five years before Holiday went into the studio for Verve in 1955. Maybe the fact that Vaughan's such a virtuoso works against the song, which purports to be about powerful devotion but sounds like a song about romantic helplessness. Why would someone with ultimate power worry about having none? Holiday, on the other hand, is a more limited vocalist who makes the lyric -- and the song -- work the way it should. When she does away with the idea of contentment, it's heartbreaking:You're gonna love me like nobody's loved me
Come rain or come shine
Happy together unhappy together
Won't it be fine? Again, this is just me. I once lived with a woman who put the three women in a different order. For her, Ella Fitzgerald was first, Sarah Vaughan second, and Billie Holiday flat last. "Too mopey," she said with a showily dismissive flip of the hand. It hurt me to see her flip her hand that way, but what could I do? I had no choice but to stand by and watch it happen. To get back at her, I decided to dislike Ella Fitzgerald, and for many years I succeeded: she was too chipper, too cheery, too up. Sarah Vaughan hung in the middle, though. I tried to listen to her, tried often, never had much success. The one exception was instructional: "Pinky," which I loved because it was a wordless vocal, Vaughan's equivalent of "Dark Was the Night." I couldn't identify a lack of conviction in her performance because I wasn't sure what exactly she was trying to communicate.
This woman also hated Prince. Well, I should clarify. She loved Prince in the mid-eighties. Who didn't? Crazy people, maybe, or art directors. She was neither, and when I met her in the late eighties, she was still very much in love with Prince, and we would lay awake at night listening to "Something in the Water Does Not Compute" over and over again. She made me a tape with "Purple Rain" on it, even though I already had "Purple Rain." Who didn't? Crazy people, maybe. She stuck with Prince through "Around the World in a Day," through "Parade," through "Sign O The Times" and "Lovesexy." But then, all at once, she acquired the most dangerous thing a Prince observer can have: perspective. She saw through the ridiculous parts of the "Batman" soundtrack, and most of "Graffiti Bridge," and by then we were heading out the door, perhaps because she had also begun to see through the ridiculous parts of me. Her eyesight improved markedly as we hurtled toward separation. Once, very late in the game, I came home and she was in the bathroom with the door locked. I asked what she was doing. "Thinking how long I can do this," she said. I told her I hoped that was a euphemism for something fun. She didn't even laugh. "If you don't like it," I said, "I'm going to release it to everyone else as a euphemism." This time, there was a laugh, but a tiny one that I knew wouldn't be enough.
This week, Prince released two new records and I thought of this woman, wherever she was (is?). I wondered if she cared about the records, if she planned on paying [insert large amount of money] a year to subscribe to Prince's new Website or in standing in line at Target and buying them for [insert smaller amount of money]. I doubted that she did. I doubt that she does. I have heard the records, repeatedly, and as much as I want to say that I now see through the ridiculous parts of Prince, the fact is that I am as incapable of objective assessment as I was in 1989, when I spent the better part of the summer listening to the "Batman" soundtrack on an auto-reverse cassette player, over and over again. The new albums are not that good, and maybe they're not good at all, but they're Prince, and because of that, I'm somewhat powerless to do anything but love them come rain or come shine.
Does that bring the two things together? Not quite. Time works, when it works correctly, like auto-reverse, always moving forward but reliably returning you to the past. When I heard the new Prince records this week, there was a moment in one song that reminded me of a moment in another song. It's not a direct connection -- not a lyrical or musical one, but an impressionistic one -- and so there's no need to restage it. The song I was reminded of was "Do U Lie?" which was (is?) the second song on the second side of Parade, a moody ballad tucked between the album's two most massive songs, "Mountains" and "Kiss." When the album came out, a billion years ago, I did not know this woman I have been discussing. But when I knew her, the album was not yet old, and we played it the same way we played "Something in the Water Does Not Compute," late at night and often. It was on cassette, and sometimes after "Mountains" I would get up out of bed to fast-forward to "Kiss." She didn't like that, I suppose because she liked "Do U Lie?" After I had been stopped from skipping it a few times, I asked her why she liked it so much. "Sarah Vaughan," she said with a showily dismissive flip of the hand. I understood what she meant, to some degree. She was saying that it was Prince's attempt to mimic Vaughan's vocal mannerisms, especially at the end, when he sounds like he's practicing "Pinky" in the shower. (I release this to everyone for use as a euphemism: practicing "Pinky" in the shower.) But I misunderstood in another regard. I thought she was dismissing Prince for this affectation, or dismissing Sarah Vaughan (who was, after all, second in her bracket). A little while later, a little bit too late, I realized that she was dismissing me.Labels: ben, jazz, vocals
posted by Ben
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Thursday, March 19, 2009
GIVE ME BACK THAT FILET O' FISH
McDonald's Advertisement
2009
COMMERCIAL BREAK
Basehead
The Soul of Rock and Roll
Imago : 1993
[Buy It]
COMMERCIAL
The Tokens
Intercourse
Rev-ola : 1971
[Buy It]
THE COMMERCIAL
Wire
Pink Flag
Pink Flag : 1977
[Buy It]
COCA-COLA COMMERCIAL
The Who
The Who Sell Out
MCA : 1967
[Buy It]
TALKIN' FISH BLUES
Bob Dylan
1961
The other week I was out drinking too much with friends and the question of pop music's use in commercials came up. It came up because one friend is an songwriter and the other one works in advertising, as a copywriter, and eventually the two of them came together on what turned out to be common ground. For a while we talked about the rock songs that have, over the years, been sacrificed on the altar of commerce -- "Like a Rock" has hawked pickups, "Rock and Roll" sold Cadillacs, "Picture Book" moved printers, and most recently "Forever Young" uplifted the Pepsi generation. Some of us had a problem with that, but most of us felt somewhat blase about the prospect. Then we turned to jingles, and the advertising copywriter turned to the songwriter: "You must think there's a big difference between the crappy jingles that advertising companies commission and the songs you write, right?"
He smiled. He shifted in his chair. "Well," he said. "I've written jingles." He proceeded to tell us about a few of them: one was for a national restaurant chain; the other was for something more modest, like dentures or car wax. I don't exactly remember. Like I said, we were drinking. The copywriter was either secretly pleased or secretly appalled. She didn't advertise her feelings. On the way home that night, I fuzzily tried to puzzle through it all, to figure out what lines have been drawn (and then erased) between art and commerce and commercial art. I vaguely remembered that I had read something about a recent album that plays fast and loose with those lines and limits. The next morning, slightly more sober, I sharpened my memory.
The album, as it turns out, is Product Placement, the debut from the Atlanta-based Advertisements. Composed of rock renditions of ten famous jingles, the album is the latest attempt to conflate (or confuse) aesthetics and economics. The four band members, all in their late twenties, use pseudonyms taken from the advertising world -- in addition to guitarist, lead vocalist, and chief spokesman Mr. Whipple, there's keyboard player Mikey, drummer Mac Tonight, and bassist The Michelin Man. Friends since they met in a late-nineties Southern-rock outfit named Red Dash, Whipple and Mikey first conceived of the Advertisements a few years ago, from what I can gather. "We were just sitting around watching TV, and he started to sing the GE song. 'GE, we bring good things to living, we bring good things to life,'" explains Whipple. "On a whim, we went down to his basement and recorded it, and it sounded great. So we called up the other guys, who we knew and had worked with, and that was our band." (I did not acquire these quotes personally. I found them in an article about the band, another form of advertisement.)
What does an ultra-gimmicky advertising-reliant rock band sound like? Well, I'll tell you. Founded on a "brisk organic sound" that recalls the "glory days of the Attractions," the band "crackles" (and "snaps, and pops, presumably") with "infectious energy." Promotional language, sure, but not far from the truth, and the lyrics, grating at first, soon become irrelevant, as they are in "Umbrella," or "Sexyback," or any number of infectious classics. From the sunny cheer of "Coke Is It" to the grungy crunch of "The Wiener Song," the band successfully works with market-tested hooks. And while a few attempts miss wide -- "You Can't Drink It Slow If It's Quik" is refashioned on as a swoony doo-wop ballad -- the LP is, for the most part, unconflicted pop.
The Advertisements' pick of advertisements run the gamut of the American marketplace, from appliances ("GE") to coffee ("Good to the Last Drop [Maxwell House]") to fast food ("Aren't You Hungry for Burger King Now?"). But with so many commercials to choose from, how did they make their final cuts? "We had a terrible time with the final track listing," Whipple says. "For instance, we knew we couldn't do more than one cereal song, and we picked Lucky Charms over Cap'n Crunch because we wanted to do this 'Within You, Without You' bit, Eastern-sounding guitars and a little raga. But we had to shelve some stuff that we loved, like a hellacious instrumental version of 'The Copper-Top Battery' with these crashing keyboards and thundering drums."
Over the years, critics who have charged themselves with protecting music's authenticity side have challenged, sometimes angrily, the appropriation of pop songs for commercial purposes. But this naive inversion -- appropriating commercial songs for pop purposes -- is surprisingly powerful. The Who hinted at this possibility forty years ago with the The Who Sell Out, where they jammed interstitial jingles between real songs. But unlike Ray Charles's "You Got the Right One, Baby" (which was written by Prince, by the way) or Yael Naim's everpresent Apple ads -- the performances on Product Placement are both unsolicited and unpaid, not endorsements of products so much as endorsements of jingles. The Advertisements aren't seeking corporate sponsors, and aren't receiving a corporate dime. "Believe it or not, we recognize these songwriters as artists," explains Whipple. "They're artists working within commercial constraints, but they're still artists. We credit them in the liner notes, people like Tom Dawes, who wrote 'Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz,' and Richard D. Trentlage, who wrote 'The Wiener Song.' These songs are an essential part of Americana, and we want them to get their due. And it's not just old songs. Have you heard that new McDonald's jingle, the one with the singing fish? Amazing."
I have heard that jingle. Have you? If so, you are not likely to forget it. My children have taken it to singing it every morning, and they may even be dreaming about it. I wrote my friend the songwriter. "I only regret that I did not write it," he said. I agree, in a sense: while I don't think it has quality, necessarily, it has qualities, and one of them is that it is memorable to a degree that would shame most pop songs, even those who set out to be purely memorable. Once, years ago, a friend of mine told me that R. Kelly's "Thoia Thoing" was the most annoying, infernally catchy recording she had ever heard. I am not friends with her any longer, but I am sure that wherever she is, she is revising her opinion in favor of the singing fish. The Advertisements take a more philosophical approach. "There's a beauty in the way that music can serve products," Whipple says. "When I was a kid, I loved watching baseball, and in one game there was a ball that was hit deep and the centerfielder had to climb the outfield wall to have a shot at it. Well, Eastern Airlines had rented the wall space, and in the newspaper the next morning there was a picture of this player catching the ball in the middle of the air, suspended in front of these giant wings. I was uplifted. When you see art and consumerism come together all packaged like that, it sticks with you."
Fine, as far as I'm concerned. And I'm not that concerned: the Advertisements have a long career ahead of them if they want it. There are plenty of brilliant jingles out there, some sung by fish, some by other animals. The elements that produce memorable songs (simple lyrics, sticky melodies) are neutral about context; they don't know whether or not they're working for The Man. But what about that fateful day when the well dries up? With the talent they've shown for fleshing out pieces like "Reach Out and Touch Someone" -- the band yells improvised phone dialogue and text-message speak over Michelin's slap bass -- maybe they'll consider recording original material. But maybe not: that might be selling out.Labels: ben, commercials
posted by Ben
LINK |
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
AIN'T NO LOVE IN THE HEART OF THE CITY
Bobby Blue Bland
Dreamer
BGO : 1974
[Buy It]
I'M THROWING MY ARMS AROUND PARIS
Morrissey
Years of Refusal
Lost Highway : 2009
[Buy It]
HONK IF YOU'RE LONELY
Silver Jews
American Water
Drag City : 1998
[Buy It]
Moving to a new city means being alone. This is an obvious statement, almost too obvious to state. But when you're the one alone in a city, it strikes you as a blinding, almost brilliant epiphany. "Here I am in a place so full of people - yet completely alone!" you think, smug, then scared, in your solitude. Or in this case, my solitude. I moved to New York City this past fall, and was suddenly very much by myself. After ten years in another friend-filled town, it felt strange and new to me.
Thousands of others have had this feeling in thousands of other cities before me. Many of them aren't even new to the city - they're just newly alone. And many of them have penned songs about it. Which makes sense - when artists are faced with change and loneliness, they muse, create, and whine poetic.
When I first arrived, I spent countless hours by myself, Manhattan and music my only friends. Headphones on, I explored, I encountered, observed. And I listened to what the experts (albeit musical ones) had to say. Their advice was varied. Bob Dylan warned that I'd get kicked up and knocked down ("Hard Times in New York Town"). The Replacements explained the woes of drinking solo ("If Only You Were Lonely"). Nick Gilder did some meditative easy rocking ("Hot Child in the City"). Heart did some melodramatic squawking ("Alone"). Soon enough, I noticed a common theme in the soundtrack: lost love. Meaning: your baby left you, which in turn has left you roaming the streets, remembering the happy threesome you took for granted. It was always you, your lover and the city you adored. And now that it's just the two of you- you and the city, that is - you're left to meander and mope endlessly. It's the perfect blend of mental catharsis, physical exercise, and, well, sightseeing. Add music and you've mapped out a potential route to recovery.
In Bobby Blue Bland's "Aint No Love In The Heart Of The City," you can tell he once loved both the city and woman desperately. And now he has, in effect, lost both. Because the blissful romance has disappeared, so has its backdrop. Sure, the city's still there, but without the context of the relationship, it's just a town full of cold shoulders and old memories. Now that she's gone the sun won't shine - at least for him - which sure 'nough is a pity indeed, because he now hates the very place that could actually help him mend his heart. As I know, the city can be a great romantic lead. It's always willing, always up for adventures - and though it pleases a giant population on a daily basis - its sights and sounds often feel like they're made for you alone.
Yes, rather than resent the place, why not embrace it to the point of extremity? Who needs love when you've got architecture? Real love is for sissies, anyway. Leave it to Morrissey to wail this slightly ridiculous sentiment with perfect (or at least perfected) sincerity. "I'm Throwing My Arms Around Paris" has him personifying a place in the absence of human touch. Give him avenues and buildings and give them fast-- only stone and steel accept his love, and you get the feeling he needs to love pretty bad. I guess I kind of do too. Thankfully, an affair with any city has the happy guarantee of reciprocation. There's an easy intimacy in getting to know its quirks, exploring its nooks and crannies. It gives and you receive expertise on where to go and what to do. What a selfless lover.
Perhaps my favorite approach is a bittersweet medium between the two. The Silver Jews' "Honk If You're Lonely" suggests using a place you love to get over the one you loved, and in doing so, find someone new to love. Or maybe just other lonely hearts to fill the void. David Berman's melancholy deadpan takes loneliness in the city and turns it into a hopeful anthem for losers everywhere. As he cruises the strips of his town, he weaves a tale of taking a second chance on life in the city. He might pine a little, but he'll be damned if he lets anyone get the best of his experience. And so he uses his old haunts to kindle new love. This seems the perfect way to deal with loneliness and explore the city from a different (and potentially refreshing) perspective:I know it seems sad to be this damn blue
But there's always a chance that you'll meet someone new Of course, all of this alone-ness is usually only temporary - eventually you meet new people, you meet more new people, and settle comfortably back into the routine of relationships. Which is where (and when) you feel most at home. Because let's face it, we're a needy bunch, us humans: needy for validation, conversation, and the occasional Sunday brunch.
But in those first solitary months, you find yourself alone in the city, and alone in the city you find yourself. After six months, New York and I are getting into the swing of things - slow dancing through evenings that run too late, stumbling groggily into hazy mornings after. I've met a lot of friends. Some keep going through the revolving door. Some stick and stick well. And when they're not around, I'm still content being alone. But I'm lucky - I wasn't heartbroken when I got here. So I guess I get the best of both worlds. And by worlds I mean cities. The sun is shining from the city hall to the county line. Stone and steel accept my love. And around every corner, there is the possibility of meeting someone new.
So by all means, honk if you're lonely.Labels: madeleine, morrissey, soul
posted by mad
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Thursday, March 12, 2009
DREAM BABY
Roy Orbison
1962
Available on : The Soul of Rock and Roll
Sony Legacy : 2008
[Buy It]
I HAD A DREAM
Howlin' Wolf
1967
Available on : Ain't Gonna Be Your Dog
Universal : 1994
[Buy It]
DON'T WAKE ME UP, I AM DREAMING
Arthur C. Clough
1911
Edison Amberol 696
DREAMS, DREAMS
Smokey Robinson and the Miracles
1969
Available on : Whatever Makes You Happy
Rhino : 1993
[Buy It]
BOB DYLAN'S DREAM
Bob Dylan
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
Columbia : 1963
[Buy It]
I DREAMED I SAW SAINT AUGUSTINE
Bob Dylan
John Wesley Harding
Columbia : 1968
[Buy It]
This week I had a conversation about dreams, and then a dream about that conversation about dreams, and then another dream that came true, and then a conversation about the dream that came true.
The conversation about dreams happened one afternoon this week, and it must have stuck in my head, because that night I repeated it, with variation. In the real conversation, I was sitting across a table from someone who was talking about dreams: not specific dreams, but the entire category, what dreams might mean, what they can't mean. That night's dream was about a conversation, too, but in the dream-conversation I was talking about renting a truck. The person in the dream, who wasn't quite the person I had spoken to in real life, explained to me that the truck I was interested in renting had a compartment behind the driver's seat filled with tools that I wouldn't recognize. That's the phrase that stuck: "filled with tools you wouldn't recognize." Even at the time, while I was sleeping, I assumed that this was a dream about my conversation about dreams.
Before I woke up, I had a second dream. I dreamed I was at a conference somewhere rural--there were mountains and a lake--and a friend of mine was at the same conference. This wasn't a fake friend that my dream invented, but a dream version of a real friend. The whole thing was faintly documentary. I was attending this conference alone, and I called my wife and my kids to say hello; in the dream my phone number was the same as it is in real life. (Again, faintly documentary.) My friend was attending with her mother and her sister, and we were all called to a breakfast meeting. Just after the food was served, my friend left the table. Her mother looked upset but said nothing at the time; a few minutes later she asked me if I would go find my friend. I found her sitting in a meeting room by herself. She had written the word "blue" on the dry-erase board in red marker. "Your mom wants you to come to breakfast," I said. She explained that she couldn't because she needed to write a thank-you note to the owner of the shop that had repaired her boot heel for free. "Look," she said, lifting up her foot to show, "all fixed."
I sneered at her. "Who cares?" I said. "It looks worse than ever." It looked fine, actually. I went back to the table and she showed up a few minutes later, and we had breakfast and talked with her mom and her sister about the conference we were attending. It was a nice dream: no monsters, no missiles.
Today on the phone I mentioned that dream to the real-life friend. "What?" she said. "I just took a boot to have the heel fixed this morning."
"Right," I said.
"I'm serious," she said. "What else did you dream?" I told her the few other things I remembered-- that her phone wouldn't work, that she was wearing a brown skirt--and none of that rang a bell. She hung up, relieved, but evidently it was still bothering her, because she sent me an email a little later: "Tell me if you have any more dreams about what happens to me. I don't trust that you're not dreaming things that might be true. Or, maybe even better, don't tell me anything about them at all."
I understood the problem, partly. Everyone likes dreams but everyone has mixed feelings about the process by which they are shared. Dreams, we tend to believe, are ways of dealing with areas of our lives that we can't politely discuss (fear, libido), and so there is always something a little unclean in the retelling. What did the boot heel represent? Was it something more intimate? Even if a boot heel is just a boot heel, why would I feel connected, even for a second, even asleep, to a female friend's footwear? And why did I have to go and be rude? She was just trying to show me the repair.
Dreams may or may not be psychological skeleton keys. The jury has been out on that for centuries, and then especially for the last century. But they are, at many levels, powerful creative acts, and because of that they have featured regularly in human artwork: paintings, novels, movies. In pop songs, dreams tend to have a more specific function: they provide evidence of life's nasty habit of snatching away objects of desire. Roy Orbison's "Dream Baby," among the most famous dream songs in rock and roll, is about an unattainable woman--"how long must I dream?" he asks, as tortured as he is pleased--and in that it harmonizes with other songs like Howlin' Wolf's "I Had a Dream" or Arthur C. Clough's "Don't Wake Me Up, I Am Dreaming," where love and joy and power are attainable in sleep but cruelly withheld by waking life. There is a countermovement, of course, where dreams aren't a sign of what's been taken, but a reminder to firm your resolve and bring about the dreamed-about thing. This principle is encapsulated in Martin Luther King, Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech and much of the positive-themed soul that ran parallel to and followed it. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles' "Dream Dream" makes the argument, as Parliament would make in "Fantasy is Reality":Dreams oh dreams baby
Go up like a puff of smoke
Dreams oh dreams baby
Wake up and your heart is broke
And I've got to do something bad
Because it's getting the best of me
I've got to make these dreams a reality Bob Dylan has dreamed liberally throughout his career, from "Bob Dylan's Dream" (a melancholy lament for lost innocence) to "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" (a rollicking, stoned bit of surrealism) to "Series of Dreams" (an intentionally fragmented lyric that challenges the very idea of interpretation). In the most beautiful of his dream songs, "I Dreamed I Saw Saint Augustine," he goes deep into the past, where he meets with the fifth-century philosopher and witnesses the ways that leaders can be destroyed by the crowds that follow them:I dreamed I saw St. Augustine,
Alive as you or me,
Tearing through these quarters
In the utmost misery,
With a blanket underneath his arm
And a coat of solid gold,
Searching for the very souls
Whom already have been sold. Here, the object of desire, a comfortable relationship between saints and the rest of society, is taken violently, as Augustine is hanged (this did not, of course occur in real life). The dream is fully realized in the technical sense: it ends mid-song, and Dylan's narrator (who is, most likely, Dylan himself) wakes to consider what he has beheld:I dreamed I saw St. Augustine,
Alive with fiery breath,
And I dreamed I was amongst the ones
That put him out to death.
Oh, I awoke in anger,
So alone and terrified,
I put my fingers against the glass
And bowed my head and cried. Augustine himself, of course, had an abiding interest in dreams. He admitted that they could be deceptive, ways of betraying the world as it is presented to us, though he also thought they could be a form of communication with the divine. Beyond the epistemological dimension, there was an ethical one: if your dream self does something morally wrong, Augustine wondered, are you responsible? (In this he was following the inquiry of several other theologians, including John Cassian, who wondered about assigning culpability for impure thoughts experienced while dreaming.) Augustine decided that a dreamer wasn't responsible for the contents of a dream, but wasn't certain why not. This is obviously one of the issues that Dylan is addressing--if he is there while the mob hangs Augustine, is he implicated? Maybe the dream revealed a secret desire to hang. Maybe an ethical man would have objected, even in his own dream. I'm interested in going back to my conversation about dreaming to discuss this at greater length, but it's trapped in the past and unavailable--or rather, I'm trapped in the present and unavailable to it. Maybe I'll have another dream about a conversation about dreaming, and I can sort it all out. Until then, it's left to me to wonder, and to feel bad for the thing that I said about the boot--again, it looked fine, a nice boot in a nice dream.Labels: ben, folk-rock, rockabilly
posted by Ben
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Thursday, March 05, 2009
SNOW
Harry Nilsson
Nilsson Sings Newman
Buddha : 1970
[Buy It]
FOOTPRINTS IN THE SNOW
Roger Miller
1960
Available on: King of the Road
Bear Family : 1994
[Buy It]
FOOTPRINTS IN THE SNOW
Ry Cooder
My Name Is Buddy
Nonesuch : 2007
[Buy It]
LOVER IN THE SNOW
Rivers Cuomo
1997
Available on: Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo
Geffen : 1997
[Buy It]
STEAL SOFTLY THROUGH SNOW
Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band
Trout Mask Replica
Reprise : 1969
[Buy It]
HUMIDITY BUILT THE SNOWMAN
John Prine
Lost Dogs + Mixed Blessings
Oh Boy : 1995
[Buy It]
Last week I went to a land of snow, though not the land of ice and snow. I skied, which hasn't happened in years, and skied fairly well, which hasn't happened in about as many years. My only goal was not to fall. I also met some new people and found them all to be very nice, which surprised me. I had forgotten that about people. I should get out more.
While I was in the snow, one of my friends was also on vacation, though she went to a land where it never snows. She was going on her trip, in part, to forget something unpleasant. I won't say whether it was an unpleasant circumstance within her family, or an unpleasant work experience, or an unpleasant relationship. The point is that she was trying to forget, and using distance and difference as tools to do so. She went somewhere with a beach, which made for nice symmetry: her surf, my snow. We figured we'd both be out of the reach of technology, but we forgot that nearly every remote outpost has the dreaded internet, and that the reach of cell phones is now roughly equal with the reach of the human species.
My first day in the land of the snow, it was sunny and warm. People skied in jeans and light jackets. The second morning I woke up to a blizzard. Snow was coming down everywhere. I was determined to get to the mountain early, and so I went tromping out in my ski boots, picked up my skis from the rack outside the hotel, and waited for the shuttle bus to take me to the base of the mountain. When I got there, I got into the lift line and realized that I had forgotten my lift ticket. To say that I was aggravated is an understatement, but I had time, so I went back to the shuttle bus and back to the hotel to pick up my ticket. As I went into the hotel, I noticed that there were no footprints by the entrance. As a record of the morning, this was inaccurate. I had been there, and I assumed other people had been, too. But the snow that was falling had already erased them. I had forgotten my lift ticket, sure, but now the snow was forgetting me entirely. It was like natural amnesia.
When I picked up my lift ticket, I also loaded up my iPod with songs about snow, and pretty soon I saw that I wasn't the only one who had considered the connection between snow and memory. Randy Newman's "Snow," which was recorded by Harry Nilsson but left off the original version of Nilsson Sings Newman, describes snow as a medium where memories both live and die.Snow
Fills the fields we used to know
And the little park where we would go
Sleeps far below
In the snow
Gone
It's all over and you're gone
But the memory lives on although
Our dreams lie buried
In the snow The bluegrass standard "Footprints in the Snow" complicates the case considerably. The song--a staple of Bill Monroe's act that has been covered by dozens of musicians--tells the story of a man who has been separated from his lover and uses the snow to locate her. More specifically, he tracks her:Now some folks like the summertime when they can walk about
Strolling through the meadow green it's fun there no doubt
But give me the wintertime when snow falls all around
For I found her when the snow on the ground
Well, I traced her little footprints in the snow
I traced her little footprints in the snow
I can't forget the day my darling lost her way
I found her when the snow was on the ground This seems like a nice story, right? His darling got lost, he went out to find her, snow helped, the end. But then the song turns, and makes it clear that it really was the end:Well, I dropped in to see her there was a big round moon
Her mother said she just stepped out but would be returning soon
I found her little footprints and I traced them through the snow
I found her when the snow was on the ground
Now she's up in heaven she's with an angel band
I know I'm going to meet her in that promised land
But every time the snow falls it brings back memories
For I found her when the snow was on the ground Miller's version is upbeat, almost chipper, and it's easy to overlook the fact that it's a love song about a frozen corpse. Ry Cooder shifts the story so that it's a cat in the snow, not a woman -- "My Name is Buddy," where his version appears, is a concept album about the American labor movement that uses anthropomorphic felines as characters -- but goes back to the older lyric in one important respect. While neither version disputes that the woman/cat in the song lost her way, Miller "can't forget that day" while Cooder (like Monroe before him) wants to "bless that happy day." Snow death is many things, but a blessing? It almost turns the tracking into stalking, and the death into a wished-for moment of revenge. That's even more plausible in Rivers Cuomo's "Lover in the Snow," which forgoes memory entirely for discovery.I wanna know
What were you doing with my friend?
Out in the eve
Deep in the shady glen I saw you,
Lying with him, down in the snow,
Letting him do all of the things that he wants to My cell phone worked perfectly on the ski lift, and after the third run, legs burning a bit, I called my friend to compare notes. She was on the beach. "Interesting," she said. "Footprints are a pretty dicey issue here, too. You can run from here to there, and as long as you keep close to the water, pretty soon there's no record of it at all. On the other hand, if you're too many yards up on the sand, it's too dry, and the wind blows away any evidence of you. That middle band, where the sand is damp, is the one where footprints last for days. Are there different names for those different kinds of sand?"
"You're cutting out," I said.
"My phone has worked fine all week," she said.
"Maybe it's mine," I said, and hung up.
She had gone too far into the issue, and I wanted to back off to a simpler, more elegant question: Is snow an instrument of memory or an instrument of forgetting? It was snowing harder, and I looked out at a creek, at the trees, at the other mountains in the distance. I didn't know anything about them except that I was among them. And then I wasn't. Let me be clear about this: it wasn't a mystical experience so much as a mathematical one, a calculation of proportion: when everything is covered by snow, what you forget most is yourself. Newman/Nilsson were right (personal pain is under there somewhere), but also deeply wrong (insisting that it be visible is an act of narcissism). Snow may not be time, exactly, but snowfall is a measure of it, a means of cutting human experience down to size. When I got to the top of the mountain, I went through a number of songs--Marvin Gaye's "Purple Snowflakes," Jonathan Richman's "Abominable Snowman in the Market"--until I found Captain Beefheart's "Steal Softly Through Snow," which is even clearer on the opposition between nature and man's desire to mark it:Breaks my heart to see the highway cross the hills
Man has lived a million years and still he kills At the bottom of the run, my phone buzzed. It was my friend, leaving me a message. "I guess we got cut off," she said. "Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that I'm doing fine. I'm not remembering as much about the bad thing as I worried I would. Sometimes I do, and it's not pleasant, but I'm not going to beat myself up about it. It'll pass, right?" She was right but I didn't call back to say so. Instead, I went back up the lift with John Prine's "Humidity Built the Snowman," a song about human limits that stubbornly indulges human hope:The scientific nature of the ordinary man
Is to go on out and do the best you can I didn't fall.Labels: ben, country, folk, pop
posted by Ben
LINK |
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
PUPPET ON A STRING
Sandie Shaw
1967
Available on: The Very Best of Sandie Shaw
EMI : 1999
[Buy It]
YOUR TIME IS GONNA COME
Sandie Shaw
Reviewing the Situation
Pye : 1969
[Buy It]
This time of year is bad for birthdays, for me. There are too many, and they come in from all directions: family, friends, new friends. Recently I almost forgot a birthday. I remembered just in time, if you count being reminded by the birthday person as "in time." I had mentally set the occasion a day later, and I was prepared, but good intentions mean next to nothing when it comes to forgetting or belating birthdays. Soon I'll have to contend with a bunch more, and I'm sure I'll drop at least one ball. Hazard of juggling.
The birthday I almost forgot was especially problematic, because it belonged to a person with whom I have had ongoing nontrivial interaction. Is that the right way to say it? What I mean by that is that it is a friend who is closer than an acquaintance but has on occasion been as far away as an enemy. What this has meant is frequent attempts to move closer (in times where there has been distance) or assess the reasons for the distance (in times when we are close). Plus, we didn't really let each other off the hook, ever: when there were feuds or fights or dustups, we mocked each other as we went through them, sometimes with songs. Once she thought I was talking too much during our phone calls and sent me a mix that included the New York Dolls' "Chatterbox" and the Monks' "Shut Up." Once I thought she was in a rut, down about everything, so I sent her a book called "Creating Optimism," which an online reviewer called "the worst self-help book I have ever read, and I have read many."
A few years ago, we were going through a strange patch where she decided that I was making her miserable, even though I was doing the exact same things I had done when I made her happy. The problem, she said, had to do with the fact that she was too tied up in the particulars of my life. When I was having trouble at work, or in my marriage, or with my writing, she would ask me tons of questions and offer tons of advice. But she felt like it was emptying out her own life. I absorbed her concerns and, because I was in an unhelpful frame of mind, sent her some songs about people who were too tied up in the particulars of other people's lives. It was harder to email songs then -- big attachments -- and it seemed like a major effort, and that combined with the fact that it was a few weeks away from her birthday made it seem like I was sending the songs as a present. She chose not to read the songs as clever or sadistic commentary on our situation, and they helped to restore our friendship. A lack of scrutiny had turned my cruel act into a kindness. It's knotty, I know. Make it a bow. Presents have bows.
One of the songs I sent was "Puppet On a String," which was recorded by Sandie Shaw in 1967. Thursday is Sandie Shaw's birthday, which I had almost forgotten -- or perhaps never knew -- until I saw it listed somewhere on a site that lists birthdays. Shaw's career started, in pop-music terms, well before "Puppet on a String." In 1964, she rose to fame in Britain with her version of Bachrach and David's "(There's) Always Something There to Remind Me." She took the song to number one, where it stayed for nearly a month, and went on to put a dozen more songs in the British top twenty, including "Girl Don't Come," "Long Live Love" and "Nothing Comes Easy." Shaw branched out into fashion (a line of shoes) and television (a variety show called "The Sandie Shaw Supplement"), returning to pop music emphatically in 1967, with "Puppet On a String," which won the Eurovision song contest.
Shaw was born in 1947. She was a teenager for the first wave of her fame. As she got older, as the birthdays mounted, she got sick of pop music. Who wouldn't? She didn't like most of the songs, and hated some of them. She famously derided "Puppet on a String" as "sexist drivel" that "instinctively repelled" her. She was more right than she was wrong, which is why I included it in the set of songs I sent to my friend:I may win on the roundabout
Then I'll lose on the swings
In or out, there is never a doubt
Just who's pulling the strings
I'm all tied up to you
But where's it leading me to? In 1969, as Shaw's pop-star stock was fading, she recorded an album called "Reviewing the Situation," which included covers of songs by Bob Dylan ("Lay Lady Lay"), the Beatles ("Love Me Do"), the Rolling Stones ("Sympathy for the Devil"), and Dr. John ("Mama Roux"), along with a selection from the musical "Hair" ("Frank Mills"). Some were good, like "Mama Roux." Others, like "Sympathy For the Devil," verged on oddities. All were deeply felt, which didn't always make for good music, but always made for music that raised the issue of goodness. The album also included a version of a song that had just been recorded by a new British blues-rock group named Led Zeppelin. "Your Time Is Gonna Come" is generally acknowledged to be the first Zeppelin cover, and it's also one of the best. Shaw hangs back and then belts out. She is gentle where she needs to be, mysterious where she needs to be, and menacing where she needs to be. I'm probably understating how good a version this is. The way she handles the first few lines alone is revelatory:Lyin', cheatin', hurtin, that's all you seem to do
Messin' around with every girl in town
Puttin' me down for thinkin' of someone new
Always the same, playin' your game
Drive me insane, trouble's gonna come to you
One of these days, and it won't be long
You'll look for me, but, baby, I'll be gone And look at how efficiently she reverses gender, taking John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page's "Messin' around with every guy in town" and turning it on its ear. This is sexist drivel that instinctively attracts me.
I sent it to my friend whose birthday I almost forgot. She didn't answer right away, and I figured she was mad. The next day I got a message from her. It was a speechless message, but not silent: she said nothing but played "Your Time Is Gonna Come" in the background, loud. Then I sent her an email that said "You're welcome" and she sent me one that said "thank you." It was like we were winding time backwards.
But time goes forward for us all. In the seventies, Sandie Shaw became something of an eccentric, technically speaking -- her career lost its center and she focused variously on songwriting, a rock musical, marriage, Buddhism, and writing childrens' books. She returned to more active career management in the mid-eighties, raised her profile with the help of Morrissey, had a solo album on Rough Trade that's still in print, and rerecorded much of her early work. But for me, forever, she'll exist for her cover of "Your Time Is Gonna Come." Today, she's 62. Happy Birthday. And happy birthday to my friend. My birthday is later in the year, and I'm expecting some kind of payback. My time is gonna come.Labels: ben, folk-rock, pop
posted by Ben
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