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Thursday, May 29, 2008
BY THE LIGHT OF THE SILVERY MOON
Ada Jones
1910
Edison Blue Amberol 421
BY THE LIGHT OF THE SILVERY MOON
Jackie Wilson
1957
Avaialble on : Mr. Excitement
Rhino : 1992
[Buy It]
MOON IN JUNE
Soft Machine
Third
Sony BMG : 1970
[Buy It]
CRASH INTO JUNE
Game Theory
Big Shot Chronicles
Alias : 1986
[Buy It]
EVENING IN JUNE
Van Morrison
What's Wrong With This Picture?
Blue Note : 2003
[Buy It]
June, coming soon, is a fine month. Kenyan independence. Suzi Quatro's birthday. Weddings. But in popular music, it has a reputation--a bad one. June, of course, is held up as one of the words that songwriters just shouldn't touch, and especially not in combination with certain celestial bodies and/or common utensils. Remember when Yoko Ono revealed that John Lennon would wake at night and worry about why people were covering Paul McCartney's songs rather than his? This was how she consoled him: "I used to tell him, 'It's because you are a talented songwriter. You don't just rhyme June with spoon.'"
You can argue she was being too hard on Paul, or that she was treating him fairly and being too hard on June. June/moon/spoon rhymes go back well before popular song, into romantic poetry, but they've been the cliche people use to disparage cliche lyrics at least since the beginning of the last century. In 1915, in Writing for Vaudeville, Brett Page was already forgiving the sin as if it were universally familiar.
So far as the vital necessities of the popular song go, rhymes may occur regularly or irregularly, with fine effect in either instance, and the rhymes may be precise or not. To rhyme moon with June is not unforgivable. Even so, it's hard to imagine that Page would entirely forgive "By the Light of the Silvery Moon." With music by Gus Edwards and lyrics by Edward Madden, the song was first published in 1908 and covered, over time, by nearly everyone: Doris Day, Gene Vincent, Fats Domino, Little Richard. Ada Jones did one of the oldest versions in 1910; Jackie Wilson did one of the most old-fashioned in 1957 (though with some truly crazy falsetto midway through). In any event, the lyrics leave no cliché turned:
By the light, of the silvery moon,
I want to spoon,
To my honey I'll croon love's tune.
Honey moon, keep a-shinin' in June.
Your silv'ry beams will bring love's dreams,
We'll be cuddlin' soon,
By the silvery moon. The backlash came quickly. The Ring Lardner-George S Kaufman play "June Moon" lampooned the songwriting business in 1929, and even before that, in 1921, the popular tenor Billy Murray, a frequent duet partner of Jones, recorded "Stand Up and Sing Your Father an Old Time Tune," which wished for a return to an era of emotional Irish ballads, before Tin Pan Alley had corroded the minds of youth:
Sure now, stand up and sing for your father an old time tune,
Please stop the trash that you sing
Morning, night, and noon
Oh, I'm sick of all those ditties
About moon and spoon and June
So will you stand up and sing for your father an old time tune? The distaste with the commonness of these rhymes has lasted a surprisingly long time, helped along by an explosion of lyrical imagination in the mid-sixties and the birth of hundreds of new cliches in the years since. In the Magnetic Fields' "With Whom To Dance?" (from Get Lost, all the way back in 1995), Stephin Merritt tries to have it both ways:
Moons in June--I've given up on that stuff
Arms have charms but I've no hope of falling in love Merritt may be rejecting hackneyed rhymes out of bitterness over being excluded from the corresponding experiences, but he is rejecting it--the next rhyme pairs "dance" and "significance." The better a songwriter, the thinking goes, the less likely he or she is to lean on arms and charms--or love and dove, or heart and apart, or dream and seem, or fire and inspire. Moon and June is simply the worst of a bad bunch. The critic and poet Clive James tried his hand as a lyricist in the seventies, in collaboration with the singer Pete Atkin. The resulting songs were complex and literary, attempts--sometimes successful--to advance the form. In his poem "To Pete Atkin: A Letter From Paris," James lays the blame at the feet of pop music:
The Broadway partnership of words and tune
Had been dissolved by pop, which then reverted
In all good faith to rhyming moon with June,
Well pleased with the banalities it blurted.
Those speech defects would need attention soon. Soft Machine's "Moon in June" extends the argument even further, defiantly admitting a cliche into its title because its contents are so eclectic. And yet, underneath the thick blanket of prog-rock, it's just a story about a man and a woman, though one sung with incomparable oddness by Robert Wyatt:
On a dilemma between what I need and what I just want
Between your thighs I feel a sensation
How long can I resist the temptation?
I've got my bird, you've got your man
So who else do we need, really? It may take more than ten minutes, but in the end, simplicity outs; the distance between "Moon in June" and, say, "Silly Love Songs" isn't as great as Wyatt (or Yoko Ono) might think:
Singing a song in the morning
Singing it again at night
Don't really know what I'm singing about
But it makes me feel all right Sometimes, you can hold yourself apart from the cliches; sometimes you have to submit. Game Theory's "Crash Into June" frames its romance as jumpy and adolescent ("crash into June / in and out of tune/ it happens all too soon"), and I've never been sure whether Scott Miller is singing about a girl, a summer night, or one in the other. Van Morrison's "Evening in June" opts for a wiser, warmer approach, more autumnal than summery. Morrison has been on good terms with moons for nearly forty years, and here he doesn't betray much anxiety about sinking into cliche (or, for that matter, lifting the song's opening cushion of horns from Joni Mitchell's "Car On the Hill"):
By the light of the moon
When the night holds the secrets
Of the sleepy lagoon
I'm contemplating moonlight
On the water
When I'm walking with you
On an evening in June Labels: ben
posted by Ben
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