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Thursday, June 14, 2007
THE LAST LETTER
Hank Snow
1951
Available on : The Thesaurus Transcriptions
Bear Family : 1991
[Buy It]
LETTERS DON'T COUNT
The Nazz
Nazz Nazz
Screen Gems Columbia : 1969
[Buy It]
YOUR PICTURE SAYS REMEMBER, THO' YOUR LETTER SAYS FORGET
Frederic Rose
1908
Edison Gold Moulded Record
I used to send lots of letters. In college, I had a girlfriend who was at another college, and sometimes each of us would send three or four of them a day. We had no Internet then and we scooped food from stone bowls with our hands.
As soon as email came along, though, things really took off. The problem wasn't sending messages. It was finding someone who was willing to get those messages and give the same back at a clip. The problem was finding someone who corresponded to you.
It might seem that I'm writing about love letters. I'm not, although that's also a worthy topic for a post. It would include Hank Snow, and his eloquent, bitter, all-too-forthright communiqué that doesn't--as the last line tells us--hit its mark. It would include the Nazz, who turn a typically dopey Rundgren pun into a typically beautiful piece of Rundgren pop that goes nuts at the end with its aggressive backing vocals. It would include Frederic Rose, in 1908, warbling out a B-list song with a Grade-A title. It would not include Richard Thompson's "Tear Stained Letter," which, though fine, contains the lyric "The scars ain't never gonna mend in a hurry." (How can something "never mend in a hurry"? Isn't it either/or? He's better than that.)
I'm writing, I think, about songs about messages. Not message songs, like "For What It's Worth" or "Fortunate Son" or "(We Gotta) Bust Outta The Ghetto" or "1 Million Bottlebags," but songs about the equivocal process of trying to reach out and communicate with another person. And though there are probably a million places to start, there's really only one place to start.
I'VE GOTTA GET A MESSAGE TO YOU
The Bee Gees
Idea
Polydor : 1968
[Buy It]
GOT TO GET A MESSAGE TO YOU
Swamp Dogg
1970
Available on : Total Destruction to Your Mind/Rat On
Charly : 1991
[Buy It]
I GOTTA GET A MESSAGE TO YOU
Tim Rose
1970
Available on : Tim Rose/Love: A Kind of Hate Story
RPM : 2000
[Buy It]
I should start by saying that this song has a story. The main character is condemned to die, and he's desperate to tell his wife that he's sorry and that he loves her. We know this because Robin Gibb has said that's what the song is about, and he co-wrote it. This Death-Row-What-A-Brother-Gibb-Know plotline, though, is among the worst things about the song. For starters, it results in some laughably bad lyrics, which sometimes happens with the Gibbs.It's only her love that keeps me wearing this dirt. I like to think of it as something more epistolary and epistemological, a song about the urgency and imprecision of communication. Partly because this is because I have already seen "The Green Mile." Partly it's because there is something interesting about the syntax. The man in the song is not saying "I've got to get a message to her." He's saying "to you." This seems to be an internal monologue; he's talking to that part of her that is alive inside of him. The alternative is paradoxical. If his wife hears the song, or any part of it, then she has in fact received a message from him. In that case, he might as well say what he wants to say instead of just saying that he has a message. It's like sending a telegram that says, "I am trying to send you a telegram." And given his precarious state, even if she hears the song, she is certainly hearing it after his execution. There's an issue here not only of the man's death, but of his death as an author. I'm not saying that my logic is flawless, only that the song's logic is flawed.
So why is it so hard to get a message to, or through? Why is it so difficult to be heard, let alone understood? One of the problems is that most forms of expression are insufficient. There's the famous Flaubert passage in which he derides the impotence of language ("Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity"). I'm not sure that it's the bears that are dancing. I'd argue that just as often, it's the messenger -- people are afraid to say the things they mean to say, and so they hem, and they haw, and that's how more language gets born. This isn't to suggest that all writing is evasion, but most works would be shorter if the speeches, and the speech, were more direct. That kind of directness might result from an upjut of bravery, from painful impatience, or from another kind of urgency -- like, say, imminent execution, though we've already seen how circuitous a condemned man can be. If I always had to say just what I meant, things would be...well, different. There would be a little more lust, a little more anger, and fewer jokes. Much of what I'd say would involve my asking people to say things back to me: any things, really, just a conversation (with words, gestures, touch, whatever) so that I know I'm not dead. If I rewrote the Bee Gees' lyrics, they'd go like this:I've just gotta get a message to you
Which is that you've gotta get a message to me. No worse than Robin.
Of the three versions here, my tastes lean toward the Swamp Dogg cover, which is sung with a kind of abject ecstacy, and away from the original - chamber pop, no matter how tremulous, doesn't strike me as a particularly lonely genre. (Tim Rose, on the other hand, does. Rose, of course, was one of those semi-obscure Greenwich Village folk-rockers--the third Tim, behind Buckley and Hardin - and a King of Almosts. He almost had a hit with his slow arrangement of "Hey Joe," which inspired the monster hit by Jimi Hendrix. He almost recorded the headlong version of "With a Little Help From My Friends" that went to Joe Cocker instead. He almost replaced Brian Jones in the Rolling Stones. His life of ups and downs, marked by bouts of alcoholism, ended during a late-career comeback in 2002.)
It's fitting to end with a message song about the importance of messages.
COMMUNICATION
Bobby Womack
Communication
United Artists : 1972
[Buy It]Labels: ben, country, funk, oldies, power-pop, soul
posted by Ben
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Wednesday, February 14, 2007
SEA OF LOVE
Phil Phillips with the Twilights
Single
Mercury : 1959
[Buy It]
ALWAYS ON MY MIND
The Pet Shop Boys
Discography
Capitol : 1991
[Buy It]
HALAH
Mazzy Star
Rough Trade : 1990
[Buy It]
MAMA, YOU BEEN ON MY MIND
Bob Dylan
The Bootleg Series, Volumes 1-3
Columbia : 1991
[Buy It]
KATH
Sebadoh
Sebadoh III
Homestead : 1991
[Buy It]
Last week I sent an email to about twenty friends, relatives, ex-boyfriends, new friends, old friends, and people I hardly know but thought would have good answers, asking "I'm making a list for my Moistworks Valentine's Day post...what are your favorite love and anti-love songs...?"
My main reason for asking was that I was curious to see how certain people would respond. Who would ignore it, thinking "What a stupid question." Or, who would ask "Don't all songs fit into one category or the other?" Who would respond immediately with a long, rambling list, or who would write, also immediately, with "I need to think."
My people did not disappoint; I got all of the above. Al Green (obviously) and Ween (awesomely) showed up on several lists. Bob Dylan, yes (and even I, with vast ambivalence about him, am torn apart by the last line of this song). Nancy Sinatra, Frank Sinatra, Throbbing Gristle, Monochrome Set, Judas Priest, Orange Juice, Sebadoh, Van Halen, and the Buzzcocks, yes, yes, yes. But the best answers, which I did not anticipate, were those songs that would make absolutely no sense to anyone but me, due only to the nature of my relationship with the responder.
"Sea of Love" fits squarely into the last sentence. "That was the day I knew you were my pet," does not typically ring the bell of today's modern woman, yet the man who named that song has sent me so far to the brink of sanity and submissive lust that I could do nothing but nod and drool and wonder which version to use here. (Of course I opted for the one he had specified.) The Pet Shop Boys version of "Always on My Mind," could only be on the list of the man who held my hand at a concert in an airplane hangar in Berlin, as both of our jaws dropped at the odd and scary sight of a thousand German fists banging the air to the rhythm. "Halah" by Mazzy Star would be merely a pretty, dreamy whine were it not for the fact that the record was played over and over again to mask the sounds of the first great sex I ever had. "Kath" was mentioned by both a close friend who knows I wrote a poem after it in college and a man who has no idea how much my heart aches for him whenever I hear it.
All this to say: Love is such a specific, alchemical thing, that to merely hear someone else sing about his/her love for yet someone else doesn't quite register. To me, a love song is all about association. But anti-love, that's another story. Gut-tearing, nauseating rejection and loss, now that is indeed universal. Here, though, is where my friends did disappoint, and where I, for fear of breaking down into a quivering wreck before finishing this post, have failed. This is what I leave to you, dear readers. Tell me the saddest (or angriest) love songs you know, and by sunset (just in time for the east coasters to burn a mix for their dinnertime sweetie), I'll post a handful here.
Thank you! Here are some highlights. I wish I could post them all...
FARE THEE WELL, MISS CAROUSEL
Townes Van Zandt
Townes Van Zandt
Sunspots : 1969
[Buy It]
ALL THE LOVE I EVER HAD
Hank Williams
Single, 1951
Available on The Original Singles Collection
Mercury : 1991
[Buy It]
GIN HOUSE BLUES
Nina Simone
Nuff Said!
RCA : 1968
[Buy It]
THE CHAIN
Fleetwood Mac
Rumours
Warner : 1977
[Buy It]
HOW CAN YOU MEND A BROKEN HEART?
Al Green
Let's Stay Together
Hi Records : 1972
[Buy It]
And a late-stage addition, for a friend and reader who knows who he is (and whose own version I prefer but don't have a recording of):
EVERY TIME IT RAINS
Randy Newman
Bad Love
Dreamworks : 1999
[Buy It]Labels: indie, joanna, love, oldies, pop
posted by Joanna
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