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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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Friday, March 14, 2008
LOVE FOR SALE
Elvis Costello
1981
Available on : Trust (Expanded)
Rhino: 2003
[Buy It]
LOVE FOR SALE
Fine Young Cannibals
Available on : Red Hot + Blue
Capitol : 1990
[Buy It]
DAY TRIPPER
The Jimi Hendrix Experience
1967
Available on : BBC Sessions
Experience Hendrix : 1998
[Buy It]
SHE WORKS HARD FOR THE MONEY
Donna Summer
She Works Hard For the Money
Polygram : 1983
[Buy It]
I COULDN'T PAY FOR WHAT I GOT LAST NIGHT
Swamp Dogg
Gag a Maggot
Stone Dogg : 1973
[Out of Print]
THE MIND DOES THE DANCING WHILE THE BODY PULLS THE STRINGS
Swamp Dogg
Have You Heard This Story?
Island : 1975
[Out of Print]
In 1930, Cole Porter and Herbert Fields wrote the musical "The New Yorkers," which told the story of a socialite who embarked on a fling with a bootlegger and began to investigate the city's underbelly: bootleggers, thieves, the demimonde. One of the songs in the production was Porter's "Love For Sale.":When the only sound in the empty street,
Is the heavy tread of the heavy feet
That belong to a lonesome cop
I open shop.
When the moon so long has been gazing down
On the wayward ways of this wayward town.
That her smile becomes a smirk,
I go to work.
Love for sale,
Appetising young love for sale.
Love that's fresh and still unspoiled,
Love that's only slightly soiled,
Love for sale.
Who will buy?
Who would like to sample my supply?
Who's prepared to pay the price,
For a trip to paradise? "Love for Sale" was a hit at the time for Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians; over the years, scores of performers have taken a crack at it, including Billie Holiday, Art Tatum, Elvis Costello (who kept the lyrics intact), and Fine Young Cannibals (who focussed on the chorus and filled the corners of the mix with actual fake street noise). In early 2008, the song was covered, of a fashion, by New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who was exposed as a customer of a high-priced escort service.
As a politician, Spitzer shot himself in the foot, and then the other foot, and then between his own legs. As a human being, though, he joined a long, storied, and highly equivocal tradition. The Beatles, who consorted with all kinds of ladies of all kinds of evenings in Hamburg, liked to joke that "Day Tripper," was about prostitution, as they did at an August 1966 press conference in Los Angeles:Q: I'd like to direct this question to messrs. Lennon and McCartney. In a recent article, Time magazine put down pop music. And they referred to "Day Tripper" as being about a prostitute...
PAUL: (nodding) Oh yeah.
Q: And "Norwegian Wood" as being about a lesbian.
PAUL: (nodding) Oh yeah.
Q: I just wanted to know what your intent was when you wrote it, and what your feeling is about the Time magazine criticism of the music that is being written today.
PAUL: We were just trying to write songs about prostitutes and lesbians, that's all.
(room erupts with laughter)
JOHN: "...quipped Ringo."
PAUL: (chuckles) Cut!!
JOHN: You can't use it on the air, that. Donna Summer was certainly not joking in "She Works Hard for the Money." The song's video, which you will no doubt remember from the nineteen-eighties, includes scenes of women working in sweatshops, as nurses, and as policewomen; the main character is a waitress in a diner (played by an actress, though it echoes the picture of Summer on the record sleeve). Beneath that, though, it is explicitly identified as a tribute to "the working woman," and it's hard to subtract prostitution from that equation:Twenty five years have
Come and gone
And she's seen a lot of tears
Of the ones who come in
They really seem to need her there
It's a sacrifice working day to day
For little money just tips for pay
But it's worth it all
Just to hear them say that they care Spitzer's escort-service patronage raises several issues about the sanctity of the marriage contract, particularly the function of married sex--which, as we know, is the kind you don't shell out $4300 for, even if it does involve unprotected assplay or drugs or whatever the unsafe practices hinted at actually were. I have sung the praises of Swamp Dogg repeatedly, but it's more efficient just to let him sing. In "I Couldn't Pay For What I Got Last Night," he tells his girlfriend or wife why she's the one for him:Last night you kissed me and my heart began to flutter
And I melted in your arms like good old country butter
You whispered sweet words honey in my ear
I knew it was the truth when you said "I love you"
You got a way of treating a man so right
If I had all the money in the whole wide world
I couldn't pay for what I got last night The girlfriend or wife will no doubt be thrilled to hear this, but also a little disconcerted. After all, who has introduced the concept of payment here? He has. A second before the song started, no one was thinking about paying anything. It's like "Can't Buy Me Love" turned to less reputable ends. And then there's the more philosophical, more funky, and more monumental "The Mind Does the Dancing While the Body Pulls The Strings," which goes halfway to explaining why men--in power or out of power, in marriages or out of them, in sickness or in health--don't always make the right decision in carnal matters:Every time you parade it never fails to rain
All experienced spectators advising you get it together
Oh, a meteorologist what's going to be the weather?
Your mind is playing tricks on you
It's got you so confused
You can't talk right all you do is stutter
You want to know why white milk makes yellow butter
Where do lights go when they go out
There's too many things you feel you gotta find out about
The mind does the dancing and the body keeps pulling the strings But the last word should belong to Michael Keaton--or rather Michael Keaton as Bill Blazejowski in Ron Howard's 1982 comedy "Night Shift," in which a pair of morgue workers (Keaton and Henry Winkler) decide to start an escort service. As the business gets underway, Bill assembles all the working girls, writes the word "Prostitution" on a chalkboard, and proceeds to deliver one of the finest motivational speeches in the history of the movies. I am quoting from a twenty-five year-old memory, so I may be a bit off:Prostitution--what does that mean really? The first thing you have to do to find out what a word means is break it up. "Pros." Doesn't mean anything. "Tit." We're all big boys and girls; I think we know what that means. "Tu." Well, there's two of them. "Shun"--that's from the Greek, meaning "I don't want it, I don't need it, push it away." I have no idea what the hell that's doing here. Labels: ben, jazz, soul, vocals
posted by Ben
LINK |
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