The Daily Awesome: The Beach Boys “This Whole World” (1970)
September 7, 2010
“Late at night, I think about the love of this whole world…” Last night, I was taking a walk, now that the weather has cooled off some and we can be outside without being immediately attacked by mosquitoes. It was one of those rare walks that I took without headphones. It was more laziness than anything that kept me from going upstairs to get my iPod before I left the house. We’d spent a lot of the holiday weekend working out in the yard with the kids and I was sore all over. But the night was gorgeous, and even though we worked hard, I think we all had a lot of fun – we all felt good about what got done, the garden and the yard looked better than they had all summer. We’d spent some time with two of my sisters and their kids. We’d even carved a little time out for ourselves – playing lazer tag, bowling, go-karting, and eating a lot of pizza on Saturday afternoon.
Last week, my partner and I attended a funeral for a woman we’ve known for a long time. She died of cancer – only a year older than myself. She was not really part of our regular circle of friends, and so it was hard to know what to say, or if there was really anything to say. The tragedy of it was so obvious that it felt vulgar to try to even say so out loud. I was thinking about her on my walk and about her little girl who would do the rest of her growing up without her, and I was thinking about my own family, my own kids, my own brothers and sisters, and how wonderful it is that we have each other – to play “dogs versus humans” in the park, to burn hot dogs on the grill, to roast marshmallows and watch our son discover how cool a styrofoam plate looks when its melting over the hot coals of a campfire.
I’m not a religious person, but in the years since I first heard the Beach Boys’ 1970 Sunflower album, I’ve come to regard this little song – not quite two minutes long even – as a sort of profession of my own personal faith. “And when I go anywhere, I see love.” Enjoy.
The Daily Awesome: Radiohead “Let Down” (1997)
August 31, 2010
After an artist has been as highly-regarded for as long as Radiohead has been, it’s easy to forget what was so exciting about that artist in the first place. After sneaking out from under future-one-hit-wonder status to usurp the title of World’s Greatest Living Rock Band from U2 in the mid-90s with their albums The Bends and OK Computer, Radiohead channeled their renown into crafting two of the strangest, most dissonant and experimental records to ever top the American pop charts – Kid A and Amnesiac.
In the last decade, with the single ascendant (due to the advent of iTunes and easy piracy), Radiohead have almost single-handedly kept the album relevant as a form. Which is why it was sort of disheartening, if not entirely surprising, to hear Thom Yorke talk about the band moving away from recording albums after the release of 2007′s In Rainbows. 15 years after The Bends, it’s easy to take for granted that Radiohead have been the greatest album band of their time; but it’s even easier to forget that the band first got our attention by just writing some really good songs (“Creep” among them, to my thinking). Tonight, I was taking the long way home from work because I just got a new car – one that I can plug my iPod into! I had it playing on shuffle and when I heard the shimmering opening notes of “Let Down”, I didn’t even recognize it. It was like I was hearing the song – which I had in heavy rotation on my Walkman in the summer of ’97 – for the very first time. The way Yorke sings the verses in gradually expanding ellipses of melody; the way his voice maintains a flatness and distance even as the music behind him grows grander and more urgent; the layers of shimmer and twinkle, delicately plucked arpeggios and folky strumming chords backing up lyrical images of disappointed people “clinging to bottles”. I’m not sure how serious Thom Yorke was about Radiohead focusing entirely on singles – and Radiohead have always been a band that thrive when they’re defying expectations, even the ones they’ve helped to perpetuate – but if, in fact, they never release another album, I have every reason to suspect that they’ll become the Greatest Living Singles Band in the World. Songs like this are why.
The Daily Awesome 8/25/10: Hot Chocolate “Love Is Life” (1970)
August 25, 2010
Five years before they scored their biggest U.S. hit with “You Sexy Thing”, the band Hot Chocolate, after a brief fling with the Beatles’ Apple label (which put out a 45 of the group’s cover of “Give Peace a Chance”) made their first trip up the British charts with this single “Love Is Life”, a song that marks the intersections between R&B and bubblegum, the Carribean and the spaghetti Western, with its dramatic arrangements of winds and strings over a calypso-inflected beat. Though it became a top 10 hit for the group, they would have trouble following it up; and in the meantime their songs were becoming bigger hits on the other side of the Atlantic – only for other artists. Stories hit #1 with their cover of Hot Chocolate’s “Brother Louie” and Canadian hard rockers April Wine hit the Top 40 with “You Could Have Been a Lady”. So inconsistent was their singles performance that it wouldn’t be until 1974 that they released their first full-length album Cicero Park. In the last couple of years, the British 7ts label has put out some really wonderful reissues of the band’s heyday records. The reissue of Cicero Park includes a second disc compiling their early singles starting with “Love Is Life” (sadly – no “Give Peace a Chance”).
The Friday Morning Awesome: Kaleidoscope “Please” (1967)
August 13, 2010
Most celebrated as the band that delivered the song “O Death” from the Stanley Brothers to Camper Van Beethoven, the L.A.-based quintet Kaleidoscope was formed in the mid-60s around singer-multi-instrumentalists David Lindley and Solomon Feldthouse, the former (who would go on to play in Jackson Browne’s band in the 70s) schooled in bluegrass, western swing and vaudeville, the latter in modal jazz, Middle Eastern and Balkan folk music. Over four years and four albums, Kaleidoscope dropped these two wide-ranging collections of influences into a vat of boiling South California acid folk with some often pretty fascinating results. But don’t let all that make you think the band made “difficult” music.
Their debut single “Please” is an amiable, immediately ingratiating folk tune about a guy just learning to make his way in the world without undue (however well-meaning) outside interference. Feldthouse sings the verses with a talky matter-of-fact-ness. The lyrics are thoughtful and firm (“I know you mean to help… but don’t you realize you can’t live my life”), and the chorus is mostly just a single word – “Please” – which he holds solidly on a single note while harmonies shift and swirl all around him for nearly ten seconds. And finally, this simple request: Don’t say nothing at all. Just stand by me.
Jukebox Classics: “Don’t You Just Know It” by Huey “Piano” Smith & the Clowns
June 29, 2010
I grew up in the 80s, so it naturally follows that I should be well acquainted with the “forgotten oldies” of Culture Club, A Flock of Seagulls, and Asia. But the music of the 50s and 60s loomed large as well, what with movies like Stand By Me, TV shows like The Wonder Years, and those super-awesome commercials for Freedom Rock .
My parents had a pretty big record collection which I felt free to plunder (and in many cases – I’m looking at you Platters records! – inadvertently destroy). But also, on the radio, you could find, tucked between the various Top 40 and Classic Rock stations that most of my friends and I listened to, not just one but several oldies stations, many of which featured DJs that spun the hits of the 50s and 60s during their first run up the charts – guys like Radio Hall of Famer Dick Biondi, who recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of his first broadcast on Chicago’s WLS, and who is generally regarded as the first American DJ to play the Beatles. It was listening to Biondi and his ilk on commutes to and from Kenosha, and while working in a pizza kitchen when I was in high school, that I got a pretty awesome education in the music that my parents and their friends, not to mention the music that my own 80s idols – Cyndi Lauper is the same age as my mom! – grew up loving.
Sure, there are still oldies stations on the radio, but the very same oldies stations that were playing not just The Beatles and the Stones, but also the hits of second and third and fourth tier artists like The Association, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, and The Vogues, are now playing only the most familiar hits by the most familiar artists of the 60s, while their playlists are increasingly trending towards the 70s and 80s. Not that I have anything against oldies stations playing the songs from my own childhood (I get it – I’m bald, I’m fat, I’m middle-aged), and a good Huey Lewis song like “Do You Believe In Love” sounds right at home sandwiched between the Supremes and the Grass Roots. But I worry about how easily we’re leaving behind a lot of those great, lesser known songs while programmers try to keep the Oldies format “current”.
With that concern in mind, I’m launching a new series here called Jukebox Classics. So called for two reasons. One is anecdotal: the other night, we were out at a local 50s themed diner with a friend of ours. Each of the tables had its own little 50s-looking CD jukebox stocked exclusively with 50s and 60s music compilations. For a quarter, you could play a couple songs. I was flipping through the selections and at one point, my friend slipped me a couple of quarters and said: “Go on, Paul, you know you want to.” He was right.
I also have a strange fascination with all these YouTube videos of people playing their vintage 45s (or in this case, a vintage 78). One of my jukebox selections at the diner was this 1958 tune by Huey “Piano” Smith called “Don’t You Just Know It”. The song was a repertory staple of early 60s garage and frathouse bands, and the first version I ever heard of it was a 1963 cover by Paul Revere and the Raiders via a two disc compilation of that band Columbia/Legacy put out in the early 90s. 
Not unlike “Louie Louie”, part of the fun of “Don’t You Just Know It” is that it is, at least by the definition prevalent in the 50s, the “devil’s music”. Aside from the non-sensical call-and-response in the chorus (a-gooba-gooba-gooba-goobah!), you can’t really understand much of what’s being sung, and if you could, you’d find the words coded with all sorts of possibly-maybe(-probably), sexually suggestive double entendre. Oh, and that falsetto voice you hear? That’s blues singer Bobby Marchan, who was also a female impersonator. So basically what we’re talking about is Jimmy Swaggart’s worst nightmare. And it’s hilarious. You can’t not want to dance when you hear it. You can’t not laugh (or at least smile really big) while listening to it. Laughter is literally built into the song. Even more than Smith’s other big hit “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu” (which topped out at #52 in 1957, but went top 10 fifteen years later via a cover by Johnny Rivers), “Don’t You Just Know It” delivers a drug-like high with drug-like immediacy.
As was the case with many black performers in the early rock ‘n’ roll era, great efforts were made to squelch Smith’s fame, even by his own record label – which, at least theoretically, stood to make a lot of money on Smith’s continued success after “Don’t You Just Know It” hit the top 10 on the pop charts. Ace Records essentially wiped Smith’s vocals from a follow-up single called “Sea Cruise”, had his white label-mate Frankie Ford sing over the Smith-produced backing tracks, and saw the song become a Top 20 pop hit.
And if you want to see the song in action: Here’s a performance by 50s revivalists and (incongruously) Woodstock alumni Sha Na Na from their 70s TV variety show. Bowzer, the tragicomic bass “greaser” from the group, went on to be a VJ on VH-1 in the 80s.
Paul’s Sunday Brunch Buffet: The Summer of ’90 Edition
June 27, 2010
There are a lot of songs that reminisce fondly about a simpler time, when we were younger and nothing sucked quite as bad as everything sucks now. But twenty years ago, in the Summer of 1990, I was 17, my family was on the verge of homelessness, and I blamed myself for it. You see, a couple years earlier, my dad lost his job at a Chrysler (formerly American Motors) plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin. I’d gotten my first job, bagging and carrying out groceries at a local SuperValu, making $3.35 an hour plus the occasional tip. Aside from those tips – maybe five dollars in a six hour shift – I didn’t spend a penny of what I made. I deposited every check in the bank.
Now, these weren’t big checks, but after a year, I’d accumulated a sum that would have been enviable to most of peers. It was around that time that I started helping my parents make the house payment. Eventually I quit the grocery store job, due to a dispute with my boss about a time-off request (I’d asked for, and was denied, a Saturday off to go see a Chicago concert – which, just my luck, got postponed), and landed a snazzy new gig washing dishes at an eatery called the Edelweiss in the heart of downtown Paddock Lake. Needless to say, I didn’t make many tips there, so I started using parts of my paychecks for spending money, and the portions I devoted to savings got smaller and smaller. And as I watched the balance on my savings shrink by mortgage payments, my motivation to save shrunk even more. To the point where I didn’t save at all. But my CD collection was growing fast.
Inside B-Side Records. It looked like this in 1990. It still looks like this in 2010.
I had a girlfriend back then. (Yes, I had a girlfriend back then.) And occasionally, we would take a day trip up to Madison (Mecca, as far as I was concerned), where the whole object would be just to blow all the money in our pockets, presumably on CDs, books, and, oh yes, fine Italian dining. One such day was July 11 of 1990. That also happened to be the day our house, which had earlier been foreclosed upon – the house I’d spent all my savings futilely trying to save – went up for auction. It was actually a great day, and I still remember a lot of the CDs I bought that day on Madison’s glorious State Street, which, at the time, boasted at least four or five record stores – chief among them being B-Side Records (one of the few survivors still open today), no more than a slit in a brick wall, but filled to brimming with the weirdest and wonderfullest music selection I’d ever seen and the weirdest and wonderfullest collection of people browsing those CDs practically ass-cheek-to-ass-cheek.
I had a mental list of songs and bands I’d seen on MTV’s 120 Minutes or read about in Ira Robbins’ Trouser Press Record Guides, and I was determined to find them. I think I spent close to two hundred dollars that day. It makes me light-headed even now to think about how it was to feel free enough to blow all that cash so quickly and recklessly, and on CDs I knew I’d never in a million years find at any record store closer to home – CD’s nobody else at my school even dreamed existed. CD’s like a Front 242‘s album Official Version on Wax Trax Records, or a Japanese import version of the John Foxx-era Ultravox compilation Three Into One. I’d recently become an Ultravox fan, after seeing Midge Ure play an opening set for Howard Jones. I knew that Ultravox had recorded three albums together with a different lead singer before Midge Ure joined the group in 1980, and that they were supposed to be really great (I can confirm this today), but I’d never actually heard them. (And in those days, you couldn’t just find them on YouTube.)
The CD I once spent 30 dollars on. Worth every damn penny.
By then, I’d left Edelweiss and was working in the same bar’s pizza kitchen. I sat down next to my Dad. He said, “So you spent your wad, huh?” I felt too ashamed to answer and soon left to walk home. The week after Labor Day, the first week of my high school senior year, we were evicted from our house, and we’d spend most of the next year squatting – first in my boss’s basement, and then in the summer cottage of a family friend. It was, to my mind, the end of the world. I took a lot of comfort in my CD collection. At the time, I had about 250 CDs which doesn’t seem like that many now that I’m pushing the 4,000 mark, but at the time it was an obscene number of CDs. As much as I enjoyed them still, I felt guilty that I’d spent money on them at a time when we were losing our house. Sure, all would be well again soon enough, but the following winter was the longest, coldest and loneliest of my life. When I remember that time, one of the prominent songs in my memory’s soundtrack is “Just for a Moment” by Ultravox, sung by John Foxx. Listening to the music the machines make, I let my heart break just for a moment…
Another treasure I took home from B-Side’s import case that day was by the British band Felt. All I’d heard of Felt to that day was a single song called “Primitive Painters”. They’d played it on 120 Minutes once – only once that I’d ever seen, but I loved it instantly. In the captions at the end of the video, it named the album from which the song came as Gold Mine Trash and I spent months and months trying to special order that CD, all to no avail. But what I found at B-Side that day was even better: a two-fer CD of the band’s 1984 and 1985 albums Ignite the Seven Cannons and The Strange Idols Pattern and Other Short Stories, which included “Primitive Painters”. (I later learned that Gold Mine Trash was a U.S. only compilation – and was the band’s only U.S. release.)
Felt's 'Ignite the Seven Cannons'
One of my favorite albums of that time, and one that has continued to speak to me in new ways in the 20 years since it came out is Australian band Midnight Oil‘s Blue Sky Mining. After they shot to international stardom with their 1988 hit “Beds Are Burning”, Midnight Oil made a very Australia-centric album. Blue Sky Mining may not have impacted the U.S. charts all that much, but it remains one of my own two or three personal favorite records ever. I remember one day, during this last summer in our house, sitting out on the front porch listening to Blue Sky Mining turned up full blast from the livingroom stereo. At the end of a song called “Mountains of Burma”, singer Peter Garrett lets loose with these crazy wails: another essential part of the soundtrack of that summer. On our trip to Madison, I picked up Midnight Oil‘s then most recent CD single “Forgotten Years”, a song about not forgetting what was fought for, nor the people who did the fighting.
I did get some happy upbeat music that day too. For instance, I found a copy of Daryl Hall‘s 1986 solo album 3 Hearts in a Happy Ending Machine, which featured his terrific hit single “Dreamtime”, a personal favorite of mine. Incidentally, I just found the same album on vinyl last week, and I’ve been spending some quality time getting re-acquainted with it. But one of the albums I bought that I’d spend a lot of quality time with for the next several years was the self-titled one and only album by the Memphis art-pop quintet Human Radio, who had a small hit with a song called “Me & Elvis” before they broke up. Sad, really, because the rest of the album is full of really clever pop along the lines of Todd Rundgren or 10cc, with great melodies and lyrics that lampooned yuppie aspiration and tweaked the sensitivities of the trendy socially conscious and the fashionably environmentalist. 20 years later, it sounds like a time capsule of 1990.
Here’s a song that should have been a bigger hit and never fails to make me feel good listening to it. Ian Hunter and Mick Ronson were glam rock refugees at a time when glam had been co-opted by legions of tacky hair metal bands. Hunter, who was already in his 50s in 1990, had been the lead singer of Mott the Hoople in the 70s, and guitarist Mick Ronson had been one of David Bowie’s Spiders from Mars and would soon go on to produce one of Morrissey’s best albums Your Arsenal (1992) before dying from liver cancer in 1993 at the age of 46. The two had been playing together on and off for a decade or so, but in 1990, they released a really good rock and roll record called Y U I Orta, anchored by Hunter’s tribute to the music he grew up loving: “American Music”. I hear the sons of Memphis. I hear the brothers of Harlem. I hear the Nashville cats and the ragtime mamas out of New Orleans…
After six years playing culturally literate guitar pop with his band the Commotions, Lloyd Cole issued his self-titled solo debut in 1990, with the aid of drummer/producer Fred Maher (formerly of Scritti Politti), and guitarists Robert Quine and Matthew Sweet. This may have been the first CD I ever bought used, and I’ve put some serious miles on it. Its big single was a gloomy epic of moral decay in the big city called “Downtown”, but its opening number was this lightly swinging Chris Isaak-ish country crooner ballad – “Don’t Look Back”. I used to wake up early, I used to try to believe, but life seems never-ending when you’re young.
And just to show that it wasn’t all gloom and doom. One of my most treasured trophies of that big shopping day in Madison was the album Submarine Bells by New Zealand indie rock forefathers The Chills. This was the lead single and opening song of that album – a record that only gets more gorgeous with age. It’s a heavenly pop hit for those that still want it.
The Chills “Heavenly Pop Hit”
Why I Love the World Cup (Hint: It’s Not the Futbol)
June 26, 2010
Seriously. This is the only reason I care about the World Cup: A German a capella World Cup-themed parody of Eddy Grant’s 1989 anti-Apartheid protest song “Gimme Hope Joanna”, accompanied by South Park-esque animation. Thank you, Basta. A thousand times, thank you.
Here’s Eddy Grant’s original:
Paul’s Top 15 Songs of Fathers and Sons
June 19, 2010
In lieu of a Sunday Brunch Buffet playlist this week, and in honor of Father’s Day, I’ve decided to get in touch with my Inner Casey Kasem and count down my Top 15 songs about Fathers and Sons. There are a lot of great songs out there about all sorts of different father/son relationships. Not all of these are loving songs. Some are angry. Some are ambivalent. Some are very well-known, some not so much. Some are old, some are new. There are almost certainly a few really good ones I missed (or don’t even know – please post your own favorites in the comment section).
#15: “KINKY AFRO” by HAPPY MONDAYS (1990). An alarming number of these songs are about Dads warning their sons not to turn out like them. “Kinky Afro” is not like that. Sure, the Dad basically says he’s a scum in the first verse (“I only went with your mother ‘cos she’s dirty, and I don’t have a decent bone in me”), but it’s not like he cares if his son turns out that way. And in the second verse, his son basically says that he’s a big scum too. And he’s kinda okay with that I guess.
#14: “RUNNING IN THE FAMILY” by LEVEL 42 (1987). The title track of their 1987 album… “Our dad would send us to our room and be the voice of doom. He said that we would thank him later.”
#13: “A BOY NAMED SUE” by JOHNNY CASH (1969). A tribute to a forward-thinking (however sadistic) absentee father. “So I give you that name and I said good-bye, and I knew you’d have to get tough or die…” I like listening to this song just fine, but watching Johnny Cash sing it to an audience of San Quentin inmates heightens elevates it beyond simple folksy novelty.
#12: “MY FATHER’S CHAIR” by RICK SPRINGFIELD (1985). The 1981 death of his father loomed large over Rick Springfield’s early 80s career. His 1982 album Success Hasn’t Spoiled Me Yet ended on a brief memorial coda and his 1983 album Living In Oz closed with “Like Father, Like Son”. Sure, he was at his most famous, singing silly power-pop ditties about girls, but each of his albums had the incongruous undertow of grief. His 1985 album Tao closes with a song that feels more like an intimate conversation or a diary entry – no verse/chorus, no rhyme scheme – written the year his first son was born.
#11: “REVEREND MR. BLACK” by THE KINGSTON TRIO (1963). This is a Lorentz family favorite. For me, pretty much every Kingston Trio song is a father/son song because some of my favorite memories of growing up involve sitting around the stereo with my parents and brothers and sisters listening to Dad’s Kingston Trio records. We kids made fun of them when we were little, but as soon as I moved away to school, one of the first CDs I picked up was a Kingston Trio hits collection. Even now, a bunch of us will swoop into an unsuspecting karaoke bar and take the place over. We can always count on my brother to sing Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World”; they can always count on me to rock out “Baby One More Time”; but we won’t be leaving the joint until all of us have gotten up together to sing “Tom Dooley”.
#10: “THE MAN I USED TO BE” by JELLYFISH (1990)
A message from a dead soldier to his fatherless son. The highly underappreciated band Jellyfish could be awfully silly sometimes. At a time when rock music was rejecting hair spray in favor of the unwashed “authenticity” of Seattle’s grunge scene, Jellyfish attempted a serious revival of 70s bubblegum and glam, god love ‘em. That said, the first track of their first album, 1990′s Bellybutton, is a somber tune about not being there. “Into battle, and in your shadow, your daddy loves you still. Yes he does.”
#9: “HIGHWAY 20 RIDE” by ZAC BROWN BAND (2010). Another serious tearjerker, this time from a divorced dad to his son. “When you drive, and you think about your life, I hope you smile if I ever cross your mind…” I choke up at that part every time I sing along – it’s just so heartbreaking. I love this video too – it’s got a great ending.
#8: “AMBLING ALP” by YEASAYER (2010). In which the Brooklyn hipsters dispense little nuggets of fatherly wisdom with references to early 20th Century European champion boxers and one heckuva surreal video. “Now, the world can be an unfair place at times, but your lows will have their complement of highs…” Note to the initiated: this is the censored version of the video. Note to the uninitiated: Nekkid People Alert! (Blurred Nekkid People, that is.)
#7: “COWARD OF THE COUNTY” by KENNY ROGERS (1980). A story about a father who died in prison, a gang rape, and an act of vigilante justice. Gangsta rap has nothing on Kenny Rogers. This one’s for Becky, Gatlin bitches!
#6: “COLOR HIM FATHER” by THE WINSTONS (1969). The Winstons were a great Chicago soul group in the late 60s (they were based in DC, but signed to Curtis Mayfield’s Curtom label) who just had an unfortunate run of luck. Their biggest hit song is this son’s tribute to his truly awesome stepfather that pointedly never mentions the word “stepfather”). Though it hit the top 10 on the pop charts, narrowly missed hit #1 on the R&B charts, and won a Grammy, the song and the group seem all but forgotten now.
#5: “A LITTLE SOUL” by PULP (1998). One of my favorite “I failed in life” songs. “You look like me, but please don’t turn out like me… I had one, two, three, four shots at happiness. I look like a big man but I’ve only got a little soul.” The video is excellent too – a sad little movie with kids playing out the parts and/or doing the work of their pathetic, apathetic, and/or somnambulant grown-ups.
#4: “CAT’S IN THE CRADLE” by HARRY CHAPIN (1974). You all knew this was coming, didn’t you? Based on a poem his wife Sandy had written, this is a song that, like Charles Dickens and his “Christmas Carol”, seems to have been written in fear – specifically, the fear of turning into exactly what we don’t want to turn into. Harry admits as much in his introduction to this song here: “… and frankly, this song scares me to death.” We had this on a K-Tel record when I was little and I played the hell out of it. I think my sister and I probably even made up a dance routine to this one once. I wonder what it must have been like for my parents to hear their 7 and 8 year old kids singing along to this song.
#3: “PAPA WAS A ROLLIN’ STONE” by THE TEMPTATIONS (1972) / “BARBARA’S BOY” by THE FOUR TOPS (1969). I went back and forth on including the Temptations song because it’s at least as much (probably more of) a Mother and Son(s) song. So I’m posting an alternate #3. They’re both great Motown songs, both by foremost Motown acts, and from the same era. But they’re lyrically opposite. Here the Papa’s a lazy no-good-nik who ditches his family.
Though “Barbara’s Boy” was released as a single, it was a not a hit, and it’s one of the Four Tops’ least anthologized performances. In this song, Papa’s not a rolling stone at all. In fact, it’s the boy’s mother whose fidelity is called into question, not so much by the father, but by other people spreading rumors. One thing not called into question is how much Levi Stubbs’ character in the song loves his son, whether they share DNA or not. And there is truly no voice better for this song than Levi Stubbs, whose voice, to me, embodies all the angst, insecurity, and heartbreak of a certain generation and demographic of men – steady, stand-up, post-war, middle-aged, working class guys – who, in real life, were/are especially reticent about talking about their feelings.
#2: “THE LIVING YEARS” by MIKE + THE MECHANICS (1988). Like the Rick Springfield song, “The Living Years” mourns a loss as it celebrates new life. I love how the lyrics never really come out and say, Dad was awesome, he did everything right, blah blah blah. The lyrics, instead, deal more with all the conflicts, and how incredibly difficult it is to even talk about them, much less resolve them, but how we wish we could. This is not a song where Mike Rutherford (who wrote it with B.A. Robertson, both of whom had just lost their fathers) just wishes he could have told his father how much loved him. It’s a song that where he wishes they could have understood each other better: “It’s too late when we die to admit we don’t see eye to eye.”
#1: (of course) “FATHER AND SON” by THE ARTIST FORMERLY KNOWN AS CAT STEVENS. In a couple of simple verses, Cat Stevens elegantly and movingly explains the essential dynamic of every father/son relationship. Father: “Take your time. Think a lot. Why think of everything you’ve got, for you will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not.” Son: “From the moment I could talk I was ordered to listen, now there’s a way and I know that I have to go away.” Here’s a terrific performance of the song Yusuf Islam gave on the BBC in 2007.
HAPPY FATHER’S DAY, DADS! Paul’s Inner Casey Kasem signing off. Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for your beers.
Paul’s Sunday Brunch Buffet: The Big Gay Superbowl LXIV Edition
June 13, 2010
Tonight, it’s the 64th Annual Tony Awards! Can I get a huzzah up in here? Growing up in Paddock Lake, Wisconsin, the Tony Awards represented the very closest I ever got to seeing new Broadway shows. And, frankly, as someone who doesn’t really get out to New York all that much (umm, like, once… ever), it still is the very closest thing I ever get to seeing new Broadway shows. Moreover, in recent years, musicals seem to be making a comeback. It’s not necessarily a new golden age, but at least it’s not the like 90s when virtually every new musical that got produced got nominated – a nadir being the 94-95 season which only saw two new musicals hit Broadway, Andrew Lloyd Weber’s torpid adaptation of Sunset Boulevard, and a theme-park-calibre revue of Lieber & Stoller rock ‘n’ roll songs called Smokey Joe’s Cafe.
Thankfully, things started looking up almost immediately when the late Jonathan Larson’s Rent opened the following year; and with the sleak, minimalist revival of Kander & Ebb’s Chicago. Musicals just feel cooler, more relevant, now than they did 20 years ago, and a new generation of musical composers – Jeanine Tesori, Adam Guettel, Andrew Lippa, Tom Kitt and Jason Robert Brown, to name a few – seem to finally be coming out of their predecessors’ long shadows, re-creating the musical in their own images. Meanwhile pop songwriters like Duncan Sheik and Elton John are taking more than a vanity interest in musical theater as a form, and both have been rewarded for their efforts. Sheik’s Spring Awakening won Best Musical in 2007, and Elton’s scored two Best Musicals in The Lion King and last year’s winner Billy Elliot.
This year’s batch of nominees has a lot to offer fans of pop and rock music – most obviously, Green Day‘s American Idiot, a stage adaptation of the band’s 2004 masterpiece, which the band previewed with their performance of “21 Guns” at this year’s Grammy Awards.
This isn’t the first time a rock album has been adapted as Broadway musical. In 1993, The Who’s Tommy became a huge hit. It’s general lack of coherent plotting not only didn’t hinder it – it actually became a sort of selling point. It was a colorful rock spectacle no-brainer. Here’s a performance from that year’s Tony Awards, introduced by (of course) Liza Minnelli – only slightly more coherent than Pete Townshend’s story.
Another rocker who’s taken more than a passing interest in musical theater is Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan, who wrote the score for this year’s Best Musical nominee Memphis, which originated as an Off-Broadway show 8 years ago.
Though the arrival of Memphis on Broadway has been a long time coming, Bryan continues to play in Bon Jovi and he’s most recently co-written another show, Toxic Avenger – The Musical, based on the horror film of the same name.
This year’s top Tony contender is the musical Fela!, based on the life of Nigerian composer, bandleader, and activist Fela Kuti, and set to his music. The show coincides with the Knitting Factory label’s recent Fela Kuti reissue campaign, and is notable not only for its 11 nominations, but for the fact that it could very possibly make Jay-Z – along with Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, one of the show’s producers – a Tony Award winner.
Of course, Jay-Z signalled early on in his career that he might have a soft spot for Broadway musicals. Long before Gwen Stefani’s update on Fiddler on the Roof, Jay-Z was channeling the orphans from the 1977 Broadway musical Annie in “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)” – a sample which, for me, established him as one of the smartest and ballsiest rappers to come out of the 90s. All of which makes me wonder: How long until “The Blueprint Trilogy: The Musical” hits the stage?
Paul’s Sunday Brunch Buffet: The But It’s Monday Night Edition, June 6 (?), 2010
June 7, 2010
Okay, so I’m late with the Buffet this week. I wish I could say it was for some dramatic pressing emergency (actually, I’m glad I can’t), but that wouldn’t be true. In fact, I spent an incredible (incredibly sad?) amount of time digitizing my collection of vintage vinyl Broadway cast albums. The Tony Awards are only a week away, and like football fans ahead of the Super Bowl, I have to quell my growing craving for showtunes any way I can. This weekend, that just meant spending time using Audacity to try to minimize the pops and clicks in my copy of the cast album of Wildcat, a 1960 Cy Coleman musical starring Lucille Ball as a conniving wannabe oil prospector (did I mention that Desilu Productions put up most of the money for this?).
The show proved to be a miserable failure, meeting with one catastrophe after another. Its Broadway opening delayed because trucks containing the show’s sets were stranded in a blizzard, and the show was closed and re-opened repeatedly due to Ball’s health problems. One night, she collapsed on stage. Moreover, nobody was coming to see Wildcat – they were coming to see Lucy, and Ball gradually tried to assimilate her role as the title character with her popular TV Lucy persona, an unfortunate acting choice that peeks through a bit, like a persistent grease stain, on the cast recording. The ailing Lucy couldn’t sustain the brutal work schedule, and when producers attempted to replace her temporarily to keep the show going, audiences demanded refunds and the show closed for good by June 1961, and was completely snubbed by the Tonys (which, in fairness, were far more competitive for musicals in 1961 than they are in 2010).
Lucille Ball is Wildcat! Sorta.
I don’t have any of those excuses. There were no blizzards in Wisconsin this weekend. But since I’m doing Sunday Brunch on Monday, I thought I’d collect some music videos where the artists are not as they seem. A couple weeks ago, I posted the new video by British techno-popsters Hot Chip, “I Feel Better”, in which a boy-band called Hot Chip and their audience (which includes the members of the real-life band Hot Chip) meets with random apocalyptic disaster… twice. It made me think of other videos in which the artists are played by other people.
I think the first time I ever noticed a video where the person lip-syncing the song wasn’t the actual singer was the video for “I Can Dream About You” by the late Dan Hartman. The song was from the movie Streets of Fire, which, being 10 years old at the time, I was mercifully disallowed from seeing. But had I seen the movie it might have cleared a few things up for me. (Another edit of the video shows Dan Hartman playing a bartender while this video plays on a TV screen in the bar.) “I Can Dream About You” was the first Dan Hartman song I’d ever heard, and for the longest time, because of that video (and from the song too, which is one of the 80s’ foremost chunks of blue-eyed soul), I thought Dan Hartman was black. So when he had another single out a little while later called “Second Nature”, with a video featuring a white guy singing, I was totally confused.
Less confusing (and more lovably absurd) was Paul Simon’s 1986 video for “You Can Call Me Al” which features the singer-songwriter as a taciturn multi-instrumentalist (serial mono-instrumentalist?) sidekick to a garrulously lip-syncing Chevy Chase, who, legend has it, learned the words to the song on his way to video shoot. This is one of those videos that came out at MTV’s mid-80s peak, just before non-music programming (like the game show “Remote Control”) were just starting to creep into the channel’s line-up. Also, it was a video that appealed to MTV’s younger audience and VH-1’s thirtysomething audience in just about equal measure – they both overplayed it – so that it was totally possible that you could flip from one music channel to the other only to find the same damn video playing. Watching it now, it looks like the great-grandfather of one of Andy Samberg’s SNL digital shorts starring two venerable SNL veterans.
Though its morphing effects look positively crude to our Black-Eyed Peas-accustomed eyes, the simply conceived and quietly moving video for (Kevin) Godley & (Lol) Creme’s 1985 single “Cry” was revolutionary for its time. This artsy duo had musical roots extending all the way back to the 60s British Invasion, but became most famous as members of the 70s art-pop band 10cc. In the late 70s, Godley & Creme started producing experimental pop albums on their own – records like the 1977 triple-LP set Consequences, a monumental concept album about environmental stewardship – an album which makes Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants seem absolutely commercially viable by comparison. Though the duo continued to make music (on a more modest scale) well into the 80s, they became far more successful directing music videos, many of which – Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit”, Duran Duran’s “Girls on Film”, The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” – advanced the notion of the music video as an artform long before even MTV recognized such achievements with an award show.
With its reactionary intent and its grandiose title, my gut feeling has always been that I should really not like George Michael’s sophomore solo album Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1, but 20 years later, the album’s second single “Freedom ’90” (titled so as to refute his not-at-all-distant past as a Smash Hits pin-up) still feels fresh and awesome, even if it doth protest too much. (Note to George: Make It Big and Faith are pop classics. Accept it.) Like the album’s first video “Praying for Time” (which is like one of those YouTube “lyrics” videos, only produced 15 years before YouTube existed – not exactly riveting television), George doesn’t appear in the video at all. He was, like, rejecting his stardom, like. Thankfully, unlike that first video, “Freedom ‘90” boasts actual, y ‘know, images – specifically lots of “past-self”-destructive images (Exploding jukeboxes!! Burning leather jackets!!) It also features supermodels lip-syncing. Which seemed a little cheap to my 17 year old eyes in 1990, but the video looks beautiful today.
By 1993, Annie Lennox had been an established international pop star for a full decade, with a powerful knack for not only interpreting a song with her voice – a breathy, ingénue coo one minute, a cathartic gospel wail the next – but also with arresting self-portraits in video. At her best, she didn’t just sing songs: she personified them, to the point where, for anyone my age, it’s virtually impossible to hear “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” without thinking of the business-suit-clad Annie mercilessly wielding her pointer and staring us down in a darkened board room. In the video for her solo single “Little Bird”, a (both literally and, in the context of this video, metaphorically) pregnant Annie shares the stage – or, rather fights to command the stage – with/against a cattily competitive crew of drag queens impersonating Lennox’s greatest hits. I love the idea of Lennox fighting to stay in front of the images that she, as an artist, gave birth to, even as she’s got another bun in the oven. [I can't find a decent embeddable version of this. It seems Vevo has every Annie Lennox video ever made except for this one. As Annie herself would sing, "Why"? Or rather: "Why-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y?"] Here’s a link.
A couple years before The Killers (the Las Vegas alt-rockers led by Brandon Flowers) released their debut album, The Killers – a completely fictional band with an apparent penchant for both glam and garage rock – appeared in New Order’s video for their fabulous “comeback” single “Crystal”. At the time, it had been seven years since the band had released an album. Their 2001 record Get Ready was their rockingest album yet, matching powerful beats and their noisiest guitars ever with lyrics about relationships from an unabashedly fortysomething perspective. “Crystal” opens with a simple, definitive statement: “We’re like crystal. We break easy.” But the video tells an altogether different story, one of youthful rockstar abandon on a giant rockstar stage with a wall of flashing rockstar lights behind them.
That same fall, Elton John put out two videos from his Songs from the West Coast album, both of which felt intensely autobiographical – not only for Elton, but for the actors enlisted to “play” him. In “This Train Don’t Stop Here Anymore”, Justin Timberlake plays Elton circa 1975 when he was at the peak of his fame, but also at the precipice of personal disaster. It’s a great, funny period piece and it spoke to Justin’s own current place in the pop universe.
“I Want Love” is simpler, far less spectacular from a production standpoint. But it’s also nakedly emotional, and of the two videos, the more powerful by far. Here, Robert Downey Jr. sings Elton John‘s words as if they are his own (and they well could be, right?) – there’s no costume, no cast of thousands. Just a man, well aware of his own flaws, practically daring us to judge him. Probably one of my Top 10 favorite videos ever.
