While my musical heart will always dwell in the Sixties, I was only nine years old when they ended (though I do have memories of the big songs of the era being on the radio, and on my older brother Mark’s turntable), and I really came of age in the Seventies, so were I to affect any passion for the music of the bulk of my formative years, I’d have to somehow flog myself into being all hot and bothered about, I don’t know, Fleetwood Mac, The Eagles, and maybe, what, Steely Dan? Pink Floyd? Or Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and the heavy metal brigade? Maybe The Bee Gees? ABBA? Elton John? Olivia Newton John? The soundtracks from Grease and Saturday Night Fever? God help me, KISS? None of it worked for me, really, not like the stuff of just a few years prior, heck, not like the epochal albums that kicked off the decade, landmark records like Who’s Next, Exile on Main Street, and Every Picture Tells a Story, recordings which, in hindsight, are more properly grouped with the greatest output of the previous decade. As the Seventies wore on, I started to feel like a pop music orphan. There was nowhere contemporary to call home.
Not that there wasn’t great music as the Seventies got going for real, sure, but what I remember most is the death of AM radio, spurred along by dreck like Popcorn, Monster Mash, Convoy and The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia – and hey, who could forget Billy Don’t Be A Hero and The Night Chicago Died? – then Disco, the Invasion of the Singer-Songwriters, the often flaccid West Coast sound, and Corporate Rock taking over. Just as Lester Bangs tried to warn the kid, they were ruining rock ‘n’ roll and strangling everything there was to love about it:
That’s how I felt about it, anyway. I did not like the Seventies. Nossir. Somehow the movies were fantastic (I’d argue the 1970s were easily the greatest era for American cinema), but the rest of pop culture, and for that matter fashion and design, were positively godawful. Remember platform shoes? Bell bottoms? Shag carpets? Harvest Gold appliances (or, in the alternative if you pleased, Avocado Green)? Orange formica and wood panelling all over the place? God damn, remember the cars? The cars sucked. The TV shows mostly sucked, too, unless you want to tell me that Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Fantasy Island, The Love Boat, The Six Million Dollar Man, Three’s Company, Mork and Mindy, Charlie’s Angels, and the serial presentations of the Battle of the Network Stars, a kind of half-assed TV celebrity special olympics featuring as many shots of Lynda Carter’s boobs and backside as decency allowed, were quality fare. It all S-U-C-K-E-D. So did most of the Top 40, as far as I was concerned. There are Great Big Hits from that miserable time that still make me want to plunge a knitting needle straight down my ear canal to skewer my writhing, tortured brain – I can’t even bear to write out their titles, but muskrats, dancing ducks, skyrockets, an old oak tree, a comfy easy chair, a certain chain of youth hostels, and a ship sinking upside down, among other absurdities, figured prominently. Even the TV theme songs were apparently conceived to drive people toward the contemplation of desperate solutions. Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, remember this?
OMG: Down at our rendez-voooooooooooooooooooo…Or how about this, from the aforementioned Love Boat?
Ay caramba! Say, that reminds me of a pitch I once wrote up for a new reality TV show I was proposing, to be called The Court Ship, in which contestants would engage in various idiotic competitions amid litigating their disputes in a cross between Survivor and Judge Judy, while sailing around the Caribbean on a Carnival Cruise liner. You know, they could run a rock-climbing race on C-Deck to determine the burden of proof, that sort of thing. It would have been a real winner, no doubt about it, especially since I planned for it to open each week with a variation of the Love Boat theme featuring new and improved lyrics of my own ingenious devise:
Court
The final venuuuuuuue
Climb aboard!
We will be judging youuuuuuuuu
The Court Ship
Settling every and all dispuuutes
The Court Ship
Chuck in a week in the brig to booooooooot!
We won’t challenge your fitness
To serve as a witness
Come view!
The Courrrrrrrt Shiiiiiiiip!!!
Yeah.
Anyway, I hated mid-to-late Seventies processed cheese music. I didn’t much care for the flailing, slobbering, nihilistic, reactionary Punk counterculture spawned by all that corporate rock, either (Ramones excepted! There’s always an exception!), but then, as the decade drew to a close, and the Eighties began, there dawned what looked to be a glorious renaissance in the making, emanating mainly from the British Isles, not to ignore the contributions of American acts like Blondie and the wonderful Talking Heads. I’ve written nostalgically in this space, more than once by now, about that brief, hopeful era, which saw the emergence of acts like U2, The Police, Squeeze, The English Beat, The Jam, Madness, XTC, and The Clash, all making wonderful new music (while even relative also-rans like The Vapors, The Drivers, and Modern English released some fabulous, still iconic power pop singles). There was also the rise to prominence of what might be considered a sort of UK Axis of Cool, a like-minded and often collaborating group of songwriters standing somewhat to the side of what the pop music press began calling the New Wave: Joe Jackson, Graham Parker, Nick Lowe, Elvis Costello, and Dave Edmunds, whose work was characterized by a return to many of the classic virtues of old school pop-rock, but incorporating motifs and lyrics updated for a savvier, much more cynical era. The compositions of this loose musical collective tended to be clever, melodic, well-arranged, often a little off-beat, and sometimes more than a little snarky, and I can think of no better example than today’s sparkling, neo-rockabilly gem, written by Costello but recorded and performed first by Edmunds in 1979.
Girls Talk is a sardonic, thoroughly disgusted take on toxic high school gossip and the emotional damage it wreaks, which preceded by a couple of years the Go-Gos’ similarly themed (and also excellent) Our Lips Are Sealed. Musically, and especially lyrically, it has Costello’s fingerprints all over it – few others besides Elvis were then writing words as bitingly, observantly, succinctly jaundiced as these:
There are some things
You can’t cover up with lipstick and powder
Thought I heard you mention my name
Can’t you talk any louder?
Got a loaded imagination being fired by girls talk
It’s a more or less situation inspired by girls talk
But I can’t say the words you wanna hear
I suppose you’re gonna have to play it by ear, right here (right here)
And now girls talk
And they wanna know how, girls talk
And they say it’s not allowed, girls talk
If they say that it’s so
Don’t they think that I know by now?
You can tell straight away from the melody, the verse-chorus structure, and the clipped cadence of the words that this is a signature Costello tune, but Edmunds worked up his own arrangement that infused the number with a great deal of extra energy – compare and contrast to the version attached at top:
Not only does Costello’s track lack the exhilarating, rhythmic acoustic work, pounding along like the Everlys on speed (almost to the level of Flamenco) – an Edmunds hallmark – it omits the delicious, ear-pleasing modulation from B to D immediately following the intro, which, along with the temporary modulation back to B for the middle eight guitar solo, takes the song to a whole different level. Plus, it’s just so charmingly upbeat about delivering its downbeat message; with Edmunds, the song loses little of its underlying edge, but comes off at the same time as utterly joyful, like he’s not griping at the malicious little small-minded gossips, he’s laughing at them.
Edmunds is a better vocalist, too, I’d say.
For more in this vein, have a listen to the gleefully naughty and not at all politically correct Teacher Teacher, written by Kenny Pickett and Eddie Phillips, but given the Nick Lowe/Dave Edmunds treatment by the band Rockpile, which the two of them formed back around 1979, only to go their separate ways after a single album, 1980’s Seconds of Pleasure:
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the needlefish 