Song of the Day: The English Beat – Save it For Later (December 23, 2020)

In my youth, such as it was, I frequented (for which read: practically lived at) the law school’s semi-underground bar, Domus Legis, at which my brother, and later a dear friend, were successively bar managers. I think what I miss most about those days, apart from the utter freedom to pursue a program of drunken debauchery on an epic scale, is the music. They had these kick-ass band monitors strapped to the wall, and the tunes blasted all night long, with my little clique having a lot to do with what got blasted. It was audio nirvana. Of all our favourite albums, we maintained that there were only a few that you could play from beginning to end and enjoy every minute, even if you weren’t drunk, among them Exile on Main Street, Who’s Next, and the record from which today’s offering is extracted, Special Beat Service by the English Beat.

Actually, that should be, simply, “The Beat”. They had to change their name for the American market to avoid confusion with another band of the same name that nobody remembers anymore.

The Beat was probably the finest band to grow out of the Ska Revival movement, producing such offbeat, rather spooky, yet compulsively rhythmic gems as Mirror in the Bathroom and Twist and Crawl, before releasing Special Beat Service (a play on the Special Boat Service, an elite British special forces unit unknown to the North American audience). This turned out to be their swan song, and what a way to bow out. I think all of us could still sing the songs by heart, especially Sugar and Stress, Rotating Head, End of the Party, I Confess, and Save it for Later, my own, and I think just about everybody’s, favourite.

The Beat had a knack, surprisingly, for witty and acerbic lyrics, full of humour and wry observations, sometimes tinged with just a touch of bitterness. From Sugar and Stress:

We know where our hearts are, right behind our wallets
Yes and that’s where they’re staying

or this, from I Confess:

Just out of spite,
I confess I’ve ruined three lives
Now don’t sleep so tight
‘Cause I did not care till I found out that one of them was mine

End of the Party:

Strength is not the same as anger
Put the taste back into hunger
Searching the box
Looking for what?
I love you, I love you not?

…all while bopping along at such an infectious pace that you tended to miss what they were really about. Save it for Later was like that; it had the propulsive rhythm, the horns and strings going, lead vocalist David Wakeling in fine form, the lot, and rarely is a song so immediately appealing from the very first chords, chords that sounded special, somehow, which we didn’t realize were the product of a unique tuning of the guitar, to DADAAD, it says here in Wikipedia. You could dance to it all right – hell, you practically had to dance to it – while perhaps never noticing that its theme was all doubt, sadness, and angst.

Sooner or later your legs give way, you hit the ground
Save it for later, don’t run away and let me down
Sooner or later you’ll hit the deck, you’ll get found out
Save it for later, don’t run away and let me down, you let me down

It’s a song about realizing that you’re growing up fast, and have a whole heap of painful life choices to make, oh so very soon. Wakeling wrote it when he was still a teenager, and explained it this way:

… it was about turning from a teenager to someone in their 20s, and realizing that the effortless promise for your teenage years was not necessarily going to show that life was so simple as you started to grow up. So it was about being lost, about not really knowing your role in the world, trying to find your place in the world. So, you couldn’t find your own way in the world, and you’d have all sorts of people telling you this, that, and the other, and advising you, and it didn’t actually seem like they knew any better.

It’s easy, from where we older ones stand today, to lose sight of how dreadful it felt, wondering what you were going to make of yourself, and whether you were up for it, whatever it was – or destined, sooner or later, to fall flat on your face. Were you going to be OK out there in the great wide world? How were you even supposed to behave out there, to please whoever it was you were going to have to please? Would you be discovered for the imposter you figured yourself to be? Would there be anybody to lean on while you tried to figure it out? The urge to stave off the dire possibilities of adulthood, just for a while, was overwhelming.

These were sentiments that a 22 year old kid about to graduate with an Arts degree, and possessing no particular skills prized by the marketplace, could readily identify, though at the time we didn’t so much understand it as feel it. It’s the general anxiety of the thing, and the overt fear of failure and loneliness. That’s what resonated, almost subconsciously.

Today, nothing else transports me so thoroughly back to that time and place, and all those feelings, almost equal parts joyous and awful.

A few years later, after I’d moved to Toronto, The Who hit town on one of their revival tours, and of course I had to go see them. In what amounted to an intermission, Pete Townshend walked on stage all by himself, acoustic in hand, and played a few numbers solo, as he likes to do, stripping the raucous ones down to their cores and re-imagining them in the process. I was utterly in his thrall when he began to finger-pluck the opening notes to that song that was beyond familiar. There was a group called The Beat, he said, and they did a song I always loved a lot. Pete knows all about the melancholy underpinnings of superficially upbeat numbers. It’s practically his specialty, and boy, was it evident that he perfectly understood Save it For Later.

Imagine that, me and one of the musicians I admire the most, simpatico.

This is Pete’s version, which he introduces by telling the story of being mystified by the song’s chords, eventually growing so frustrated trying to reproduce them that he simply rang Wakeling up out of the blue and asked him what the hell the tuning was. Of course; it was something he’d nicked from the Velvet Underground.

Song of the Day: Pere Ubu – Waiting For Mary (January 3, 2021)

Hailing from Cleveland, of all places, this experimental combo named itself after a character in a play by French author Alfred Jarry, and if you have the time to figure out what some guy named Father Ubu could possibly have to do with avant-garde alt-rock, by all means, and let me know. Pere Ubu is one of those cult bands with influence, but no sales, and are often spoken of in terms that remind one of the Velvet Underground, to whom they are often compared. People really take their stuff seriously – get this:

Andy Gill, in the New Musical Express, wrote:
Yet by 1978 they had achieved what no other group would even attempt, before or since, they had become the world’s only expressionist Rock n Roll band, harnessing a range of rock and musique concrete elements together in a sound which drew its power from, and worked on, levels of consciousness previously untouched by popular music. The music Ubu made in 1978 was heart and soul, body and mind, in one.

Greil Marcus, in the 2000 edition of his book Mystery Train, wrote:
Pere Ubu boards a train that passes through a modern nation as if it were an ancient land, all ruin and portent, prophecy and decay. Thus the terrain makes the familiar terrain strange, unseen – new.

Robert Palmer, in the New York Times, wrote:
Pere Ubu was either ahead of its time or out of step altogether; the band’s earliest music sounds as if it could have been recorded yesterday, and is likely to keep sounding that way for some time.

Joe Cushley, in Mojo, wrote:
Ubu are generally regarded as the missing link between the Velvets and punk. From the beginning they obviously understood the nuts and bolts of popular music, and then loosened them.

Edwin Pouncey, in The Wire, wrote:
They’re the greatest out-rock ‘n’ roll group of this millennium, and probably the next.

http://www.ubuprojex.com/pereubu.html

Wow. You don’t say. I wouldn’t know, truth to tell, I haven’t exactly taken a deep dive into their oeuvre (maybe I should!), but I always liked Waiting for Mary, which was a favourite of one my roommates, back in my days as a house painter. I likewise have no idea what this one is about, not a frigging clue – maybe it’s just about meeting a friend who’s always late? – but it chugs along so infectiously, no? It’s like an anarchic romp through a china shop, this one, with lyrics that suggest nothing so much as the complete disorientation of everyone involved:

Welcome to Mars!
It’s open all hours,
What are we doing here?
Bill’s in the back and
Fred’s on the phone, sayin,
“What are we doing here?”

I just love the pizzicato from the strings – a really nice touch.

I’m sure it means something, and I’m sure there’s some greater significance to waiting for this enigmatic Mary to show up, maybe it’s like waiting for Godot, I don’t know. Who cares? Let’s dance! I’m thinking this is the track I’ll choose for the first Saturday night patient-therapist rave-up in the nuthouse to which the men in the white smocks will soon be dragging me, the way things are going.

Song of the Day: Shriekback – Gunning For The Buddha (January 4, 2021)

Well, continuing with a series of songs I always mightily enjoyed without having the first clue what they were about, I give you Gunning for the Buddha by Shriekback, a band formed out of odds and ends left over from a few of the most entertaining English groups of the late 70s and early 80s, among them Barry Andrews from XTC and Dave Allen from Gang of Four.

As strange as it is pleasing, Gunning for the Buddha includes lyrics like these, nestled within a soothing, melodious soundscape of bongos and steel drums so tunefully Caribbean in its vibe that you just want to pull up a set of palm tress and sit in the sand, looking out over the turquoise sea while sipping a rum punch:

Death and Money make their point once more
In the shape of philosophical assassins
Mark and Danny take the bus uptown
Deadly angels for reality and passion
Have the courage of the here and now
Don’t take nothing from these half-baked Buddhas
When you think you got it paid in full
You got nothing, you got nothing at all

Huh?

I learn so much researching Songs of the Day! It turns out that the lads are loosely quoting one Linji Yixuan, the Ninth Century Chinese Tang Dynasty founder of the Linji school of Chan Buddhism (!!).

Linji is described as an iconoclast who prodded his students towards what he considered their awakening by screaming at them and beating them about the head and shoulders (thus also inventing modern pedagogy), and coined various provocative slogans, including “if you meet your forefather, kill him”, and “if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him”. Others quote him as saying “when we meet the ghost Buddha, we should cut off his head”, and the premise seems to have been that the path to enlightenment could only be trod when first we abandon the views and ideas we have about all things, including any preconceived ideas about Buddhism and Buddhist teachings. Linji may also have meant that no one can really recognize the Buddha, and no one who would claim to be the Buddha actually is, so if someone has managed to convince you that he’s the real deal, you’re mistaken, because he can’t be, he’s a trickster, and should be taken out.

Don’t ask me, I just work here.

Anyway, here we have a merry pair “on the road and gunning for the Buddha”. They actually spot a half-baked Buddha in a bar downtown, holding forth on nuclear fission and sounding all knowledgeable and shit – phoney! Kill him!

Song of the Day: Pete Townshend – Pure and Easy (January 8, 2021)

There’s a tradition that stretches back into the vaguest depths of antiquity, part myth, part quasi-scientific theory, which postulates a secret musical chord, a divine harmony that expresses in some way the very essence of creation. I’ve spent a little time looking into the origins of this curious yet somehow compelling belief, and it’s hard to pin down, but it seems to go at least as far back as Pythagoras, who is supposed to have stated “there is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres”. You still hear the expression “music of the spheres” sometimes. It’s an echo of the ancient cosmological model that envisioned the seven visible celestial bodies, all of which obviously revolved around the Earth, as being suspended in space on concentric, crystalline, transparent spheres, made of an ethereal fifth element – literally, the “quintessence”. This concept of seven nested spheres is also the origin of the phrase “seventh heaven”, a reference to the highest, and presumably most exalted, layer of the cosmos.

Within this conception of the universe, the music of the spheres might be thought of as the essential vibrating frequency of space itself (a notion that eerily presaged the discovery of the omnipresent radio noise identified by modern astronomers as the “cosmic background radiation”, thought to be the faint residue of the Big Bang). If I follow correctly, Pythagoras associated the seven note musical scale with the orbits of the seven celestial bodies, and thought that the relative spacing of the spheres and the spacing of the notes on the scale shared some fundamental relationship; he also saw math and music as intertwined, since in Pythagorean philosophy “all is number”, and Pythagoras understood that the pitch of a note emitted by a vibrating string is inversely proportional to its length, a relationship that can be expressed numerically. If math and music were more or less the same thing, and the ratios between notes and the relative distances of the spheres were likewise two sides of the same coin, it followed that the cosmos was best understood as a giant harmonic instrument, and further that the spacing of the planets, like the ratios of the musical scale, were aspects of a unifying grand design, embodying a musical and mathematical key that could unlock the mysteries of creation. Pythagoras may even have believed that each of the spheres literally emitted its own distinct frequency of audible hum, which combined with the others to form one perfect note.

Admittedly, this all gets pretty dense and mystical, but it seems that the Lost Chord is a variant of the Music of the Spheres, the perfect harmonious combination of notes that expresses in musical terms the mathematical perfection of the relative proportions of the spheres overhead, and thereby reveals a vital clue to the origin and purpose of all things.

I’ve read that one can find iterations of this mythology spread across cultures as disparate as the Celts and the ancient Hebrews. It seems to have been crystallized in the modern consciousness by a Victorian era composition that was almost universally adored in its time, The Lost Chord, written by Sir Arthur Sullivan, who drew on an 1858 poem by Adelaide Proctor, a popular figure of Victorian literature all but forgotten today. The inspiration to adapt Proctor’s poem to music came to Sullivan, most poignantly, at his brother’s death bed. The words:

Seated one day at the organ,
I was weary and ill at ease,
And my fingers wandered idly
Over the noisy keys.

I know not what I was playing,
Or what I was dreaming then;
But I struck one chord of music,
Like the sound of a great Amen.

It flooded the crimson twilight,
Like the close of an angel’s psalm,
And it lay on my fevered spirit
With a touch of infinite calm.

It quieted pain and sorrow,
Like love overcoming strife;
It seemed the harmonious echo
From our discordant life.

It linked all perplexèd meanings
Into one perfect peace,
And trembled away into silence
As if it were loth to cease.

I have sought, but I seek it vainly,
That one lost chord divine,
Which came from the soul of the organ,
And entered into mine.

It may be that death’s bright angel
Will speak in that chord again,
It may be that only in Heav’n
I shall hear that grand Amen.

More recently, the idea surfaced again in the ponderous Art Rock of the Moody Blues, whose album In Search of the Lost Chord littered many a drug-soaked college dorm room back in the late Sixties, and was alluded to again, with perhaps somewhat greater artistry, by Leonard Cohen in 1984, with his beautiful Hallelujah:

Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do ya?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing “Hallelujah”

It would seem that Pete Townshend was drawing consciously on the same tradition when he composed Pure and Easy, but not so; it’s supposed to have been something that came over him spontaneously, apparently out of the ether (with an assist, perhaps, from the Eastern mysticism in which he was then immersing himself), while the Who were on tour following the release of Tommy. This is from the relevant Wikipedia entry:

“I’ve seen moments in Who gigs where the vibrations were becoming so pure that I thought the whole world was just going to stop, the whole thing was just becoming so unified.” He believed that the vibrations could become so pure that the audience would “dance themselves into oblivion”. Their souls would leave their bodies and they would be in a type of heaven; a permanent state of ecstasy. The only reason this didn’t happen at Who gigs was because there was a knowledge in the listener’s mind that the show would end and everyone would wake up and go to work the next morning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifehouse_(rock_opera)#Original_concept

This was the germ of an idea for an incredibly ambitious follow-on to Tommy, which Townshend dubbed Lifehouse. As the idea developed, Pete, apparently at this point growing more visionary by the hour, imagined a future dystopia that in many ways anticipated by decades the internet and immersive virtual reality, with the masses laying about in a sort of decadent torpor, from which only a rediscovery of the emotional power of music could rescue them:

“The essence of the story-line was a kind a futuristic scene…It’s a fantasy set at a time when rock ’n’ roll didn’t exist. The world was completely collapsing and the only experience that anybody ever had was through test tubes. In a way they lived as if they were in television programmes. Everything was programmed. The enemies were people who gave us entertainment intravenously, and the heroes were savages who’d kept rock ‘n’ roll as a primitive force and had gone to live with it in the woods. The story was about these two sides coming together and having a brief battle.”

Under those circumstances, a very old guru figure emerges and says ‘I remember rock music. It was absolutely amazing—it really did something to people.’ He spoke of a kind of nirvana people reached through listening to this type of music. The old man decides that he’s going to try to set it up so that the effect can be experienced eternally. Everybody would be snapped out of their programmed environment through this rock and roll-induced liberated selflessness. The Lifehouse was where the music was played, and where the young people would collect to discover rock music as a powerful catalyst — a religion as it were.

Trippy stuff, right? But look where it ends up:

There once was a note, pure and easy
playing so free like a breath rippling by

The note is eternal, I hear it, it sees me
forever we blend, as forever we die

In Townshend’s ultimate version of the story, whether he thought of it that way or not, the Lifehouse would be a refuge where the people gathered around their saviour to rediscover the Lost Chord. Nothing less than that.

By all accounts Pete drove himself all the way ’round the bend trying to realize an ever-expanding vision that ultimately included setting up shop at London’s Young Vic theatre to film an extended sort of communal rave up, at which something conceptually identical to the Lost Chord – for real – might actually be attained on film. “Then I began to feel, well, why just simulate it?” he said later. “Why not try and make it happen?”. In what sounds like a descent into utter madness, Townshend developed all sorts of oddball schemes to create what amounted to an enormous work of performance art combined with a genuine mass transcendental experience, and wound up not in Nirvana, but in the throes of a nervous breakdown. It might have ended there, but scattered amidst the wreckage were the greatest songs of his career, among them Baba O’Reilly, Won’t Get Fooled Again, Behind Blue Eyes, and Song is Over, all of which emerged finally on the prosaically named Who’s Next, surely one of the greatest albums of the past sixty years. Missing in action, strangely, was the centerpiece, Pure and Easy, except in the form of a few strains which appear as a mournful coda as Song is Over closes out the album.

While a recording by the Who emerged eventually, the one to hear, attached above, appeared in 1972 on Pete’s solo album Who Came First. There’s a certain philosophical grandeur to the song, as there is to the seductive idea that there might actually be a hidden design discernible in the physical workings of the cosmos, waiting to be revealed in a perfect sonic frequency that’s always been there, eternal, maybe not merely metaphorical but perfectly real and audible, if only we’d make an effort to listen; but we don’t, preferring to focus the energies of our civilization on perfecting new ways to kill and die, perhaps, Pete suggests, for no better reason than we’re otherwise incurious, lack empathy, and feel chronically bored, most of all by each other’s lives. As the song concludes on the repeated refrain of once was a note – listen, we’re left not just with a sense of the ecstasy of finally hearing it, but of the awful sadness of knowing that nobody else does, or perhaps ever has.

Song of the Day: The Rolling Stones – Ruby Tuesday (January 12, 2021)

A poignant reminder of a time when even the rowdy, disreputable bad boys who terrified your mother could release something so steeped in beautiful sadness and regret that it still tugs at your heart strings over 50 years later, Ruby Tuesday is a classically influenced ballad arranged for cello, piano, and a mournful turn on the recorder by poor, doomed Brian Jones, who lends a particularly delicate touch to a song that sounds about as much like Street Fighting Man – or Roll Over Beethoven, for that matter – as a Nightingale sounds like a Great Dane. Credited, like most of their original compositions, to Jagger/Richards, Ruby Tuesday was in fact written mainly by Keith Richards with input from Jones, and Mick, to his credit, has always insisted he had nothing to do with it, though he’s always loved singing it. It’s often described as being about one of the band’s groupies, but Richards has said it was about then-girlfriend Linda Keith, while often describing it in terms that don’t even hint at its true tone and substance:

It was probably written about Linda Keith not being there (laughs). I don’t know, she had pissed off somewhere…That’s one of those things – some chick you’ve broken up with. And all you’ve got left is the piano and the guitar and a pair of panties.

That’s our Keef (shades of Nigel Tufnell discussing his heartbreaking, Bach-inspired magnum opus, Lick My Love Pump).

Ruby Tuesday shot to the top of the charts Stateside when radio stations, scandalized by the overt sexuality of Let’s Spend the Night Together, flipped the 45 and played the B-Side instead (cue Grandpa Simpson: back in our day, rich men flew by in their Zeppelins, and music came on two-sided plastic discs that had bumps on them, which you played on the Victrola, either through the giant ear trumpet or the rubber pneumatic listening tubes…). It would be nice to think that the AM radio program directors realized which was the better song, but really, it was the dread fear of dirty filthy sex, as promoted by those lascivious leering louts from London, setting a bad example as always – imagine, just putting it out there for everybody to hear like that! Had they no care for the women and children? Good God, man – spend the night together!?! You know what they mean, right? It’s not an invite to a pyjama party, let’s just put it that way! Yikes! And horrors! When they sang it on Ed Sullivan, Mick had to change it to let’s spend some time together, thus, no doubt, sparing untold millions of innocent Middle Americans from cardiac arrest.

So maybe Ruby Tuesday got its initial bump in airplay more or less by default. I like to think it was bound to have been a hit anyway.

If all you knew of the Rolling Stones was what you’d seen and heard from them this century (or indeed from about 1985 on), you’d probably find it a bit of a stretch, linking those guys to something so wistful, melodic, and heartfelt. Really?

That’s the yobbo who wrote lyrics like this?

There’s no time to lose, I heard her say
Catch your dreams before they slip away
Dying all the time
Lose your dreams and you will lose your mind
Ain’t life unkind?

For real? Well, yes and no. It was that guy, sort of, but back when he was this guy:

Hey, as Walt Kelly once said, describing his early renderings of Pogo Possum, he looked different back in those days, but then so did I, and probably you did too. Hell yes, he looked different. He was different. The whole scene was different.

For a while there, it wasn’t just about money, and fame, and chicks – it was, to be sure, about those things too, as ever, but there was also an unexpected injection of artistic ambition into the competition to reach the toppermost of the poppermost. It was all the fault of those kids from Liverpool; suddenly everybody wanted to write their own songs, and they all wanted to come up with their own Yesterday or Eleanor Rigby. Sometimes, admittedly, the results were fairly risible, but a few came pretty damned close, before the endless hard miles of fame, drugs, and massive amounts of lucre wore almost everything away, leaving little behind but a travelling circus of boundless avarice and frankly pitiable self-parody.

Who could have seen it all coming? Who would have predicted that just a couple of years later, Brian Jones would be booted from the band and wind up face down in his swimming pool? Who could have foreseen, in the run up to the Summer of Love, that the Sixties would come to a sordid end as the Hells Angels beat a kid to death right in front of the stage at Altamont?

Somehow, it’s the pretty little coda, when Brian brings it home, that always gets me the most. In the brief preceding interval you can, if you listen closely, hear somebody, maybe Mick, counting time in a faint whisper, one, two, three, four, and it feels so immediate it’s as if I’m there with them in the moment, and all those years between today and the end of 1966, with all their shocks and disappointments, seem never to have passed at all.

Song of the Day: The Velvet Underground and Nico – Femme Fatale (January 16, 2021)

Funny thing about the beguiling Nico, the beautiful vocalist who performed a number of classics on the Velvet Underground’s epochal 1967 album, The Velvet Underground and Nico: almost everybody refers to her as a chanteuse, I suppose because she was European with a thickish accent, albeit German, not French, and “singer” just doesn’t seem exotic enough for a vocalist who puts the listener in mind of decadent pre-war Berlin nightclubs, or Marlene Dietrich singing Lili Marlene. Her given name was Christa Päffgen, but she was dubbed “Nico” when she was just a teenager, working as a fashion model, and from about 1955 on she was never Christa again. While still very young, she lived a bit of a charmed, jet-setting life, gorgeous, multi-talented, multi-lingual, showing up in all the major fashion magazines of the day, Vogue, Elle, and so on, then acting a small part in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, after which followed larger roles in European cinema, while she bounced between Paris and New York until somehow bumping into Andy Warhol, and via him, Lou Reed and the Velvets. Warhol seems to have conceived of her as a sort of prop, a final touch that added an alluring, mysterious element to the Underground’s stage presence within his conceptual performance art extravaganza, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a mind-blowingly avant-garde multi-media show that amounted to a virtual acid trip of overlapping music, film, and dance interludes, which went on tour in 1966.

Despite her many gifts, she was no musician, and perhaps wasn’t even much of a vocalist, from a purist, technical perspective, and her involvement with the less than overly enthused band into which Warhol inserted her wasn’t without its tensions – Lou Reed is said to have found her irritating, especially when her long stints of dressing room preparation delayed the shows – but then, there was something about her, wasn’t there? Her performances on that first album, one of the greatest ever made, remain indelible, and it’s frankly impossible to imagine anybody else as lead vocal on All Tomorrow’s Parties, I’ll Be Your Mirror, or today’s selection, Femme Fatale, which comes off like a profile of a professional heartbreaker by an almost admiring rival in the trade. Trust me, she seems to be saying to some poor besotted male slob, not without sympathy, but nonetheless with brutal honesty, I know whereof I speak.

The story goes that Warhol asked Lou Reed to write a song about model/actress Edie Sedgwick, one of Andy’s muses and frequent star of his experimental films, described in a Vanity Fair profile as “beautiful, rich, and the avatar of Warhol’s dreams”. Oh, don’t you think she’s a femme fatale, Lou?, Warhol is supposed to have said.

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2017/12/andy-warhol-and-edie-sedgwick-a-brief-white-hot-and-totally-doomed-romance

The Velvet Underground and Nico was released in March, 1967, and promptly vanished without a trace, almost unnoticed by the music press, and completely overlooked by a public which purchased perhaps fewer than 5,000 copies before year’s end. Femme Fatale was selected as the B side to Sunday Morning on a single which, despite packing an astonishing amount of beauty and artistry into such a small package, suffered a similarly dismal fate. It wasn’t until the mid-1970s that anybody started to notice, but from then on the reputation of the album, and the band that recorded it, grew by leaps and bounds to attain almost mythic proportions. Nowadays it’s hard to believe that a record universally admired as an artistic achievement on a par with Sgt Pepper and Blonde on Blonde, containing a mix of songs which on the one hand made the Stones sound like Lawrence Welk, while on the other were as timelessly beautiful as anything McCartney ever composed, could have received so little attention upon its release. Seems the world wasn’t ready for the stark, uncompromising vision of the modern urban underbelly that was the Underground’s stock in trade, songs about drug addiction, prostitution, sexual deviance (as it was then defined), and generally aimless moral and psychic disintegration.

It wasn’t all heroin, BDSM and The Black Angel’s Death Song, though; some of the best they recorded in their brief existence were just about love, heartbreak, and the plain uncomplicated sadness of feeling spiritually empty. Have a listen to I’ll Be Your Mirror, Candy Says, Stephanie Says, Jesus, Pale Blue Eyes, or Sunday Morning. We may associate them with the late 1960s counterculture, but songs like those, like Femme Fatale, don’t really belong to any particular time, or place. You really can imagine one or another being sung by Marlene Dietrich, or slotting in to The Threepenny Opera, adding an extra measure of melodicism and emotional depth somewhere between Mack the Knife and Pimp’s Ballad.

Song of the Day: Bruce Springsteen – Girls In Their Summer Clothes (January 22, 2021)

To my ears, anyway, he never sounded so much like the Boss as he does in this essential distillation of an entire career’s worth of anthems of the everyday struggles, pains, joys, and passions of the ordinary guy, a simultaneously stirring, plainspoken, and nostalgic remembrance of a certain summer evening that’s part Phil Spector, part Roy Orbison, and all Bruce. Written in the present tense, the song nevertheless feels retrospective, Springsteen pulling the listener back to those perfect golden hour moments in the Julys and Augusts of youth, those times we all experienced, when the shadows were growing long, all the colours faded to pastels, the streetlights were just starting to shine, and the whole night was ahead, with all the old, favourite haunts beckoning. You remember. It was like this:

Well the street lights shine
Down on Blessing Avenue
Lovers they walk by
Holdin’ hands two by two

A breeze crosses the porch
Bicycle spokes spin ’round
Jacket’s on, I’m out the door
Tonight I’m gonna burn this town down

And the girls in their summer clothes
In the cool of the evening light
The girls in their summer clothes
Pass me by

Maybe I’m particularly in love with this one because it’s a song my Mom would have liked a lot. She was an unlikely Springsteen fan, finding something irresistible in the melodrama and outright Wagnerian grandeur of his biggest, most crowd-pleasing numbers. I can see her now, grooving to Born to Run, Thunder Road, and Dancing in the Dark. One Christmas my brother bought her a big, multi-CD Springsteen retrospective, and I remember it playing when I returned to Halifax on visits. Girls in Their Summer Clothes would have been just the thing, right up Mom’s alley.

A song can be quite like a Rorschach test, and maybe it says more about me than anything Springsteen intended, but every time, I’m Just a couple of bars in, and it all floods back. The old gang, the joint where you all used to meet, that girl who broke your heart, the album you listened to over and over, that first deluxe widescreen 70mm Dolby Stereo movie that blew your mind, impossible that it could all have been so long ago, now, but what can you do. Maybe you never paused in the moment back then, to take it all in and realize what it would all mean to you one day; or maybe you did, and what you remember now is how even then, those special times felt precious, ephemeral, and bittersweet.

Song of the Day: Buddy Holly – Well All Right (January 26, 2021)

His tragically short career provides probably the greatest “what if” in the history of popular music. Not for nothing did the Beatles name themselves in homage to Holly’s band, the Crickets, and not for nothing was Holly’s one of the first music catalogues to which Paul McCartney bought the publishing rights. He was just 22 on February 3, 1959, when he took that fateful plane ride with Richie Valens and the Big Bopper, and had been releasing records for a scant two years when he and the others lost their lives on what became known as The Day the Music Died. Think about that – in just two years, all those terrific songs, Peggy Sue, That’ll Be the Day, Every Day, It’s So Easy, Not Fade Away, Maybe Baby, Heartbeat, Rave On, Oh Boy, Words of Love, simple, tuneful little pop gems that really weren’t so simple, and pointed the way to a new sort of rock ‘n roll, buoyed by melody, clever time signatures, and a sense of the possibilities inherent in studio recording. Those revisiting the catalogue expecting to find dull, hiss-filled artifacts of the Stone Age are always taken aback at the pristine clarity and fidelity of the masters, which, thankfully, have been lovingly repackaged over the years into a number of compilations that continue to sell – essentially, the record labels put everything he ever recorded into one box set, and call it his “greatest hits”.

Holly was, despite his youth, already on his way to joining the pantheon, and the attached, my own favourite, is a prime example of his accelerating sophistication. It’s a love song, yes, but with a defiant edge, and a stark arrangement for acoustic guitar that makes it sound right at home among the songs released by the greatest of the decade that followed him. Who knows, had he lived, he might well have produced a body of work to rival that of the English kids who cut their teeth playing his songs, and who, having learned his tricks, continued far down the road he’d just begun travelling when his journey was cut short.

Song of the Day: Marlene Dietrich – Lili Marlene (January 29, 2021)

It began life as a poem written during WW I by Hans Leip, a German soldier and subsequently minor literary figure, titled Das Lied eines jungen Soldaten auf der Wacht (The Song of a Young Soldier on Watch). It wasn’t set to music until 1938 by composer Norbert Schultz, and in its first recorded incarnation, by singer Lale Anderson, it barely raised a ripple. Then came a new World War, and the discovery of the little-known record by somebody working for German Armed Forces Radio, upon which it was heard by Erwin Rommel, then commanding German forces in North Africa. The Desert Fox fell in love with it. He ordered it played every evening to soothe the soldiers of his Afrika Korps, and as it was broadcast throughout the Mediterranean theatre over Radio Belgrade in occupied Yugoslavia, played with Teutonic precision as the sign-off at precisely 9:55 PM each night, it wasn’t just his own troops who fell in love with it.

Before long, it grew so popular with British forces that English language recordings were hastily made (can’t have the lads listening to the bloody Krauts, can we?), first by vocalist Anne Shelton, and then, iconically, by Vera Lynn, she of We’ll Meet Again and White Cliffs of Dover. Perhaps even more famous is the attached rendition by Marlene Dietrich, who first performed it as part of a project begun by the American Office of Special Services, predecessor to the CIA, whose Morale Operations Branch intended it as a propaganda tool to be broadcast with presumed demoralizing effect to German soldiers over the OSS radio station Soldatensender. This only increased its general popularity, everybody on both sides tuning in, and Dietrich was called upon to sing it live for Allied troops all over the European theatre, laying them flat in the aisles wherever she went. In due course these performances were featured in newsreels shown in theatres on the home front, where the reaction was equally enthusiastic, until just about everybody, everywhere, was listening, enraptured by the sublime melody. Thus what began as a German poem of the First World War became the almost universally adored theme song of the Second, the sentimental favourite of homesick soldiers of the Axis and Allies alike, and of all of the loved ones who hoped to see them one day home again. By VE Day, it was probably the world’s most popular piece of music.

German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels positively hated the song, for the same reason the OSS was eager to promote it: as rendered in the original German, Lili Marlene, despite its superficial similarity to a conventional love ballad, is perhaps the most moving and evocative anti-war song ever recorded. Those accustomed to the pure, romantic sentimentality of the English lyrics as warbled by Vera Lynn, which make it all about the girl who waits faithfully back home for her soldier boy to return, might be taken aback by the decidedly different tone of the poem as it was first written; here it is translated literally, with no alterations to preserve rhyme or metre:

In front of the barracks, in front of its large gate
There was a lantern
And still it’s standing there
Let’s meet again in the lantern’s shine
Let’s stand underneath it
Like we used to do, Lili Marleen
Like we used to do, Lili Marleen

Our shadows merged, and
That we loved each other
Everyone could conclude
And all the people could see it well
As we stood underneath the lantern
Like we used to do, Lili Marleen
Like we used to do, Lili Marleen

The sentry was already calling,
They bugled the last post
“That may cost you three days!”
“Comrade, I’ll be right in!”
That was when we had to say goodbye
How I wished I could go with you
With you, Lili Marleen
With you, Lili Marleen

It knows the sound of your steps
The lovely way you walk
It’s burning each and every night
But it forgot about me long ago
And should woe befall me –
Who’ll be the one, standing by the lantern with you?
With you, Lili Marleen?
With you, Lili Marleen?

From the realm of silence
From the earthen grounds
Lifts me like I’m dreaming of your lovely mouth
When nightly mists are drifting
I’ll be standing by the lantern
As once, Lili Marleen
As once, Lili Marleen

Should woe befall me, who’ll be the one standing by the lantern with you, Lili? The version crafted for the grunts on our team didn’t mention that the poor, frightened soldier got killed in his trench, and now, long forgotten, aches for his lost love from the other side, while these days his darling Lili perhaps meets somebody else beneath the old lantern.

Goebbels tried to ban it. You can see his point.

Anybody following Songs of the Day here on The Needlefish will know that if there’s one thing for which I’ll always be a helpless sucker, it’s an exquisite melody. Write me something like Lili Marlene, and if needs be I’ll do my damndest to separate the art from the artist, which, sadly, is necessary in this case because this fellow Norbert Schultz turns out to have been a bit of Nazi, and an avid composer of patriotic scores for the propagandistic extravaganzas put on across various media by the aforementioned Goebbels. He was not, therefore, somebody we ought to admire as a human being, but maybe look at it this way: with Lili Marlene he undoubtedly managed, however unwittingly, to thoroughly undermine any contribution he made later as a composer of stirring martial themes for the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. His music rendered immortal the almost unbearably poignant sentiments of a poem that made his own people long for an end to war, and gifted the Allies something which, when suitably tweaked, put the forces of his enemies in mind of all they had to look forward to once victory was won, and they could all go home. I don’t know whether he just went along to get along, or was a fervent Mein Kampf-reading, Jew-hating, Hitler-worshiping son of a bitch, but either way, isn’t there something delicious in the irony?

Besides which, damn, it’s one for the ages, isn’t it? No wonder it made Rommel weep inconsolably into his schnapps. I’m not saying we give its composer a pass, but given what became of it, I’d say we can enjoy Lili Marlene, in all its ineffable, heart-rending beauty, absent any guilt.