Song of the Day: The Zombies – Time of the Season (April 9, 2021)

Released in 1968, Time of the Season is distilled essence of the Sixties, the sound of Swinging London, Carnaby Street, and Cool Britannia. It was a time when all things British, from BOAC flight bags to James Bond movies, were the peak of modern hip, and this song, which was everywhere in 1968-69, seemed to wrap it all up in a tight little ball. Amazingly, prior to this the Zombies had only limited success in America, and Time of the Season became a hit well after it was recorded, and over a year after the band had broken up. It’s now seen as a shame that the group never got the commercial encouragement it needed, they showed real promise, and the album Odyssey and Oracle, on which this song appeared, is now held to be a minor classic.

The record is noteworthy for it’s clean, unfussy production, an artifact of having been recorded at Abbey Road Studios, as well as for Rod Argent’s “psychedelic” organ work, which anticipated what Ray Manzarek would soon be doing for the Doors on the other side of the pond.

This was by no means their only standout song. Just as good was She’s Not There (attached at bottom), a wounded cri de coeur about the special girl that got away (or at least she seemed special, the faithless little heartbreaker), which was well ahead of its time upon its release in 1964, and Tell Her No, an anxious plea to the world at large about a wayward girlfriend. Yet it’s Time of the Season that lives on in the popular imagination, maybe because of the way it grabs the listener’s attention in the first ten seconds with its almost fuck-you coolness, maybe because of the timeless appeal of its call-and-response structure (What’s your name? Who’s your daddy?), or maybe just because it’s one of those songs that immediately and perfectly evokes a certain time and place, even for those who weren’t there. It’s been covered numerous times, used in any number of TV shows and movies, and sampled repeatedly, as over the years all sorts of artists have been drawn to its irresistible rhythm track.

For me, it’s almost like a key that unlocks a box full of stored, now ancient sensory perceptions from childhood. I can remember the glow of the dashboard radio (Philco Ford!), looking up at the night sky from my position in the front seat, too low to see out the windshield. I can smell the rain as it hit the clay tennis courts at the boating and athletic club we South End boys all used to belong to, and I can see the jukebox in the boat house. I can feel heat off the summer sidewalks of the street where I grew up, and hear the trains rumble by in the railway cut just south of our place. Curiously – the mind is a strange thing – I flash back to the distinctive shapes of the tail lights of the various cars that filled our neighbour’s driveways, the wide, narrow strips that stretched across the back end of the Mercury Cougar, the indented, triple chevrons on a ’67 Mustang, the rectangles of the Ford Galaxy; as a boy, I was fascinated with cars, and memorized the features of all the makes and models. I remember walking along the shore of the North West Arm, skipping stones, and riding our bikes under the cathedral of trees in Point Pleasant Park. Always, in these memories, it’s Summer.

She’s Not There:

Song of the Day: Alexi Murdoch – All Of My Days (April 11, 2021)

Murdoch is an ex-pat from Scotland, living in LA these days, and has made quite a reputation for himself despite being anything but prolific, with just two albums and a four-song EP forming the entirety of his output since he first rose to prominence in 2002. Even so, you may well have heard some of his work, which has been used in numerous movies and TV shows, appearing in everything from The O.C. to Scrubs to Stargate Universe. His stuff sets a certain tone, beloved by those assembling the soundtracks for sad and thoughtful moments on screen. Don’t let that put you off, though. This isn’t mere musical wallpaper.

When I first heard All Of My Days, I thought it was something by my beloved Nick Drake that I’d somehow missed, and no matter how many times I listen, the feeling that this fellow Murdoch is somehow channelling the spirit of the tragically dead genius is overwhelming. I suppose you could get all sour-pussed about it and accuse Murdoch of copycatting almost to the point of plagiarism, but listen, there are worse things to plagiarize if that’s your opinion, and anyway I don’t think his work can properly be characterized so dismissively. Like a lot of his songs, All Of My Days is almost exactly like something Drake would have written, but copies no particular song – which is, really, a hell of a thing to pull off. For all I know, Murdoch never even listened to Drake (though in that case I’m gob-smacked), and to my ears his songs are by no means pale imitations of a greater writer’s work.

Anyway, let’s not get all fussed about whose style he’s either imitating or eerily replicating without really meaning to, let’s just sit back and enjoy. It’s lovely isn’t it? So very soothing. A song for a warm twilight evening, overlooking the sea.

Here’s another one, if this your cup of tea:

Song of the Day: Bruce Springsteen – Stolen Car (April 13, 2021)

[The song] is concerned with those [relationship] ideas: that if you don’t connect yourself with your family and to the world, you feel like you’re disappearing, fading away. I felt like that for a very, very long time. Growing up, I felt invisible.

This one is from Springsteen’s fifth studio album, the sprawling, two-disc The River, released in 1980. It was his first #1 album, and spawned his first top 10 single, Hungry Heart, a song very much in the tradition of big stadium rousers like Born to Run, Thunder Road, Dancing in the Dark, and so many others he’s gifted us. In a lot of ways it was typical Springsteen as we’d come to know him, no small thing to be sure, but buried inside were a number of album cuts that were greeted with little fanfare at the time, but pointed the way to a more mature, introspective, and thoughtful style of songwriting that would soon characterize his finest work, even if later, more raucous numbers like the badly misunderstood Born in The USA still grabbed all the attention.

The River was released in a time of pronounced economic recession, when a generally unsettled and pessimistic pre-Reagan frame of mind was the zeitgeist, which apparently struck a chord within Springsteen, who’d always had it in him anyway, from the very start (listen to Meeting Across the River off of Born to Run). In the songs of The River, broken hearts, shattered dreams, lost hope, and loneliness were starting to come to the fore, as exemplified by today’s selection, which explored such themes to honestly devastating effect.

Stolen Cars would be one of my nominations for saddest song of the 20th century. Using, as he so often does, autos as a central emotional metaphor, he tells a story of the soul-destroying impact of falling out of love, of two people simply ceasing to feel anything for each other any more within a dead marriage that refuses to die. It kills me. I lose it every time his wife describes how reading his old love letters made her feel a hundred years old. Imagine hearing that. Imagine that lost and lonely feeling of coming unmoored from everything upon which you once built your life, and realizing that you were asleep at the wheel as it happened little by little, nobody’s fault, maybe, it happens, but now it’s over. It’s just so over.

What then?

Song of the Day: Gordon Lightfoot – If You Could Read My Mind (April 15, 2021)

Who doesn’t like this one? Who can be such a stone-hearted grump?

Released in 1970, If You Could Read My Mind was an instant hit on this side of the border, shooting straight to the #1 slot on the Canadian charts in short order, but it wasn’t until 1971 that the Americans noticed it, and pushed it to #5 on the Billboard Hot 100. From then on he was famous, though it wasn’t like he’d previously been unsuccessful, not when he was already dining out on a stream of royalties derived from the many covers of his songs, which everybody from Peter Paul and Mary to Elvis were recording in the late 1960s. While others made hits of his compositions, Gord had been kicking around the clubs and coffeehouses in Yorkville and Greenwich Village, where he was eventually discovered and signed by Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan’s manager. If You Could Read My Mind was included on his first U.S. album release, Sit Down, Young Stranger, which bombed initially, until various DJs in major markets started playing its standout track. The album was hastily renamed after it, and started to sell. He never looked back.

The song has a sad, romantic wistfulness to it that stood in stark contrast to earlier ones like For Lovin’ Me, in retrospect a rather chauvinist love ’em and leave ’em anthem made famous by Ian and Sylvia. Gord wrote it while staying all alone in an empty house, smarting from his first divorce, and full of regrets. Curiously, given its generally rapturous reception, Lightfoot has claimed that he doesn’t really like the recorded version, saying to one interviewer “Do I like the way it sounds? No. The first thought that came through my mind (was), ‘I wish I could’ve had just one more take. I wish I hadn’t had those few alcoholic beverages the night before.’” Most listeners would think that’s crazy talk. The execution is pretty near perfect, his distinctive voice setting just the right mood, his guitar playing immaculate, the tasteful string arrangement adding just the right touch. Plus Lightfoot wraps it up with elegant precision – there’s nothing like a song that ends properly.

Artists. They’re never happy.

I suppose this is rather an obvious selection from a sprawling catalogue full of worthy songs, many of them less commercial and arguably more powerful. Why not Steel Rail Blues, the tale of a loser who’s gambled away his ticket home, or Early Morning Rain, about a drunk who can’t afford a ride on one of those new-fangled jets, or Black Day in July, his account of the devastating Detroit riots of 1967? What about Ribbon of Darkness, or Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, for crying out loud? Why pick the easy one that’s full of conventional romantic sentiments?

I’m just naturally sappy, I guess.

Song of the Day: XTC – Mayor of Simpleton (April 23, 2021)

This is only the second time that XTC has appeared in Songs of the Day (the other being when I presented the sublime We’re All Light ):

Song of the Day: XTC – We’re All Light

…which doesn’t seem right, given the high esteem with which I (and, dare I say it, right-thinking pop music aficionados everywhere) regard them. After all, I tended to agree with band leader Andy Partridge when he impressed me with the statement that “there aren’t many groups who get better and better with every album, and I like to think we’re the other one”. So, long overdue, here’s another delightful one from Partridge, which appeared on the 1989 album Oranges and Lemons.

The title itself is such a quintessentially English play on words, and the lyrics comprise a long series of clever, funny, and genuinely heart-warming rhyming couplets, as the narrator admits he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but argues that his heart is full of love, and doesn’t that matter just as much? Like:

Well I don’t know how to tell the weight of the sun
and of Mathematics well I want none

and:

I can’t have been there when brains were handed round
or get past the cover of your books profound

and:

Well I don’t know how many pounds make up a ton
of all the Nobel Prizes that I’ve never won

before making his pitch:

and I may be the Mayor of Simpleton
But I know one thing and that’s I love you
When all logic grows cold and all thinking gets done,
You’ll be warm in the arms of the Mayor of Simpleton

…all wrapped in clever melody while bouncing along at a brisk, happy pace. It’s wonderful.

The song is particularly noteworthy for the agile, melodically contrapuntal, thoroughly McCartneyesque bass line provided by Colin Moulding (who himself wrote some gems I’ll have to discuss at some point), and features a chord progression that Partridge thought sounded a bit like Blue Oyster Cult’s Don’t Fear the Reaper, which probably makes sense to musicians and other songwriters, but is nothing the average listener would ever notice. Said Partridge of Moulding’s contribution:

Colin had to work very hard to get that bass line. It’s very precise. It took me a long time to work it out, because I wanted to get into the J.S. Bach mode of each note being the perfect counterpoint to where the chords are and where the melody is. The bass is the third part in the puzzle.*

By now you’ll have guessed one of his primary musical influences, besides Bach.

Strange to think that XTC, whose nuanced and highly polished songcraft involved a conscious effort to revive the glories of Sixties pop, started out as a rather noisy post-punk outfit that some thought would be carrying the torch passed by the likes of the Sex Pistols. Some of their early records are pretty loud and fierce. It wasn’t long, though, before they switched to a much more accessible style of writing, with Moulding and Partridge both supplying songs that would sit well in mix tapes amid those by the Beatles, the Kinks and the Who. Conventional wisdom has it that of the two, Moulding was the more melodic, while Partridge was more hard-edged and lyrically sophisticated, though really these generalizations don’t work any better for them than they do for Lennon and McCartney.

A distinctive feature of a number of Partridge’s pieces is a sound pulled straight from the modalities of Medieval music (listen to the verses of Senses Working Overtime), and Indian influence is also sometimes discernible (as in Beating of Hearts, and Green Man). The pulling of all these threads together very often resulted in exhilarating, thoughtful stuff, full of social commentary and keen observation of the human condition in all its foibles and cruelties. There were songs about the vain and pointless acquisition of status symbols like expensive cars, about being bullied in school, about the predatory excesses of religious fundamentalism, about mindless warfare, the tragedies of the distant past, even cosmology – and so much more. Making Plans for Nigel concerned a mentally disturbed kid, Towers of London was a tribute to all the nameless workers who died constructing the landmarks of the great city, All You Pretty Girls was a rousing sea shanty (!), Earn Enough for Us was about the stress of never quite making a decent wage, Love on a Farm Boy’s Wages was the lament of a downtrodden rural labourer wondering how he can possibly afford to get married and support a wife, and Ball and Chain, amazingly, was about urban planning and the lamentably ruthless destruction of people’s houses and grand old buildings to make way for towers of steel and glass. That’s just scratching the surface! It was quite the banquet they laid out from the late Seventies on to the last year of the 20th Century, when they bowed out with the terrific two part collection Apple Venus/Wasp Star. They never sold a ton of records, but they moved enough product to keep their recording contract, and what a body of work they have now to look back upon. If you want music that’s terrifically enjoyable, and composed on the assumption that its listeners are intelligent and sufficiently learned to grasp all the allusions and nuances, look no further.

*Sorry to be tedious on this score, but what Partridge describes is something McCartney would have done off the top of his head.

Song of the Day: Donovan – Catch the Wind (April 25, 2021)

Donovan Leitch was playing folk music in his native Scotland before anybody on his side of the pond had ever heard of Bob Dylan, from since he was a 14 year old adolescent at the end of the 1950s, but it was to Dylan that he’d always be compared, sometimes dismissively, sometimes as a presumed imitator. Back in the day they were supposed to have been rivals, and Donavan appears as such in the film Don’t Look Back, a documentary of Dylan’s 1965 tour of Britain. It wasn’t really true. By then, Donovan was already appealing to a somewhat different set of listeners, and emerging as a star in his own right, helped, like so many contemporary UK acts, by appearances on the legendary British TV series Ready Steady Go.

Catch the Wind was released in 1965, and he went on to bigger hits with Sunshine Superman and Mellow Yellow in 1966. There were other successes after that, including one called Epistle to Dippy (the titular “Dippy” was a soldier in the British Army, not sure how the singer knew him), the pleasantly light-hearted There is a Mountain, and then the anthemic Atlantis, which was released at the end of 1968 and featured the sort of marathon “10-mile fadeout” pioneered earlier that year by Hey Jude (apparently with no copy-catting by anybody, as Atlantis, while released later, was recorded months earlier than the Beatles’ mega-hit). Meanwhile, he enjoyed the company of the sort of friends you acquire only when they respect your talent, including, perhaps surprisingly, much harder rockers like Jeff Beck and Ron Wood, who appeared on some of his records. Donovan was also known to hang out with the Fab Four, and crossed paths with the Beatles repeatedly throughout the Sixties; he’s there clapping along on the famous Our World broadcast of All You Need is Love, and he was with them during their sojourn to Rishikesh in India, there to seek cosmic truth from the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who ultimately failed to impress (when the spiritual leader asked Lennon why they were leaving the ashram, John, being John, responded “If you’re so fucking cosmic, you tell me”). It was because of Donovan that the Rishikesh interlude wasn’t a total bust, as he taught both John and Paul his “finger plucking” style of guitar playing, soon used to great effect on the subsequent White Album, in John’s Dear Prudence and Julia, and McCartney’s Blackbird and Mother Nature’s Son. It’s thus fair to say that some of the Beatles’ most sublime songs might never have been composed without him.

By the end of the Sixties, the flower-powered hippies with whom Donovan was inextricably associated began to go out of style, and he faded from public view, though he continued to play and record for decades after, well into the 2000s.

In retrospect even his early songs, like today’s selection, sound only superficially like Dylan, being far more pop-oriented, and imbued with a sort of Celtic romanticism and wide-eyed innocence that Bobby D. would never have communicated, even if he could have. It’s quite impossible to imagine a song like Jennifer Juniper showing up on, say, Blonde on Blonde. Dylan wasn’t about to write fanciful songs about mythical places, or the trippy joys of smoking banana peels, either. Yet characterizing Donovan as a comparative lightweight doesn’t seem quite fair, even if it’s objectively true, simply because his songs are so, well, pleasant, listenable, melodic, and sometimes playfully tongue-in-cheek. There are sad moments when that’s just what the doctor ordered, yes?

Catch the Wind is beautifully produced and recorded, featuring lovely guitar technique, and harmony from what sounds like a section of echoing mandolins playing from somewhere off in the distance (one wonders if they were recorded from outside the studio and down the hall, which is how McCartney produced the same effect for the far-away booming drums in Mother Nature’s Son – another trick he passed on in India, perhaps?). I’ve always found it irresistibly sweet and comforting, even while the exquisitely trained, somewhat bullying grammarian that forever lives inside me keeps insisting, sotto voce, “to catch the wind, lad, to catch, not and !” My better angels are prepared to grant the artist a little expressive leeway, especially when the minor transgression is committed in service of such a warm, wistful little gem.

Song of the Day: The Beatles – Hey Jude (May 22, 2021)

A song that’s so familiar and over-exposed that it’s possible to forget how truly magnificent it is. Lennon put it succinctly in one of his last interviews in 1980: “One of Paul’s masterpieces”. Remember when you heard it for the first time? I was just a little kid when it was everywhere in the summer of ’68, wafting out of every open window, pouring out of every transistor radio, while it held down the Billboard #1 for nine straight weeks, its poignant melody an old friend almost from the outset, the rousing “ten mile fadeout” on everybody’s lips. The attached video captures that initial rush of delighted discovery, as the lads debuted the tune to the world, and turned the David Frost show into a virtual festival of communal high spirits, surrounded by a racially diverse crowd composed of the old and young, male and female, all singing along and clapping in time, creating one of the most indelible tableaux of the Sixties. Such a pity that we old folks can never live that moment again, but younger ones can, and it’s possible, via YouTube, to watch their faces when they do, and re-experience just a bit of that first feeling of astonishment and joy; it turns out there’s a whole genre of videos in which listeners don the headphones and hear Hey Jude for the first time:

It’s always emotional. Jude, whoever you are, thank you for inspiring this song says Joy-Jean, the second listener above, as the coda fades down to silence. There must be a back story to this.

Of course there is, and every Beatles fan knows it – when she said that I rushed immediately to the comments section to make sure that somebody had filled her in – and it’s emblematic of that particularly magic moment in songwriting history when McCartney was at his unassailable peak, and spun out such music continually and spontaneously, off the top of his head, and sometimes even in his dreams. Its beautiful message occurred to Paul in a moment of compassion, as he was driving his Aston Martin to Kenwood, Lennon’s massive house in tony Weybridge, where he’d been thousands of times back when he and John were writing things “one on one, eyeball to eyeball”, as John once put it. This time, though, John wasn’t there. He’d taken off with Yoko Ono, utterly in the thrall of the odd and unconventional avant-garde artiste, leaving wife Cynthia and son Julian high and dry, and Paul, who was especially fond of the child, reckoned that he’d best go over and see how they were holding up, and offer what moral support he could. Still smarting from his own falling out with the exquisite Jane Asher (his own damned fault, regrettably), he was at that point especially sensitive to the sadness and anxiety of break-ups, and he wanted them to know that John might abandon them, but he wasn’t going to. Typically, he began to think of a way to raise Julian’s spirits, and by the time he was there the song was almost fully formed. “Hey Jules,” he sang to himself as he drove, “take a sad song and make it better”. Easier said than done, but Cynthia was moved, saying later “I was touched by his obvious concern for our welfare … On the journey down he composed ‘Hey Jude’ in the car. I will never forget Paul’s gesture of care and concern in coming to see us.”

Just a couple of weeks ago, Julian told an interviewer at the Sunday Times that he still gets goosebumps whenever he hears the song that the man he still calls “Uncle Paul” wrote while travelling to console a sad little boy.

Ever the diplomat, Paul changed the title to Hey Jude before presenting it to John, who loved it – from his comments over the years, it’s evident that this was his favourite among Paul’s compositions – and, being John, figured it was about him, and his love affair with Yoko, exclaiming Ah, it’s me! McCartney wasn’t about to tell him that no, it’s about the dear child you left all alone like a cad and a bounder, and replied that actually it was about his own situation, to which John responded “check, we’re going through the same bit”. One assumes he found out eventually, but if so it never soured him on the song, of which he spoke fondly even at the height of their acrimony in the immediate aftermath of the band’s dissolution. He was particularly taken with the lyrics, about which Paul was unusually (and to John unaccountably) bashful, apologizing for the line “the movement you need is on your shoulder”, describing it as a place-holder until he could change it to something better. “It’s stupid” said Paul. “It sounds like a parrot”. Lennon wouldn’t hear of it: “You won’t, you know. It’s the best line!” When he performs it these days, you can sometimes see a certain emotion flicker across Paul’s face when he sings the lyric that his partner made him keep.

The four minute coda is structured around the plagal cadences (or in this case, more accurately, double plagal progressions) that Paul always favoured – a musical device also known as the “dying fall”, or “Amen”, once almost unheard of in rock and roll, being a feature of medieval music and the Anglican hymns Paul absorbed as a choirboy*. It wasn’t supposed to stretch on for four minutes, but in the studio they got into such a groove that they just kept going, almost mesmerized by its mantra-like quality. Getting into the spirit of things, Paul damn near shredded his larynx, improvising throughout, thus capping off one of pop music’s most extraordinary vocal performances, and completing the emotional journey from the sweet and soothing sentiments of the beginning to the ecstatic self-affirmation of the joyous conclusion. It’s a hoot, when watching the attached videos, to see everybody’s eyes widen at Paul’s James Brown/Little Richard-inspired howling. His range, from start to finish, is amazing. Beneath the vocal, powerful heft is added layer by layer by a 36 piece orchestra, the members of which were paid extra to also record an overdub of all of them clapping and singing (incredible though it seems from this vantage point, one grumpy player refused, declaring that any such thing was beneath him).

At the end of the recording session, George Martin opined that it was all well and good, but AM radio DJs, accustomed to two and three minute tracks, would never play a seven minute song. “They will if it’s us” replied John.

Arrogant, and right. It topped the charts everywhere. Australia, Japan, Belgium, Sweden, the Philippines, Germany, everywhere. For a few weeks of that high summer of 1968, the whole world was singing in unison, and boy, did we need to. 1968 was a horrible year, full of calamities, wars, assassinations, and massive civil unrest, as if everything was on the cusp of falling apart, from the burning jungles of Vietnam to the Soviet-repressed streets of Prague, and seemingly all points in between. It seemed only the Beatles could soothe us. Only they could lift our spirits and draw us into the global chorus, millions chanting na na na na, Hey Jude, and for just a little while doing like the song said, making it better.

You can’t help but sing along. It’s simply irresistible – trust me, I’ve been swept up in it myself, and I’m nobody’s idea of a joiner. It was when I was part of a crowd that numbered in the tens of thousands, made as always of the old and young, black and white, male and female, while Paul performed Hey Jude to what looked to be the entire city of Halifax, an ocean of people packing the vast Commons and flowing up the sides of Citadel Hill and on to all of the balconies of the surrounding apartment buildings, maybe 60,000 of us, maybe more, all singing together and experiencing a blissful catharsis that I’ll never forget. Everyone was on their feet. Everyone was belting it out. The guy next to me had tears streaming down his cheeks, and so did lots of other folks, all of us genuinely grateful for the opportunity to be there and live in that moment. I choked up too, a little bit.

O.K., a lot-a-bit.

A couple of years ago, Stephen Colbert was interviewing BTS, the hugely popular K-Pop boy band, and asked them if they knew any songs by the Beatles, the only other group to have scored three #1 albums in a single year. Maybe he thought they were too young, or that nobody in a place like South Korea would know anything about the Beatles these days, especially not the young hot shots who were now top of the pops. Well…

*Yesterday, She’s Leaving Home, Let it Be, and many others conclude with plagal cadences.

Song of the Day: The Talking Heads – Once in a Lifetime (June 7, 2021)

When I first saw this video, I’d never heard of the Talking Heads. Had no idea who they were. There I was, in my first year of university, hooked on the music of the sixties and wondering whether the popular airwaves would ever again crackle with anything meaningful and moving, and suddenly there he was, David Byrne, flop-sweating and apparently overwhelmed by dread, looking terrified by both the present and future, and suffering the repeated existential body blows of life’s dreary realities and crushing expectations, standing there being rocked back on his heels as if struck by the random bullets of life’s eternal drive-by. He seemed to have crawled right inside the heads of me and most everybody in my mixed-up, anxious cohort: You may ask yourself, how do I work this? How did I get here?

The music was extraordinary, spare, stripped down, almost primal, with rhythms straight out of Africa, sounding agitated, disoriented, and evocative of someone inching ever closer to the breaking point. This wasn’t Culture Club, and it sure as hell wasn’t Bananarama. It was scarcely pop music at all, not as we’d grown accustomed to it in that strange period of transition at the end of the Seventies; Remain in Light, the epochal album on which Once in a Lifetime was centrepiece, was released in1980, the same year that Captain and Tennille, Olivia Newton John, and Air Supply were still charting hits. One of the biggest songs that year was Rupert Holmes with his insipid Pina Colada Song. Lipps Inc. had a huge success with Funkytown. Gary Newman was flogging the vapid techno-pop of Cars. Emerging out of the miasma that hung over all of that slickly-produced musical processed cheese food, Once in a Lifetime cut like a knife. It was out of time and seemingly out of nowhere, and it was saying something unsettling about the way we lived our lives.

Letting the days go by. It was both lament and warning, and boy, what a piece of performance art. I guess you could argue that being in a position to indulge in the luxury of second-guessing your life choices falls under the category of “First World Problems”, but Once in a Lifetime is more total nervous breakdown than mere bourgeois existential angst. This guy is flipping out. I think maybe we all flirt with this sort of mental collapse at some point, wondering what in God’s name we’ve done, whether we’re right or wrong, and continually seeking, whether we know it or not, escape into the cool, silent, psychic solace of a quiet space within ourselves, referred to here as the water underground. Into the blue again we go, into the silent water.

Same as it ever was.

Song of the Day: The Beatles – Yesterday (June 9, 2021)

[I promised one of my handful of regular readers a new song of the day by day’s end, so it was necessary to pull something from the list that I could write about off the top of my head, no extra thought necessary. I’ll get back to the less obvious tracks in due course. Meanwhile, Laurie, hope this does the trick.]

In a recent post in praise of Hey Jude, I noted that it was one of those songs that had grown so familiar over the years that it was possible to lose sight of how great it really was. Well, that goes double for today’s selection, reputed to be the most covered song ever written, which boasts a melody so perfect, so graceful – I’ve read musicological analyses in which it’s suggested that it might be the greatest melody in the history of popular song, and maybe music in general – that it’s sad, really, the extent to which we’ve grown used to it. It’s practically woven into our collective DNA, as if we’re all born already able to sing it, and I’m convinced that people will indeed be singing it centuries from now, perhaps without remembering any longer who wrote it. It’ll just be part of our cultural inheritance, like a Happy Birthday or Three Blind Mice, albeit infinitely more sublime.

Like a lot of the Beatles’ compositions, it comes packaged with a backstory that sounds apocryphal, but is actually true. I suppose most everybody knows it, the tale of how McCartney composed this most formally elegant of songs while he was sleeping. That really happened. He literally dreamed it. In the morning he rolled out of bed, and was able to play it from memory, as of he’d always known it. There were no lyrics, yet; Paul gave it the interim title “Scrambled Eggs”, which fit the meter and would do until he could come up with something better, unless, as he was fully prepared to accept, the tune already had lyrics because he hadn’t really written it at all. Not that the boy lacked ego, but c’mon – in his sleep? He composed a song like this one while he was unconscious? Probably not, right? Probably, Paul reckoned, he’d heard it somewhere, forgotten, and was now simply disgorging another composer’s work from his subconscious. Worrying about that, he hesitated to make a recording, and asked everybody he knew if they’d already heard his purportedly new song somewhere else. This went on for some months, until George Martin, who knew his pop music history, and also had access to EMI’s vast record library, assured McCartney that it wasn’t so. It was definitely original. Unlikely as it seemed, Paul really had written it while stacking Zs.

Martin likely knew this to be true from the moment Paul played it for him. First, the song’s structure was deceptively but entirely unconventional, based on segments of seven bars – about as common in popular song, as author Jonathan Gould once remarked, as a 17 hole golf course – and who but McCartney, unconstrained by the strictures of formal musical training, could have come up with that? Second, there was no way a melody that gorgeous could have remained obscure. If somebody else had written it long ago, it would certainly already be famous. No, it was Paul’s all right.

Finally, it seemed safe to go ahead and commit it to master tape, claiming authorship. Against McCartney’s instincts, Martin wanted to score the basic track for an overdub of string quartet, which he was sure would enhance the song’s natural pathos while adding a certain gravitas. This didn’t go over well at first. What did he say? Strings? Ugh. Paul was more than dubious. The Beatles were a rock ‘n roll combo, for the love of God, not a chamber ensemble. He didn’t want, indeed could barely imagine, any of that “Montovani nonsense” polluting the next album. But the trusted producer prevailed, and upon hearing the score Paul agreed; it was perfect. The final recording would, then, feature only Paul and his acoustic, backed by the string quartet. No drums, no bass, no electric guitars. There was some anxiety in recording it that way, since it would be the first Beatles track in which only one of the Beatles was playing, practically a solo effort. Would the others be OK with that? Would it go over well with the fans?

As it happened, yes and yes.

As with so many Beatles songs, it’s impossible to recapture the feeling of listening to it for the first time, and almost as hard to grasp how revolutionary it sounded to those who first heard it in 1965. At that point Beatlemania was still in full swing, with the narrative still focussed on the haircuts, the screaming, and the unprecedented mass popularity, none of which seemed to have much to do with the presumably disposable songs they were playing. While there were a number of serious composers, both popular and classical, who already understood that something special was happening with the Fab Four – among them, of course, other members of the new generation like Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson and Pete Townshend, but also established maestros like Richard Rodgers, Leonard Bernstein, and Aaron Copland – any suggestion that the Beatles were not just record company product, not just a fad, not merely the latest ephemeral boy band, but the vanguard of a musical revolution in which Lennon and McCartney would soon establish themselves as perhaps the greatest songwriters of the modern era, would have been greeted with unaffected scorn. Yeah, sure they would. Pull the other one. It was a crazy idea!

Until it wasn’t.

Then came the epiphany. Suddenly, with the release of Yesterday, it was as obvious to the entertainment press as it was to the guy sitting next to you on the cross-town bus, even though for many it seemed only a little more likely than the Yankees starting an ostrich in centre field. The cherubic mop-top with the funny Liverpool accent and teeny-bopper fan club was, manifestly, a goddamned genius.

So this marks the point where everything changed, and the popular perception of the Beatles shifted away from the haircuts, Beatle Boots, Pierre Cardin suits, and general mass hysteria, and everybody started listening to the songs, really listening, with increasing joy and wonder. Watch this performance, and try to cast your mind back to a time when this was utterly new, revelatory, and startling in its unexpected beauty. “For Paul McCartney of Liverpool, opportunity knocks!” says George in his introduction, alluding to a popular talent show that was the American Idol of its day. Then, all alone on stage, Paul transcends the moment and gives them one for the ages, all of 23 years old and already building his immortal legacy.

Song of the Day: Ry Cooder – Get Rhythm (June 11, 2021)

I just adore this great old video, which unfortunately seems to be available only in this low resolution VHS transfer (with frigging sub-titles!), featuring Harry Dean Stanton as the manager of a run-down cantina with no patrons, and none likely to show up, until the music starts pulling them in.

Ry Cooder is one of the greatest blues guitarists ever to play slide, and has been a legendary session man for years, playing for everybody who’s anybody at one point or another – Wikipedia lists Captain Beefheart, The Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, Little Feat, Neil Young, Randy Newman, the Everly Brothers, David Lindley, The Chieftains, The Doobie Brothers, and even Eric Clapton – and that’s hardly exhaustive. I read somewhere that he was considered for a permanent slot in the Stones, after the tragic departure of Brian Jones, and one wonders how the trajectory of that outfit might have been different if that had worked out. The story goes that Cooder pissed of Keith Richards by noting that the guitar riff for Honkey Tonk Women had been ripped off from an old blues song (more than plausible), and that was that. You can get an idea of what the Stones sounded like with Ry doing his magic from Sister Morphine, a track off Sticky Fingers, to which Cooder lends his amazing slide work.

Get Rhythm was written by Johnny Cash, appearing first as the B Side to I Walk the Line, way back in 1956. Cooder’s version was released in 1988. It showcases his impeccable technique, and bounces along with enough energy to pull even the denizens of the moribund Club El Mundo Elegante out of their collective funk.