SONG #148: How Deep Is Your Love?

Bee Gees, Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack, 1977

Got back to basic blog format for this one.  Turned on the iPod, hit shuffle, and just committed.  And what a tune!

I am a little too young to have emulated Saturday Night Fever, but I'm just old enough to have been influenced by it.  I was eight when it came out, and there was NO way I was seeing that film with my parents' consent.  They actually went to see it (got a babysitter and everything) and Dad came home completely traumatized.  I still remember vividly his movie "review" the next morning at breakfast:

Dad:  It was HORRIBLE.  Nothing happened.  At all!  It was a movie about a bunch of vulgar idiots.  

Me:  Like what?

Dad:  Here's the whole movie in thirty seconds:  "Hey, jerk!  Eat your f'n breakfast!"  "F you!" "F yourself!" "Waaaaaaahhhhhhh!"  The end. (It's important to note here that I'm not censoring.  Dad said "F."  He curses like a woodland creature.)

Mom:  Craig!  (For Mom, "F" was some seriously strong language.)

Dad: Well, that's what happened!

Mom:  But the main person, what's his name... the dancing one...

Dad / Me (simultaneously):  John Travolta.

Mom:  Yes.  WOW, can he dance!  Goodness!

Dad:  Yeah, but who cares?  It was awful, son.  You're not missing ANYTHING.  Awful.

When I finally saw the movie years later and got to the breakfast scene ("Ma-- he hit my hair!") I died laughing at my Dad's hilarious synopsis.

There's all this feelgood nostalgia about Saturday Night Fever, but have you seen it lately?  It is some dark, miserable business.  Classic late 70s.  The characters do some heinous things to one another, and the ending is hardly happily ever after.  It's more "What are you gonna do?"  It's hard to believe that it blew up the way it did.  It was the Forrest Gump of 1977 (huge film, huge soundtrack) without any of the uplift.  SNF shares more in common with A Clockwork Orange.  If Forrest Gump had assaulted Jenny "Of Mice and Men" style and ended the film in an adult home for the handicapped playing ping pong against himself, Forrest Gump would be similar to Saturday Night Fever.

One of these things is not like the other...

No wonder all the teenagers in my neighborhood who were obsessed with the movie seemed so sad.  THAT was their role model?  Hardly a "you can accomplish anything" message.  It was more "If you can coat yourself in an impervious, narcissistic shell and overcome your empathy for others, and you can dance, there's a good chance that you can take advantage of weaker prey."

Contrasting all that darkness and oil crisis and recession and hostages and Battle of the Network Stars malaise was, of course, the music from the film, which was EVERYWHERE for two years.  From my young perspective, the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack was the soundtrack of planet Earth.  You went nowhere without hearing it.  Everyone knew it.  So, like a good American, I received for Christmas the Saturday Night Fever 8-track tape.  I am not making that up.  The ULTIMATE 70s time capsule relic.

For my younger readers-- the 8-track was easily the worst way to listen to music.  Wikipedia can explain better than I can.  The rest of us will wait for you:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-track_tape

I gravitated to the fast numbers (especially The Trammps' Disco Inferno-- to this day, I can't sit still to Disco Inferno), but I will always, always have a soft spot for this simpering, cloying love ballad, based on two really vivid moments of hearing it.

The first moment came in the car.  We were driving home from somewhere, and it was bitter cold outside, and the Volkswagen Bug didn't exactly have a killer heating system, so I was shivering on the vinyl seat in the back looking out the window when the moon came out and illuminated everything so perfectly: all of the scraggly  bare winter trees, the few clumps of unmelted snow, the water of the Severn river as we went over the bridge.  At that moment. "How Deep Is Your Love" came on the radio, and that image of winter moonlight and this song are indelibly linked for me.

The second was listening to my clock radio late at night in the summer of 1978.  After I was sent to bed, I could never fall asleep right away as a kid, and that summer I figured out that if I tunred on my clock radio at the lowest setting and lay down on the speaker itself, I could hear the radio without my parents hearing it.  So I fell asleep about thirty nights in a row to Q107 (the only station I could get).  In 1978, Q107 played the same 25 songs over and over all day and night, so there were many nights when my last conscious memory was the intro to "How Deep Is Your Love."  I would wake up around 4 am with grill marks on my face from the plastic pattern of the clock radio, and an urge to wear polyester.

As for the song itself, it's actually nice to hear the boys sing in a normal register instead of the chipmunky one that made them famous.  It also is one of the most floaty tracks ever recorded-- it goes by so quickly and effortlessly that it's easy to forget that you just heard it.  It has all of the 70s tonal giveaways-- Fender Rhodes piano, strings, jazzy passing chords-- but it feels a little more timeless than other music from the period.  The lyrics are just what you'd expect (I especially cringe at "You come to me on a summer breeze") but they're also innocuous enough to be forgotten for the most part.  Finally, the song has just enough of Tony's aggressive character ("It's ME you need to show how deep is your love") to be accurate while injecting some much-needed softness into the film.  People hear this song and think they remember something touching about the film's "love" stories.  They're wrong, but that's the power of the Bee Gees-- they make us think we miss a time we don't by hearing music we think we like but don't.  That is a pretty neat trick.  Hopefully Donald Trump is not taking notes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBMriOspUvA

SONGS #143-147: Side One of 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1

Midnight Oil, 1982

Hi again.  Where have I been?  What happened?  Let's just think of it as a creative hiatus and leave it at that.  After half a year off, absolutely out of nowhere, the iPod got my fingers moving again.  It's good to be back.  The album that did it was one I first heard in 1984, and which has stayed one of my 50 favorites for 27 years.  

You have probably heard of Midnight Oil, and you probably only remember this:

That's 6'5" Peter Garret, lead vocalist, Australian activist and politician, and big weird bald dude.  The band was all over MTV for two years at the end of the 80s, and seemed to be poised to join U2 as the great arena rock activist bands.  They then abruptly ran out of gas and disappeared.  You probably remember those hit singles with the same nostalgia as Dee-Lite's "Groove Is In The Heart."  Good songs, but no need ever to hear them again.

I need you to keep an open mind-- before Midnight Oil went global, they were the most interesting Australian rock band from 1978-1985.  They were AC/DC's angry, punkish, intellectual cousin.  Unlike the polished efforts that made them famous, 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 is a weird, wonderful record.  And I never would have heard if it hadn't been for the incompetent folks at the Columbia Record and Tape Club.

I've talked about these clubs before; back in the day, the record clubs were a great way to get a huge infusion of music at once.  The deal was that you would receive between 8-12 records for a penny, and then have to buy 7-10 more at "regular club prices,"  which were a huge rooking.  In the end, though, you ended up with about 20 albums for the price of 10.  

Dick Clark explains it well for you right here:  http://youtu.be/_l3F0XrL4ME

I was a member a lot of times-- maybe ten? (It was always advantageous to quit as soon as you could and rejoin.  Staying in the club after fulfilling the agreement was economic suicide.)  I knew people who used fake names and never fulfilled the agreement, but I was way too chicken to try that.  When I moved into a group house in college, we got mail from the company for about ten fake people (John Cocktoasten* being my favorite), including some threatening collection agency letters.  "Mr. I.P. Freely, you owe the Columbia Record and Tape Club $27.74. We have passed this matter on to Cheech and Bruiser, and they are coming to break your thumbs.")

In 1984, I read an article about Midnight Oil and what a wild, rocking live show they purportedly had.  I couldn't find any of their records in my local music stores (almost impossible to imagine now) so I ordered their most recent record, Red Sails In The Sunset, from the record club.  It came (it always took forever-- about a month-- also almost impossible to imagine now) and when it did, it was the wrong Midnight Oil album.  They had sent me their first American album: this one.  (At the time, I didn't know they had already released three Aussie-only albums.  All three of those records are great as well, but not in the same class as this one.)

My first thought was to return the album and wait another month for the replacement, but I was 14, and it was a brand new album, right there, in my hands, and the turntable was feet away.  I didn't stand a chance.  I did a quick justification in my head of why I should keep it (it's always good to hear a band's first album, maybe it's a sign, etc etc) and threw on side one and settled down to try to do homework.

I was not met with the wild, ragged rock n roll I had been led to expect.  Instead, a synthesizer pulsed quarter notes while another synthesizer played kabuki-sounding notes over the top.  I waited for the band to kick in, but instead, one of the strangest voices in rock music started singing over the stop of this skeletal keyboard bed:

"There's a wind on the eastern side

Ghost gums dance in the moonlight night

Mopoke mourns the racketeers"

What? the? hell?  Did he actually just say "Mopoke?"  What's a Mopoke?  Where are the damn guitars?  Where's the out of control rock music?  I kept waiting for the buildup, and the track almost got going at three minutes, but then it went back to the moody synthesizers.  I was thoroughly disappointed, but I had to admit-- it was atmospheric, and I had never heard a first track like this one.  It took guts to open a record with four minutes of impenetrable art-pop.  That doesn't mean I liked it, and I seemed in danger of actually getting homework done.

The track faded into some feedback and guitar noodling, and then... BOOM.

"When I'm locked in my room

I just wanna scream

And I know what they mean

 One more day of eating and sleeping..."

It was like having someone reach out of the speakers and slap me in the face.  There was the band as advertised.  The drums sounded like anvils (and not Metallica St. Anger anvils, but good ones) and the guitars were squealing and all over the place.  This album was one of the first rock albums I heard that used guitar effects not to soften the guitars, but make them more angular and driving.  To this day, I think it's one of the most sonically interesting guitar albums I've ever heard.  They never sound the same from track to track, even within the same song.

And that voice and lyric-- everyone has moments when a song communicates his inner thoughts.  (For example, Rebecca Black's "Friday."  Just this morning I had to choose whether to kick it in the front seat or the back seat.)  Here was one of those moments for me.  I was in my room.  I was doing homework I didn't want to do.  I was generally angry, confused and oppositional, and felt like each day was another drag into the inevitable of birth, school, work, death.  I was locked in my room, wanted to scream, with one more day of eating and sleeping.  It took about 20 seconds for homework to be forgotten.  I was transfixed for the rest of side one.

Side one (or tracks 1-5 now, I guess) rewards the careful listener with unique, crafted and expertly played songs.  "Only The Strong," with three distinct sections in a four minute song, gives way to a brooding pulsing number "Short Memory" about politics with spectacular guitar and piano work and lyrics that are far more interesting than "It belongs to them-- let's give it back."  The next track, "Read About It," is the great lost anthem of the 80s.  It has one of the all-time killer guitar riffs and a fabulous key change at the end.  Also, check out the bass playing on the outro-- so good.  That bleeds into the almost-seven minute "Scream In Blue" that starts with three minutes of furious band instrumental and falls into a plaintive piano ballad.  It all works so well together even though it's eclectic and adventurous and in no way made for radio consumption.

Seriously?  It's one of the best Side Ones in rock music.  And one of the least well-known.  Do yourself a favor and check it out.  To me, side one is basically one unified song-- I never hear any piece of one of these songs without stopping, going back to "Outside World," and playing the whole thing through.  And Side Two is no slouch-- it has "US Forces" and "The Power And The Passion," among other great tracks.

Midnight Oil went on to disappoint me.  As much as I love the band's first five albums,  I'm actually not a big fan of the hit records-- "Beds Are Burning" and "The Dead Heart" were too slick and obvious for me really to love.  And it's not that I need to like the unknown stuff and reject the popular material-- they just came off as sloganeering blowhards rather than artists when they made the jump to stardom.  I missed the complex band they had been before everyone was listening.  

So enjoy, and good to see you again.

SIDE ONE:

Outside World:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqKc5rMie9I

Only The Strong (Live 1982): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyqWoq2STjw

Short Memory:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1ii__QoNuM

Read About It:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QzH4KOf9Bs

Scream In Blue:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bByWXYgGRJk

*Fletch, for those of you playing at home.

SOMETHING FOR YOU!

Hi, all.  I did an interview about this very blog and the bands I play for, and if you're looking for something to have in the background while you make waffles this weekend, may I humbly suggest... me!  Talking about music.

Hope you enjoy.

Listen and/or download here:

http://www.michaelromanowski.com/renee-and-romo-in-the-studio-with-jeff-symonds

SONG #142: New Year's Day

U2, War, 1983

We start today with one of my favorite bass player jokes.  

A band is on stage playing.  The singer is singing, and thinking "I'm gonna totally hit on that girl in row five when we're done."  The guitarist is playing, and thinking "I think I need some new pedals.  Maybe a new amp.  I don't have the right tone tonight."  The drummer is playing, and thinking "This sucks.  I should have gotten more money for this gig."  And the bass player is playing, and thinking "A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A."

I think of that joke when I listen to early U2 records (and especially when I watch early footage of the band).  As much as I think Adam Clayton's playing fits the early U2 albums like a glove, and he's obviously a crucial aspect of the band's personality (and apparently kept them from disappearing into hard-core Opus Dei Catholicism) he's not the most dextrous player in the world.  Nevertheless, he's a great example of a guy who wrung just about all he could from his talent (his real talent seems to be being a famous rock star-- he does that side of his job admirably), and even though he's the worst musician in the band, his contributions to early U2 are invaluable.  

"B (Sunday) D (Bloody) G (day!)"

In fact, this album and the first Violent Femmes record are what I learned to play the bass to.  I bought a bass in the summer after 8th grade and came home with it knowing only how to play "Smoke On The Water," so I pulled out the two albums with the bass playing I most admired and started playing along.  By the end of the summer, I had both those albums covered, moved on to Who records, and that was basically that.  I didn't really play much bass in high school-- I got to when our bassist did lead vocals for a few songs-- but I finally had the chance in college to dig in to the instrument more thoroughly, and these days it's definitely my instrument of choice.

My first bass.

"New Year's Day" was such an important song to me on so many levels.  I heard it for the first time right before a weeklong class trip into the woods of Wye Island.  That week was easily the most unhappy week of my young life-- I was in the depths of 8th grade awkwardness as deep as one could go-- and when I got home, I took a 45 minute shower, made my folks drive me to the mall, and I bought War.  That kid on the cover said it all; that is exactly how I felt.  I even looked a little like him, only far less tough and able to stand up to a camera.  I played that record out for the next month.  Literally, I ended up needing to replace it from overuse a year later.

I don't know if I have the critical perspective necessary to make this assertion, but this song seems to stand head and shoulders over every U2 song that came before it.  I love the first album Boy, and some of those songs have aged extremely well, but it sounds like a young band's first record.  While that's part of its charm, the recordings lack a little confidence and muscularity in the playing.  The second U2 album, October, is one of the worst second albums ever made by a major artist.  It's close to being a career killer.  Only "Gloria" survives as a listenable track.  Some of the songs still translated live, it's true, but it did not suggest a band on the rise.  In fact, it seems as if the band considered breaking up for a number of reasons.

A lot was riding on War, then, to solidify the band, and "New Year's Day," the pre-release single, had to deliver.  The first five seconds tell you that the band has upped the ante in every way.  First, there's the sound of the track.  Those bass notes are enormous-- they fill up your speakers and headphones.  Those piano keys play a perfect, instantly memorable tune, and then Bono and the drums come crashing in.  The drums finally sound as big as Larry Mullen's playing.  The production here, by Steve Lillywhite, is as important as any of the band's contribution.  Lillywhite's long career was made right here.  It's also the first album on which Mullen recorded with a click track, and the difference is immediately noticeable.  Gone are the time fluctuations from the early songs, and it gives this track the propulsion it needs to last over five minutes.

Edge's playing is much grittier here as well.  A lot of the guitar part sounds improvised and designed as a response to the vocal line, and while there's nothing complicated going on, Edge's choices are terrific.  The two note figure that rests underneath the line "I... will be with you again," for example-- it's just four notes, but it fills up the sound without cluttering it.

The other great thing about "New Year's Day" is that it's not a "safe" single.  Unlike "I Will Follow" from the first album, it doesn't even seem like an attempt to write a hit.  It's almost six minutes long, and it's close to a full minute before the vocal starts.  Moreover, it's a piano-based song, one of the few in the band's catalog, so it doesn't even introduce the band's signature delay-pedal sound.  Instead, Edge chicken-scratches through the breaks with some of the funkiest (and perhaps the only funky) playing of his career.

Despite all the rule-breaking, it's such a singalong.  Bono's vocal is tremendous here, one of the best of his career.  Those high notes he hits near the end are lost to him now, and probably because of how much gusto he put into them as a kid.  It's hard for me not to scream along by the end, even though I never had those notes in the first place.

Say what you want about U2 (and I'll have plenty to say later about their more recent catalog) but this song encapsulates pretty much what there is to love about rock music.  A great track for the first day of school, don't you think?

LINK:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9kw4bdKOMs&feature=more_related

SONG #141: Stand Up

Al Green, Call Me, 1973

Hello again!  Thanks for indulging my vacation-- I almost wrote a blog or two on the road, but I had really let my brain settle in at about 80% functionality, and I figured I better wait until I got home to try to communicate anything.  Not that I'm at full strength today-- I just took a two hour nap this afternoon after sleeping in.  Hopefully, you had a chance to read some old blogs in my absence.  More likely, you just now thought, "Oh, right!  That blog!"  Either way, back to business.

Most of the time, vacation for me means not much music.  I'm surrounded by people I rarely get to see, and by the time I put Will to sleep, I can barely keep my eyes open.  The one musical moment that does stick out from the last two weeks happened at the beach with the blog gal's family.  My sister-in-law Annie (who is a real writer-- her book's being excerpted in Time Magazine in a month or so) was cooking, and had Pandora playing on her laptop, and one fantastic soul song after another came on.  I went in to compliment her on her taste, and when I discovered it was a free internet radio station, I thought of how much easier it is now to hear music than when I was a kid.  

Take today's artist, Al Green-- when I was in high school, no Al Green records were in print.  Crazy, but true-- he hadn't been put on CD yet, and the Hi Records catalog was in shambles.  So if you're me, and you want to check out this "Al Green" you've been hearing about, you either have to listen to soul radio and hope you get lucky (and there's no soul radio in the 'burbs), go to a used record store and pay way too much for a used copy of one of his records, or just put him on the "to hear someday" list.  It was a great day in the reissue-crazy 90s when I finished my "to hear someday" list (not sure who the last artist was-- maybe German art-weirdos Can).  My sister-in-law is not a record collector, but thanks to Pandora, she's extremely well-versed in classic soul.  That's a beautiful thing about the internet age, and it reminds me why not everyone has a 20K iPod.  If you don't mind someone else playing DJ, you don't need one.  

The other thing that struck me as I casually listened to Pandora's choices for an hour was that, one after another, they were soul artists who had incredible hot streaks, and then completely crashed and burned.  My one decent epiphany of the vacation (other than I need to be more careful when I bodysurf at 40 than at 30, and that ice cream always tastes better dipped in chocolate) was that soul singers share a remarkably similar career arc to comedians.  Both seem to discover their voice, absolutely own their art for about five years, and then lose their touch utterly and completely.  That doesn't happen in other fields-- painters don't have five year hot streaks, nor do writers, or even other genres of musicians.  It seems particularly to plague comedians and soul singers.  As Howard Cosell used to say, let's go to the videotape:

Visionary, great comedians who suddenly lost it and became shockingly unfunny:

Bill Cosby-- Owns the 1960s.  By 1979, his standup is wretched.  His TV career follows the same pattern-- The Cosby Show was solid (if unwatchable in reruns), but all other attempts were cringeworthy.  Plus, there's Leonard Part 6.

Richard Pryor-- Owns the 1970s.  As funny as a person has ever been.  Then, suddenly and tragically not funny around 1982.  Legend forever tarnished by The Toy, perhaps the most misguided film by any major comedian.

"na·dir 

[ney-der, ney-deer]–noun: the lowest point; point of greatest adversity or despair."

Robin Williams-- Amazingly funny from late 70s to early 80s.  If you haven't heard his first comedy album, Reality... What a Concept, try to find it.  I think it's genius.  And then... have you seen a Robin Williams movie lately?  Hoo boy.  Low point by far: Patch Adams.  Absolutely unforgivable.  That movie was so manipulative and cloying and awful that I felt like I'd been emotionally harassed by it.  It's the film equivalent of the date-rapist preppy guy in 80s teen flicks.

"Your terminal illness is funny if I put this red nose on!  Watch!  I'll show you!  Knock knock.  (Who's there?) The angel of death.   HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!  Want me to do a funny genie voice?   Hello?"

Eddie Murphy-- Owns the early 1980s.  Replaces Pryor as funniest man on earth.  And then... wow.  He now seems to be in a race with Burt Reynolds to see who can make more terrible movies.  By my count, it's still a landslide at 40-23 Burt*, but Eddie has decades of crud ahead of him.   Eddie does have nine good movies, but only two since 1988.  And Norbit and Pluto Nash should each count as -10.

What can you say here?  Truly-- what possible caption could communicate what's going on in this photograph?

Jerry Seinfeld-- Owns the early 1990s.  Has had the good sense to go into semi-retirement just as he started to grate.  If he comes back, I believe we're in for some serious schtick.  How quickly have Seinfeld reruns aged, by the way?  It's crazy-- they look and sound and feel really old already.  It's like watching Love, American Style.

There are plenty of other examples (George Carlin, Rodney Dangerfield, Steve Martin, Sam Kinison, Bill Hicks, David Cross, etc.)  Needless to say, I'm pretty scared to see what Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle do next.  They both feel like they're staring at the abyss to me.

So there you go-- comedians seem to be able to put their finger on the pulse for about five years, and ride the zeitgeist, and then they're not only done, but totally superfluous.  Once they lose their connection, their ability to hear the hidden rhythms in our society, they can't communicate at all.

It's the same with almost every soul singer that I love.  Here's an incomplete list off the top of my head, but enough of one to make my point:

Aretha Franklin-- After scuttling for years, she strikes gold at Muscle Shoals in 1967 with Atlantic, and is the greatest singer on the planet for about five years.  Then she rides the "Freeway Of Love" to the all-you-can-eat diner for the next 40 years and counting.

Eddie Murphy in Norbit.  No, wait  That's the other... oh.  Oh, dear...  um...

Bill Withers-- Makes a series of terrific sides in the early 70s; by the end of the 70s, he's the worst kind of sappy, syrupy hack.

Bonnie Raitt-- Don't think she's a soul singer?  Listen to her first five albums or so.  Then do yourself a favor and STOP LISTENING!  It gets really sad really quickly.  I'm thrilled for her that she had a resurgence and made some dough-- she seems like a terrific person-- but I'm not a huge fan of those records.

Lauryn Hill-- I think the Fugees record and Miseducation are great.  Ms. Hill then seems to have gone quite mad.  The MTV Unplugged 2.0 record is among the worst I've ever heard.  It's like watching someone pretend to be a star in her bedroom through a two-way mirror.  So disconcerting.

Otis Redding-- Now, Otis dies at the height of his fame, so he's a different story, but my guess is that the 70s would have been very unkind to him.  Perhaps my favorite singer of all time, by the way.  If I had to pick one voice, it might very well be Otis Redding.

Stevie Wonder-- If you count Little Stevie Wonder and Grown-Up, Artistic Control Stevie Wonder as two artists, then he belongs here too.  Stevie will get his own blog someday.

Prince-- Again, Prince needs his own entry, but if you take away his work from 1980-1987, would you even consider him a good artist?

Curtis Mayfield-- Starting to see a pattern here?

Donny Hathaway-- Or here?

Mable John-- See Blog #8.

Sly Stone-- See Blog #79.

See what I mean?  There's something going on.  What is it about comedy and soul singing that links them in this way?  Why are these careers impossible to maintain?  

Here's my theory: to be a great comedian, you have to be willing to reveal everything about yourself.  You have to be unafraid to admit to your greatest weaknesses and faults.  While you're usually likable because you're so funny, you also usually reveal yourself to be miserable at the same time.  Comedians are rarely having a good time-- it's what allows them to tune in to society's foibles in ways that the rest of us can't.  The greatest comedians always make me feel smart because they make me say "Yeah!  I noticed that too!" to myself, and then incredibly dumb because I needed them to point out the importance of that insight I knew but had done nothing with.

Great soul music does the same thing to me.  The best songs make me feel smart because I can get lost in the music and agree with all the musical choices being made, and emotionally smart because they make me feel consciously in ways I had felt only subconsciously .  And then, at the same time, I feel dumb because I needed a song to show me how I was feeling.  That's my admiration for both forms.  They give me that sense of catharsis that we've been searching for since Aristotle coined the term; both forms make me feel better because they explain to me why I wasn't feeling better to begin with.  

And that's why I think you burn out after half a decade-- who can keep up that kind of honesty and pace and openness and rawness?  Things get in the way-- for example, you make money, or you get married, or you have some kids, or you finally go to therapy, or you're consumed by your demons, or whatever.  Any one of those changes can disconnect you from the secret voices you were hearing.  You need someone else to carry that load.  And so the torch keeps being passed to the next brilliant misanthrope who tears him or herself open so we can see ourselves.

Now... I told you all that to tell you this.**  The thing that struck me about that Pandora playlist was that you could let all that music blend together so easily and use it as a nostalgia soundtrack.  In the early 80s, the movie The Big Chill suggested that 60s soul music was invented for 30-something white people to listen to at reunions while they cooked dinner together and realized the existential nightmares their lives had become without peace rallies and flower power.

Boy did I hate The Big Chill.

To Pandora and my sister-in-law's credit, in the hour I listened, I mostly heard songs on the 20K list.  Nevertheless, great soul music and good soul music sometimes is difficult to separate.  It has a sound and a feel, and if all you're listening for is that, then it's easy for lesser artists to slide right on by.  Same with comedy-- any good comedian can hang in there for five minutes.  "Hey-- I was just on a Jet Blue flight, and I was wondering what would happen if that crazy flight attendant was the pilot???  I think it would go something like this..."

Which brings us to this Al Green song.  I've chosen this song so you can ask yourself this same question-- is this song good or great soul music?  This song is from Green's best album, but is not a song that's ever received significant airplay.  

The truth about Al Green's work from this period is that it all sounds the same-- there's a very specific aesthetic to the Hi Records catalog, and every song follows it.  On the Al Green records of the early 70s, I think they hit on a pitch-perfect approach.  The first thing you'll notice is the drums.  These are the most straightforward, untreated drum tracks you'll ever hear.  It's hard to play that slow and simple and specifically, but these tracks pull it off over and over, with the bass offering small rhythmic alterations with extremely tasteful fills.  Then there's that fantastic guitar-- just a hint of distortion, bubbling around the beat and vocal, emphasizing the most melodic qualities of the electric guitar.  The final touch are the horns, always understated but essential-- you might not even notice them in the verses until your second time through the track.  Listening to early-70s Al Green makes me feel like I'm moving in slow motion.  It's as slow as a song can be and still be dance music, but it's serious dance music-- if the term wasn't woefully underused, I'd say "Stand Up" is, more than anything, sexy.

The final piece of the puzzle, of course, is Al Green's voice.  He's got such complete control over the songs from 1971-1975 that what he does sounds effortless.  I can tell you that these songs are hard as hell to reproduce, though.  Trying to cover Al Green songs will make you feel pretty unfunky pretty quickly, especially if you have to try to sing them.  Green holds notes forever with painful dexerity-- I don't know how he keeps notes going using so little breath.

Robert Christgau says "Stand Up" is the "subtlest black identity song ever."  Interesting reading-- it does sound like a call to arms to take advantage of the moment-- "tomorrow's about to come."  I like the reading of the song as a more laid-back "Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved" or "We Got To Have Peace," but Green's work is rarely that overtly political, so I read it more as a song about being and living in the present, which would thematically connect it to his best love songs.

You can argue that this tune is a not-as-good rewrite of one of Green's hits, and maybe you're right, but to me, I think that misses the point.  Al is so tuned in to his art in 1973 that songs like "Let's Stay Together" or "Here I Am" are pouring out of him.  It's good to pause and appreciate all the songs from that moment, because it's never coming back.

Irregardless***, it's nice to be home.  Time to do eleven loads of laundry.  I think I'll put on my Motown's Hits To Do Laundry To playlist...

LINK

* Thank you, IMDB.

** Thank you, Bill Cosby.

*** Thank you, Massholes.

SONG #140: Friends

Elton John, Friends Soundtrack, 1970

Forgive a sentimental fool his indulgences.

This track is a forgotten Elton John song from an even more forgotten film.  He agreed to do the music right before he exploded as a solo artist, and this album isn't usually included in his discography.  There are actually two great tracks on here-- this one, and a song called "Can I Put You On," which is on Elton's 11-17-70 album (by far his best, I think, but that's another blog.  But seriously, 11-17-70-- check it out.)

I've always had a soft spot for this tune-- I think the album cover is hilarious, it knows when to end (only 2:23, probably the exact length of the film's credits.  It used to be that a film's theme song had to be under three minutes for that reason) and it features Elton's pre-fame singing voice.  I love Elton's performances on his early albums, before he's a parody of himself and singing through a Donald Duck costume.

On his early records, John strikes me as a somewhat shy talent.  It's part of what makes those albums great.  The guy's obviously phenomenal, but he still has a memory of being unknown and a regular person.  Compare the singing on "Burn Down The Mission" to "Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting."  They're both uptempo tracks, but the singing on the first one is earnest and in love with the music he's playing.  Just four years later, he had become an entertainer first and a musician second, and I think that's why he lost that quality and balance that made him special in the first place.  In a list of "Artists who lost their way," John would definitely make the top 10 (other finalists-- Rod Stewart, R.E.M., The Outfield).

On this song, John is at his most charming, unassuming and effortless, and while it's a breezy little tune without much heft to it, I think that chorus is a winner every time.  Try listening to it this morning and not singing "Making Friends!" spontaneously later in the day-- can't be done.  I like all the dramatic touches-- the string section on the first chorus, the late entry of the drums in the second verse, the introduction of backing vocals in the second chorus.  It's classic Elton John before there was such a thing-- it's like having a glimpse into the rough draft of a great book.  Just a year later, he had this formula perfected.

I actually chose "Friends" today, instead of obeying the rules of the shuffle, not just because I wanted to look up weird photos of Elton on Google (here's a few more):

uninhibited (adj) 1.not inhibited or restricted.  2. not restrained by social convention or usage

but because I've been overwhelmed by the response to the blog this past week. I've gotten hundreds of comments from old friends and new, and it's been great to hear from all of you.  I'm humbled seeing the faces of so many folks who are checking in and sticking with my ramblings.  Moreover, this song's sense of the passage of time and the resulting fragility of friendships resonated with me as I looked at the number of people who I haven't talked to in so long who are revisiting these songs and stories with me.

I'm on the road for the next several days, but I'll be hoping that "the day will be a lighter highway" for you, and I'm hoping to be back at it this weekend.  Thanks again for reading, and sometime this week put your favorite album on and enjoy some summer.

Too maudlin?  Perhaps, but I needed to offset the snarkiness of last week.  Maybe I'll do "Lonesome Loser" by the Little River Band next as an antidote.  See you soon--

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17u9mxdvQEo

(Yay-- it only took 140 songs for me to figure out how to embed a link.)

SONG #139: Angry Eyes

Loggins and Messina, Loggins And Messina, 1972

Some songs you need to keep close to you for completely random reasons.  Here's the story with this one, a hilarious country-rock monstrosity from the days of sleeveless, cable-knit sweater vests, awesome beards, and mid-song bass solos.

It is the summer of 1992.  I am driving across the country from California after my first year of teaching to go back home to Maryland for a few weeks in the summer because I basically can't figure out what else to do.  I am driving by myself, so I want to do the trip as fast as possible.  We are in the days before iPods or satellite radio, so the entire passanger seat of my car is a pile of tapes and CDs.  I don't have a CD player in my car (too fancy for me) so I have to use a Discman and one of those cassette adapters, which means I have to change the batteries every four hours or so-- there's also a huge stack of AA batteries in the glove compartment.

This is the itinerary that I follow:

Phase 1-- San Francisco to rest stop somewhere in Nebraska on I-80  (20 hours)

Sleep in back of car for six hours.

Phase 2-- Nebraska to Indianapolis, IN (spring for truly tragic hotel room) (17 hours)

Phase 3-- Indianapolis IN to Annapolis, MD  (11 hours)

That is a dumb, ill-advised way to travel across the country, but I was young and broke, and it made every conversation with every gas station clerk and Dairy Queen window attendant (and the cop who gave me a speeding ticket for going 68 in a 65) extremely meaningful.  Luckily, midwesterners are incredibly, genuinely friendly, so I had long conversations about corn-infused gasoline (Gasohol) and life in Iowa while filling either the car or me up.

On the way home, I've even dumber:

Phase 1-- Maryland to Champaign-Urbana IL to stay with friend from high school (hey, Sally).  (12 1/2 hours, plus a day of hanging out)

Phase 2-- Champaign-Urbana IL to... San Francisco.  Non-stop.  (34 hours)

You read that correctly.  I drove for 34 straight hours, by myself, from Illinois to San Francisco, across some of the most boring real estate in the world.  Why?  Because I could, I guess.  It was the kind of decision that a lonely, bored 22 year-old makes.  I thought I'd get back home and have more summer in CA.  Instead, the effort of doing that ridiculous leg made me sick as hell for a week.

Somewhere around 4am of that night, in the desolate Wyoming darkness, I realized that I wasn't what one would call completely awake.  I decided to see how long I could go without blinking.  I made myself blink at 45 minutes to make sure I wasn't dead.  I had entered a completely zen, half-life state.  I just guided the car's headlights in between the lines of the road.  I had not seen another vehicle, even a truck, for hours.  At 5am, I decided that I better pull over, so I paid attention for the next exit.

Have you been through Wyoming on I-80?  You get about five chances to pull over in the entire state.  I had just passed Rawlins, and the next town was Rock Springs, about 100 miles away.  The interstate was under construction, so there was no shoulder, and no rest stop.  Moreover, when I had last pulled over for gas at Midnight, a huge, filthy, drenched (it had been pouring) obviously insane hairy guy in a camoflage poncho with a hand-written sign saying "EAST" had asked me for a ride (happily, I was headed "WEST"), and he'd spooked me a bit about trying the "sleep in the rest stop" plan again.

So I had to grin and bear it-- I had gotten myself into this stupid mess, and now it was time to see how much I wanted to survive.  I was out of junk food and caffeine.  The Discman's batteries had given out, and I couldn't reach or find replacements.  Desperate, I turned on the radio for help.

Have you ever listened to Wyoming radio?  Not a lot of choices, especially in 1992.  Here's what scanning the dial got me on FM:

Bone-crushing static.

Scan

Bone-crushing static.

Scan

"Some people seem to think that the words of Jesus... are about peace.  WRONG!!"

Scan

Modern country music.

Scan

Bone-crushing static.

Scan

Bone-crushing static.

Scan

"Fiery pits of HELL!!!"

Scan

Modern country music.

That's it.  Two stations, equally unappealing.  The religious barker would have turned me away from God, and the modern country music would have made me crash the car on purpose to try to meet Him.  I began to panic, and switched to AM.

Scan... nothing.  I go around the WHOLE dial once without catching anything, but then my radio pulls up a miraculously clean signal of a station playing the very end of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Gimme Three Steps."

This song is what comes on next, and I'm a fan for life.  After these eight minutes, I feel like I've had a nap and a shower.  When I hit Rock Springs at 6:30am, I just kept on going and going and going until I was home.  "Angry Eyes" was my guardian angel.

If you had asked me to predict which song would do that, it would not have been this one.  Loggins* and Messina are responsible for two of my least favorite songs-- the "I'm so in love with you honey" song that people make bands play at weddings, and "House At Pooh Corner."  I have particular venom for that one because I've heard six or two thousand (I lost count) a cappella groups sing it, and I really dislike a cappella.  It's not just because in college the a cappella groups would draw 800 people to a show while the rock bands played to... the other fourteen surly guys in the other rock bands.  Well, maybe that's the main reason.  But I still hate it-- all the cutesy arrangements, and swaying back and forth, and "Let's all wear suits that we got for our Bar Mitzvahs" outfits, and the "Let's have the guy who can't sing do percussion" beatboxing, and the skits, and the cheesy, Broadway arrangements that ruin songs we all love-- I saw a group do "Where The Streets Have No Name," and half the band "sang" The Edge's guitar part through the whole thing by going "Dunka-dunka-dunka-dunka" over and over.  Some nights I still wake up screaming.  Yes, I'm bitter and judgmental, but so was Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites, and he was right about a lot of things also.  

Irony is when the actual meaning is the complete opposite from the literal meaning.

So those of you who were in a cappella groups, feel free to write in and defend yourselves.  Or, I can keep your identities secret, and you can continue to live taunt-free adult lives.  Your choice.

Back to Loggins and Messina.  Under any other circumstances, this terribly conceived song whose faults are numerous would never have garnered much attention from me, but it's precisely those faults that attracted my attention enough to pull me back into the land of conscious thought and safe driving.  

"Angry Eyes" is a really funny attempt to be a bunch of different genres all at once.  It starts off as a classic 70s swamp-rock tune, all Doobie Brotherish, but Loggins' twangy vocal puts us right into country singer-songwriter world.  The chorus invents the sound The Eagles would shamelessly rip off for the next eight years, and the lyrics are right up Glenn Frey's misogynistic alley as well (see Blog #17 for a more complete Eagles analysis)-- "Well I bet you wish you could cut me down with those angry eyes."  The lyrics to this song are a total throwaway.  Woman looks angrily at man.  Man notices.  Fini.

That covers the first minute, and the 2:25 single version never leaves that territory.  But at 5am, that DJ on that little tiny AM station wasn't about to be bothered changing a record that quickly.  I thankfully got the full, 7:45 minute album version,  'cause that's where the fun stuff is.  Things get very weird and quickly at 1:15.  Without warning, we get a full horn section playing a Steely Dan-style chart for twenty seconds, right into a BASS SOLO.  A bass solo ninety seconds in.  I can understand having a bass solo in a twenty minute epic, but after ONE chorus?  That's just lazy.  That's followed by a soprano sax and xylophone dueling solos section that continues for the next two minutes.  I am not inventing this.  You're listening to it, right?  Doesn't it sounds like the Stones' "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" played on the instruments they gave you to mess around with in elementary school music class?  That's when I really perked up in the car.  I thought I was hallucinating.  "Is that a... a xylophone?"  And it is.  NOT a vibraphone, the much more cool, electrified option, but an old-fashioned, "OK kids, now we're going to learn Pop Goes The Weasel" XYLOPHONE!  Needless to say, I was intrigued.

The guitar returns at 3:00, but the sax isn't done hitting that high note.  We get not one, not two, but three "WAAAAAAAAAAAA!!" from the sax player.  It cracks me up every time.  "Not yet!  Not yet!  This is my moment!"  By 3:30, we're in classic 70s guitar solo land.  This could be a Chicago track at this point.  At 4:00, the guitar starts to lose ideas or interests in things, and he plays a bizarre, angular figure that, in a live context, would mean "I'm done.  Someone else take it."  No such luck-- the band just keeps on goin', so the guitar has to also.  For another full minute!  It's the most tired, "I wish this were over" guitar solo I've ever heard on a studio recording.

At 5:00, the drummer suddenly switches to double time randomly, but no one in the band follows.  He tries again.  Strike two.  What is going to save this endless tune?  A FLUTE SOLO at 5:25!!  Seriously, were instruments just lying around?  Did the guitar player put down his guitar dejectedly, having failed the band and the track, see the flute, and think, "Ah, what the hell?"  Now we're in the Jethro Tull wilderness, all jazzy guitar single note arpeggios and a meandering flute.  It has been FIVE MINUTES since the band sang the chorus.  At this point, we're heading into prog-land.  This one minute section wouldn't be out of place on a Yes record.

And then... after almost six full minutes of some of the most random jamming committed to tape, we're back to the beginning!  The band gives us 45 seconds of pop-country rock, and even tries to join the drummer in double time for the last few seconds, and we're out.

It killed me, and I found myself blurting out the chorus randomly for the next twelve hours.  I couldn't wait to get home and tell people about this crazy track.  

And now I have.   

Closure.

If I asked you to name the one song that got your heart racing, NO ONE would mention this one.  It's a time capsule relic.  But I don't care-- for the rest of my life, singing "Angry Eyeee-zzzzz!" will be like getting a Vitamin B-12 shot.

I always wonder who that DJ was who played me that song, who was bothering to broadcast anything to that empty section of Wyoming nothingness-- he must have been broadcasting from his car, since I was in the middle of nowhere and the signal faded to nothing five minutes after this tune.  I drove on and away, bringing, gratefully, this little piece of unforgettable detritus with me.

LINK:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oowuyzxgmtg

*  Kenny Loggins also wrote the theme songs for Caddyshack and Footloose, which deserve a loving blog of their own.