And Now There Are Two

I first met Bill in 1964, by accident.  Bob and I had cruised into this club somewhere in Boscombe, met a bunch of musicians and (to cut it short) picked up Bill and formed the group that we named the Trackmarks.  Me, Bob and Bill were the core of that group.

 When we decided to split out, we gradually formed the core of Dave Anthony’s Moods, recruiting others as we went along.

 Bill was a great bass player.  All the way through our musical relationship, he was there behind everyone else’s madcap flights, holding down the foundation.  We probably didn’t appreciate that enough.  Andy once told me that he’d gone on to make great keyboard music of his own; I’m sorry that I never heard that.

 He was very funny, and loved a Spoonerism.  (Or Snooperism, as he called them.)  I can’t remember any of his jokes, which is probably just as well, because the best jokes vanish from their moment.

 Some years ago my phone rang, and it was Bill.  We chatted a bit.  He said “your voice sounds different.”  I’m sure he was right.  So did his.

It Was Sixty Years Ago Today

Well, yesterday actually.

I’d wanted to mark the anniversary in some way – not because anniversaries matter particularly in themselves, but more because it was an excuse to recall some Young Emotions (that was Ricky Nelson, btw) and share some superb music.

But it had to wait until today; I would gladly have shared Buddy with everyone, but it doesn’t work that way unless you’re prepared to selfishly hijack a family get-together, which I wasn’t.  

So here are the five tracks I chose for us to share this evening (you’ll have to find your own spotilinks):

1. True Love Ways
2. Rave On
3. Learning The Game
4. Everyday
5. and of course That’ll Be The Day (That intro was the first thing I ever learnt to play, after skiffle chords).

Fundaments of Music – Rhythm

Heart, Lungs and Feet.

Feet probably came first, because we tend to walk in 4/4 time (although see below for the waltz).  Breathing is two to the bar – in, out – and the heartbeat is tempo rather than rhythm (it’s no accident that the catchiest riffs are at around 120 bpm, twice the average pulse rate).

So the breathing would tend to synchronise with the footsteps, and sooner or later sounds – grunts, probably, to begin with – would naturally get uttered.  In pre-agricultural societies, there was a lot of group walking, so the grunts would get synchronised within the group.  Once they stopped for a rest, someone would still have those grunts and that walking rhythm persisting in their head, and eventually they’d start to slap their thighs, or clap their hands, someone else would laugh and join in… and you have the start of music.  The roots of rhythm, as Paul Simon beautifully captured it.

Oh, and that 3/4 – I don’t know about you, but that’s how I tend to get up a steep slope.  One leg does the heavy lifting, then it’s the other one’s turn.

The Fundaments of Music

I was sent towards this by a friend’s quiz asking us to name some young rich musicians, which took us via a fairly long route to musical styles, which led Z to nominate ‘techno’ as one style she couldn’t deal with, which pointed me towards Underworld and then, back from there, to Terry Riley and ‘In C’, five of its intriguing 35 minutes’ worth we listened to….  And now, here I am, wondering what makes some sound into music.

I used to think there were three fundaments, but I’ve just expanded that to five.  Here they are:

1.      Rhythm

2.      Melody

3.      Harmony

and the two new ones:

4.      Structure

5.      Texture

It’s not impossible that I might expound on each of these in the future.  After all, what are blogs for if not to burble away to oneself?

Clue: ‘In C’ exploits 1 and 5 at the expense of the others.

Rules Are Made To Be Broken

We were discussing Picasso the other evening, and how he needed to learn the fundamental skills of his craft, and the understood rules of his medium, before he could afford to ignore both of those imposters and become a true artist.

I’m now listening to Cecil Taylor doing something comparable to improvised jazz.  The first track on ‘The World of Cecil Taylor’ (Candid 9006, 1960) is called ‘Air’, and could easily be discounted as just a bunch of, let’s say, well-enhanced would-be’s plonking around on their piano, drums and bass to demonstrate their undoubted mastery of the skills without ending up making anything approaching real music – until you get halfway through, and the age-old jazz trick of ‘fours with the drummer’ kicks in.  At which point you realise that Cecil on piano and Dennis Charles on drums are actually playing the same phrases, competitively bouncing them off each other and winding each other’s last shot up to the next level, and that they know the rules too.  At which point you – or at any rate I – burst out laughing.

But it’s track two that really proves my point (if I have one).  It’s a corny ballad from South Pacific called ‘This Nearly Was Mine’.  Taylor mischievously tears it apart and stitches it back together like a child playing with a dressing-up box – but the song never gets lost; and I imagined that he was feeling, and expressing, a variant of what Rodgers was after when he tried to catch Emile’s emotions when he thought he’d lost Nellie.

But I’ve stretched this far enough, so I’m off to antidote with a chunk of The Clash. Who also knew how to break the rules they knew.

The Hills Are Alive

Sadly, nobody made a 1970s horror film with that title.  They had Eyes.  (But if so, they must’ve been alive, surely?  You can’t have eyes if you’re dead – you can only have deadeyes.)

So, moving rapidly on: everyone agrees that The Sound of Music is the best awful song ever written, in the best awful musical ever written, at least by R&H.  A school of thought suggests that they should have packed it in after Carousel, and I have some sympathy with that, only bidding South Pacific as a preferred quit point.  But they knew what they were doing.  Well, they’d both been in the trade, individually and then together, for half a century or more.  (The first trace I can find of Rodgers as a composer is a song called ‘Any Old Place with You’, with Lorenz Hart, in 1919; and of Hammerstein writing, with Otto Harbach and Herbert Stothart, a musical called ‘Jimmie’ in 1920, from which no songs, perhaps thankfully, seem to have survived.)

Anyway, what I’d meant to write about (prompted by some thoughts about rhythm, melody and harmony) – the actual sound of the stuff – will have to wait for another day.  Besides, there aren’t any hills around here.

(to be continued...)

Influential Albums #5 – Todd

About the fourth time I listened to this, I thought I understood the first track.  It’s called ‘How About A Little Fanfare?’, and it begins with Todd enunciating seven heavily distorted syllables that make no sense at all, except that they’re followed by a loud, cacophonous, well, fanfare.

So at that fourth listen, I clapped on the cans, dropped the needle into the groove, and heard a very quiet pre-play of what was to follow – the fanfare…  the syllables suddenly made sense… “how was that little fanfare, that little fanfare…?”

I’ve never been able to make it happen since.  Presumably you have to hit the run-in groove at exactly the right point to hear it; or else I was hallucinating – this was 1974.

I’ve just listened to sides 1 and 2 of this album (I still can’t make the little fanfare play again, but I swear it exists, somewhere out there in the vinyl exosphere) and would like to explain, in three simple paragraphs, why it’s influential.

1.     Todd Rundgren was a pioneer explorer of the electronic creation of music.  Synths had of course been used extensively in pop from 1968 onwards, but no-one had previously built an entire album around these totally constructed sounds and playing – the latter including his early use of sequencing technology to make a machine perform licks and riffs that not even the most proficient human would be capable of replicating.

2.     He was also a pioneer in the techniques of self-performed, self-produced multi-track recording. Although many other musicians are credited on the internet as having performed on the record, including the Brecker brothers who obviously did the horn parts (Todd egocentrically doesn’t name anyone but himself in the original cover notes), it’s obviously mostly him.  This made me begin to understand that just one person, given the right kit and skill-set, could make music from scratch.

3.     It contains one of my Desert Island Discs.

Influential Albums #4: Is This What You Want?

In 1969 we were bothered, bewildered, but still bewitched by the Beatles.  John had embarked on his dead-end solo career, Paul was on a desperately controlling mission to keep the dream alive, Ringo was, as always, going with the flow…  The only one who seems now to have had any forward-pointing focus was George Harrison.

I was marooned, geographically and musically.  My band had broken up but was contractually obliged to go through the death throes in Italy.  I’d entered into a mistaken marriage which left me, I suppose, emotionally marooned too.  Records seemed my route to salvation.

Just then, Paul invented Apple Records, launching it with Mary Hopkins’ delightfully charming ‘Those Were The Days’ and then following up with two superb albums: James Taylor’s first, about which I’ve previously blogged, and this one by Jackie Lomax, produced by George, with a stellar cast of backing musicians.  It’s probably available online if you want to have a listen, I can’t be bothered to find a link.  If you can’t either, you’ll just have to take my word for it: this is interregnum pop at its very best.  I’ll have to explain that.

Popular music has always been an industry, and as such governed by the laws of industrial economics, which operate to drive quality down to the lowest common denominator.  It happened to jazz, swing, rock’n’roll, disco … the best was forced out by the worst.   Of course, there’ve always been swerves around the outside curve, which I’ve kept an ear open for; but ‘the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’  But there was that brief break when nobody knew what was going on or who was in charge – and some wonderful things popped up out of the vacuum.


We’d been playing the ‘random record’ game, whereby you point at a CD or an LP in the stack, eyes closed, and have to listen to it.  Last night Z came up with Gill Scott-Heron’s last CD; tonight I fished this out.  Not my original vinyl – when my bandmate Andy returned from Italy a few months after me, penniless and with a family in tow, he had hardly any music, so, having got a job in the meantime, I gave him my copy and bought another.

That’s probably why I count it as influential.

Instruments of Tortuous Delight

I seem to be being drawn towards musical participations of various sorts, some more likely than others.  I’m not the musician I once was, due to lack of practice, in turn due to a combination of physical difficulty (my right arm doesn’t strum very well any more, and certainly can’t fingerpick), distraction (so much else going on in my life), and indolence.  I have five guitars – I had a picture of them all, but can’t find it and certainly lack the energy to recreate it – only two of which (the acoustic and, inevitably, my beloved Telecaster) I ever pick up nowadays.  Shame, really.

So I’ve gathered together all the other musical instruments I possess (with one exception, a mouth organ which I suspect is lurking inside one of the guitar cases).  Here they are.

Half of them, as you’ll see, are percussion.   The others are my old school recorder (which I can still tootle a bit); a mandolin that belonged to Viv, who never played it  (it needs restoration, really – the lack of tuning pegs, which doesn’t really show in the picture, makes it, erm, untunable); a duck, given to me as a birthday present by my brother: it took me ages to realise that you had to put your fingers on some holes and blow into its backside, whereupon it would emit up to, ooh, at least a pentatonic scale; and some little bells, which fall on the boundary but which I’ll count as not percussion, because you can do things with them other than shake and bang.  (I realise I’m on, ah, shaky ground here, categorically.)

I love percussion.  I have a great sense of rhythm, which sometimes even makes its way down the ever-lengthening neural pathways to my hands and feet.  I could have been a drummer, if I’d had the energy. 

My best ever percussion instrument was a Fiat 850 van we used to hire when Bessie, our Transit, was on one of her frequent rest cures.  But that’s another story. 

The Devil’s Interval

I’ve been scratching around for something to blog about, anything really, just to keep my hand and brain and vocabulary and syntax in – but there’s so much  stuff going on that precludes anything other than an emotional response, which is something I’m possibly too good at experiencing but not at all good at expressing.  So instead I switched on the telly, and found the Penultimate Night of the Proms, dedicated to the musicals of Leonard Bernstein.

To be honest, I’m not that familiar with most of his stuff, and nothing I heard over the two-plus hours did much to persuade me to explore further – with, of course, one shining exception.  Which, of course, I don’t need to explore further, because every last note of it has been etched into my being ever since 1956.

It is the greatest musical there will ever be.  And for me, somehow, it bridges the two dominant aspects of my psyche: the emotion and the logic.  (The child and the parent, in psychoanalytical terms.)  I know exactly how it moves me, and I know exactly why.  Let me peek into the second of these.

It’s very simple, actually.  The whole thing is built around a musical trope called the Tritone.  Technically, it’s a flattened fifth.  If the fifth note of the C major scale is G (which it is), flatten it and you get G flat (or an augmented fourth, F sharp, depending on the way your instrument is tempered… sorry, maybe a bit too technical there).  To hear this, you only need to listen to the first three notes of ‘West Side Story’ – “Da-daaah DA!”  That third note is the tritone.  Then listen to any of the ballet sequences – there it is again, all over the place.  And ‘Maria’: what’s the second note of that tune, exactly?

It was called The Devil’s Interval in medieval times, largely because – well, it is, isn’t it?  You can learn much more about the psychology and physiology of this here, if you really want to.

So there you have it.  ‘West Side Story’ bit me, chewed me up and spat me out when I first heard it, and still does.  But more importantly, it taught me that music, as all art, doesn’t drop from heaven or rise from hell – it’s made by human beings, who can use their feelings and their rationality to mould heaven and hell’s best efforts into forms of beauty neither of those imposters can imagine.

 

 

Self-inflicted Earworms, and other dreams

Aren’t dreams interesting?

At 4.15 a.m. I was wakened by a dream (Ginger Baker, who has had his head shaved and entrusted me with the tresses, is escorting me to a nightclub, which turns out to be a muddy pig farm with a hummock in the middle, where I lose my shoes, but then this Korean girl comes along and starts to – ) which I’ll tell you all about some other time.

So it’s 4.15 in the morning, and Frank Sinatra’s ‘I Thought About You’ from ‘Songs for Swingin’ Lovers!’ is playing in my head, complete with Nelson Riddle’s arrangement and Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison’s muted trumpet obligatos, and much as I love this record, at this point in time I need to delete it.  So I try all my usual insomnia tricks – the yogic toe-to-scalp muscle-by muscle relaxation, the step-by-step walk to my primary school, the attempt to list alphabetically all the girls I’ve known in my life, from A to Z (I usually skip over Q and X, and I and U) – but what happens is that the music in my inner ears segues into entirely invented orchestral clichés, which swerve between Basie and Victor Sylvester, through chord changes I can almost hear but never pursue and I decide to just let it play itself out… 

Whereupon, of course, I shut down into a dreamless sleep, until the six-fifteen goods train rumbles past and rattles the windows.

Having read ‘The Child’s Garden of Psychoanalysis’, I can interpret most of the above, except: why was she Korean?

Job Done

Right, I've finished writing it.  Well, it's only taken about five years - not full time, but at least a day a month on average.


It's called "This Obscure Group", subtitle "Dave Anthony's Moods - a personal memoir of the best unheard band of the Sixties."  I've put a few edited extracts on this blog before, but this is the final product.  Or at least as final as it's going to be.  I could go on tinkering for ever.


So I'd like it to be read, or at least available.  Does anyone know anything about publishing (vanity or otherwise)?  It's long enough - about 42,000 words - to form a slim volume, especially if padded out with a few photos. 

Guitar Heroes

As I’ve decided to become a musician again, my darling 50-year-old Fender Telecaster has gone into guitar hospital to have its innards fixed.  The outside, at least the cosmetic as opposed to functional parts, is beyond salvation, its battle scars and makeovers being part of its life story, not to be resprayed or botoxed over.  (This is starting to sound a bit self-referential, but.)  But it does have to do its job, and plugging it into an amp does need to result in more than electronic crackles.

Anyway, in preparation for that, I’d been picking it up and picking a bit.  Which has led me to ponder on the guitar players I most wish I’d been, or at least wish I could play like.  So here are three:

Scotty Moore.  When Elvis walked into Sam Phillips’ studio that fateful day in 1954, Sam rapidly put together a scratch studio group to back him.  Scotty was the lynchpin, and produced some great country-tinged fingerpicking licks that, to this day, I find it hard to unravel. 

But after the great RCA sell-out (Sam got, I think, $34,000 for the lot, artist and recordings; the illegal immigrant ‘Colonel Tom Parker’ got the right to squeeze every squeezable cent out of ‘his discovery’, slowly eroding and then destroying the talent in the process), the sound had to harden up, and Scotty jumped in with both hands.  But he was too much of a natural-born musician to treat this new-fangled rock’n’roll stuff as mere noise, as most people out of their teens did.

Take his solo on  'Too Much', from 1956.   He starts with four bars of a vicious chordal chromatic up-and-down run, as rock-n-roll as it comes, then wanders off into territory more usually inhabited, at the time, by West Coast cool jazz exponents like Stan Getz, before bringing it back down again with a snippet of that good ol’ country pickin’.   Sheer genius!  Scotty later claimed that the middle bit was an accident, as the song was in an unfamiliar key (B flat) and he’d got lost; but I don’t believe him.

Steve Cropper.  From somebody who was, I submit, the real and very present power behind the newly-ascended  King’s throne (imagine ‘Hound Dog’ without the guitar), to an equally powerful but much less evident contributor.   If you’ve heard anything by Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, Eddie Floyd, or any other Memphis soul masterpiece from the sixties, you’ve heard Steve, in his role as a member of Booker T and the MGs, the Stax house rhythm section.   I was going to use the word ‘minimalism’, but that’s not it; ‘precision’ is closer, or just plain ‘rightness’.  I’ve chosen, of course, 'Green Onions' – he only plays about ten notes, but they’re all the right ones, necessarily in the right order.

Link Wray.  Finally, a guitarist who, although he had a long, illustrious career as a master picker (I remember a long-ago documentary in which Link and Chet Atkins traded finger-style licks for several minutes, competing and laughing out loud at each other’s audacity), is remembered for just one ground-breaking single from 1958 – but what a single!  If you’ve seen ‘Pulp Fiction’ you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about: 'Rumble'.  It’s been said that without this record, the future of popular music would have been very different – no heavy metal, no punk – you may have your views on whether or not this would have been a good thing, but you can’t deny its power.  It hit me between the ears when I first heard it, and I still love it.

 

When I said I wish I could play like them, of course I can, at least some of the simpler stuff.  (I could teach anyone to play ‘Rumble’, even if they’d never touched a guitar in their life.)  What I really meant was: I wish I’d been there.  I wish I’d thought of it first! 

Can’t wait to get the Tele back…

P.S. I’ve no idea whether the Spotify links will work for you.

 

 

More Days in a Life

Ages ago, I wrote this, and through some quirk of consciousness (see tomorrow’s post, maybe) the idea jumped out at me again, from wherever ideas lurk.  So here are five more.


It Won’t Be Long. Almost any of Lennon’s songs on ‘With the Beatles’ or ‘Hard Day’s Night’ would do for this slot.  I was a wannabe songwriter bound tightly by the musical conventions of the previous fifty years. Lennon threw a disdainful pot of musical paint at all that: wrong chords, missed or truncated bars, irony-laden Glenn Miller quotes harshly, gleefully out of context …  I wrote dozens of pastiche imitations –  all thankfully lost, but I’ll never forget the exhilaration of discovering that A major to F# major and then back to A, or B flat, or wherever, was okay: rules could be broken.  This discovery soaked through from mere music to real life over those few churning years.


Rain.  I’m basking in the garden of 17 Hutchings Walk, one weekday afternoon in June 1966, early in that coruscating summer.  I’m not at all focussed on music, my mind and my body are elsewhere entirely, wafting around various situations and one particular girl.  But then this sound drifts through the French windows, and sucks me indoors. Somebody’s got the new Beatles single, and has put the B side on first.  Something opens.


And Your Bird Can Sing.  We’d done our usual set at the Piper in Milan, and I’d struck up a conversation with the Indonesian lead guitarist of the new all-girl support band, the Honeys.  She had a genuine Gibson Les Paul, which meant I was in love with her.  We sat knee to knee while she proved to me that the jangly two-line guitar part could be played at one go, not double-tracked, if you were good enough, which she was.  Complications grew from nowhere over the next few stretched-out weeks.  She had a husband and a child back in Holland, it seemed.  In the end she fled the country.  I don’t think it was because of me, but I’ll never know, will I?  I wish I could remember her name.


Hey Jude.  This one is a sitcom moment.  Andy walks in to the pensione with a 45 in his hand.  “Rubbish new Beatles record,” he announces.  Maybe he’d only heard the B side.


I Just Don’t Understand.  Lastly, a teaser.  This was never a ‘proper’ Beatles track: it’s on the Live at the BBC compilation, recorded for Pop Go The Beatles in July 1963.  I’ve included it because I love the song (original 1961 record by Ann Margret, you can find it on YouTube), love John’s performance of it, and love how it reminds me precisely what it was like to be a teenager in love.

So why does it sound better?

There’s nothing like quantum physics for getting you off to sleep.  Following on from last week’s post about vinyl, I was musing on the parallel – in the twenties, until cleverclogs like Schrodinger and Dirac came along, theoretical physicists agonised over whether light was a wave or a particle.  (On Monday, Wednesday and Friday it was a wave, on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, a particle.  On Sunday, they prayed.)

There’s never been any doubt, though, that sound is a wave.  Until thirty-five or so years ago, it stayed that way.  A bang on a drum, a pluck on a guitar, would be carried through the air to a microphone and thence to fluctuations on a magnetic tape, pushed through a few bits of technology and carved into a squiggly groove on a vinyl LP; then reverse-pushed though some more technology into a speaker which would turn it back into the sound wave it started out as, or as near as possible.  A wave, however, all the way.  The technical term for this is ‘analogue’.

Then some bright spark worked out that they could turn this analogue wave into particles, or binary digits, by snatching tiny bits of it as it entered their domain, and within a few years analogue recording was old hat, and all sound waves ended up as sampled particles.  Of course, at this stage they still had to be converted back into waves so that they could be etched onto a vinyl platter; but then the compact disc came along and even this transition wasn’t necessary.

Because the CD rapidly (and in some ways rightly) commercially forced out the cumbersome old fragile LP, it then became necessary to convert old analogue records into a digital format so that they could become CDs.  This was called ‘remastering’, a blatant euphemism if ever there was one.  And now it’s become smart to convert them back again, so that they can be resold as fashionable vinyl LPs.  (I was almost going to say ‘groovy.’)

All these transitions end up in the same place: sound waves going into your ears.  As a writer to today’s Guardian rightly observed, nobody has ever listened to digital music.

So the answer to the title question is: it doesn’t, necessarily.  The rule is: the fewer transitions it’s been through on its journey from its birth to your ears, the better it’s going to sound.  Nearly all the vinyl LPs I own conform to this rule, having stuck to being waves throughout their gestation. 

Meanwhile, I’m still working through the analogue alphabet, and have got to The Association, Insight Out (1967).  Here is a sample of the care instructions from the inner sleeve, which I rather like.  Care is a good, strong word.

The record sounds wonderful.  Shame about the music.  A bit of Chet Atkins next…

Back to vinyl!

There was an article about this in the Guardian the other day, basically saying how much better it sounded.  They cooked the books a bit by doing their blind tastings using about £10,000 worth of equipment, but the consensus seemed to support the proposition.  I’m lucky enough not to have chucked out my turntable (not that I would have done, it cost me all of £250 ten years ago), and I have several hundred of the lovely squiggly groovy things, so I’m giving it a go, album or two a day, A to Z.  (If you expect me to sustain this through to Frank Zappa, prepare to be disappointed.)

So right now I’m listening to something called “Juju Music” by King Sunny Adé And His African Beats.  Apart from the occasional click, it sounds bloody marvellous.  Of course, I’d have to buy the CD or MP3 equivalent to prove this, but that’s not going to happen.  I’m slightly apprehensive, though, about how ‘Electric Ladyland’ is going to hold up, given the abuse it suffered in 1968.  In fact, I’m going to give it a spin right now.  King Sunny is great but a bit samey.  Pause.

End pause.  I'm halfway through Voodoo Chile (the slow blues take with Stevie Winwood on Hammond).  I needed to turn the volume up a bit, records weren’t as loud back then.  Amazingly, not even any clicks so far.  Every note is clear and defined, the bass is deep and unmuddy.  I know the cliché is ‘warm’, but honestly, it’s true.  Oops, a click just there.  And now, oh chit, it’s sticking.  Scuse me while I give it a nudge…

So there are downsides – you have to look after the things, and keep them clean.  Bit like ourselves, really, I suppose.  And talking about sides, you have to get up and turn them over after 25 minutes max, which is good mental and physical exercise, and leads me into a whole broader vein of thought that will have to be saved for another day.  Meanwhile, I might just try a burst of Mose Allison before bed.

Nineteen strumming days to go

You have to overcome that sneaky weasel that whispers ‘don’t bother, you can’t do it.’  So, I dusted off the acoustic and tried a few chords.  Quite surprising actually.  I’d fully expected the problem area to be on the right, because that’s where the embolism was; the arm itself gets tired and aches, and the fingertips feel permanently sore, and my grip isn’t as strong as it used to be.  So I’d guessed that gripping a plectrum and vigorously strumming, with my right hand and arm, would be the problem area.

Not a bit of it.  Well, yes, the gripping bit is a bit unreliable, but I’ve found a nifty thumb-pick which mostly solves that.  (Rog, you were more than half right.  Another symptom is that the extremities are susceptible to the cold.)  And the strumming muscles need toning up. 

No, the problem area is my left hand.  To be precise, the fingertips.  They need to get hardened up.  When I first played the guitar, at age fifteen, we used to use surgical spirit to toughen them up, but I’m not going to go that far.  I did ten minutes Wednesday evening, twelve Thursday, fifteen Friday, fifteen tonight.  Should be all right on the night. 

The family singsong is in fact going to be a bit more than that.  They’ve apparently invited about twenty people for Boxing Day lunch – you have to admire these people’s energy levels and dedication, even while recognising that they’re quite mad – and I guess singing will commence about six p.m.  All that suits me; it’s much easier to control a crowd of twenty than one of eight.  Appropriate quantities of anaesthetic will have been applied.  (I gather it’s a fairly acceptable Argentine Malbec this year.)  The format will be as usual: Green Green Grass, Tie a Yellow Ribbon, my party piece (usually Got You Under My Skin), then I’ll invite requests and we’ll do part of American Pie as a finale.  Should be over in seventy minutes max. 

(I’ve just realised that the post title is wrong – I’m off to Dorset for three days tomorrow, and won’t be taking the guitar.) 

Doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah …. I’m in Heaven!

I know I’m behind the curve, because millions of my readers, especially in the USA, have already bought it, but just in case you haven’t (and assuming you can recognise proper music when you hear it)  – ‘Cheek to Cheek’ by Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga.

About five decades separate them in clocktime, but no more than a beat in music.  They meet in opposite directions: her maturity, his youthfulness; his maturity, her youthfulness.

It’s had me dancing, in my body and my soul.  Am I showing my age?  I do hope so.

Ten Great Intros

I was flipping through ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah’, Bob Stanley’s magisterial history of modern popular music (which should be essential reading for anyone with anything approaching a  passionate interest in the subject – it’s 737 pages long, but you can skip), when I came across a remark about the role of the intro in a great pop record.  In the days when radio play was the key to sales, a good hook at the very start could make all the difference.  Record makers realised this and played around with the concept (and its creative potential), and the intro eventually became a miniature art form in its own right.

So I started to wonder what might be amongst my top great intros.  I drew a few boundaries: it had to be instrumental, which sadly rules out, for example, Good Vibrations (‘I…’) and Heartbreak Hotel (‘Well…’); it had to aurally identify the record before the song itself actually started – to stand alone, if you like; and as a self-imposed constraint, it had to be from the fifties and sixties: both because that’s my formative musical era, and because those decades were definitely the golden age of the intro.

[I wanted to make this a kind of quiz – guess the intro from a brief sound clip – but I lack the technology for this, so the Spotify links (where they work) will be followed by the whole record.  I hope you don’t mind.] 

Okay, here goes (don’t expect many surprises):

Chuck Berry – Johnny B. Goode

 More or less randomly selected – it tied with ‘That’ll Be The Day’ – but in the fifties, upfront guitars like this were a blast between the ears.  And Chuck’s has lasted longer: you can still hear it played today, if you listen closely.  And it’s a better song, at least lyrically.

Four Seasons - I've Got You Under My Skin

Because it’s is just so beautiful, and contrasts so drastically with the next selection, the same song opened up to such opposite interpretations, surely a hallmark of an imperishable masterpiece of songwriting.

Frank Sinatra – I’ve Got You Under My Skin (or more correctly Nelson Riddle): 

These two intros to the same song couldn’t be more different in setting the emotional tone (sad resignation versus angry menace), not to mention the musical tenor, of what’s to follow, yet they’re equally memorable.

The Beach Boys – California Girls

Spoiled for choice here really – God Only Knows was a close contender –  but this is just so evocative!

The Beatles - Strawberry Fields Forever

 Well, I had to include one, didn’t I?  Again, random choice.  First ever use of the Mellotron?  And it does illustrate one intro trick, which is to start with the bridge or middle bit; they played this card over and over again.  Strangely, it doesn’t appear to be available on Spotify; why would that be?  Oh, I know…

Ray Charles – What'd I Say - Parts I & II

The longest intro in pop history?  It might sound tame now, but when I first heard it on Luxembourg, through a wave of phase, I thought I’d tuned in to some other planet, which of course I had.

Elvis Presley – Jailhouse Rock

Because I can remember exactly where I was when I first heard it.  And because, for reasons lost in time, it made me want to sing as well as play rock ‘n’ roll.  And because of the rimshots.

Bill Haley – (We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock

The shortest intro in pop history, just two rapid-fire drum rimshots – it hardly qualifies. But it counted for a lot more in 1956.  Drums had never been so loud.

Bob Dylan - Like a Rollin' Stone  (again, no Spotify link)

Yet another rimshot, followed by a mind-spinning swirl of quintessential 1965.  You heard the words before they even started – didn’t you?

And of course I’ve kept the best till last…  Dave Anthony's Moods - New Directions

Modesty forbids me from saying more ...! 

Influential Albums #3

The 5^th Dimension: The Magic Garden 1967

Here it is on Spotify: The Fifth Dimension – Magic Garden

Jimmy Webb is best known for his evocative songs for Glen Campbell – ‘Galveston’, ‘Wichita Lineman’, ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ – and before that, the two albums with Richard Harris (cheekily recycling Rex Harrison) which yielded, amongst other lesser known chunks of grandiose kitsch, the seven minute soft green icing of ‘McArthur Park’.  Later, he’d pluck up the courage to sing with his own voice. (Check out ‘P. F. Sloan’, a loving tribute to an otherwise forgotten seventies non-iconic singer-songwriter, recently nicely covered by Rumer.)

Before any of that, though, he cut his teeth on two albums with the unlikely vehicle of this superficially manufactured vocal group (three guys, two girls, no stars).  The first contained the bouncy ‘Up, up and Away’ but was otherwise unmemorable.  The second was a masterpiece.

‘The Magic Garden’ is primarily a break-up album, in the form of a song cycle.  It’s framed by a ‘Prologue’ and an ‘Epilogue’, with the words “Have you tried love?”, which I remember thinking was a clever trick, spoofing some kind of soap powder advert.  In between, ten songs take you through the famous four stages of love – exhilaration (‘The Magic Garden’); doubt (‘Dreams/Pax/Nepenthe’*); resentment (‘The Worst That Could Happen’); and bitter resignation (‘Paper Cup’), with thematic links between tracks. 

There are a couple of anomalies – ‘Ticket to Ride’, although a stomping version, juts out a bit like a leftover from an earlier meal, and the coyly titled ‘The Girls’ Song’ is clearly a technical exercise in out-Burting Bacharach.  But these are minor blemishes – and they both fit into the story, actually.

And the sound!  Believe it or not, it was the first record I ever heard on stereo headphones.  Perhaps for that reason, or perhaps chemical enhancements played their part, but I had never heard music so deeply and widely before outside of a concert hall.  I like to think that it was mostly due to the sheer quality.  World-class production (the legendary Bones Howe) and performances (Hal Blaine’s ubiquitous West Coast ‘Wrecking Crew’), and of course the 5^th’s finely honed vocals.  Slap on the cans, press the pedal to the metal and catch track 7, ‘Requiem: 820 Latham’.**

 

Influential?  Well, it certainly was on me.  I spent the next twelve months trying to write Jimmy Webb songs – multi-structured, symphonically chordal, cryptically personal, cynically romantic.  I failed, of course, and no-one has ever heard them: but the attempt justified the failure.

 

 

*Jimmy could do cryptic titles with the best of them.

** Like I said.