MUSICAL MYSTERIES: WHO DO YOU LOVE?

This is becoming topical, as the thoughts of our leaders turn to whether we, the great unwashed, albeit with very clean hands, can or should be crushed by the restarting wheels of industry. Which is more important, survival of the species or of the economy? With, as ever, the failure to appreciate the fairly solid link between the two. Maybe by both sides, but I am simply a medic, not a businessman. As I start writing, the Observer Sunday newspaper over here, the U.K., has published an opinion poll, stating a 4/5 majority wanting to err on the side of caution and to maintain the lockdown. However, many of the politicians are in the smaller subset, it seems and feels, with Boris uncharacteristically unforthcoming, with perhaps his throw of the dice having given him an unwelcome perspective, absent ahead of his hospitalisation. Anyway, one of the ideas out of lockdown is a concept of family 'bubbles', a named small list of family/friends with whom you may consort. So, who do you love? Enough?

The song is by Bo Diddley, the owlish rocker with glasses, often a bowler hat, funny shaped guitars and an unshakeable self-belief. Always looking for ways to aggrandise himself against his peers, the idea came to him as he witnessed a group of kids trying to outbrag each other. Full of arcane images to conjure up dread and a sense of mystery: rattlesnakes, skulls and graveyards, by showing he is the biggest baddest Daddy of all, he begs the question of his lover: Who do you love? With but one expected answer. Covered so many times over the years, I am sure we all think we know it, so the original may come as some surprise:

Bo Diddley

It doesn't even carry much of the trademark Diddley shuffle. That would come later. And it wasn't even a hit, at least for Bo. It took Ronnie Hawkins, the journeyman Canadian rocker, to get it charting, admittedly in his home country. The vocal is all swagger, dipping into a manic frenzy at each verse/chorus end. Not bad for 1963. Name mean anything? Ronnie Hawkins. And the Hawks. Yup, I can see that glimmer of recognition. Those Hawks, later the Band, with incendiary guitar from Robbie Robertson.This they reprised, with Hawkins, at their own zenith, for The Last Waltz.

Ronnie Hawkins & the Hawks

Fast forward another five years, and we are in San Francisco. Local hipsters the Quicksilver Messenger Service were so taken with the song it became the entire second side of their second album, extends and interpreted into six separate "suites, blending live performance with studio work-outs. Indeed, so keen were the band on Diddley, they included another of his songs, Mona, on the flip.   With twin lead guitars and access to all sorts of stimulants, this was a heady and ambitious project. Arguably no small amount of pretension but, hey, it was 1968.

Quicksilver Messenger Service

I confess I knew none of these versions as they dropped, my first exposure being via short-lived UK rockers, Juicy Lucy. I was 12 and found their 1969 rendition, as ever on Top of the Pops, sinister and exciting. This group were unusual for this country in that they included pedal steel guitar, via one Glenn Campbell, not that one and no relation. Sadly it has dated badly, and my rifle back into their catalogue prove disappointing likewise.

Juicy Lucy

Now I am all grown up, my tastes have broadened and I especially love covers. So, rather than penning words, here's some of my favourites, not all from expected sources.

Townes Van Zandt

Tom Rush

Carlos Santana (with the Fabulous Thunderbirds)

Dr. Feelgood

Dion DiMucci

So, decision time, who do I love? Who's going to be in my bubble? And how do make it happen?

Who?

Musical Mysteries: What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?

R.E.M.: What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?
[purchase]

I know that my chosen song for this piece asks a question, but the answer to the question isn’t the mystery. In this case, it is the question itself, and the context in which it became famous, that is the mystery, albeit one that was solved years after the precipitating event, and the release of this song.

On October 4, 1986, newscaster Dan Rather was walking on Park Avenue in New York to his apartment after having dinner with a friend, when he was attacked and beaten by two “well-dressed” men, one of whom kept demanding, “Kenneth, what was the frequency?” Why Rather was attacked, why the assailant demanded to know the “frequency,” and kept calling Rather “Kenneth” were mysteries. Rather was quoted as saying, "I got mugged. Who understands these things? I didn't and I don't now. I didn't make a lot of it at the time and I don't now. I wish I knew who did it and why, but I have no idea." The New York Times article about the incident referred to the motive as a “mystery,” so I guess this officially validates my choice of subject.

The phrase, “What’s the frequency, Kenneth,” became part of popular culture afterwards, and in October, 1993, about 7 years after the event, R.E.M. recorded a song with that title, and included it on the 1994 album, Monster. According to Michael Stipe, the song isn’t directly about the Dan Rather incident, but is about the Generation X phenomenon in contemporary mass media, sung in character as an older critic whose information consists exclusively of media products:

I wrote that protagonist as a guy who's desperately trying to understand what motivates the younger generation, who has gone to great lengths to try and figure them out, and at the end of the song it's completely fucking bogus. He got nowhere.

Rather actually performed the song with R.E.M. on the Late Show With David Letterman. Based on that clip, it is no mystery why Rather did not pursue a singing career.

In 1997, the mystery was solved.

Just prior to the release of Monster in 1994, William Tager shot and killed an NBC technician, Campbell Montgomery, outside the sound studio of the Today Show. Tager had tried to enter the the studio with an assault rifle, and Montgomery died in an attempt to block him. Tager was arrested and reportedly told police that the television network had been monitoring him for years and beaming secret messages into his head. He apparently came to NBC looking for a way to block those transmissions.

Tager was convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years in Sing Sing prison, not far up the road from where I’m sitting right now, and later told a psychiatrist that he was a time traveler from a parallel world in the year 2265. A convicted felon in the future, Tager said he was a test-pilot volunteer in a dangerous time travel experiment. If he was successful on his mission, his sentence would be overturned and he would be set free. The authorities in the future kept tabs on him via an implanted chip in his brain. During the examinations, Trager also confessed that he had attacked Dan Rather because he mistook him for the Vice President of his future world, one Kenneth Burrows. When Rather saw a picture of Tager in the newspaper, he identified him as the man who attacked him.

Of course, Dan Rather’s career took off after his coverage of the assassination of JFK in 1963, an event which some believe has never been properly solved. They’re wrong.

musical mysteries: Why don't we do it in the road?

purchase [White Album]

If we are talking about questions, I suppose the question word <why> is at the fore of this theme. What better choice then, than a song that asks that self-same question: why?

Without any previous background knowledge, I would have posited that the Beatles' <Why Don't We Do It In The Road?> was a Lennon composition. You know? Free Love ... Push the limits...

To my surprise, I learn that it is a McCartney piece with Starr's assistance and that - to top it off - Lennon is said to have been hurt that he was not included.

By the time the <White Album> came out, the band was all but defunct. As opposed the the relative conformity/sequence/progression of songs on <Revolver>, <Sgt Peppers>, <Magical Mystery Tour>, the <White Album> is disparate, disjointed in terms of theme.

Granted, there is a certain amount of non-sense coming in from time to time starting earlier. Earliest Beatles songs were very muchly boy/girl themed, and then we start getting things like "We all live in a yellow submarine". WTF? I mean, I can kind of see "We're Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band" in terms of lyrics, but by this point in time, we've gone a bit off the rail - in terms of what AM radio thrived on.

And then there's "why dont we do it in the road?"

I suppose there's the distant possibility that what we could be doing in the road is scat, but that's not much more sociologically acceptable than the actual, more obvious notion behind the song.

McCartney apparently witnessed 2 monkeys in the act in the streets of India. But as I said, this seems much more the kind of question that Lennon would have raised - delving into and questioning the social stigmas that define our behaviors. You know: if love is so beautiful/the answer to all our troubles, then why don't we do "it" in the road?

MUSICAL MYSTERIES: QUESTION/THE MOODY BLUES

If you are a fan of the Moody Blues, frankly, I would, in the words of their best song, (which they didn't even write) , Go Now, my musical mystery being around why? It isn't, of course, ever that simple, and they have had one or two toe-tappers in their repertoire, the featured song being possibly one.

Question 

Given the whole song is based around the lack of any answers to the big questions of life and death, and is asking quite why there are no answers to the big questions of life and death, I struggle to fully understand the thrust. So we get the bombastic orchestral faff at the beginning, oohs and aahs resplendent, then the frantic strumming guitars enveloping the questions, followed by the slow interlude of justification, explaining the interrogation being only for the want of someone to understand the inquisitor. And change his life. I think. And then it all goes off again, onward to the fade. It was actually quite a big hit single here in the U.K. and I remember noting this was a bit different, pricking up my ears when they did a turn on chart show, Top of the Pops. And, being the precocious nerd I was (am?), because they were deemed serious and proggy, I decided that I liked it, even. Indeed, for a while, because I had also liked Go Now and, hell, yeah, I loved Nights in White Satin, that perennial last number at innumerable sad school discos, I thought I liked the Moody Blues. A deeper look into their catalogue saw me wisely back away, discovering unforeseen depths of symphonic dreck. (With, actually, NiWS, no different........)

Nights in White Satin

But let's look at the evidence. What was good in this song? Actually, revisiting it as I write, I love the bass, loping nimbly along in the slipstream of the thrashing acoustics. I like, nay admire, the drums, especially when they come tap-tapping at the door. (The drummer, Graeme Edge, also went up in my estimation when he entitled his solo album, Kick Off Your Muddy Boots, Muddy Boots being his play on the band's name. Mine was/is Bloody Moos, not that that adds anything here.) The then keyboard player, Mike Pinder, looked the height of cool, the teenaged me admiring the beard and bald combo that also endeared me, poor idiot that I was, to the 1970s look of Mike Love. I think that's about it. The rest of the band, especially with hindsight, had clearly invested in too much in all that white satin, it encasing their torsos just a tad tighter than history will forgive.

I should really here report some epiphany, some damascene moment of the scales falling from my eyes, the older me of the 2020s belatedly acknowledging the debt modern music owes to their groundbreaking ouvre. But I can't. Still symphonic dreck. And as for the album titles..... But, you know, there is one song that is so wretched I love it. Really love it. Lyrics so crass that even if they were believable, the lumbering arrangement effectively denies the statement any credibility at all, the choral vocals startlingly oxymoronic. Yet, somehow, and I don't understand this, it works. How? Now that, ladies and gentleman, really is the question.....

 I'm Just a Singer (in a Rock'n'Roll Band)

What?

Musical Mysteries: The Boys Are Back In Town

Thin Lizzy: The Boys Are Back In Town
[purchase]

Like many of the themes that we use on Star Maker Machine, this one came to me when I was driving in my car, listening to the radio, and the song that prompted this particular theme was Thin Lizzy’s hard rock classic, “The Boys Are Back In Town.” Now, there have been many musical mysteries throughout history, and even if you limit it to the “rock era,” there are some really fascinating ones. I have to admit that “The Boys Are Back In Town” didn’t crack any of the lists that I found when I Googled “musical mysteries.” And yet, to me, it is deeply mysterious. Let’s delve right into the lyrics:

Guess who just got back today? 
Them wild-eyed boys that'd been away 
Haven't changed, had much to say 
But man, I still think them cats are crazy

OK, who got back today? Where did they come back to? Where have they been? Why did they come back? And what makes them crazy?

In doing some research about the song, which was in part inspired by the hard-drinking, working class fans of the band, it appears that singer/songwriter/bassist Phil Lynott’s mother Philomena ran the Clifton Grange Hotel (subject of an earlier Thin Lizzy song) with an after-hours bar in Manchester, England, which was frequented by the Quality Street Gang, a group of Manchester criminals and Manchester United supporters, as well as entertainers and footballers (which may have overlapped). So, it may be that some of these mysteries, but not all, have plausible answers. But not all of them. We still don’t know where they came from, and why they returned.

They were askin' if you were around 
How you was, where you could be found 
Told them you were livin' downtown 
Drivin' all the old men crazy 

Presumably, this is a about a woman (since at the time this was written, it was not likely that Lynott would have referred to a man who drove “old men crazy”). But who is the woman? And was it only old men that she drove crazy?  What effect did she have on younger men, if any?

The boys are back in town (The boys are back in town) 
I said, the boys are back in town (The boys are back in town) 
The boys are back in town (The boys are back in town) 
The boys are back in town (The boys are back in town) 

Yes, we know. The boys are back in town. But we still don’t know why. Or where they came from.

You know that chick that used to dance a lot 
Every night, she'd be on the floor, shakin' what she's got 
Man, when I tell ya she was cool, she was red hot I mean she was steamin' 

Is this about the same girl who was driving the old men crazy? Or a different one? What's she "got?" (I think we can make an educated guess.)  Is this town filled with beautiful women? Or just one (or two)?

And that time over at Johnny's place 
Well, this chick got up and she 
Slapped Johnny's face 
Man, we just fell about the place 
If that chick don't wanna know, forget her 

Where’s Johnny’s place? What did Johnny do to incite a face slap? (Although we can probably guess.) And why did everyone appear to find it so amusing? Is it sort of a slapstick thing? What is it that this woman doesn’t want to know? And is not being curious a sufficient excuse to forget her?

If you believe the Manchester story, then it is likely that “Johnny” refers to “Johnny The Fox,” a member of the Quality Street Gang, who is also the subject of the later Thin Lizzy song, “Johnny The Fox Meets Jimmy The Weed,” from the Johnny The Fox album. Of course, Johnny is a pretty common name, so we can’t really be sure.

The boys are back in town 
The boys are back in town 
I said, the boys are back in town 
The boys are back in town 
The boys are back in town 
The boys are back in town 
The boys are back in town 
The boys are back in town 

Yep. They’re baaaaaaaaaaack!

Spread the word around guess who's back in town 
You spread the word around

Why is it necessary to publicize the arrival of the “boys?” Is it a warning, or an enticement? Or both?

Friday night they'll be dressed to kill 
Down at Dino's bar and grill 
The drink will flow, and blood will spill 
And if the boys wanna fight you 
Better let 'em 

Where’s Dino’s? Why will blood spill? And why should we let the boys fight?

Dino’s also appears to have been a different bar in Manchester, possibly "Deno's," a Greek/Cypriot place with a reputation for debauchery. Why it seems appropriate to condone fighting and violence remains a mystery.

That jukebox in the corner 
Blasting out my favorite song 
The nights are gettin' warmer 
It won't be long 
Won't be long 'til summer comes 
Now that the boys are here again 

What’s his favorite song? And why is the return of the “boys” a harbinger of summer? Are they like migratory birds?

Another mystery about this song is that the band originally didn’t want to include it on the Jailbreak album, or release it as a single, but two DJs in Louisville, Kentucky, latched on to the song and played it so much that it became a viral hit, and probably saved the band’s career.

And yet another mystery about this song is why the Republican Party thought that it was a good song to use at their convention in 2012 when failed House Speaker and failed Vice Presidential candidate, and alleged “policy genius,” Paul Ryan took the stage. Philomena Lynott was quoted afterwards as saying that son Phil, who died in 1986, would have disagreed with Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan on issues including gay marriage and taxes:

As far as I am concerned, Mitt Romney’s opposition to gay marriage and to civil unions for gays makes him anti-gay – which is not something that Philip would have supported. He had some wonderful gay friends, as indeed I do, and they deserve equal treatment in every respect, whether in Ireland or the United States.

It is, of course, mysterious, that in 2016, this country elected a Republican president who makes Romney look good by comparison.