No, Thanks: "No-no Song", by Ringo Starr

Purchase "No-no Song" by Ringo Starr

2020 brought a lot to bear, not the least being a real challenge to sobriety. When there's nothing to do, getting drunk in the dark of my cave-like home office with something mindless streaming through the Netflix tractor beam was often the highlight of the day. Memes and internet jokes about happy hour being pretty much any hour of the day abound. Still.

Because this shit is far from over. 

Taking a break from the news, from the social media doom scroll, and from the living room couch are all important steps to recovery. So, is laying off the booze and hiding the keys to the liquor cabinet. Seems like the sober-er times of 2020 are the times I'll most want to forget. There really hasn't been anything much in the way of redeeming when it comes to the past year. Save for music, which even in the best of times, is a key to happiness.

I know highballs and new tunes were a balm in this dark year. But, like all good things, in moderation we trust. Because 2020 feels a lot like a hangover that won't fade.

This track from Ringo's 1974 Goodnight Vienna is a fun little reggae-esque romp about getting sober. Given the prodigious amount of chemical experimentation of the Beatles' later years, and lack of lingering damage it caused, in comparison to many of their contemporaries, "No-no Song" comes off as more than just another silly Ringo tune. ("Octopus Gardens," anyone?  "Yellow Submarine?" ) This song has the feel that it was meant to be a lark, but took on a more realistic sense the more it got played. Ringo always struck as the most whacked out of the Beatles, to be honest. But, here in "No-no Song," he seems to be striking a sober chord, if only because he's tired of waking up on the floor. How serious he is depends on how much you want to see the song as ironic. It was written by Hoyt Axton, famous cowboy singer and actor, who had also struggled with sobriety and drug use in his life. And Ringo was far from sober at the time of the recording. In an interview with Time magazine, he claimed that he and Axton recorded the song "...with the biggest spliff and a large bottle of Jack Daniel's." 

I suppose, reading too much into the song is a mistake. It is kind of funny, in it's escalation of peer pressures and continuous inebriation. But, maybe it's just supposed to ironic, like it's ironic when we wake up from a bender and say, "I'm never doing that again..." 

Irony, for sure. But, then this is 2020 and we've got a premium on irony. Filled to very top with it. Looking back, all this was predictable. Preventable. And looking forward, we'll look back on this and just shake our heads in angry, rueful hindsight at what could have been.

In the meantime, we've still got time to listen to good music. The bottle and whether the cap stays on, or comes off, once again, is another question. We can always so "no-no" in the future. Let's get through the next few months first. And hope for better days to come. 

Here's a bit more countrified version of "No-no Song" with the first All-Starr Band, which looks a lot like the E Street Band...

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

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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?

Burn/Fire: Fire On High

Electric Light Orchestra: Fire On High
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Regular readers of my work here and elsewhere know that I’m a fan of prog rock, and I think that it is pretty clear that the Beatles were a profound influence on prog bands, many of whom have acknowledged this directly, or have covered Beatles songs. Electric Light Orchestra,which was founded when Roy Wood, of The Move, wanted to explicitly pick up where the Beatles left off, and use orchestral arrangements and instruments to fuse classical music with pop shows how it is possible to mix the two.

Initially, Wood recruited Jeff Lynne to join The Move, which also included drummer Bev Bevan, and they gradually morphed the older band into a new unit, Electric Light Orchestra. Wood left the band during the recording of their second album, leaving Lynne as the leader. And, there is no question that Lynne loved the Beatles (and the Beatles loved him—as you can see in the article that I linked to above, not only did they like his songs, Ringo and George guested on their albums, Lynne produced solo albums for Ringo, Paul, and George, replaced George Martin as producer for the Beatles’ last singles, and, of course Lynne was a Traveling’ Wilbury).

I was a fan of ELO during their mid-late 1970s heyday. I enjoyed the mix of pomp and pop. “Fire on High” is one of their stranger songs, suitable only as a B-side—an instrumental (mostly), with backwards vocals ("The music is reversible, but time... is not. Turn back! Turn back! Turn back! Turn back!"), choral segments and all sorts of odd stuff going on, making it still a fascinating listen.

Interestingly, despite its weirdness, a portion of the song was used by CBS for its sports coverage in the 70s. I have a strong memory that it was used for the network’s NBA coverage, but the Internet disagrees, telling me that it was actually, used for a sports anthology show, sort of like the better-known Wide World of Sports called the CBS Sports Spectacular. As we know, memory is a strange thing.

Back in the late 1980s, my friend Bill and I shared an apartment in New York, in the days when having an answering machine was still something that everyone had, and creating a theoretically clever outgoing message was popular. I remember that we used a few seconds of “Fire on High” and pretended that we were announcing a game while imparting the standard “we aren’t home, leave a message at the beep” message.

As I am writing this, I’m having second thoughts about whether it is a good idea to share this story or not. But we're all friends, here, right, and you won't think less of me. Right?

Songs From Movies about Musicians: Backbeat

Purchase: Backbeat Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

Backbeat, a bio-pic about the earliest iteration of The Beatles—well, The Silver Beatles, actually—came out in 1994, and at the time, I remember thinking: wow! What a movie! So cool, so uber-hip as to be so different from what was happening at the time. I’ve re-watched it since and all I can really say is, in deference to the aging process, the accents are good, especially the guy who played George Harrison. In fact, all the portrayals are good: Lennon is brooding and nasty, Paul is smiley, yet focused. George is quiet. Then there’s Pete Best, the world’s unluckiest drummer, but the focus of the film, Stuart Sutcliffe, the “lost Beatle” or the “5^th Beatle”, who left the band to become a painter and then tragically died from an intracerebral hemorrhage is the central story. The injury was the possible result of a vicious beating he took, and a kick to the head, in one of the Beatle’s many misadventures in Hamburg, Germany, where they cut their teeth as a bar band pre-1964 and their history-making splashdown in America to start the British Invasion. The film’s focus is on those wild times, as the Beatles sorted out just exactly who they were, and the irony of seeing them portrayed as pre-icons, unaware of what was to come, makes for interesting watching.  And the fact that the film devotes most of its image making to Sutcliffe and his relationship with photographer Astrid Kirchher, lends to the air of mystery around just who the Beatles were before they become the biggest celebrities in history.

Sutcliffe died a year after leaving the band, at the age of 21, after having secured a scholarship to attend the Hamburg School of Art. Pete Best was replaced by Richard Starkey…the rest is history.

It’s sad to think of what could have been when one discusses Sutcliffe (or Pete Best, for that matter). An artist first, Lennon convinced him to join the band and play the bass, which Sutcliffe had absolutely no talent for whatsoever. But, he looked cool, and in a band as image-conscious as this, that counted for a lot. In fact, it was arguably Sutcliffe that inspired and invented the Beatle’s image—point in fact: he was the first to wear a mop-top; the others were copying him. Same with the Beatle boots and the duds. But, with Lennon, McCartney and Harrison being as talented as they were, tensions were bound to arise—the looks would only get them so far. Seriously, think about it: The Beatles started out like any other pop outfit: thriving, rocketing to fame on their carefully cultivated image and the devastating good looks. But, they surpassed the look and did something as yet really unachieved at that time in pop/rock music, which was make music. 

Music, as in italicized music, asterixed music, real music*.  

The level of talent, of song writing and composition skills, has rarely, if ever, been matched since by a pop band. So, good looks, mop top haircuts, and those Chesterfield suits with the velvet collars and the drainpipe pants, would have only taken The Beatles so far if not for the god-given musical talents. Imagine a history where the Beatles were a relegated to a few oldies hits, dusted off on classic rock radio, never achieving Abbey Road, or Sgt. Pepper’s, because they were kind of Justin Beiber, or something even less, a factory made hit, here and then gone. Pop music is more flash than it is bonfire. The Beatles remain an ever-growing phenomenon not because they were among the first, but because they deserve, perhaps, had to be that. 

The movie itself, as I said, is…OK. It’s a nice period piece, full of authentic sets, haircuts, and great wardrobe. It shows the tensions in the band, defines the personalities that would go on to be more legendary the real, and depicts Paul’s anger and dislike of Sutcliffe, knowing he was better on bass than the aspiring art-school aesthete.  

But, it is the soundtrack that we will end on. Produced by Don Was, and featuring a veritable all-star line up including Dave Priner of Soul Asylum (huge at the time the movie came out); Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs; Mike Mills of REM; Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth; and a young kid named Dave Grohl from a little band called Nirvana. The album is a vanity project of sorts, with ace musicians, wildly popular at that particular juncture, covering, in a most un-ironic way, their roots. The music that Beatles started out with was and remains some of the most enjoyable ever written: 2-minute, whip crack rockabilly and soul numbers that really, though covers themselves at the time, were the very earliest traces of rock n roll. The DNA of the genre, if you will—what made rock n roll a cultural force, and not just a local southern radio oddity named after a slang term for sex, with a fast backbeat and a quicker guitar riff and shuffle.

This modern day crew cuts a fantastic, hyped up and warp-speed collection of such tunes as Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” and “Good Golly Miss Molly”, “Twist and Shout”, Chuck Berry’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll Music” and “Carol” and the Berry Gordy penned, “Money”, perhaps the most recognizable of the later Beatle’s hits.

The soundtrack is well done, recorded crisply and full of a buoyant, joyous energy. And like its predecessors, it clocks in at under a half-hour—those 2-minute pop classics, all jangle guitar, shotgun snares and ripping vox are a thing of the past, sadly.  I remember thinking of the album as a nice little novelty, a different kind of sound from musicians who I loved at the time, doing far different sounding music than what was popular (Greg Dulli, in particular, is in excellent form—but, then, the Afghan Whigs were really just a hyped up, angry soul band…). 

For me, having grown up on The Beatles and studied them deeply well before I even got out of middle school, the soundtrack was a lark, a fun reinterpretation. But, for a lot of people my age, in the confused post-Nirvana (Cobain committed suicide just about a week after the soundtrack came out), still growing grunge and alterna-revolution, the soundtrack to Backbeat was kind of a text book, a primer for what came before and laid the groundwork for the rock ‘n roll that was happening now (well, then actually…).  

The thing itself, rock ‘n ‘ roll, is constantly changing, but its roots, as open to debate of ownership and origin as they are, remain solid. The place rock music came from is sacred, a spring or an oracle, still able to mystify. Going back, regardless for the reason, proves, like all good art, that reinterpretation, not necessarily reinvention, will keep the thing perpetually alive. And kicking. Hopefully to a kicking backbeat…

Pour: Rain, by The Beatles

Purchase Rain, by The Beatles 

I’m going to reach a little here. Our theme is “Pour”, as in pouring rain, or a beer, but as is the fashion with SMM, interpretation is an open-ended exercise and itself its own tolerantly loose term.

I thought a lot about pouring and due to my partiality towards spirits and libations, I was thinking on drinking songs to try to fit the theme. But writing about drinking songs gets as old as drinking songs themselves—heard ‘em all a few too many times. Expanding on the theme, there’s rain. Easy. Some great songs have been written about rain. And why not? Rain is as evocative a metaphor on paper as in real-life. And “Rain”, by the Beatles, is not only a fine piece of trippy melodic pop sugar, but it’s a track I never get tired of hearing.

The Beatles “Rain”, released as a B-side to “Paperback Writer”,  remains one of my favorite Fab-Four songs. I always thought it was their first foray into their experimental, psychedelic side, and it came out before their genre-crossing masterwork—and harbinger of things to come, sonically, aesthetically, and otherwise—Revolver.  

It’s a wonderful song, in all the best ways that pop songs are great: the swirling guitar comes close to sounding as if its crunching through the soni-scape, but it’s light enough to seem as if it’s just happily caught in a tilt-a-whirl, lazily going round and around. That fuzzed-out guitar lead by George is as ‘60s as it gets, and the lilting, sing-song vocals by John and Paul’s slippery groove bass line combine with what I think is my favorite drumbeat that Ringo ever laid down, all tripped out gun shot and gently propulsive, to bring 2 minutes and 45 seconds of exactly the kind of song that touches into the best part of your brain that makes you love, love, love music…

Meaning: a song like “Rain” sends the listener scrambling through their onomatopoetic thesaurus looking for tangible words to describe not just the sound, but what the sound feels like, what it does as it works on you and makes you reach for the rewind button again and again. The Beatles will perhaps always serve as the greatest band for drawing a listener into a beautiful interior world, a bubble of sound that, once experienced, colors, literally and metaphorically, all the rest of the music they might ever hear. 

I suppose that’s what makes The Beatles so great (not that the subject nor my instance is necessary at this point): once you’ve heard them, and if you were lucky enough to fall in love with rock music because of them, and to them, the band will color, in brilliant hues, whatever else you listen to, pretty much for life…

As a P.S. of sorts, I wanted to send a shout out to one of my favorite music blogs, Cover Me, which, you can guess, specializes in cover versions of songs we all know, by delivering mp3s of cover versions we don't...Cover Me's write up on "Rain" is pretty cool and the five choices they present as for our tune are just out of this world fun...Five Good Covers: Rain