Dishonesty and Lies: Would I Lie to You?

Eurythmics: Would I Lie to You?

[purchase]

I seem to be reliving the days of synth-pop this week. First the Thompson Twins, and now this. But surely, no one did it better than the Eurythmics. One reason for this was the amazing voice of Annie Lennox. But the songwriting of Dave Stewart may have been just as important. In turn, this may be because Stewart’s first instrument was not the synthesizer, but the guitar. Whatever the case, by 1985, the group had decided to feature more of Stewart’s guitar playing, and one result was the crunching guitar parts of Would I Lie to You? It was a high point of the band’s artistry, and probably my favorite song of theirs.


;)

Dishonesty & Lies: Lie I Believe

The V-Roys: Lie I Believe 

[purchase]

Scott Miller has built a reputation over the last decade as one of the finest songwriters and performers in the roots/rock game today.  His quick wit and quicker pen have earned him a strong fan base and easy comparisons to artists such as his one time producer Steve Earle and his idol John Prine.

Prior to his solo career, Miller performed in a band called the V-Roys alongside Mic Harrison, Jeff Bills, and Paxton Sellers.  Few people know, however, that before his time with the V-Roys, Miller spent some time in the NFL as a wide receiver/punt returner with the Miami Dolphins.  Miller amassed 487 return yards, 274 receiving yards, and two total touchdowns during a five year career from 1991-96.

This song about self delusion comes from the V-Roys 1996 debut album, and Miller's first post-football release, Just Add Ice.  

Dishonesty and Lies: Lies

Thompson Twins: Lies

[purchase]

The Thompson Twins song Lies takes off from the worst lie you can tell a person, if it is a lie: “I love you”. The song says the rest.

I caught up with the Thompson Twins in the summer of 1983. They were playing at my local new wave/ punk dive, City Gardens in Trenton, NJ. I had never heard of them, but I had seen enough good shows at City Gardens to take the chance. The band took the stage, and I almost left. At this point, the Thompson Twins were a trio, with Tom Bailey, Joe Leeway, and Alannah Currie and her amazing hair. There they were, with no instruments except synthesizers of various sorts. Now, I didn’t like the synth-pop bands as a rule, and I still don’t. Their music sounded emotionally chilly, and their sound was robotic. But, as I soon found out, this was not the case with the Thompson Twins. I still don’t know how they did it, but the gave one of the most amazingly energetic shows I have ever seen. Sadly, by the next year, things changed. The band’s lineup was the same, but now they were making bland pop songs like Doctor, Doctor. But that amazing energy was glorious while it lasted. They were able to capture it on record, and it still sounds as good to me now as it did then.

And I am happy to say that there never was either a threat to Stonehenge or a British version of the Mouseketeers that I know of. This was a reference to our Mouseketeers theme that appeared on April Fools Day in 2009. Incidentally, in the late 70’s, the Walt Disney Company had the idea to buy Stonehenge and build a British Disneyland around it. They wanted to prepare the country for Disneyfication, so they created a British version of The Mickey Mouse Club for the BBC. It didn’t take, so Stonehenge was saved. But I mention it because Alannah Currie was an original British Mouseketeer.

Dishonesty and Lies: C'est Une Peche De Dire Un Mentire

Ann Savoy: C'est Une Peche De Dire Un Mentire

[purchase]

Cajun music has its roots in the French-speaking northeastern Canadians who settled in Louisiana in the mid-1700s.

Ann Savoy, a little-known mid-twentieth century Cajun artist, learned music from her father, an itinerant preacher, fiddler, and singing teacher. She collected and sang traditional ballads throughout her life, usually unaccompanied in the Cajun tradition. Introduced to a wider public by folklorist and musicologist Alan Lomax, Savoy recorded extensively, and claimed to be able to perform over 500 songs. She was often known as Granny Savoy. This original version of the later-famous song (known as It's A Sin To Tell A Lie in English) was collected by Lomax in 1941 and appears on his collection Folk Songs of the United States Vol. 5: French Ballads and Dance.

Nothing I wrote about Ann Savoy is true. She's not an historical singer discovered by Lomax; she's contemporary (and I was merely lucky in that she posted a picture of herself that looks decidedly old). This song's from the 2002 movie, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, in which she played a small role as a musician. It's not the original version, which was written in 1936 (in English) and was recorded first by Fats Waller.

Dishonesty and Lies: Lies

The Beatles: Lies

[currently unavailable]

Such were their abilities at the height of their powers that even the Beatles' b-sides were pop gems. "I Saw Her Standing There"? B-side. "I Should Have Known Better"? B-side. "Rain"? B-side.

While "Lies" is not as well know as those (it was only released as the flip side of "You're Gonna Lose That Girl" in the Benelux countries), it is just as good as any of them and deserves a more prominent spot in the Beatles cannon.

Dishonesty and Lies: Lola

The Faces (Japan): Lola

[purchase]

The obvious lie in this post is that the version I posted wasn't the Kinks at all, but a girl J-Pop group, The Faces. It's a fairly bad cover, beginning from the idea of a girl group singing the story in the first place, don't you agree?

Here's the Kinks version:

The Kinks: Lola


According to the Roman Catholic church, there are lies of commission (things you say) and lies of omission (things you don't). This song is about one of the more intriguing of the latter sins.

Those introductory power pop chords — C-D-E— are nearly universally recognized by now. Ray Davies of the Kinks states that a true event inspired the story. He claims (but can we believe him?) that their manager spent one debauched evening happily dancing with a black transvestite in Soho, London. The rest, as they say, is history. This 1970 tune of the unwitting yet oddly contented punter gave us the immortal words, "I'm glad I'm a man, and so is Lola!" and gave the Kinks one of their biggest hits. It's become an anthem in sports arenas right up with the songs of Queen and Gary Glitter. Which may be saying something we'd do well not to investigate too carefully…

I made up the part about this song being a sport anthem. I've never once heard Lola at a game, have you?

Dishonesty and Lies: John Riley

Chuck Durfur with Connie McKenna: John Riley

[purchase]

John Riley is a song with a very big lie. Riley has sailed for seven years, and now he is home at last. Does he run to his wife, and press her into his arms? No! He tests her first, by pretending to be another man and trying to woo her. Only when she proves true to him does he reveal his identity. Question: at this point, why should she believe him?

I first heard the song in a version by Joan Baez. This one follows her melody and lyrics, but shows the influence of Bert Jansch. It’s an unlikely mixture, but it works beautifully. Chuck Durfur is an obscure figure. His John Riley comes from one of only two albums he ever made. Durfur is a guitar player, and most of his music is instrumental. The singer here is somewhat better known. Connie McKenna was the lead singer for the group Ceoltoiri, and I believe she has also done some solo work since.

Of course, you may recognize the story in this song from Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus does the same thing to his wife Penelope when he returns from the Trojan War. But you may not know that the story is older than that. If so, there is a good reason; the remainder of this paragraph was my second whopper. In the earliest versions we have of the myth of Persephone, she is not abducted to Hades’ realm; rather, Hades woos her, and she goes willingly. Six months later, her mother Demeter finds Persephone, and persuades her to return to our world. But, again in this early version, Hades appears in disguise to Persephone six months after that. He woos her all over again, but in the guise of another person. As in the song, Persephone stays true to Hades, he reveals himself, and they go back to his realm. From there, the story follows the myth as we know it today. A beautiful retelling of this version of the tale can be found in Ancient Myth and Modern Magic by Moonbeam Truehart, (Llewellyn, 1986). Sadly, this book is long out of print.

Dishonesty and Lies: Jack-A-Roe

Bob Dylan: Jack-A-Roe

[purchase]

This song is really a story within a story, although you don't find that out until the last verse. Of course the lie in the story is the young woman passing herself off as a male sailor. But the way I see it, the whole story is was fabricated to win the heart of the woman the narrator addresses in the final verse. Yes, I'm assuming the narrator is a guy, because it sounds like the kind of thing a guy would do. (Or perhaps I've been watching too much How I Met Your Mother.) So multiple lies are afoot in this song.

One of only a handful of songs written by Mark Twain (using his given name, Samuel Clemens), "Jack-a-Roe" has gone on to become a folk standard. Indeed, it's often mistakenly attributed to the ubiquitous "trad."

Like many people who didn't grow up on folk music, I was introduced to the song via the Grateful Dead. (Specifically, the version on 1981's live acoustic Reckoning.) In the mid-80's, Bob Dylan toured with the Dead as his backing band. A few years later, Bob recorded his own version of the song for his first solo covers album, 1993's Good As I Been to You. It's his version I've included here.

Dishonesty & Lies: Fake Plastic Trees

Radiohead: Fake Plastic Trees

[purchase]

There's nothing oblique about these lyrics: keeping up the appearances of a perfect, plastic lifestyle really does wear you out. And it's familiar, too: because of its straightforward, soaring melody, and its poignant take on modern existentialism, it has spawned versions from Amanda Palmer, Duncan Sheik, Lori McKenna, KT Tunstall, Jeff Tweedy, and more - more covers, ultimately, than any other Radiohead song, except perhaps Creep.

But the circumstances of this song's origin are surprisingly straightforward, for a band now known for unexpected album releases, cryptic album combination easter eggs, and a densely textured, often challenging songbook: after rejecting several "Guns and Roses-like" takes as far too bombastic, management kicked the rest of the band out of the studio; the band's singer Thom Yorke subsequently recorded the song in one take, and mixed it himself afterwards, making this one of the very few solo efforts recorded under the band moniker.

As a result of its unusual origin, though Fake Plastic Trees is often cited as a turning point, representing a move away from the grungy sound of their earliest works, both Yorke and band guitarist Jonny Greenwood have since distanced themselves from the song, choosing not to perform it in public except under contract or duress, and claiming in various publications that it is, ultimately, not meaningful enough to bear repeating "any more than we have to, to keep the fans happy".

Dishonesty and Lies: Liar

First lie: This is not Three Dog Night; it's Argent!

Three Dog Night: Liar

[purchase]

Three Dog Night is the only group I know that had three lead singers. (Second lie. As some of you pointed out, there are many groups with 3 lead singers.) It's a testament to how bad my late 60s tween radio quality was—or to how clueless I was—in that I never realized this until much, much later. All I was aware of at the time was how cool I thought they were. Some things never change.

Liar, like most of Three Dog Night's top ten songs, was a cover tune. This one was penned in 1970 by Argent member Russ Ballard. They also managed to make hits out of tunes by Paul McCartney Williams (third lie!) (An Old Fashioned Love Song), a hit from the musical Hair (Easy to Be Hard), Randy Newman (Mama Told Me Not To Come), Harry Nilsson (One), Laura Nyro (Eli's Coming), Hoyt Axton (Never Been to Spain, Joy to the World), and Elton John (Your Song).

I want to be with you as long
As you want me to,
I won't move away,
Ain't that what you said?
Ain't that what you said?
Ain't that what you said?
Liar, liar, liar.

Dishonesty and Lies: Promise

Violent Femmes: Promise

Purchase

You know that I want your loving
But my logic tells me that it ain't never gonna happen
And then my defenses say I did't want it anyway
But you know sometimes I'm a liar


Sometimes the person we lie to the most often is ourself. As Jeff Winger said on last week's episode of Community, "Nine out of ten lies occur six inches or less from the mirror."


Violent Femmes were an alternative rock outfit hailing from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They became instant post-punk darlings with their hit-filled self-titled debut album which included unforgettable songs like Gone Daddy Gone, Blister in the Sun, and Never Tell.


Like any great record, Violent Femmes was full of excellent deep tracks as well. Promise is one of those.

Dishonesty and Lies: Don't Play That Song For Me

Ben E. King: Don't Play That Song

[purchase]

Here’s another original, one which I have not featured in my long-running series over at my place. More famously covered by Aretha Franklin eight years after Ben E. King’s 1962 original, the song states this week’s theme unequivocally: “You know that you lied, you lied, you lied, lied, lied, lied.”

Don’t Play That Song was written by Atlantic supremo Ahmet Ertegün with Betty Nelson. Before Ben E. King, former singer of The Drifters, recorded the song, legendary RCA producer S. Elmo Blum had come across a demo recording of it. Recognising the song’s hit potential, he urged his record company to buy the rights for Elvis Presley, who according to some reports even demoed it. One can almost hear Elvis singing it; alas the many esoteric Elvis studio cuttings have revealed no recording of Don’t Play That Song, so we should take that rumour with a pinch of salt.

In the event, Ertegün wisely decided that one of his artists should record the song, using a riff that is more than just a bit similar to that of King’s big hit the previous year, Stand By Me. It reached #11 in the US charts.

Dishonesty & Lies: Step Right Up

Tom Waits: Step Right Up

[purchase]

Boyhowdy is responsible for the pictures on the sidebar that accompany our themes. When I saw this week’s, I knew what my first song had to be. Step Right Up is Tom Waits’ brilliant send-up of late night TV advertising pitches. These contain, in the words of Douglas Adams, “much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate.” Tom Waits takes this to its logical extreme. Since Tom Waits wrote this song, these kinds of pitches have moved from late night TV to cable infomercials. So the song is at least as relevant now is it was then. Ironically, a version of Step Right Up with different lyrics was once used as an advertising jingle by Enron. In the company’s messy collapse, the only tape of this version known to exist mysteriously vanished.

Actually, I know of no one who ever tried to use Step Right Up for any sort of jingle. This was my first lie of the week.

Trouble -> Dishonesty & Lies: Trouble Over Me

Tift Merritt: Trouble Over Me

[purchase]

Tift Merritt carries us from trouble to dissent with this fully self-aware plea for self delusion, in which a litany of boldfaced lies ("I don't want a boyfriend", "leave me alone") belie a fully honest urging for someone to make some trouble over her. Twenty-something Merritt, who was born and lives in small-town Texas, is an oft-overlooked singer-songwriter in terms of commercial success despite two failed Grammy nominations in 2004, in part because although her music is often mis-categorized and sold as country, its sound is more of a folk-rock hybrid, but she has plenty of cred in the industry and in-crowd; the song was featured in audiophile Nick Hornsby's 31 Songs project, and other works have found placement on several prominent TV and film soundtracks in recent years, including the 2009 Hornsby-adapted vehicle An Education.

Trouble: Trouble

Todd Snider: Trouble

[purchase]

I have not posted in forever - shame on me!

Back in the days when I was a "regular", you could count on me for two or three submissions a week... and Todd Snider's tunes would show up frequently to illustrate my musical points (samplings can be found here, here, here and here)...

I first fell in love with him from his debut CD, Songs for the Daily Planet, released in 1994 - I always thought Trouble was the best non-country country song ever written. "A woman like you walks in a place like this, you can almost hear the promises break" - does it get any better than that? (rhetorical question... :-)

Trouble: Nobody Knows The Trouble I've Seen

Grant Green: Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen

[purchase]

This post is courtesy of Mr. Geoviki, who first turned me on to the amazing jazz guitarist Grant Green. I discovered a fair share of guitarists on my own, but Mr. G's the real guitar fan. In fact, while I sit upstairs and write these blog entries, he's down in the mancave practicing chord progressions and arpeggios.

Green released this album of spirituals cum instrumental wonders in 1962, the third in a series of concept albums recorded for Blue Note, and it's brilliant. Not only is Green in fine form, he's accompanied by a young Herbie Hancock on piano. If you like your jazz straight up and accessible, you'll like Grant Green.

Trouble: Trouble (x3)

So many songs are just called "Trouble" - seems the word itself is sufficient to set the stage for artists aching to address the challenges and pain of life. We started the week with a cover of the Little Feet song of the same name; as we come to the end of our theme, here's three more favorites, none of them in their original form, all of them relatively rare and hard to find, even as their original versions are likely familiar to the average audiophile.

Shawn Colvin: Trouble (live)

[out of print; purchase used]

According to chart data and Amazon, Shawn Colvin's 1996 popfolk opus A Few Small Repairs is her best-selling album; it spawned her highest charting single, and garnered two Grammys, for Song and Album of the Year, two years after its relese. But I saw Shawn long before the world saw her coming, on a small stage in a cramped Cambridge coffeehouse, and to me, her best songs have always been the delicate ones, where her little-girl voice and the raw lyrical distance she draws from a portrayed world of pain shine through in their simplest form.

This version of Colvin's Trouble offers the best of both worlds: the song has its origin on A Few Small Repairs, yet here we hear it live, with Colvin's voice able to crackle with the energy of the late-nineties Lilith Fair audience who saw her as both a headline act and an icon of female empowerment. But after all that, it's not so different from the studio version: listen, and you can hear the album arrangement coming through, proving once again how vital the support of Colvin's cowriter, producer, and musical partner John Leventhal is to her commercial success.

The Holmes Brothers: Trouble (Cat Stevens cover)

[purchase]

Everyone knows who Cat Stevens is, though sadly, in a world where religion is a dirty word, many modern audiences know him less as a poetic seeker and more as the seventies artist who converted to Islam after an apocryphal near-death experience and disappeared from the scene for decades. But proud folk artists and others still cover the man's greatest works, most of which date from his delicately textured acoustic period between '69 and '77, and since Trouble was there at the beginning - it's originally found on Mona Bone Jakon, which gets much less in the way of play or props than Stevens' two subsequent discs, Tea For The Tillerman and Teaser and the Firecat - I have several versions of this seminal tune on my hard drive, including this one, featuring the Holmes Brothers' raspy blues harmonies, originally found on the Crossing Jordan soundtrack.

Mutual Admiration Society: Trouble (Jon Brion cover)

[purchase]

Mutual Admiration Society was a one-shot collaboration formed out of LA's Largo, a club which for decades has been a mainstay of the LA singer-songwriter scene. The band's single, self-titled album was rehearsed and recorded in a six day period in 2000, and eventually released in 2004 on bluegrass label Sugar Hill, possibly due to the rising name-brand recognition of the trio of young musicians who play alongside Toad The Wet Sprocket founder and frontman Glen Phillips here - Sara Watkins, Sean Watkins, and Chris Thile, a group you probably know as Nickel Creek.

The album contains two covers, both relevant to our theme this week: a delightfully gypsy-folk take on Harry Nillson's Think About Your Troubles, and this one, originally penned and performed by Jon Brion, arguably the central figure in the Largo scene, and sadly best known outside of that for penning the soundtracks to several films, including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Magnolia, Boogie Nights, and, embarrassingly, Popeye, starring Shelly Duval and Robin Williams, neither of whom are known for their singing, and for good reason.

Today, of course, Glen, Sean, and Sara still play and record together as part of Works Progress Administration, another on-again off-again collaboration who released their own one-shot album in 2009. And Largo? It still functions as a locus for the likes of Aimee Mann, Brion, Phillips, and others; I'm still hoping to make it out someday, to see the scene at play.

Trouble: Trouble Man

Marvin Gaye: Trouble Man

[purchase]

In 1971, Marvin Gaye was coming off the success of his 1971 groundbreaking album, What's Going On (which Motown president Berry Gordy had tried to deep-six because of its deeply political message). The early seventies saw many soul musicians (including Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, James Brown, and Barry White) scoring for the new genre of movies catering to a black audience. Gaye moved to Los Angeles to write, produce and record the soundtrack for the 1972 blaxploitation movie, Trouble Man. The movie tanked, but the soundtrack lived on, giving us this soulful tune.

There's only three things that's fa sho': taxes, death, and trouble.

Trouble: You've Got Your Troubles

David and Jonathan: You've Got Your Troubles

[purchase]

David and Jonathan, perennials in lists of one-hit wonders for their cover of The Beatles’ Michelle, were actually Roger and Roger — Cook and Greenaway.

If you don’t know their names, you will know their songs. They wrote such hits as Gene Pitney's Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart, The Hollies' Long Cool Woman In A Black Dress and Gasoline Alley Bred, Home Lovin’ Man for Andy Williams, Deep Purple’s Hallelujah, Something Tells Me Something’s Gonna Happen Tonight for Cilla Black; White Plain’s My Baby Loves Lovin’, Blue Mink’s Melting Pot, Whistling Jack Smith’s I Was Kaiser Bill’s Batman, Cliff Richards' High And Dry, and Gary Lewis’ Green Grass.

They also wrote a song called True Love and Apple Pie for Susan Shirley. They later rewrote that song with two other chaps to produce the famous Coca-Cola jingle I'd Like To Buy The World A Coke, which in turn became a rather annoying hit for The New Seekers (get the Susan Shirley song and the Coke jingle as well as the story of the song HERE). By contrast, for themselves they wrote songs with titles such as Gilly Gilly Ossenfeffer Katzenellenbogen By-The-Sea (well, they did have another UK hit with the more soberly titled Lovers of the World Unite).

Their first successful songwriting collaboration was You've Got Your Troubles, which was a US and UK top 10 for The Fortunes. The Birmingham band would have a hit with another Greenaway/Cook song, This Golden Ring. The two Rogers recorded the song themselves, but it seems unclear when: one source claims that they did so before The Fortunes recorded their version in May 1965; most sources say David and Jonathan’s version was released in 1966.

Anyhow, the two Bristolians ceased their biblically-monikered George Martin-produced duetting high jinks in 1968, having recorded a flop with Softly Whispering I Love You (four years later a hit for The Congregation). Greenaway was invited to join the newly-formed band Blue Mink. He declined, but recommended Cook, who became co-lead singer with Madeline Bell. Cook and Greenaway wrote the bulk of Blue Mink songs.

After Blue Mink, Cook moved to Nashville, eventually becoming the first British songwriter to be inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Trouble: Lookin’ For Trouble

Steve Goodman: Lookin‘ For Trouble

[purchase]

When I think of Steve Goodman, I think first of his wonderful sense of humor. Next, I think of his warmth, and the love for his characters that comes through in songs like The Dutchman. (Yes, I know Goodman didn’t write The Dutchman, but his performance brings out this quality, and it also shows up in his writing.) At first listen, Lookin’ For Trouble is another matter. Goodman’s base of operations was Chicago, and here that city’s blues comes out through him. But listen again. The song is a piece of advice to someone who might still be able to benefit from it. In this take on the blues, all is not lost. Goodman’s narrator is singing this to someone he wants to help, and what comes through most is how much he cares.

Incidentally, Lookin’ For Trouble is a song that I first encountered in a wonderful performance by Mollie O’Brien and Rich Moore. Later, I found an equally wonderful version by Red Molly. Both were too recent to include in this post, but, if you like this, you will want to seek out those versions as well.