You know this song. You must, unless you live under a cone of silence: it was number one with a bullet in 2001, and it hasn't really left the airwaves since, though these days you might be more likely to find it on a classic rock alternative morning show kick-off, a sign that the DJ is getting a little long in the tooth himself.
It's pop. From a number of perfectly valid angles, it's pap, too. But one of the things I love about music is the way it shifts when you do. It's why I specialize in cover songs, back on my own blog - because the flip and switch that shudders through your consciousness when you encounter great coverage is like a door opening in the brain to let the sunshine in.
And in this case, two things recently "flipped" this song for me. First: I finally encountered the acoustic version, after all these years, released in 2008 for a deluxe edition reissue of the original, and found it tense and delicious, pensive where the original radio single is angry. And second, I realized it doesn't have to be about some patronizing emo moonpie trying to cheer up an insecure groupie, as I always assumed. Instead, it's the song I always wanted to get right for my own daughter, on the days she's down and in the fourteen-year-old funk.
Hard to imagine this song is a year older than she is. May she, too, learn to be herself, and just be.
I have no doubt that our new theme will include a wide range of songs and ideas. There are simply too many things one could be in the middle of. “Middle” can be in the middle of the song title, as it is here, or in the middle of the lyrics, or simply in the middle of an idea of what the song is about. But, for me, the theme is, first of all, a reason to finally be able to share this one.
One Step Beyond, the debut album by Madness, was an album that grabbed me right away. I had already been swept off my feet by British ska, starting with the Specials, and moving on with all due haste to the Selecter, Bad Manners, and The English Beat, just to name the highlights. I would go on to explore the earlier Jamaican form of ska as well. Where reggae, when it reached the US in the early 1970s, offered strong messages and a new to me rhythm that I found irresistible, ska had was a sort of punked up version of the same thing. It replaced reggae’s polish with an urgency that I found addictive, and it was more musical by far than punk itself. Given all that, Madness stood out with a sound all their own. In the Middle of the Night in some ways shows what was different about them. The song has a completely British sense of humor. If George had not been the subject of this song, it is not hard to imagine him instead as a character in a Monty Python sketch. Bad Manners was the other British ska invasion band that displayed a sense of humor, but where they were over the top, Madness was sly and insinuating. Madness also had an approach to making music in which one can recognize the influence of British music hall styles and approaches. I suppose that really is the difference. Other bands seized on the infectious combination of reggae and punk energy, and Madness did too. But Madness also embraced their heritage. One has more than their accents to go by in saying that this is a British band, and George in this song is the kind of character one only seems to find in England.
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
A rare gap in my day allowed me some further reverie around this theme, wondering whether there is a tipple that at some time has not put the poetic muse into overdrive. (Answer: quite a few, but here are a few that did!)
WATER: Clearly we start with the only real essential, that last choice at the party, adam's ale. And what better than a bit of cheesy soviet folk-jazz-rock, the russians seeming always to me big fans of plain. Yeah, right. I had never heard of Garik Sukachyov before today, but he and his "proletariat jazz" seems quite big in the eastern bloc and more, were I able to read the cyrillic of his publicity pages. The song is "Pour Me Water".
TEA: Can't stand it myself, but the life's blood, it seems of my nation, a brew being the solution to any crisis, the balm to any bluster, the antidote to any antipathy etc etc. I was expecting some Bonzo Dog type parody to celebrate this drink, but, should I be surprised it was rap, sorry, Grime, artist Yungen that celebrates this nectar. And the song? "Comfy". Not really, or, um, my cup of tea.
COFFEE: In truth from where this idea came, this song , "Truck Drivin' Man", and the band both longtime favourites of mine, with the chorus refrain of "Pour me another cup of coffee, for it is the best in the land" lilting into my head at the merest flicker of fancying a flat white. An old country staple, Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airman nail this as theirs. (I saw erstwhile guitarist Bill Kirchen, self-styled king of Dieselbilly on a solo UK tour in 2015, asking he play it as a request. Without the rest of that stellar crew, he showed he still could.)
COKE: Nope, not that one, the fizzy drink, but I felt a need to slowly build up to liquor, keep you thirsty, as it were. The only reference I could find to pouring one comes from this little Elvis Costello mid-period beauty. From his never bettered "King of America", in 1986, this song references not necessarily its consumption, more to how it may be, in the song, comparable to the vintage wine of the more decadent europeans. (As I listen again I wonder as to whether anyone currently resident in Washington might see themselves somehow as King? What's the name of the song again? Brilliant Mistake........)
WINE: I know beer probably comes next, but I couldn't find me a convincing one, so onto another King, Dean Martin, no stranger to either grape or grain. Possibly lost for choice, this is the only one with an explicit instruction to pour. Not much else to say. (Is it just me, but anyone reminded just a little of this?)
RUM: You get the drift, by now I am just naming a drink, any drink, and asking google for a stiff one. This is the probably unfeasably long straw I got here, along with an umbrella and, quite possibly, some dry ice. Who the f is Zac Brown and why is he singing this execrable nonsense? "Castaway". I wish it was. A hat band from the southern states, I learn, committing the common if no less cardinal sin of mistaking country music with cruise ship crap in the caribbean. (See also Jimmy Buffett. No link.)
GIN: Gin is dead classy nowadays, taking a place ahead of malt whisky in its myriad styles and varieties, all increasingly exotically and artisanally sourced, prices escalating through the stratosphere. This song, "Galaxy of the Lost" was made in 2007, so the chances are it was a Gordons, possibly ahead even of Mr Ramsey's last ditch attempt to resurrect the also-ran loser generic (or brand leader as these things often are in the real world.) More tonic than gin in both the song and performance, by ex-Test Icicle, Lightspeed Champion.
WHISKY: Right on cue, waiting for the gin backlash, here's whisky revving in the pits, tho' maybe this band are more down the rotgut end of the market than my tipple of choice, Laphroaig, thanks for asking. Double. No ice. This? "Pour Me" by Trick Pony. I like the way the video finishes before the end of the song. It seems somehow how it should be. Like the amnesia of an alcohol related black-out.
BOURBON: I don't think this is cheating. Bourbon may be generically a whisky, but, no, not really, it is different altogether. And what is about all these country dudes and their drinking? Mind you, this song, by Alan Jackson, is a whole lot classier than the whisky above, a whole lot. Lonesome guy, a broken heart, an understanding bartender. Heck, I'm there already. But if those goddamn rednecks put that Trick Pony song on the jukebox again I swear I won't be responsible for myself.
TEQUILA: Oh, hell, I must have just lost a moment or two there, where am I? That bourbon was just soooooo smooth. But what's this shit? Like that fine line between not enough and too much, I have strayed again from good country to bad country. Or from country to western as we so hilariously put it back home. Never liked tequila anyway, whether "Pour me another Tequila, Sheila" is pouring or not. Bobby Bare sounds someone I don't need to know. Am I right?
Hating to end on a low note, perhaps, but even with that large pint of water, the tea, the coffee, the cola, all that wine, rum, gin, whisky, bourbon and tequila is going to have some effect on the next day. So here is Bobby Bare's son (Bobby Bare Junior!) to remind us quite what. I have one of his records. He seems a whole lot cooler a character than his dad. Less successfull too, I'll wager, but at least he'll be forgotten on account of his art.
I am pretty sure that I memorized the entirety of <Selling England ByThe Pound>. Probably couldn’t sing along today on the first try - but it
would come back quickly, I knew it that well. As years went by, it was Phil
Collins whose name cropped up more frequently (one of the early MTV hits was
his "You Can’t Hurry Love") - while Peter Gabriel was more or less
dismissed. Worse: Gabriel was denigrated as being not quite of right mind ...
maybe kind of crazy?
Like many other "combos", Genesis was good because of the
cross-fit of its' leads styles: Collins tends to the middle, Gabriel to the
edges. But which of the two is more creative? For that matter: What defines
creativity? Producing more? Being more artistic? Sorry: I mean
"artistic"?
That said, while Collins remained in the spotlight, Gabriel faded. Well ...
not entirely. He, too made an early MTV appearance with Sledgehammer: a whopper
of a production. It must have pushed the limits of video editing to the edges
for its time (The Wikipedia says it earned the most awards any clip has ever
attained. Rightly so. IMHO way surpassing another MTV clip of about the same
time: I Want My MTV/Money for Nothing). Virtually every frame (25 per second) of Sledgehammer is
a separate shot. Talk about attention to detail! And it that attention to
detail that may have marked Gabriel as not quite "right".
But, as much as I love both the Sledgehammer video and the song itself, it
is only tangentially related to the current SMM theme of <pour>. What we
need is a song that relates to pour, and Sledgehammer's closest reference is to
"blue sky".
To the rescue, as I attempt to focus on Gabriel: <Red Rain>. Lots of
pouring here. Again and again: we've got ... "pouring down all over
me". But this isn’t a case of trying to make the foot fit the shoe ....
it's a darned good song that you should really take a listen to the clip at the top.
A couple of years ago, I wrote about how my love of music began in the summer of 1969. That summer saw the release of “Sugar, Sugar,” a classic “bubblegum” rock song credited to The Archies, a fictional band of cartoon characters from the comics, and specifically, from The Archie Show, a cartoon series that began airing in 1968 on CBS. As a 7 year old, I was directly in the target demographic, and remember watching the show, and its various later incarnations and spin offs. The Archies, of course, were an attempt to piggyback on the success of The Monkees, a fictional group of actual humans which remarkably turned into a real band, themselves created to piggyback on the success of The Beatles, an actual band of legendary humans.
“Sugar, Sugar” was written by Jeff Barry and Andy Kim, and features the lyrics ‘Oh, sugar, pour a little sugar on it honey/Pour a little sugar on it baby,” making it theme-appropriate. Because Archie, Betty, Veronica and the gang were fictional, the song featured a crew of studio musicians managed by Don Kirshner (who had originally supervised The Monkees’ music), including Chuck Rainey, who played with Quincy Jones and Steely Dan, on bass, and drummer Gary Chester, who appeared on tons of hit records. Lead vocals were performed by Ron Dante, accompanied by Toni Wine, who multitracked their voices to create the full Archies sound.
Ultimately, “Sugar, Sugar” was the number one song of 1969, and its influence cannot be underestimated. You find its DNA in the power pop that arose in the 70s and 80s, and even in punk bands like The Ramones. Not to mention Def Leppard. Since I love that music (other than Def Leppard), I have to believe that constant repetition of “Sugar, Sugar” during the summer of 1969 somehow imprinted in my brain a susceptibility to poppy, hooky music. Remarkably, the song became a hit again the next year in a cover by Wilson Pickett, a very different artist. It has been covered often, by artists as diverse as Alex Chilton, Bob Marley, The Germs, and Homer Simpson. There are also German, twoCzech, and Spanish covers. Recently, it was featured on Riverdale, a noir live action version of the Archie comics, played not by some modern version of The Archies, but by Josie and the Pussycats. (All of a sudden, this is turning into a Cover Me "Five Good Covers" piece....)
Flash forward from the summer of 1969 to the summer of 1978. That was the summer that I graduated from high school, and as a graduation present, my parents sent me to Europe on a multi-week teen tour. It was an incredible experience. We flew to London, took a ferry to Holland, and then bussed south to Italy—I’ll never forget waking up in the middle of the Alps for the first time—then north to Paris before I somehow was trusted to lead a small group of my fellow teens back to New York while the rest of the group continued on without us. We had a good group of kids, mostly from the New York area, and I very quickly became closest with two other guys, Larry and Keith. We spent an enormous amount of time together that summer, riding buses, touring and just hanging out.
It turned out that Larry’s father was Don Kirshner’s partner, and he joked that The Monkees and Archies were going to put him through college. At the time, though, their big act was Kansas, and after we returned from the trip, we all saw the band play Madison Square Garden together.
As things happened, we grew apart as our lives turned to college, careers and families.
Flash forward to 2011, about a year after I joined Facebook. I had reconnected with Keith and Larry, and another woman, Nancy, who had been on the trip. We met for dinner in New York, and had a great time, but although we promised to do it again, we haven’t. I’ve been in touch, on and off with Larry, on Facebook and off, have had a little contact with Keith on Facebook, and it appears that Nancy has unfriended me. That’s sort of the way life is, I guess. It is difficult to keep in contact with people when your social circles really don’t overlap, your relationship is based on a short, intense period decades in the past, with a long eventful gap and considering the amount of effort that it takes to rekindle a friendship.
The other day, I was lucky to attend a speech at Princeton Alumni Day by Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Alphabet (the holding company for Google). He talked about how his belief was that technological innovation would solve the world’s problems. In response to a question about the effect of social media on human interaction, he observed, essentially, that we may have more relationships, but that those relationships are not as deep. And that does seem to be the case in the Facebook era.
Personally, I’m not complaining. I’ve always been somewhat introverted with a small number of close friends at any given time. Through Facebook, I’ve been able to create a larger circle of friends, some who I haven’t spoken to in years and some of whom I’ve never even spoken to in person, and enjoy interacting with them comfortably in the ether.
Just because my country has voted to BRexit Europe doesn't make me any the less the polyglot Francophile. (Pretentious? Moi?) So, given a paucity of songs pouring out this, that and and the other, or like this, that or the other, what am I to do? My first choice has had several appearances here, so it has to be the glory that is Plastic Bertrand.
Roger Allen Francois Jared, a member of that scatologically slim brotherhood, Famous Belgians, isn't really all that famous, even arguably in Brussels. But he did have an international hit single in 1977, a number 8 in the UK, and, highly convincingly for a foreign language song, number 57 in the U.S. Billboard chart. And while it only peaked at 11 in his homeland, of course the french and the swiss granted it toppermost off the poppermost, with number 1s.
It wasn't even his song, it having been originally written and performed by his record producer, Lou Deprijck, always denied by Jared until a 2010 court case eventually confirmed the truth. In fact, he hadn't sung any of the songs on his first 4 albums. Ooops. I think this truth spoils the story, if I am honest, but thankfully there has yet to be a case questioning the validity of one Elton Motello, who sang a loosely "translated" english version.
Thankfully leaving that behind, I thought it entirely essential to reveal another genuinely francophone version, courtesy the excellent Nouvelle Vague. From their 3rd album, this is what the band had to say about it. (O, so it wasn't sung by a french person either......)
Finally, and unnecessarily, above is a version I had never been aware of, NYC's finest, Sonic Youth, covering it. I wondered why too.
I will always associate this song with being excused from gym class. It happened in my senior year of high school. I had sung in the men’s chorus, (which was a way of getting out of homeroom), for three years, and the conductor urged me in my junior year to take choir as well. I also took choir as a senior, but I never even considered taking Schola Cantorum. This was the elite small singing group and class, and I never thought I would be good enough. I was, however, a rarity in high school especially, a true basso profundo, a low bass. I could sing notes below the staff with authority. So it happened in the middle of my senior year that one of the basses in Schola Cantorum broke his leg in a skiing accident, and could not perform with the group for the rest of the year. My choir teacher, who also taught Schola, basically strong-armed me into the group. He even got me excused from gym for the remainder of the year, which meant I got credit for nine classes in an eight period day. Java Jive was the first song I learned with the new group.
Java Jive was originally done by the Ink Spots, as presented here. I did not know that until years later. When I found the Manhattan Transfer version, I thought my search was over. In fact, I don’t think Manhattan Transfer has ever done an original song, but they do have a marvelous way with covers. Their Java Jive starts out being pretty faithful to the Ink Spots, but, at the bridge where they start listing the beans, they begin to make the song their own, and they take it out in style. The original lyric here says, “unless it is a cheery cheery bean”, which I have to assume was period slang. Manhattan Transfer’s pronunciation here is muddy, and some later versions sing it as the nonsensical, “chili chili bean.” I have never tried using coffee beans in chili, and I don’t expect to.
Horace Heidt and His Musical Knights: I’m a Little Teapot
Finally, our theme would not be complete without a version of I’m a Little Teapot. I have played the hero here, wading through some truly appalling examples of how bad children’s music can be to find this one. It’s a bit obscure now, and I could not find a purchase link. But this one was a big band hit in 1940. There was a dance that went with it, the Teapot Tip. The song was written a year earlier, and a dance that was more appropriate for very young children, and also easier, was also created at that time. I don’t have all of the details, but I believe the kids’ version was basically the moves that kids do to the song to this day. If you have ever sat through the preschooler portion of a dance school recital, you know the moves I mean. Meanwhile, in my big band version, I believe the singer is Ronnie Kelton. This is the only version of the song I could find that includes the lyrics about Napoleon.
The current theme [pour] came came to mind from a number of places: a theme that hasn't been done before... a theme that is somehow current ... a theme that might spark the disparate contributors and therefore interest the audience. Actually, it was raining cats and dogs as the theme idea was in gestation. Buckets. But at the the same time, it occured to us that there are a number of things that pour: liquids .... yes; ... some solids as well (marbles and beads pour well), but also emotions. Emotions, as in what a vocalist or a piano player puts into his/her performance: they pour out their hearts, and it is that which makes one performance different or better than another. It is songs where the artist pours out his/her heart that draw us in and that we love.
There is no small list of songs that include "pour" either in the title or the lyrics: poring rain, pouring out my heart, pouring liquid or other.
Of course, as a child, you likely learned: It's raining, it's pouring ... the old man is snoring.
Jose Feliciano's Rain make the most of it.
But - keeping in mind that pouring has multiple connotations ... here's a couple more:
Weather Girls:
Supertramp:
it's the sax player that is pouring it out here ...
Here’s a band that never really was: Three was an offshoot of
two DC bands, Minor Threat (drummer Jeff Nelson) and members of Grey Matter,
with early involvement from Dischord Records creator and DC musical founding
father, Ian MacKaye. Mackaye and Nelson had just recorded a legendary (in my
town) two song project called Egg Hunt,
and were looking to form something new. Sadly, Three never got off the ground,
save for one album, a brilliant rock n roll album, far afield from the
discordant, angry nue-punk we expect from Dischord, called Dark Days Coming.
On that album, which I heard first on vinyl, which places it
in its own special category of my musical memories, is a song called Swann Street. Swann Street is anthemic in the very best ways, slow burning
through a solo acoustic guitar opening before winding up full-on with tidal
wave drums, Townshed-esque power chords, and a chorus meant to sung
stadium-sized loud.
Despite the refrain to “keep your ear to the ground”, which
is radio-worthy and demands a sing-along, there’s an odd, somewhat out of place
line, …”these berries smell like shit/I don’t know why,” which places this song
firmly in DC territory. The song is named after the street in Dupont Circle,
Swann Street, where singer Steve Niles lived. The berries are a reference to
the Gingko trees that line the streets of DC, especially in my old neighborhood
of Dupont. Famous for dropping a particularly stinky berry, everyone in DC
knows the springtime nightmare of stepping on a gingko berry and then carrying
that sticky, jellied mess into their home, grinding it in the carpet—getting it
out shoe tread is worse than dealing with dog poo. The smell of ginkgo
permeates the city in spring and never fails to make one wonder: who the hell
planted these trees? They had to know…
According to Dischord.com, where I had to turn to get a lot
of this info, Three imploded before Dark
Days Coming was released, but Grey Matter went on to release a number of
seminal Dischord albums, and in 2008, at the Black Cat’s 15 Anniversary show,
they performed a superb rendition. Hearing the audience singing along reminded
me of both what a great song this is, but also how insular, in the best way,
the DC music scene was (is). This is a
secret classic, and when I meet someone who knows this song, knows how great it
is, there is an instant bond, in the way the great songs can bind us together.
I’m not doing the song justice: I picked it because even
now, at 45, the song turns me up inside like it did when I first heard it, back
in 1990. Sometimes, when I try to put into words what songs mean, I feel like
I’m somehow taking away from the neural-spark that a great song ignites inside that
ineffable joy, a sharpening of the soul, a infinite initial reaction that,
despite the years, will always repeat.
Swann Street is a boundless,
wound-up blast; a rock anthem worthy of bands far bigger in size than Three and
it never fails to remind me of home. And, DC, despite being a seat of power and
almost always the center of the world’s attention, is really just a small town.
But, then, home should always feel that way. Here's a few versions of your new favorite song:
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