"Sunny Afternoon" / The Kinks

By chance it IS a sunny day today, although a little chilly for May. Still, that's not why this song popped into my head and will not be budged.

It began a few days when, someone asked me to list my top ten favorite Kinks songs. I realized that "Sunny Afternoon" is perhaps their only genuinely big hit (#2 in the UK, #14 in the US) that still makes the list for me, no matter how much it's overplayed. Then today, posting This Day In Kinks History on the Kinks fan forum, I discovered that today is the anniversary of the day, 47 years ago, when the Kinks went into Pye Records Studio #2 to record this song.

Or rather, re-record it -- in 1966 Ray Davies was just beginning to become the studio perfectionist who would later hold up their classic album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society for months, eventually releasing it by chance on the same day as the Beatles' White Album. Ah, the history of the Kinks is full of such disastrous decisions.

But in the case of "Sunny Afternoon," Ray knew what he was doing. He brought in session keyboard whiz Nicky Hopkins to add some plinky good-time sounds, played on a Hohner Melodica. Those iconic pub-sing-along backing vocals were dubbed in by Ray, Dave, and Ray's wife Rasa. "'Sunny Afternoon' was made very quickly, in the morning," Ray recalled in a Rolling Stone interview. "It was one of our most atmospheric sessions. . . . Pete [Quaife] went off and started playing funny little classical things on the bass, more like a lead guitar, and Nicky Hopkins was playing 'Liza'. . . .Little things like that helped us get in the feeling of the song."
   
At the time, Ray recalled, he was listening almost obsessively to two other artists -- Frank Sinatra and Bob Dylan (now there's an odd couple for you).  I can hear Sinatra's impact in the campy croon Ray puts on; Dylan probably accounts for the sly satire on Britain's Wilson-era tax policies.  (George Harrison's "Taxman" was written the same year.) But as always, the whole is so much more than the sum of all these parts. And the minute that great bass line begins -- two notes plopped wearily on each step of a descending minor scale -- I'm hooked.

Just watch the Kinks cavorting in the snow. But, wait -- I thought this was supposed to be a sunny afternoon? Well, the song was a summer hit, but the Kinks didn't make this video until the following February, for a Belgian TV show. The contrast just underlines the delightful irony of this song.

"The tax man's taken all my dough / And left me in my stately home..." Beneath the satire, of course, Ray Davies was as always working out his personal issues. In 1966, Ray was up to his eyeballs in lawsuits to recover withheld royalties from music publishers and former managers; no wonder he felt a stab of sympathy for the property-rich, cash-poor singer of "Sunny Afternoon." And if that felt like a betrayal of his working-class roots, even more need to work out his anxieties in satire.

No wonder Ray had suffered a nervous breakdown only two months earlier, which explains the wail of "Save me save me save me from this squeeee--eeze" in the bridge. Nothing like turning your own  existential despair into comedy. And in the second bridge, he changes it to "Help me help me help me sail awaa-aay" -- the trademark Kinksian longing for escape. When conflicts and pressures pile up, introvert geniuses like Ray Davies often long just to run away.

I suspect there's another autobiographical hint in verse two: "My girlfriend's run off with my car / And gone back to her ma and pa / Telling tales of drunkenness and cruelty"?  It would be seven more years before Rasa Davies would finally move out, taking their two daughters, but there's already probably a sting of truth to this detail. I picture Rasa in the studio, listening to Ray deliver those lines with a mocking flutter in his voice, and wince on her behalf.

So here we've got a song about lazing on a sunny afternoon, living a life of luxury -- it should be a mellow blissed-out song. Instead, it's built on a minor-key bass riff, with jerky rhythms and ping-ponging melodic intervals. This guy is at the end of his rope, moaning and miserable. In a way, this is the comic bookend of "Shangri-La" -- now that he's found his paradise, his reward for working so hard, why the hell is he unhappier than ever?   

And then here's the genius part. Ray Davies managed to pack all of that psychological complexity in this song -- and STILL made it one of the most delicious singalongs ever. The tongue-in-cheek humor, the bouncy arrangement, and the cheery harmonies turn it all into tailor-made for hoisting a pint. The Kinks may be dancing in the snow, the tax exile weeping in his beer, but all I want to do is croon along with a grin on my face.  Give Ray Davies life's lemons, and he'll turn them into the most delicious lemonade ever.

"O. K." / Michael Penn

Another song I was saving for Waltz Week, but life is conspiring against me on that front, and with Graham Parker and the Rumour heading back into town -- well, it all connects. On my end, at least.

So who is Michael Penn?  He's Aimee Mann's husband, he's Sean Penn's brother, he's Eileen Ryan's son, but get over all of that, will ya?  He's simply a wonderful singer-songwriter who has never gotten the attention he deserves. You may say you haven't heard his work, but listen to the supremely catchy chorus of 1989's "No Myth" and you'll realize you have. (And if you've seen the Paul Thomas Anderson film Boogie Nights, you've heard even more, since he did the film's score.) All the insiders, the people in the know, dig his talent, but the world at large seems to be blissfully unaware. And I'd like to change that.

What gets me most of all is the simplicity of this song. Penn is a supremely intelligent songwriter -- just listen to his lyrics -- but the mark of true intelligence is that you know when to pare things back. The acoustic arrangement, the minimal studio intervention -- it's just a guy and his electric piano, a guitarist across the room, trying to resuscitate an endangered relationship. 

"Baby calm down,," he begins, gingerly, coaxingly. "Baby come back down to the ground." Already we know that he's the stablizer in this relationship, as he begs, "Let me hold you, / Let me hold this moment a spell."  I love how he interposes a pregnant pause between each line, with just a tiny winsome curl of guitar slipped in as he inches tentatively forward, walking on eggshells.

The chorus is really the meat of this song, swelling in volume and repeated three times, with minor word changes: "There's really not a lot of options open / For another kind of aftermath. You're hoping / That there's something else that you can do to / Make it come true / Make it perfect, / Make it O.K." Notice how those long lines circle anxiously around a tight cluster of notes, getting tangled in his syntax, until the melody rises on "Make it come true" and the key changes to major, like a wave breaking on a beach. From there on, everything dissolves and relaxes into simple phrases and short lines, shifting down the scale to rest.

I love how you see him talking her down here. It's a delicate evolution, from strenuous yearning ("make it come true") to performance anxiety ("make it perfect") to restful acceptance ("make it O.K."). A lesser songwriter would have done it the other way, promising his gal that he could work wonders. And when you think about it, it's a funny sort of comfort he's offering her: He's telling her that she has no options, that she can't fix things, and he can't either. For all we know, this is their final break-up moment. But sung in that sweet, slightly husky tenor, this chorus is calming, soothing, and consoling as all get-out.    

Now that she's off the ledge, he widens his camera angle to give us some context. This whole album (Mr. Hollywood, Jr.) is very Los Angeles, and the scene he paints in verse two is pure L.A.: "Light the marquees, / Santa Anas twist through the trees" Then he narrows in on an oddly domestic detail of laundry hung out to dry: "While the line swings, / Putting all your light things with his." That last line perplexed me until I started to think of a couple doing their laundry together in a laundromat, and then it made perfect sense. All those dramatic events -- the klieg-lit movie premiere, the wild winds -- pair up with the mundane domesticity of doing laundry. Because this is the heart of making a relationship work: getting the day-to-day stuff right.

That waltz tempo, too -- that's a sneaky choice for this song. There's something romantic and yet comforting about the 3/4 lilt, even as Penn plays against it with syncopation and oddly enjambed sentence breaks. It's not a simple-minded waltz, but it's not a thrusting rocker, either. The key shifts, the tempo shifts, are all artful negotiations. You get the feeling that this guy has had to coax his partner down before, and he gets better at it every time.

And I'm sitting here listening, yearning to be so comforted. I actually feel endorphins release when he hits that last phrase. Making it O.K. isn't a compromise, isn't a sell-out -- no way, not the way Michael Penn sells it in this song. By the time the chorus lands there, it feels like a haven of peace. In a rock song. Bravo, Mr. Penn.

"Stupefied" / Robyn Hitchcock

Listening to Robyn Hitchcock is a pretty fair way to feel high without have to smoke or snort anything. There's always something deliciously off-kilter about his music, from the Rimbaud-like imagist lyrics to the tripping syncopations to the crunchy snarls of dissonance. It never fails to give me a kick. 

With most artists, I listen to a new album hunting for themes, biographical tidbits, a new musical direction. None of those criteria matter with a new Robyn Hitchcock album. Is Love From London any more "about" London than any of his previous albums? No. It's not particularly about London at all, apart from one song -- "Strawberries Dress" (Robyn Hitchcock writes a lot about strawberries) -- that begins by mentioning the Telecom Tower. The lyrics are more stream-of-consciousness than self-expression, and the sound -- as always -- can only be described as the idiosyncratic Robyn Hitchcock sound, a freeform blend of folk and rock and jazz full of insidious melody.

Here's track three, "Stupefied." As you listen, tell me -- whom does it remind you of?

  
I've always known that Robyn Hitchcock was a huge John Lennon fan, but I never thought he sounded particularly like Lennon until this song.  I'm thinking of the later Lennon, the post-Mind Games Lennon, after he rediscovered joy and melody. (I've always given Harry Nilsson credit for that.) 

Maybe it's the piano accompaniment -- those plunky modulations -- or the light-fingered percussion skipping behind it. Then there's the chromatic melodies, the unresolved chords at the end of lines, and the way he sings just slightly against the beat.

But most of all, it's the lyrics, a series of absurdist koans that Lennon himself would have enjoyed. "Ain't no money on the ceiling / Ain't no ceiling on the floor," Robyn begins, suggesting a sense of dislocation that works perfectly with the next lines: "Got that terrifying feeling / You don't love me any more." I love how the verse's melody scrabbles around among a few close-together notes, conveying the boxed-in feeling of this beleaguered guy.

In the next verse, desperate for some comfort, he ruefully informs us, "Ain't no whisky in the Talbot," which according to Wikipedia probably means a rare brand of automobile, though it could also be a lunar crater or an obscure type of railway wagon (Robyn Hitchcock also loves trains). "Ain't no sugar in your tea," he adds, as if shaking his head morosely along with that loungy beat. "There's an answer to it all but / You're still mystifying me." Well, that makes two of us.

Perhaps the answer lies in the refrain, as he soars up into a Lennon-like nasal falsetto: "You wanna get [off beat] hi-ii-iigh." Letting loose with that sustained high note really feels like escape, doesn't it?  First time around, he continues, "But you don't know just why"; by the third refrain, he tells us, "and by now you know why." So it's the second refrain that's the heart of the song:

     You wanna get high,
     It's in the blood supply
    And time'll go by
    Like a neuron in the sky

Don't you know just what this feels like?

Verse three is my personal favorite. "Ain't no honey back in Norway / Ain't no kroner in your pants / Must have blown it in the doorway / On those sugar-coated ants." Maybe these are lazy, opportunistic rhymes, but I prefer to see them as evocative word associations -- the honey with the sugar, the Norway with the kroner, and of course ants, another of Hitchcock's insect fascinations. You've gotta love the way his voice swoops on "pants," which is of course inherently one of the funniest words there is.

All I know is, by the end of the song I'm feeling a little stupefied myself -- but in a good way.

"Coconut" / Fred Schneider

It must be fun to be a B-52.

Trawling around iTunes trying to find more songs by Victoria Williams, I discovered this adorable Harry Nilsson tribute album. So many artists on here that I love -- Marshall Crenshaw, Ron Sexsmith, Al Kooper, Aimee Mann, Randy Newman, Bill Lloyd, both Brian and Carl Wilson -- and smack dab in the middle of it is our very own Love Shack sherpa Fred Schneider of the B-52s. Now, if you'd asked me which Harry Nilsson song would be perfect for Fred Schneider to cover, I don't know if I would have come up with this one. But the minute I heard it, I realized it was PERFECT.

It's a raucously fun song even when Harry himself sang it, but Fred pushes it to a whole new level. "Coconut" was just a hair shy of a novelty tune; I've always imagined that Nilsson began singing it to himself in the middle of a colossal tropical-drink bender, and luckily remembered enough of it the next day to capture the lightning in a bottle. (So to speak.) There's not much to it lyrically -- mostly just the repeated mantra "you put the lime in the coconut / And drink 'em both up." To tell you the truth, sometimes I forget and think this song was written by Jimmy Buffett. Not that there's anything wrong with that, for all my Parrothead friends out there.

I have one major criterion for a great cover version: It has to bring something new to the song. And on that score, Fred Schneider succeeds brilliantly. (It was first recorded for his 1996 solo album Just Fred.) In the great B-52s tradition, he takes this amiable little tune and sends it off into outer space, with dissonant snarls of guitar, frantic drum smacks, and buzzy little synth riffs that sound like transmissions from Mars.

Besides putting the lime in the coconut, we're also supposed to call a doctor and ask him what to do -- and this is the motif that Fred really goes to town on. His voice comes out of one speaker, frantically begging the doctor to tell him what to do about his bellyache; out of the other speaker, he plays a particularly snide doctor, advising his patient to put the lime in the coconut and call him in the morning.  In true Rock Lobster-style, he unleashes layers of wails, growls, and shouts, weaving in and out of those messy instrumentals.  (Really, has anybody ever done more with less vocal talent than Fred Schneider?)  It's truly a party gone out of bounds.

Well, it's spring vacation and I have NOT gone to the Caribbean. In fact, the landscape outside my window is six inches deep in crusty snow and slush. But Fred Schneider has just delivered an umbrella drink to my lounge chair, and I'm lovin' it.

"Junk" / Victoria Williams

Somehow this chick has totally escaped my radar up to now. I can't remember how I found this song (I suspect it was on someone else's iTunes playlist, as I was scouting out tunes for Hell Hath No Fury Week), but it has quietly begun to lodge itself on a high spot on my Rock Chicks playlist. 

So I toddle over her website and learn that Victoria Williams is very well connected -- she has been married in her time to both the Plimsouls' Peter Case and the Jayhawks' Mark Olson (Olson wrote the song "Miss Williams' Guitar" for her, not for Lucinda Williams) and she was ranked #89 on Paste Magazine's Top 100 Living Songwriters list -- not too shabby. Best of all, she hails originally from Shreveport, Louisiana, which makes it fitting that I should write about her on my friend Craig's birthday. (Happy birthday, Craig!)

You'll find this track on Williams' 2000 album Water to Drink. (Memo to self: buy this album NOW.) I love the lazy grit and sass of this song, not just in her voice but in those swampy guitar licks. In the middle, it wanders into downright psychedelic territory, and that Beatley mellotron loop at the end -- whoo-hee!

Yet the sneaky thinkg about this song is that it isn't storytelling, isn't a love letter -- it's a philosophical statement about temporal mutability. (Hunh? Come again?) "One man's junk is another man's jewel," she starts off in that froggy voice, and literal me, I start to think about recycling. (Love that second line: "Throw-outs may be polished into pearls.") She develops the idea in verse two: "One's man's junk is another man's project / Fixing up junk is a lifelong process." I must admit, I'm one of those this-thing-could-be-mended types myself.

And yes, the dreamy chorus at first sounds like this is a paean to eBay: "In the dreamy chorus -- "Wrap it up, / Send it off /  To a place where it's appreciated." How noble to give cast-offs a second life.

But note how, in the end of verse two, she describes this use-and-reuse as a human imperative: "Fixing up junk, that's what we're born to do -- junk!" She's not just talking about physical objects. In the bridge she shifts ground, singing about the metamorphosing relationships of people she knows: "Bonnie hung on to her darling, / Betty threw up and forgot him / Joey left his track full of Harleys." I suddenly re-hear verse one, see that "junk" means a discarded lover, who becomes a "jewel" to someone new -- someone who has learned how to fix up junk, perhaps.   

Learning how to let things go, how to redefine who we are and whom we love -- that's a life skill none of us have perfected yet.

It's an all-things-must-pass vision of life, which Williams sums up as "We share what was with each other / Pass around old molecules." These are downright trippy ideas, and the song mirrors that with its spacey musical effects.

By the second time she sings the chorus, she pushes that "wrap it up / send it off" concept a little farther, adding: "Trip to the moon / Wave goodbye / To yesterday's because and whys." Suddenly, all this recycling and passing around seems wonderfully liberating.    

Who knows how profound this song really is? All I know is that I'm flying on the phantasmagoric instrumentals, viscerally hooked on that funky beat.  Those crunchy discords, oh-so-slowly resolved -- I can't get enough of them.

One thing I do know:  I will never confuse Victoria Williams with Lucinda Williams again.

Occasional Shivers / Chris Stamey

I was gonna save this for my Rock Waltz week -- but it won't wait.

This is from Chris Stamey's new album, Lovesick Blues. Now, I only recently got up to speed on his band the dBs, so you'll forgive me if I'm even behinder on Stamey's post-dBs solo work. This is like his third or fourth solo album (depends how you count) and I have no idea what they're like. I only bought this one in the middle of a YepRoc spending frenzy -- you know, Dave Alvin, Robyn Hitchcock, Fountains of Wayne, the usual suspects -- and tossed it into my virtual shopping cart for the hell of it.

To tell the truth, when I first listened to it, on my car's 10-CD changer, I thought I was listening to Michael Penn (another long-overdue post). Only gradually did it strike me that a) the vocals were way too nasal, and b ) the lyrics even more well-crafted than Penn's.  I swear, I pulled the car off the road for moment and said to myself, "Whoever this guy is, he's an honest-to-god POET."  I scrabbled madly around the CD cases scattered all over the seat beside me. When I pulled out Lovesick Blues, it was a real eureka moment.

And this song -- track 9 -- absolutely demanded I hit replay, over and over again.

It's a waltz all right, but a laidback one -- a real slow dance. I imagine it set at a party, a chit-chatty sort of cocktail gathering, the sort we grown-ups find ourselves going to every once in a while. He looks up and sees someone -- "Occasional glances / Across the room" -- and catches his breath.

But this is no "Some Enchanted Evening" love-at-first-sighting. No, no, no. They're ex-lovers, and I'm betting there was a time when strenuous efforts were made NOT to be in the same room, EVER.  But time has passed, and all that has died down. Surely by now they can see each other casually without fireworks.

Or can they?

Clearly it's been a while. "Occasionally casually peck a cheek / to say you could still care / though that was long ago / years or days, I forget . . . " But there's the rub -- if he's vague, it's not because the memory is so distant, but because it still hurts like yesterday. And if the hurt is still there, so is the passion. Maybe they're here with other people -- but if so, you'd never know it, because those other people melt away, like everyone else in the room.

He still has no idea where they stand, and in verse two he desperately tries to read her, to get a clue. "Perhaps you remember the bitter taste," he muses, "Perhaps you recall with a smile." And it's not just her memory he's got to parse, it's her present intentions. "Perhaps you envision the rapt embrace," he dares to hope; but on the other hand, it could be "the tentative kiss of a child."

This is all playing out in real time, and I for one am hooked. That languid tempo is brilliant -- it's so wary, and yet so damn seductive. They're edging toward each other, circling around, testing the waters. The melody is part of the game, too, with its tender little chromatics and plunging octave jumps. It's a tough melody to sing, and Stamey's not a natural crooner. But I don't know -- there's a vulnerability to his nasal, tentative vocal that makes this even more poignant.

A million pop songs have been written about having your heart broken, but only a handful are about having to survive heartbreak for the rest of your life. (Readers, help me out here -- what songs do you know that fit that bill?)  It's about being a grown-up, living with your own past. It takes a true poet like Chris Stamey to help us out with that. 

Young Americans / David Bowie

Before heading off the England for grad school in 1975, I spent weeks compiling audiocassettes of my must-have music, praying a dinky tape deck could replace my stereo system and shelves of vinyl. At the last minute, I ran to the nearest record store (remember those?) and supplemented my homemade mixtapes with a handful of new cassettes, impulse buys of completely new-to-me albums I hoped would help tide me over. Linda Ronstadt's Greatest Hits, for some reason, and Maria Muldaur's Waitress in a Donut Shop. Dylan's Nashville Skyline. Stevie Wonder's Innervisions. The soundtrack to The Harder They Come. Frank Zappa's Hot Rats. Rod Stewart's Every Picture Tells a Story. Steve Miller's The Joker.  J.J. Cale's Naturally. Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water (probably because the store didn't have Bookends, the one I really wanted). And -- one of the most random purchases of the day -- David Bowie's Young Americans.

An odd assortment, eh? But, separated from my LP collection, I played those tapes to death over the next two years, and I'll always have a special fondness for every track. (Because -- remember audiocassettes? -- we listened to tapes straight through; it was such a pain to fast-forward or back up.)

Even today, I can't listen to "Young Americans" without smiling.

My main reference point for Bowie up till then had been the glorious "Space Oddity" -- imagine my surprise to hear Mr. Glam Rock transformed into Soul Brother No. 33. Recorded in Philly, with R&B luminaries like Luther Vandross aboard, Young Americans (both song and album) was Bowie's homage to American soul music. In typically Bowie fashion, he never took this too seriously, describing his imitation as "plastic soul," or "the squashed remains of ethnic music as it survives in the age of Muzak rock, written and sung by a white limey." (The British talent for self-deprecation, in full flower.)

On top of that, the lyrics made absolutely no sense. It was like switching channels at random while watching late-night TV, a surreal montage of Life In These United States. I was hardly surprised when someone told me that Bowie wrote this after a 3-day coke binge. Of course!

But oh, the slick smooth hustle of that beat, underlaid with gospel choir back-up singers and David Sanborn's sizzling sax -- I just can't resist it. I love the edge of hysteria in Bowie's vocal, all gulps and pant and howls of ecstasy. Those random phrases still worm into into my head at the strangest moments, and once they do, I'm on that soul train for days.

Phrases like: "They pulled in just behind the bri-idge, he la-ays her down, / He frowns, / 'Gee-ee my life's a funny thing, am I still too young?'" (Calling James Dean!)   Later on in verse two, she gets her own bit of non sequitur dialogue, as for no reason at all "She cries 'Where have all Papa's heroes gone?'"

In the bridge, Bowie leans confiding into the mike for his own husky, half-spoken question: "Do you remember / Your President Nixon?" In 1975, that name still sent a chill through the room. Yet the riddling follow-up -- "Do you remember the bills you have to pay? / Or even yesterday?" -- I always assumed it meant that our society was still paying the price for the Nixon era, but now I wonder if I'm giving Bowie more satiric credit than he deserves. 

And that other haunting question, from verse three: "All the way from Washington [remember the March on Washington]? / Her bread-winner begs off the bathroom floor / 'We live for just these twenty years / Do we have to die for the fifty more?'" I often ask myself that question. Was Bowie really clever enough to skewer America's obsession with youth way back then? 

Still, there are a few flashes of real poetry. That sexy line "She took his ring, took his babies" in verse one; later on, "Sit on your hands on a bus of survivors / Blushing at all the Afro-Sheeners." I don't know what that really says about race relations in America, but I see it. And later on, he blurs the race lines even further, scatting "Black's got respect, and white's got his soul train." No one knows where they stand any more.

It's a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world all right, and Bowie keeps shifting the ground under our feet. In the first chorus, he sighs, "All night /She wants the young American" but later it's "He wants the young American," and then it's "you" and finally it's "I." Or as he babbles in the drawn-out, chaotic ending, "You want it, I want you, you want I, I want you want" -- who knows where desire begins or ends?

It's a mash-up all right -- dig the part when the backing singers quote the Beatles "A Day in the Life" -- "I heard the news today, oh boy." Along with his soul obsession, Bowie was in the middle of a John Lennon phase -- the YA LP also featured a Lennon-Bowie collaboration, "Fame," and Bowie's cover of Lennon's "Across the Universe." Let's throw it all in while we're at it!

My favorite questions, though, come in that final section:  "Ain't that close to love? /Well, ain't that poster love?" (I sing that to myself all the time, I swear.) And that prescient statement of gender role confusion: "Ain't there a man who can say no more? / And, ain't there a woman I can sock on the jaw?" (Ah, the British pronunciation of "jawr"...)

But the best is that dramatic moment when the instruments stop, the echo switches on, and Bowie drops to his knees to wail in his best James Brown voice: "Ain't there one damn song that can make me / Break down and cry?"

Beat, beat, wait for it -- and with a great keyboard gliassando the instruments rush in, the hustle picks up again, and we're back on the dance floor. Ah, a bizarre and wonderful song indeed.