WEDNESDAY SHUFFLE

Okay, so it's late AGAIN. But give me a break -- I was out listening to rock and roll all evening. Hey, I have my priorities straight!

1. "Cruel To Be Kind" / Marshall Crenshaw
From Labour of Love: The Music of Nick Lowe (2001)
Too perfect -- because it was Marshall Crenshaw I went out to see tonight, at a Gulf Coast benefit tribute concert to Alex Chilton (how's that for mashing together causes?). I'll say this right now: I prefer Marshall's version of Nick's big hit record to Nick's own -- MC just nails the plaintive, wounded, clueless quality of Nick's persona here. He just sounds like a guy who'd let this chick walk all over him, and then buy her excuses.

2. "I Take It On Home" / Charlie Rich
From Behind Closed Doors (1973)
Another country artist I just don't know enough about. I grew up knowing his two big hits, the coy "Behind Closed Doors" and the smarmy "Most Beautiful Girl in the World," so I never gave him a chance. I recently started to trawl through his back catalog, however, and -- HELLO! This song is even on the same album as those two; it was written by Kenny O'Dell, who also penned "Behind Closed Doors." Go figure. It's a honey.

3. "Summer Song" / Chad and Jeremy
From Yesterday's Gone (1964)
Mushy sentimental pop-folk -- but it was British mushy pop-folk, which made it all okay to my little pre-teen heart in 1964. These guys were so darn cute . . .

4. "Wonderful Feeling" / Lulu and Alan Price
From Shout!: The Decca Years (compilation)
Now here's some sassy British pop, circa 1964, with the gritty edge of Lulu's powerful girl voice matched by Alan Price's own Geordie gruffness. Alan had quit the Animals by then and was forging a more mainstream pop course with the Alan Price Set; how perfect to match him up with Lulu, who was treading her own fine line between pop and R&B. Alan wrote this song; produced the track, too. It's completely infectious pop, swinging horn section and all.

5. "Jenny Wren" / Paul McCartney
From Chaos and Creation in the Backyard (2005)
Paul trying to find his inner folkie. I've got to love it, because it's Paul (who by the way tonight received the Gershwin Award for Contemporary Music at the White House -- toss it in the drawer with all the other citations and medals, Pauly!). If I didn't harbor a sneaking suspicion he was just trying to re-do "Mother Nature's Son" . . .

6. "Moving the Goalposts" / Billy Bragg
From Don't Try This At Home (1991)
I feel a Billy Bragg post coming on. Bragg's deft political satire (which comes off extra-spiky in those Cockney vowels) sometimes overshadows his brilliant relationship songs. Here we've got both in one song, as he name-checks Gennady Gerasimov (former Soviet ambassador to Afghanistan), then side shifts into a tender, and incredibly sexy, depiction of him and his girl, occupying new territory in their own love affair. He draws this little vignette with so few details; we have to connect the dots . . . but it's all there. Stunning, really.

7. "It's Not Hard" / Alan Price
From Based on a True Story (2002)
And now here's Alan Price much later in his career -- on this obscure self-released album that contains some of his finest stuff in years. Who knew?

8. "Now's the Time" / Brinsley Schwarz
From The New Favourites of Brinsley Schwarz (1974)
Because there always must be something by Nick Lowe, even if it's a completely callow throwaway track -- not even a Nick composition, but an old Hollies song, written by' Graham Nash and Gene Clarke, issued as the B-side to their 1963 hit "Stay." Nick's not even singing the lead (is that Ian Gomm instead? or Brinsley?). And yet it's on my iTunes, and it's adorable.

9. "Holly Would" / Jackie DeShannon
From Laurel Canyon (1969)
Did I download this track because it has my name in it? Oh, probably. A little character study of a sort of free spirit, very post-Summer of Love Southern California.

10. "A Slow Song" / Joe Jackson
From Night and Day (1982)
There are only a few albums that I have loaded in their entirety onto my iTunes. (Make that only a few non-Nick Lowe albums.) Night and Day is one of them. I just love how desperately Joe throws his earnest, cracking voice into this plaintive waltz. This entire album seems to me to dance on the knife edge of a love affair that could go down the tubes at any minute. So why not dance real close while you still can?

The 100 Best Singles In My Head
Nos. 61-65

By some great serendipity, here in the early 60s of my list comes a cluster of five mid-60s classics from the British Invasion. Major artists? Maybe not (I'd make an exception for Georgie Fame, but only the basis of his later jazz albums). But major British Invasion hits? Indeed they are.

[Click on the highlighted links to read my earlier posts on those songs]

61. "To Sir With Love" / Lulu (1967)
I'll admit, my love for this song is inextricable from my love for the film it appeared in, an Inspiring Teacher drama starring Sidney Poitier, Suzy Kendall, and teenaged Lulu herself. I still cry whenever I see it; even this clip makes my eyes well up. While Lulu had been a star in the UK ever since she was 15, belting out a hit version of the Isley Brothers' "Shout," this was the song that really broke her into the U.S. market. In the movie, she sings it in the closing scene, when a pack of troubled urban secondary-schoolers gather to thank the teacher (Poitier, natch) who helped them turn their lives around. (Bonus points if you recognize the band playing in the first part of that clip as the Mindbenders.) For a natural diva like Lulu, there was plenty of drama to play with in those lyrics by Don Black (a movie-theme specialist, who also wrote "Born Free") -- "Those schoolgirl days / Of telling tales and biting nails are gone" or "If you wanted the sky I would / Write across the sky in letters / That would soar a thousand feet high." But perhaps more important was that emotive melody, written by Mark London, the husband of Lulu's longtime manager Marion Massey. London knew exactly how to showcase their girl's brassy, rich contralto -- octave leaps, swift swoops up and down the scale, long sustained notes packed with crescendo and vibrato, heartfelt warbles of melisma. And Lulu, god love her, made it all sound so easy, effortless, spontaneous. "But how can you thank someone / Who has taken you from crayons to perfume?" THIS is how you do it.

62. "Georgy Girl" / The Seekers (1966)
Another movie theme song, from another brilliant 60s British movie -- slightly earlier, in arty black-and-white. (Have I ever mentioned that this is my #1 favorite era in cinema?) Another girl singer, too -- Judith Durham -- with a voice that nearly rivaled Dusty Springfield for clear hard power. Back then, when I played this 45 constantly on the fold-up stereo in our basement rec room, I never noticed that this song was in fact written by Dusty's brother Tom Springfield, her old partner from the folk trio the Springfields. Tom also wrote the Seekers' earlier hits, "I'll Never Find Another You" and "A World Of Our Own" (I'd love to know Dusty's reaction to having her brother feed hits to Judith Durham); for the lyrics on "Georgy Girl," he turned to musical comedy actor Jim Dale. With its perky whistling motif, "Georgy Girl" sounds more like cabaret, or at least folk music, than backbeat rock 7 roll. The Seekers weren't British but Australian -- the first Aussies, in fact, to score Top 5 hits in the US, UK, and Australia -- and like many people, I often confused them with the Searchers. In general I think the Searchers were a much better band, but this one single gets me more than anything the Searchers ever did. Maybe that's because I so loved the movie, with Lynn Redgrave playing an impulsive, cheerful, slightly overweight girl harboring a mad crush on the gorgeous boyfriend (Alan Bates) of her icy roommate (Charlotte Rampling). Now there was a movie I could identify with. Despite its plucky melody, we all knew this was a desperately sad song. "You're always window shopping / But never stopping to buy / So shed those dowdy feathers and fly! / A little bit" -- what an anthem to grow up with.

63. "A Summer Song" / Chad & Jeremy (1964)
It really does blow my mind that in the course of one year -- 1964 -- I could have so many crushes on different British musicians. Oh, Chad, with your golden mop and black-framed glasses . . .

64. "Michelle" / David and Jonathan (1967)
Truly, this is not a shameless way to sneak yet another Paul McCartney song on here. I honestly did love David and Jonathan's cover of "Michelle," and besides, the Beatles didn't release this one as a single. In case your memory of this has been obliterated forever by the Beatles' album version (I know mine has), here's a video:



Okay, okay, OKAY, it's not better than the Beatles' recording. It clips along a little faster, and David and Jonathan's voices are smooth and banal compared to Paul's. They weren't really singers, after all; they weren't even named David and Jonathan (corny Bible reference), but songwriters Roger Greenaway and Roger Cook, who also wrote "You've Got Your Troubles" for the Fortunes. Rog and Rog teamed up here with George Martin to help the Beatles extend their brand, maintaining their full frontal assault on the record charts. Martin added background oohs and a touch of strings, transposed Paul's acoustic finger-picking to what sounds like a harmonium, and had Rog and Rog harmonize the whole way through. It's just slightly slicker than the Beatles track -- but for a genius track like "Michelle," that slickness is no improvement. On the other hand, you'd never know that if you hadn't heard the Beatles' version yet, which I hadn't when this first hit the airwaves. And I have to say, it does feels more Parisian -- I could almost hear accordions in there, and visualize Apache dancers in a smoky Left Bank cafe. McCartney, always keen to score points for sophistication, was striving for that French bohemian sound, which is why he asked his pal Ivan Vaughn's wife Jan to supply a few French phrases -- "Michelle, ma belle, sont les mots qui font tres bien ensemble." Paul hadn't a clue what it meant. I'd just started studying French in grade school, though, and it was lovely to imagine that Paul was sending me secret messages in "our" second language. The fact that he'd had to employ David and Jonathan to slip that message to me made no difference at all.

65. "Yeh Yeh" / Georgie Fame (1965)
Sorry, Mr Lennie, but you do not know whereof you speak. It should be apparent by now that I have a sneaking affection for jazz-inflected rock, and here's the guy who led me to it.

“A Summer Song” / Chad and Jeremy 

 IT'S BRITISH INVASION MONTH! 

Rock stars in glasses -- I never could resist them. When Chad and Jeremy came along, there was no question which one I’d have a crush on. (Though Jeremy was pretty dishy too.) Amidst all the rock & roll combos we imported from England in 1964, Chad and Jeremy were different – just the two of them, with an acoustic guitar and soft, earnest folk-singer vocals. I picture them perched on stools, either side of a microphone stand, wearing turtleneck sweaters, looking arty and intellectual. (Chad’s glasses certainly added to that image.) Yet their music was much less groundbreaking than the Merseybeat records. Loaded up with strings, a horn section here and there, those tracks were closer to Gene Pitney than Gene Vincent.

Still, I was young, they were English, Chad wore glasses – I had to love them. Their first US single “Yesterday’s Gone,” had a twanging guitar riff that was a little too country for me (it actually began to chart as a country & western song, until fans learned that these guys were longhaired Brits.) But “Yesterday’s Gone” thrived on the pop charts, and was followed a couple months later with “A Summer Song,” a wistful ballad from their second UK album. Released in August 1964, right on time for those end-of-summer break-ups, it totally hit a chord. 

“Yesterday’s Gone” was a summer farewell song, too, but it was brisk and bitter compared to this honeyed gem. “A Summer Song” offered the sort of poetic images guaranteed to melt teenage girls’ hearts: “Trees, swaying in the summer breeze, “Soft kisses on a summer's day,"  “Sweet, sleepy warmth of summer nights," with the young lovers strolling through it in soft focus, gazing at the stars, and "Laughing all our cares away, / Just you and I.” (How comforting to realize that even Englishmen could mess up grammar for the sake of a rhyme.) 

Drums and horns invade the folkie sound on the bridge, as the emotions darken: “They say that all good things must end some day; / Autumn leaves must fall.” But Chad and Jeremy aren't having it. Their voices join in unison, declaring: “But don't you know that it hurts me so / To say goodbye to you?,” splitting only on the trilled “you.” And then -- well, they're teenagers, not in control of their fate, and though they ruefully protest one last time -- “Wish you didn't have to go [nice horn riff here] / No, no, no, no” -- soon enough in the last verse they're back home, listening to the autumn rain. The circle is closed, with all cliches intact. And as an adolescent who had never yet loved, let alone lost, it was a perfect sign-off.  

The equally dreamy “Willow, Weep For Me” followed that fall, scoring a trifecta of 1964 hits for C&J. In early 1965, they popped up in guest roles on both The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Patty Duke Show -- Chad and Jeremy were also legitimate actors, who’d met at London’s prestigious Central School for Speech & Drama -- and those well-bred accents sealed the deal for me. (Jeremy had gone to Eton, was descended from the Duke of Wellington, was a page at Queen Elizabeth’s coronation – you couldn’t get further from the Liverpool slums). 

And then . . . they seemed to fade away, like a summer romance. Jeremy wanted to be an actor with a sideline in music; Chad wanted it the other way around. Whatever. I soon had Herman’s Hermits to keep me warm. But I always kept Chad and Jeremy pressed in my British Invasion scrapbook – like a ticket stub, faded summer flowers, a few grains of sand. Old loves.