“This Is Us” /
Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris
I heard this song on the radio a few months ago and was so wowed by it – coming at me unexpected, out of the vast ether – that I had to get my hands on this album.
Mind you, I have mixed feelings about both Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris. I loved the early Dire Straits albums (it’s a toss-up whether “Sultans of Swing” or “Walk of Life” is my favorite song), but Knopfler’s political activism irritates me; I don’t doubt he’s sincere, but I hate it when celebrities cash in their fame to pose as great humanitarians. (Hear that, Bono?) As for Emmylou – well, I’m jealous of that fatuous look certain male music fans get when just saying her name. I should love the fact that this gray-haired woman has the guys swooning, right? But I find her personality strangely cold; beyond being a pretty face with a fantastic voice, she’s a cipher to me. Give me a gutsy broad like Bonnie Raitt or even Chrissie Hynde any day. (Granted, I’m not a guy -- what do I know?)
But I’ll put all those prejudices aside -- All the Roadrunning is just a superb mid-life album. Knopfler’s slightly gruff, ordinary-guy voice blends surprisingly well with Emmylou’s shimmering soprano, and his Telstar-ish guitar licks, distinctive as ever, break through the country-rock surface of these songs, a nervy counterpoint to the fiddles and pedal steel guitars.
This particular track has a simple premise -- a series of images, candid snapshots of a life lived together. “This is us down at the Mardi Gras,” it starts out, flipping next to “This is us in your daddy’s car.” I can just see the overexposed film, faces a little blurry – “Had a little too much to drink / Too long in the sun / Having too much fun.” I love the way their voices trade back and forth, like a long-married couple who finish each other’s sentences. There are shots of their wedding (“You in that amazing dress / I was stoned on love I guess”), their honeymoon, and, eventually, of their growing family and anniversaries. There’s trivial events too -- “You at the Sunday game / Standing next to what’s his name” – all the ephemera of days gone by. The tempo hustles briskly along – just like life, which can’t be slowed down, only grabbed on the run in fleeting Polaroids.
A few years ago, my parents transferred their home movies to videotape for their kids, and while the movies were being transferred, they viewed along, commenting to each other (“Look at how long her braids were,” “That red convertible was my favorite car” etc.) When we watched the tape with them, they made exactly the same comments live, a split second before their voices on the tape did. It was spooky, but also weirdly comforting -- those random remarks somehow distilled the shared values of our family life. My braids would always be that long, that convertible would always be officially The Favorite Car. You could count on it.
This song has the same comforting quality. These iconic snapshots have become the memories, and they’re cherished all the more for being faded and out of focus. I think of the Kinks’ song “Picture Book,” and its cynical line, “Picture book, of people with each other, to prove they loved each other, a long time ago.” “This Is Us” doesn’t agree. These people seem so happy looking back at this scrapbook – I envy them. “You and me, making history / This is us,” the two voices agree at the end of one verse. True, it’s not “history” to anybody else but them – but that’s precisely why it’s so precious.
Friday, June 29, 2007
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
“She’s Going” / The English Beat
Though the Specials were the first late-70s ska band that stole my heart, I had to love the English Beat as well – not to mention General Public and Fine Young Cannibals, the two excellent bands they split into after three brilliant, inventive albums (when you’ve got that much talent in one group, why not spread it around a bit?). Their sound was funky, urban, hectic, and ineffably finger-popping cool. I dug it.
This 1982 song’s a perfect example of that sweet amalgam of reggae, r&b, soul, jazz, and punk that made this ska renaissance so delightful. The beat, of course, has its roots in reggae, though it skitters along much faster; that emotive lead vocal is soulful indeed, and the way the voices trade back and forth is classic r&b call-and-response. And then there’s the plaintive sax and the tooting horns dancing in and out -- jazz pure and simple.
The song’s a lot darker than you’d think at first from its bouncy upbeat energy, though – that’s where the punk kinship shows up. It’s a Tortured Relationship Song with so many twists and shadows I can’t really tell what’s going on. The first time around I thought it was just a break-up, but the more I listened, the more ominous lines came to light. The best I can make out is that it’s a murder-suicide – “So next time she meet him / They'll both be in heaven”; “she'd rather die than live to behave so badly”; “just watch the spirit slipping out of her hand.” No wonder they say halfway through the song, “I guess you thought it was an ordinary row. / Well you were wrong. / Just take a look at her now.” Yikes.
All of which gives the chorus an especially grim irony: “She's leaving, / Too late to take her home./ She's going, / Too late to tell her you love her. / She's freezing, / Rather be dead than alone. / She's going, / I think you're too late she's gone.” Phrases we throw around so lightly – “I’d rather die that do that” – take on a ghastly double meaning.
Thanks to that snappy ska beat, every line is stuffed to bursting with words, firing at you so rat-a-tat fast, it’s hard to sort it all out. It’s never clear who loves whom, who wants to leave whom, who would miss whom, only that there’s a shipload of misery swirling around. Actually, most of the English Beat’s songs sound similarly disoriented, I’ve noticed – maybe it says something about the working-class Birmingham milieu they came from. When you’re in the middle of certain edgy social scenes, you really can’t tell up from down, wrong from right, black from white, love from hate. You have to be a cool cat indeed to land on your feet.
But that beat, that beat – it’s way too intoxicating to resist. The voices pop in and out like horns themselves, tripping along on the rhythm, and I feel almost guilty, enjoying this song as much as I do. Ah, well, it’s a bleak world, all right – might as well dance, brother.
She's Going sample
Though the Specials were the first late-70s ska band that stole my heart, I had to love the English Beat as well – not to mention General Public and Fine Young Cannibals, the two excellent bands they split into after three brilliant, inventive albums (when you’ve got that much talent in one group, why not spread it around a bit?). Their sound was funky, urban, hectic, and ineffably finger-popping cool. I dug it.
This 1982 song’s a perfect example of that sweet amalgam of reggae, r&b, soul, jazz, and punk that made this ska renaissance so delightful. The beat, of course, has its roots in reggae, though it skitters along much faster; that emotive lead vocal is soulful indeed, and the way the voices trade back and forth is classic r&b call-and-response. And then there’s the plaintive sax and the tooting horns dancing in and out -- jazz pure and simple.
The song’s a lot darker than you’d think at first from its bouncy upbeat energy, though – that’s where the punk kinship shows up. It’s a Tortured Relationship Song with so many twists and shadows I can’t really tell what’s going on. The first time around I thought it was just a break-up, but the more I listened, the more ominous lines came to light. The best I can make out is that it’s a murder-suicide – “So next time she meet him / They'll both be in heaven”; “she'd rather die than live to behave so badly”; “just watch the spirit slipping out of her hand.” No wonder they say halfway through the song, “I guess you thought it was an ordinary row. / Well you were wrong. / Just take a look at her now.” Yikes.
All of which gives the chorus an especially grim irony: “She's leaving, / Too late to take her home./ She's going, / Too late to tell her you love her. / She's freezing, / Rather be dead than alone. / She's going, / I think you're too late she's gone.” Phrases we throw around so lightly – “I’d rather die that do that” – take on a ghastly double meaning.
Thanks to that snappy ska beat, every line is stuffed to bursting with words, firing at you so rat-a-tat fast, it’s hard to sort it all out. It’s never clear who loves whom, who wants to leave whom, who would miss whom, only that there’s a shipload of misery swirling around. Actually, most of the English Beat’s songs sound similarly disoriented, I’ve noticed – maybe it says something about the working-class Birmingham milieu they came from. When you’re in the middle of certain edgy social scenes, you really can’t tell up from down, wrong from right, black from white, love from hate. You have to be a cool cat indeed to land on your feet.
But that beat, that beat – it’s way too intoxicating to resist. The voices pop in and out like horns themselves, tripping along on the rhythm, and I feel almost guilty, enjoying this song as much as I do. Ah, well, it’s a bleak world, all right – might as well dance, brother.
She's Going sample
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
“Perfect Crime #2” / The Decemberists
Any group that names themselves after a group of 19th-century Russian revolutionaries gets my vote. I’ve only heard the Decemberists’ most recent album, The Crane Wife, but it was clear from the first listen that it was gonna grow on me. True, I detect a smidgeon of art-student pretension to this Portland, Oregon, band, but so long as the music holds up, that’s okay by me. They seem to have a droll sense of humor that saves them from getting too caught up in their own literary construct.
The Crane Wife definitely tells a story, though I haven’t yet pieced it together in detail – songwriter Colin Meloy says it was inspired by a Japanese folk tale, but several of the songs (including this one) are tangential to that narrative. Still, you instantly pick up its haunting folk ballad quality, full of battlefields and ghosts and dire omens and tragically parted lovers, and they pull it off with real conviction.
“The Perfect Crime” is prime Decemberist material: dark minor-key melody married to a driving pop beat; cryptic, poetic lyrics in the verse, returning to a chorus with a mesmerizing hook. In this case, the refrain is simply “It was a perfect, a perfect, a perfect, a perfect crime,” with “perfect” hopping around to different intervals as the chords shift darkly around it. (The last time around, “perfect” is teasingly repeated 32 times before they finally end the sentence.) If this song were a silent movie – and it practically is already – it’d be in sepia and white, with lots of close-ups and very few title cards.
If you’re an English major geek like me, you’ll get the classical reference in the first line, an echo of Homer’s Odyssey – “Sing muse of the passion of the pistol / Sing muse of the warning by the whistle / On a night so dark in the waning / A dawn obscured by slate sky raining, oh oh.” I’m already looking warily over my shoulder. Now we get suspenseful quick-cut shots of danger: “Five and twenty burglars by the reservoir / A teenage lookout on the signal tower / The mogul’s daughter in hog ties . . . The bagman's quaking at the fingers / The hand-off glance a little lingers / A well-dressed man in the crosshairs / A shot rings out from somewhere upstairs.” Alfred Hitchcock would have loved this.
No matter how perfect this crime is, you just know they’ll get caught in the end, thanks to that minor key, the reverberating echoes of the vocals, the downward spiral of the melody, and the relentless rhythm. Sure, there’s a guitar solo between verses that breaks free like a getaway car – but let’s face it, getting caught in the end is required film noir tradition, isn’t it?
So it’s not about teenage love, or the war in Iraq, or how the lead singer gets depressed on Sunday mornings. I believe we have plenty of other songs about those things. The only other number that even remotely reminds me of this delicious track is Elvis Costello’s “Watching the Detectives,” and you know how much I love that song. Bravo, Decemberists!
Perfect Crime #2 sample
Any group that names themselves after a group of 19th-century Russian revolutionaries gets my vote. I’ve only heard the Decemberists’ most recent album, The Crane Wife, but it was clear from the first listen that it was gonna grow on me. True, I detect a smidgeon of art-student pretension to this Portland, Oregon, band, but so long as the music holds up, that’s okay by me. They seem to have a droll sense of humor that saves them from getting too caught up in their own literary construct.
The Crane Wife definitely tells a story, though I haven’t yet pieced it together in detail – songwriter Colin Meloy says it was inspired by a Japanese folk tale, but several of the songs (including this one) are tangential to that narrative. Still, you instantly pick up its haunting folk ballad quality, full of battlefields and ghosts and dire omens and tragically parted lovers, and they pull it off with real conviction.
“The Perfect Crime” is prime Decemberist material: dark minor-key melody married to a driving pop beat; cryptic, poetic lyrics in the verse, returning to a chorus with a mesmerizing hook. In this case, the refrain is simply “It was a perfect, a perfect, a perfect, a perfect crime,” with “perfect” hopping around to different intervals as the chords shift darkly around it. (The last time around, “perfect” is teasingly repeated 32 times before they finally end the sentence.) If this song were a silent movie – and it practically is already – it’d be in sepia and white, with lots of close-ups and very few title cards.
If you’re an English major geek like me, you’ll get the classical reference in the first line, an echo of Homer’s Odyssey – “Sing muse of the passion of the pistol / Sing muse of the warning by the whistle / On a night so dark in the waning / A dawn obscured by slate sky raining, oh oh.” I’m already looking warily over my shoulder. Now we get suspenseful quick-cut shots of danger: “Five and twenty burglars by the reservoir / A teenage lookout on the signal tower / The mogul’s daughter in hog ties . . . The bagman's quaking at the fingers / The hand-off glance a little lingers / A well-dressed man in the crosshairs / A shot rings out from somewhere upstairs.” Alfred Hitchcock would have loved this.
No matter how perfect this crime is, you just know they’ll get caught in the end, thanks to that minor key, the reverberating echoes of the vocals, the downward spiral of the melody, and the relentless rhythm. Sure, there’s a guitar solo between verses that breaks free like a getaway car – but let’s face it, getting caught in the end is required film noir tradition, isn’t it?
So it’s not about teenage love, or the war in Iraq, or how the lead singer gets depressed on Sunday mornings. I believe we have plenty of other songs about those things. The only other number that even remotely reminds me of this delicious track is Elvis Costello’s “Watching the Detectives,” and you know how much I love that song. Bravo, Decemberists!
Perfect Crime #2 sample
Monday, June 25, 2007
“You Only Live Once” / The Strokes
On principle I should resent these guys – New York City prep-school boys with all sorts of built-in show biz/media connections who rocketed nearly instantly to fame in 2000. Whatever happened to the idea that a band should spend a few years slogging around in dingy clubs and hammering on record producers’ doors?
And yet I can’t hate the Strokes – their music actually is good, tight, hook-laden indie rock, remarkably uncluttered with post-modern posturing. The first time I ever heard a song by the Strokes, in fact, I thought they must be 80s New Wavers I’d somehow missed; their music has that same stripped-down clarity and energy I loved about Blondie and the early Talking Heads. The disaffected drawl of lead singer Julian Casablancas is just ironic enough to appeal to me (think Morrissey or Lou Reed), especially given the slightly off-kilter lyrics. I rarely notice drummers, yet I marvel at the one-man sonic propulsion machine that is Fabrizio Moretti.
The Strokes song I keep repeating is “You Only Live Once,” the upbeat first track from their 2006 album First Impressions of Earth. (Replacing my previous favorite Strokes song, "Under Control" from their second album, Room On Fire.) As I recall, this is what it feels like in your twenties when everybody you meet claims to have things all figured out: “Twenty-nine different attributes / Only seven that you like / Twenty ways to see the world (oh-ho) / Twenty ways to start a fight (oh-ho).” What’s a boy to do? In later verses, he mentions “a thousand ways to please your man” and “countless odd religions,” contrasting these to “One stubborn way to turn your back (oh-ho) / This I’ve tried and now refuse (oh-ho).”
By the time the chorus rolls around, I imagine his girlfriend getting weary of his theorizing babble and threatening to leave – and that pulls him right back down to earth: “Oh don’t don’t don’t get up / I can’t see the sunshine / I’ll be waiting for you baby / Cause I‘m through / Sit me down / Shut me up / I'll calm down / And I'll get along with you.” When all’s said and done, why waste time trying to solve life when you just ought to be living it?
With that oh-so-danceable drumbeat, that bouncy offbeat guitar riff, you can’t help but love this dope. This song’s not about the lyrics anyway; it’s about those cheerful little “oh-ho’s” that punctuate the verses, and the blithe insistence of that repeated guitar note. Even when he’s pleading “shut me up” over and over, I see him doing it with a grin. So what if he has no deep ideas to offer? It has a beat and you can dance to it – and in this world, that’s often all you need.
On principle I should resent these guys – New York City prep-school boys with all sorts of built-in show biz/media connections who rocketed nearly instantly to fame in 2000. Whatever happened to the idea that a band should spend a few years slogging around in dingy clubs and hammering on record producers’ doors?
And yet I can’t hate the Strokes – their music actually is good, tight, hook-laden indie rock, remarkably uncluttered with post-modern posturing. The first time I ever heard a song by the Strokes, in fact, I thought they must be 80s New Wavers I’d somehow missed; their music has that same stripped-down clarity and energy I loved about Blondie and the early Talking Heads. The disaffected drawl of lead singer Julian Casablancas is just ironic enough to appeal to me (think Morrissey or Lou Reed), especially given the slightly off-kilter lyrics. I rarely notice drummers, yet I marvel at the one-man sonic propulsion machine that is Fabrizio Moretti.
The Strokes song I keep repeating is “You Only Live Once,” the upbeat first track from their 2006 album First Impressions of Earth. (Replacing my previous favorite Strokes song, "Under Control" from their second album, Room On Fire.) As I recall, this is what it feels like in your twenties when everybody you meet claims to have things all figured out: “Twenty-nine different attributes / Only seven that you like / Twenty ways to see the world (oh-ho) / Twenty ways to start a fight (oh-ho).” What’s a boy to do? In later verses, he mentions “a thousand ways to please your man” and “countless odd religions,” contrasting these to “One stubborn way to turn your back (oh-ho) / This I’ve tried and now refuse (oh-ho).”
By the time the chorus rolls around, I imagine his girlfriend getting weary of his theorizing babble and threatening to leave – and that pulls him right back down to earth: “Oh don’t don’t don’t get up / I can’t see the sunshine / I’ll be waiting for you baby / Cause I‘m through / Sit me down / Shut me up / I'll calm down / And I'll get along with you.” When all’s said and done, why waste time trying to solve life when you just ought to be living it?
With that oh-so-danceable drumbeat, that bouncy offbeat guitar riff, you can’t help but love this dope. This song’s not about the lyrics anyway; it’s about those cheerful little “oh-ho’s” that punctuate the verses, and the blithe insistence of that repeated guitar note. Even when he’s pleading “shut me up” over and over, I see him doing it with a grin. So what if he has no deep ideas to offer? It has a beat and you can dance to it – and in this world, that’s often all you need.
Friday, June 22, 2007
“Oklahoma USA” & “Come Dancing” / The Kinks
KINKS WEEK
Here’s another pair of songs I always link together, two more servings of Ray Davies nostalgia. The Davies brothers had six older sisters (!), and Ray was clearly thinking of them when he wrote both songs – and thinking of them with such fondness, the songs couldn’t help but come out lovely.
1971’s Muswell Hillbillies is full of references to the Davies family – the granny in “Have a Cuppa Tea”, the uncle in “Uncle Son” -- but the most tender track on the LP is “Oklahoma USA,” about a girl who, like Ray’s sisters, finds escape from drab postwar England in American movies. “She lives in a house that's near decay, / Built for the industrial revolution, / But in her dreams she is far away, / In Oklahoma U.S.A. / With Shirley Jones and Gordon McRea.” It’s a delicate, winding bluegrass-style melody (Muswell Hillbillies frequently drifts into country idioms), which Ray sings over a rambling piano, with an occasional touch of acoustic guitar and a quaint wheezy harmonium.
This song knocks me out, because in a weird reversal it is my life – except that the dream that kept me going was all about drab postwar London. But it doesn’t really matter which direction that cultural exchange flowed for you -- her fragile dreaminess, her longing for escape, speak vividly, and it’s classic Ray Davies. The refrain of this song – its moral, really – is one of the most poignant things he’s ever written: “All life we work but work is a bore / If life's for livin', then what's livin' for?” I ask myself that question EVERY DAY.
Twelve years later, on State of Confusion, Ray returned to these memories with “Come Dancing.” He’s in Village Green mode again, lamenting the loss of old England -- “They put a parking lot on a piece of land / When the supermarket used to stand / Before that they put up a bowling alley / On the site that used to be the local palais.” Like an archaeologist, he reconstructs an entire era from that one artifact: “That's where the big bands used to come and play./ My sister went there on a Saturday / Come dancing, / All her boyfriends used to come and call. / Why not come dancing, it's only natural?” It’s perky but deliberately retro, with a swing beat and synthesizers faking big-band horns; you’re caught up in the giddy joy of those long-ago dance nights.
The second verse sketches an elaborate courtship ritual, with her dates waiting in the hallway (can’t you just imagine little Ray at the top of the stairs, watching?). The scene’s loaded with desire and repression: “He'd end up blowing all his wages for the week / All for a cuddle and a peck on the cheek.” In the bridge, Ray becomes an outright voyeur: “Out of my window I can see them in the moonlight, two silhouettes saying goodnight by the garden gate.” I can almost hear the heavy breathing.
Flash forward to the present: “My sister's married and she lives on an estate. / Her daughters go out, now it's her turn to wait. / She knows they get away with things she never could, / But if I asked her I wonder if she would, / Come dancing, / Come on sister, have yourself a ball.” We can still see the ghost of the girl that once was inside that suburban matron. (Which makes it a natural bridge to its companion piece on this album, “Don’t Forget To Dance.”)
The sister in “Oklahoma USA” is a lost dreamer; the “Come Dancing” sister is more of a party girl – but both of them find themselves in music. As Ray did – and as we do too, thanks to the Kinks.
KINKS WEEK
Here’s another pair of songs I always link together, two more servings of Ray Davies nostalgia. The Davies brothers had six older sisters (!), and Ray was clearly thinking of them when he wrote both songs – and thinking of them with such fondness, the songs couldn’t help but come out lovely.
1971’s Muswell Hillbillies is full of references to the Davies family – the granny in “Have a Cuppa Tea”, the uncle in “Uncle Son” -- but the most tender track on the LP is “Oklahoma USA,” about a girl who, like Ray’s sisters, finds escape from drab postwar England in American movies. “She lives in a house that's near decay, / Built for the industrial revolution, / But in her dreams she is far away, / In Oklahoma U.S.A. / With Shirley Jones and Gordon McRea.” It’s a delicate, winding bluegrass-style melody (Muswell Hillbillies frequently drifts into country idioms), which Ray sings over a rambling piano, with an occasional touch of acoustic guitar and a quaint wheezy harmonium.
This song knocks me out, because in a weird reversal it is my life – except that the dream that kept me going was all about drab postwar London. But it doesn’t really matter which direction that cultural exchange flowed for you -- her fragile dreaminess, her longing for escape, speak vividly, and it’s classic Ray Davies. The refrain of this song – its moral, really – is one of the most poignant things he’s ever written: “All life we work but work is a bore / If life's for livin', then what's livin' for?” I ask myself that question EVERY DAY.
Twelve years later, on State of Confusion, Ray returned to these memories with “Come Dancing.” He’s in Village Green mode again, lamenting the loss of old England -- “They put a parking lot on a piece of land / When the supermarket used to stand / Before that they put up a bowling alley / On the site that used to be the local palais.” Like an archaeologist, he reconstructs an entire era from that one artifact: “That's where the big bands used to come and play./ My sister went there on a Saturday / Come dancing, / All her boyfriends used to come and call. / Why not come dancing, it's only natural?” It’s perky but deliberately retro, with a swing beat and synthesizers faking big-band horns; you’re caught up in the giddy joy of those long-ago dance nights.
The second verse sketches an elaborate courtship ritual, with her dates waiting in the hallway (can’t you just imagine little Ray at the top of the stairs, watching?). The scene’s loaded with desire and repression: “He'd end up blowing all his wages for the week / All for a cuddle and a peck on the cheek.” In the bridge, Ray becomes an outright voyeur: “Out of my window I can see them in the moonlight, two silhouettes saying goodnight by the garden gate.” I can almost hear the heavy breathing.
Flash forward to the present: “My sister's married and she lives on an estate. / Her daughters go out, now it's her turn to wait. / She knows they get away with things she never could, / But if I asked her I wonder if she would, / Come dancing, / Come on sister, have yourself a ball.” We can still see the ghost of the girl that once was inside that suburban matron. (Which makes it a natural bridge to its companion piece on this album, “Don’t Forget To Dance.”)
The sister in “Oklahoma USA” is a lost dreamer; the “Come Dancing” sister is more of a party girl – but both of them find themselves in music. As Ray did – and as we do too, thanks to the Kinks.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
“Where Are They Now?” / The Kinks
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, RAY DAVIES!
The first Kinks song that really got me was “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” – that tongue-in-cheek ironical satire, delivered in a camped-up effete British accent -- how could I fail to love it? Like the roguish Scarlet Pimpernel, “They seek him here / They seek him there / In Regent Street / And Leicester Square.” Besotted as I was with Swinging London, I felt very much in on the joke; I could laugh along with Ray Davies at this Mod fashion victim, “eagerly pursuing all the latest fads and trends.” And then in the chorus, when Ray's brother Dave snidely chimes in on back-up vocals – “Oh yes he is / [Oh yes he is] / Oh yes he is / [Oh yes he is]”. . . . I wonder if the vain poseur who inspired this song ever realized Ray meant him. Probably not.
That’s how things looked to Ray Davies in 1966; what a change by 1973, when “Where Are They Now?” came out on Preservation Act I, the first installment in Ray Davies’ two-part rock opera. (Plenty of Kinks fans are baffled by the Preservation albums, but those LPs are what made a Kinks fan of me forever.) This song is such an important part of the soundtrack of my life, I still forget that isn’t considered a major track in the Kinks canon. It's sung by a character called simply the Tramp, an outsider who gently muses from afar about the play’s action (I’m sorry Ray didn’t use him in Act 2). And whereas in The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, Ray declared himself the champion of “the old ways” – china cups and virginity and all those quaint concepts – here he’s written an elegy to a much more recent Lost England: that one brief shining moment after the British Invasion when London was the Fab Capital of the World.
“I'll sing a song about some people you might know / They made front pages in the news not long ago / But now they're just part of a crowd / And I wonder where they all are now,” he begins softly, tentatively, just Ray and a piano. From then on, as the guitars and drums and organ kick in grandly, it’s a catalog of glossy celebrity names -- Ossie Clark, Mary Quant, Christine Keeler, John Stephen, Alvaro. He throws in for good measure the hip writers who defined that era, Stan Barstow, John Osborne, Keith Waterhouse, and Alan Sillitoe (plus their fictional heroes Arthur Seaton, Charlie Bubbles, Jimmy Porter, Joe Lampton – matching writers to characters was like a mini-course in Eng. Lit. for me). He mourns the Teddy Boys (D.A. hairdos, drainpipe pants) and the beatniks (coffee bars, pullover sweaters), finally leading up to the verse that says it all to me: “I wonder what became of all the Rockers and the Mods / I hope they are making it and they've all got steady jobs, / Oh but rock and roll still lives on, / Yeah, rock and roll still lives on.”
As a girl who had long lived for the Rockers and the Mods, this pulled hard on my heartstrings. The melody is unbearably yearning and sad, matched only by the equally wistful “Sitting In My Hotel,” my favorite track from Everybody’s In Show Biz. I hadn’t yet been to London in 1973; “Where Are They Now?” was like a checklist of all the icons I longed to see – and now I never could. I’d missed the boat forever. And yet . . . I hadn’t, because Ray Davies was summing it all up for me, in this one exquisite song.
I bless the light that shines on you, Ray. Happy birthday.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, RAY DAVIES!
The first Kinks song that really got me was “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” – that tongue-in-cheek ironical satire, delivered in a camped-up effete British accent -- how could I fail to love it? Like the roguish Scarlet Pimpernel, “They seek him here / They seek him there / In Regent Street / And Leicester Square.” Besotted as I was with Swinging London, I felt very much in on the joke; I could laugh along with Ray Davies at this Mod fashion victim, “eagerly pursuing all the latest fads and trends.” And then in the chorus, when Ray's brother Dave snidely chimes in on back-up vocals – “Oh yes he is / [Oh yes he is] / Oh yes he is / [Oh yes he is]”. . . . I wonder if the vain poseur who inspired this song ever realized Ray meant him. Probably not.
That’s how things looked to Ray Davies in 1966; what a change by 1973, when “Where Are They Now?” came out on Preservation Act I, the first installment in Ray Davies’ two-part rock opera. (Plenty of Kinks fans are baffled by the Preservation albums, but those LPs are what made a Kinks fan of me forever.) This song is such an important part of the soundtrack of my life, I still forget that isn’t considered a major track in the Kinks canon. It's sung by a character called simply the Tramp, an outsider who gently muses from afar about the play’s action (I’m sorry Ray didn’t use him in Act 2). And whereas in The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, Ray declared himself the champion of “the old ways” – china cups and virginity and all those quaint concepts – here he’s written an elegy to a much more recent Lost England: that one brief shining moment after the British Invasion when London was the Fab Capital of the World.
“I'll sing a song about some people you might know / They made front pages in the news not long ago / But now they're just part of a crowd / And I wonder where they all are now,” he begins softly, tentatively, just Ray and a piano. From then on, as the guitars and drums and organ kick in grandly, it’s a catalog of glossy celebrity names -- Ossie Clark, Mary Quant, Christine Keeler, John Stephen, Alvaro. He throws in for good measure the hip writers who defined that era, Stan Barstow, John Osborne, Keith Waterhouse, and Alan Sillitoe (plus their fictional heroes Arthur Seaton, Charlie Bubbles, Jimmy Porter, Joe Lampton – matching writers to characters was like a mini-course in Eng. Lit. for me). He mourns the Teddy Boys (D.A. hairdos, drainpipe pants) and the beatniks (coffee bars, pullover sweaters), finally leading up to the verse that says it all to me: “I wonder what became of all the Rockers and the Mods / I hope they are making it and they've all got steady jobs, / Oh but rock and roll still lives on, / Yeah, rock and roll still lives on.”
As a girl who had long lived for the Rockers and the Mods, this pulled hard on my heartstrings. The melody is unbearably yearning and sad, matched only by the equally wistful “Sitting In My Hotel,” my favorite track from Everybody’s In Show Biz. I hadn’t yet been to London in 1973; “Where Are They Now?” was like a checklist of all the icons I longed to see – and now I never could. I’d missed the boat forever. And yet . . . I hadn’t, because Ray Davies was summing it all up for me, in this one exquisite song.
I bless the light that shines on you, Ray. Happy birthday.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
“I’m On An Island,” “Apeman,” “Drift Away” / The Kinks
MORE KINKS WEEK!
It’s a theme Ray Davies keeps coming back to – finding a safe haven from life’s overwhelming stresses. (What else can such a sensitive soul do?) I’ve already written about Complicated Life and State of Confusion, Ray’s complaints on the verge of a nervous breakdown; now here are three wistful songs about escape.
“I’m On An Island” has always been a sentimental favorite of mine. With its acoustic arrangement and calypso beat, it makes me picture a tropical hideway, although I’ve heard that Ray wrote it about Iceland. On the surface it echoes John Donne’s “No Man Is An Island,” but the ghost of a failed love affair haunts every line. “But there is nowhere else on Earth I'd rather be / Than if my long, lost little girl was here with me,” he sighs in the bridge. “I'm on an island / And I've got nowhere to run / Because I'm the only one / Who's on the island.” Yes, loneliness is hard, and heartbreak isolates him from the rest of humanity – but something in that sashaying beat, in his floaty singing, tells me that this island is an irresistible escape.
“Apeman” is more broadly satirical, like the album it comes from, 1970’s Lola V. Powerman and the Money-Go-Round. Ray’s escape here is a cartoon King Kong fantasy, a matter of sitting in coconut trees and eating bananas. (Mick Avory’s drumming sounds deliciously primitive.) Don’t you just love that bridge where Ray goes into vintage rock ‘n‘ roll mode to sing, “Come and love me,/ Be my apeman girl / And we will be so happy / In my apeman world”? Otherwise, it sticks with the calypso beat, adding a steel-drum sound on the keyboards, as he ticks off a list of society’s shams: “I think I'm so educated and I'm so civilized / 'Cos I'm a strict vegetarian / But with the over-population and inflation and starvation / And the crazy politicians….” In the middle eight, he sounds like a pompous documentary voice-over: “In man's evolution he has created the cities and the motor traffic rumble, but give me half a chance and I'd be taking off my clothes and living in the jungle.” That bit’s satire, but I feel his panic in the wailed refrain, “I don't feel safe in this world no more / I don't want to die in a nuclear war / I want to sail away to a distant shore / And make like an apeman.” There he is, looking for that island again.
Now let’s jump forward in time, to the Kinks’ most recent studio album (I refuse to call it their last), 1993’s Phobia. Right now this track’s my favorite from this uneven LP. Musically it splits in two – Ray’s opening cry “Sometimes I wish I could just drift away” is sung in a yearning folkie voice, but his vision of what the world’s come to is hammered out in savage punk-rock style: “They say there's gonna be a river of blood / It's apocalypse now / So we're waiting for the flood / The ice is gonna melt, the water gonna rise / And we'll all go to hell / So they're keeping us advised.” It builds and builds, until Ray just has to break in with that wistful longing again: “I think I'll just drift away / To that island of my dreams / Live in total fantasy / Close my eyes and drift away.” Eventually his satiric focus narrows to a specific target: “Newsmen winding up the nation / A little bad news helps circulation / Pass on the panic to the population” – Ray Davies never did like the press. But as he seeks his tropical fantasy, I imagine him sticking his fingers in his ears and singing la-la-la; that repeated "Drift away" gets increasingly desperate, and raw, and FURIOUS.
Ah, this island of Ray Davies’ – I can just imagine it. We all need to go there sometimes, don't we?
I'm On an Island -- sample not available
Apeman sample
Drift Away sample
MORE KINKS WEEK!
It’s a theme Ray Davies keeps coming back to – finding a safe haven from life’s overwhelming stresses. (What else can such a sensitive soul do?) I’ve already written about Complicated Life and State of Confusion, Ray’s complaints on the verge of a nervous breakdown; now here are three wistful songs about escape.
“I’m On An Island” has always been a sentimental favorite of mine. With its acoustic arrangement and calypso beat, it makes me picture a tropical hideway, although I’ve heard that Ray wrote it about Iceland. On the surface it echoes John Donne’s “No Man Is An Island,” but the ghost of a failed love affair haunts every line. “But there is nowhere else on Earth I'd rather be / Than if my long, lost little girl was here with me,” he sighs in the bridge. “I'm on an island / And I've got nowhere to run / Because I'm the only one / Who's on the island.” Yes, loneliness is hard, and heartbreak isolates him from the rest of humanity – but something in that sashaying beat, in his floaty singing, tells me that this island is an irresistible escape.
“Apeman” is more broadly satirical, like the album it comes from, 1970’s Lola V. Powerman and the Money-Go-Round. Ray’s escape here is a cartoon King Kong fantasy, a matter of sitting in coconut trees and eating bananas. (Mick Avory’s drumming sounds deliciously primitive.) Don’t you just love that bridge where Ray goes into vintage rock ‘n‘ roll mode to sing, “Come and love me,/ Be my apeman girl / And we will be so happy / In my apeman world”? Otherwise, it sticks with the calypso beat, adding a steel-drum sound on the keyboards, as he ticks off a list of society’s shams: “I think I'm so educated and I'm so civilized / 'Cos I'm a strict vegetarian / But with the over-population and inflation and starvation / And the crazy politicians….” In the middle eight, he sounds like a pompous documentary voice-over: “In man's evolution he has created the cities and the motor traffic rumble, but give me half a chance and I'd be taking off my clothes and living in the jungle.” That bit’s satire, but I feel his panic in the wailed refrain, “I don't feel safe in this world no more / I don't want to die in a nuclear war / I want to sail away to a distant shore / And make like an apeman.” There he is, looking for that island again.
Now let’s jump forward in time, to the Kinks’ most recent studio album (I refuse to call it their last), 1993’s Phobia. Right now this track’s my favorite from this uneven LP. Musically it splits in two – Ray’s opening cry “Sometimes I wish I could just drift away” is sung in a yearning folkie voice, but his vision of what the world’s come to is hammered out in savage punk-rock style: “They say there's gonna be a river of blood / It's apocalypse now / So we're waiting for the flood / The ice is gonna melt, the water gonna rise / And we'll all go to hell / So they're keeping us advised.” It builds and builds, until Ray just has to break in with that wistful longing again: “I think I'll just drift away / To that island of my dreams / Live in total fantasy / Close my eyes and drift away.” Eventually his satiric focus narrows to a specific target: “Newsmen winding up the nation / A little bad news helps circulation / Pass on the panic to the population” – Ray Davies never did like the press. But as he seeks his tropical fantasy, I imagine him sticking his fingers in his ears and singing la-la-la; that repeated "Drift away" gets increasingly desperate, and raw, and FURIOUS.
Ah, this island of Ray Davies’ – I can just imagine it. We all need to go there sometimes, don't we?
I'm On an Island -- sample not available
Apeman sample
Drift Away sample
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