"Private Idaho" / The B-52s

Why this song now?

I DON'T KNOW. Isn't that the whole point of this blog, to bypass the "should" and dive straight for the "why not"?

Okay, let's get the Wikipedia part of the show out of the way. Track 5 of Wild Planet, 1980, released as a single that hit #74 (#5 on the Hot Dance Play chart) and spawned a 1991 Gus Van Sant movie starring the late great River Phoenix as well as the delectable Keanu Reeves, he who shall ever be in my mind Ted from the beloved classic Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

But really, for those of us who were 100% invested in the B-52s brand of sneakily brainy ironic dance-party New Wave rock -- the question is really more like "Why do you ask?"

 

This song came to me as I was (no joke) walking through a corridor in the undercroft of an Episcopalian church listening to Upper East Side New Yorkers blag on about the minutiae of their ever-so-important Manhattan lives. So there I was, vested in my choir robe (because I do love to sing from time to time) and all I could think is, "You're what?!!" (A close cousin to the "Love Shack" response, "Tin roof! ... Rusted!"

Because, come on, let's get real -- has there ever been a better song about our American tendency to live in gated communities, isolated from the rough-and-tumble of other people's lives, and paranoid about the consequences of  actually having contact with other human beings?

Or, as Fred Schneider intones, singing over that ominous undergroove, "You're living in your own Private Idaho / Living in your own Private Idaho." And Kate (or is it Cindy?) adds, "Underground like a wild potato." (The one and only actual Idaho reference in the song.)

"Don't go on the patio," Fred warns, and Cindy (or is it Kate?) adds, in a tone of semi-hysteria, "Beware of the pool, / Blue bottomless pool." Such beautiful promise, and all it leads to is Fred's "It leads you straight / Right through the gate  / That opens on the pool." And for all these years, here I've been such a chump, thinking that a beautiful blue swimming pool was a GOOD thing.

But Fred doesn't stop there. Oh, no. "Keep off the path, beware of the gate, / Watch out for signs that say 'hidden driveways'/ Don't let the chlorine in your eyes / Blind you to the awful surprise / That's waitin' for you at / The bottom of the bottomless blue blue blue pool." Danger alert!

And so consider me officially freaked out. Because this is what it means to be a privileged American (in 2014 as much as it was in 1980, or even more). It's all about anticipating disaster, and smugly being ahead of the game. "The lawn may be green / But you better not be seen / Walkin' through the gate that leads you down, / Down to a pool fraught with danger / Is a pool full of strangers." Is this a way to live your life?

And yet -- when all is said and done -- do we not love that surf guitar riff? (God bless you, Ricky Wilson, and R.I.P. -- this is one of the AIDS deaths I will never entirely get over....)

"Ohio" /
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

Wrote this 2 months ago. No idea why I didn't post it until now. Go figure.

What a winter I had. Okay, yeah, we all had an awful winter weather-wise, but I'm not just talking weather. In fact, for me the blizzards and ice-storms were totally appropriate: they reflected the life-changing miseries of having brain surgery and sitting at my only brother's bedside as he slowly, agonizingly died. Can't lift your head off the pillow? That's cool; life sucks so badly that head-lifting is no longer considered an option.

And then, when I most needed to believe that life could still be good -- I spent 48 hours in April in my hometown of Indianapolis hanging out with my grade-school friends. Not high-school, mind you, but grade-school, though I ought to explain that this wasn't your normal grade school class but a hand-picked crew of ostensibly gifted and talented weirdoes. We were kept in the same socially awkward corral together for 4 years, long enough for us all to embrace our inner geeks, and to give up on ever being cool (though some of you folks are in retrospect the coolest human beings I've ever known).

Who else would so get into the trivia quiz I invented? I've never seen adults so eager to tackle a pointless exercise, just for the fun of knowing stuff. Watching you all obsess over the quizzes, I suddenly realized I had come home to MY PEOPLE. You are the core of who I have become, for better or worse, and screw everyone who doesn't understand why it's cool to just be fully alive in the geek-o-rama moment.

And when I asked the (trick) trivia question: "To what is Neil Young referring when he sings, "Three dead in Ohio"?  Bless you, you all came back with, "It was FOUR dead in Ohio, and it was Kent State."

Because our generation -- at least the thinking parts of it -- will never forget the images of college students like ourselves being mown down by scared-shitless National Guardsmen on the Kent State campus on May 4, 1970. Neil Young, ever quick to record the national temperature on such matters, released this song with his CSN colleagues in June 1970 (lightning fast response, in those days). Life, as it is lived.

 

 

The Kent State Massacre (yes, let's call it by its proper name) happened on May 4 and by May 21 songwriter Neil Young had gathered in the studio his colleagues David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash to record the song Young had written. (Parenthetical aside: Forgive me, but I've never really been a fan of CSN; it's only when you add Young into the equation that I get interested. Why is that?)

 

The fast-track release of this song fascinates me. You'd never get that nowadays. But how important was it that this song got onto the airwaves when this tragedy was still fresh in our minds? Today the recording industry is all bottom-line and post-production folderol, but in 1970? This song mattered, and so the record label suits (probably not suits in those days) did what needed to be done to get it out FAST.

 

The lyrics are dead simple, really, and the main thing is the lightning-bolt courage of that first line: "Tin soldiers and Nixon coming / We're finally on our own." To call the National Guard "tin soldiers" was pretty ballsy, even in 1970, but to call out President Nixon on his role in this tragedy took major cojones.

 

Once you've named Nixon, the battle lines have been drawn, and so "This summer I hear the drumming, / Four dead in Ohio." I love that evocation of ominous jungle drums, the youth culture rising at last to draw a line in the sand. 

 

And it was this photo that galvanized us all, one of the great photo-journalism shots of all time. The second part of the verse sums it up: "What if you knew her /  And found her dead on the ground /

How can you run when you know?" Okay, so Neil didn't get it quite right; it's a guy on the ground and a woman keening over his body. That doesn't change the emotional power of this image.

 Oh, and that great crunchy guitar line, and Uncle Neil's whiny urgent vocals. This song cried out to us as a tale that NEEDED to be told.  We didn't need Facebook to pass around the counterculture meaning of this thing, and enshrine it as a cultural milestone. Let us take note: The jungle drums worked better than the internet, when the message meant so much. A trending hashtag? Please -- we invented that, along with unspoken filters that would have kept Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus marginal for good

 

This is what it meant to be a teenager in 1970 -- scary and powerful and incredibly sad. Is it any wonder that I should feel bonded for life to these peeps?

Happy birthday, Ray!!

 On the occasion of the 70th birthday of Ray Davies, once and future frontman of the Kinks....

"See My Friends" / The Kinks

Not only do I love Ray Davies, I also love the many amazing friends I've made over the past decade of following Ray, on-line and in-person and in any other configuration you've got. (You know who you are, Kinksters.)

And so this one seems a particularly apt birthday tribute to The Man Who Makes It All Worthwhile.

 

It's fascinating, really, when you listen to this track, to realize that Dave Davies isn't playing the sitar; he's just faking it on a regular electric guitar. The shimmery-spangly weirdness of this raga is the same, and in true Kinks fashion, if they only did one psychedelic track it would be a real humdinger. The Kinks were always great musical chameleons, borrowing from music hall here, jazz there, blues here, country music there. Even if psychedelic raga wasn't their signature sound, when they turned their collective hand to it they were bound to nail it.

Not only nail it; nail it. What Ray somehow intuitively grasped was the power of the circular form of the raga, like a poetic villanelle. Sure, the modern Western verse/chorus-verse/chorus-bridge-verse/chorus form implies a progression of thought, but the Eastern form allows us to return over and over to the undeniable truth of loss. So what if we don't end up anywhere different?

Just try singing this song -- it's incredibly powerful. It's almost mandatory to throw your heart into the recurrent phrases and chord shifts. Everything always shifting and morphing -- how psychedelic is that?

 Ray say he wrote this in Bombay, listening to fishermen's voices floating over the water. In 1965, everybody who was anybody was going to India in those days for spiritual enlightenment. But in true Ray Davies fashion, at the same time he was emotionally being pulled home to England; those mournful voices triggered him to brood over the death of his sister Rene, who died when he was 13. Rene was the sister who bought him his first guitar; this had to have hit him hard.

"She just went," Ray muses in the second verse; "She just went / Went across the river." Crossing the river, a classic image of death. Though Ray darkly follows that up with "Now she's gone / Wish that I'd gone with her" -- whoa, nothing like a little suicidal note to skew a song. But hey, it's the 60s, we were all into that then.

Ray's no fool; the lyrics are ambiguous enough to let listeners apply it to a romantic break-up ("she is gone / She is gone and now there's now one left / But my friends"), but the emotional reality of this song for me is that of a mourner. That melismatic melody line, keening from one note to another nearby note -- isn't that the wail of grief?

Maybe I hear that especially hard because I'm still mourning my brother, who died in March. But Ray, too, recently lost another sister, Joyce, as a result of which he couldn't make it to his June 12th induction into the US Songwriters Hall of Fame. We're on the same page, Ray. I'd like to think that this song comforts you now as it did then.

It sure rings true for me.

"Big Sister's Clothes" /
Elvis Costello and the Attractions

When Trust came out in early 1981, I felt let down. Considering how I'd loved all his previous albums, why did this one leave me baffled and a little bored?  Had Elvis lost his gift, or was it me who'd changed?

A bit of both, I suppose. Maybe it was time to move on. At any rate, I didn't listen to it nearly so much as his others. (Even today, I'm likely to get confused and think that "Watch Your Step" and "From A Whisper to a Scream" are from Armed Forces and "You'll Never Be a Man" is from Get Happy!)

On the Rhino re-issue's wonderful liner notes, Elvis himself claims that there were way too many drugs in the picture when he made this record. Recycling past sounds was no doubt an easy out when inspiration ran dry. But 30 years or so down the road, it doesn't matter any more which albums the songs were on, or whether the arc of his career was consistent. I've since learned that half the joy of being an Elvis Costello fan is watching him get lost in left field for a while, knowing (as I know now) that he'll eventually wander home. 

And since I've been singing "Big Sister's Clothes" in my head all day, might as well give in to it.

  
In keeping with the cynical, jagged tone of Trust (talk about ironic titles), "Big Sister's Clothes" begins and ends with an ugly, grating sonic crunch. When I play it in my head, though, I leave that part off -- it doesn't really seem to belong to the song.

Instead I find myself hooked on its perky syncopated tempo, the beguiling hoarseness of Elvis' vocals, the understated arrangement (it's almost folky), and of course EC's playful trademark puns. Lines like "She's got eyes like saucers / Oh you think she's a dish" or "The sport of kings, the old queen's heart / The prince in darkness stole some tart" or "With a hammer on the slap and tickle" (rhymes with sickle, as in the old USSR hammer-and-sickle logo) -- Elvis never could turn away from a clever pun.

But now that I think about it, the part that's always stuck with me is the chorus. It starts off in a cheery major key, just like the verses -- "But it's easier to say 'I love you'" -- but then shifts into a darker minor key on the second line: "Than 'Yours sincerely,' I suppose." It's as if he's wading into moral ambiguity, and digging up some murky depths indeed. He notes, "All little sisters / Like to try on big sister's clothes," then as he ominously repeats "Big sister's clothes," it sure doesn't sound as if this game of dress-up is all that cute or innocent. It sends a chill through me every time.  

At the time, I assumed this song was about Elvis's first wife, a marriage heading for the rocks. But now I can pick up a political dimension that an American like me wouldn't have gotten at the time: It's really about Margaret Thatcher, who'd just come into power. The woman he's singing about is a hard-hearted hypocrite -- "Compassion went out of fashion / That's all your concern meant," a pretty prescient remark considering what happened in 1984 when the Iron Lady clamped down on the coal miners' strike.

It's pretty muddled satire, though; I'm not sure that "getting" the references would have helped make me like the song any more. (It's interesting to note that this is the only song on the album that producer Nick Lowe refused to put his name to. I would really like to know the story behind that.)

And in the end, all I need is that magic key shift in the chorus to keep me humming it 30+ years down the line.

Reverb Thursday

“When A Man Loves a Woman” / Percy Sledge

You have to go back to the early 60s to find a song that believes in love like this song does. Sure, it's not pure and noble love he's talking about -- more like sexual obsessions -- but the sweeping melody, not to mention Percy Sledge's soulful delivery, elevates lust to epic heights.

 

 

 

You know you’re in for monumental emotion from the very first notes, with their blaring horns, resonant organ, and ponderous bass. This is the ultimate slow dance, slouching and grinding from beat to beat, each chord shift groaning toward resolution. I remember this song coming on during school dances – one round of dancing this song, and you practically felt knocked up. (Usually I’d wimp out and flee the dance floor.)

“When a ma-an loves a woman,” Sledge trumpets grandly at the outset, flinging his voice into those high notes, pitched just over the key’s octave note. It’s pretty ballsy, how he claims to have the definitive word on love between a woman and a man, on a universal basis, but he’s sure got my ear.

That commanding opener is evanescent, though; right away things start to disintegrate, slip-sliding down the scale, as he stuffs in the details – “Can't keep his mind on nothing else / He'll trade the world / For the good thing he's found.” The rest of that stuff – the crap that besets this man – is inevitable (in other verses he turns his back on his best friend, spends his very last dime, sleeps out in the rain); but somehow all of it means nothing next to the fact that he’s loving with his whole heart. The stately, almost lazy tempo takes this all in stride; it’s the way of the world, and eternal as the pyramids.

For the first three verses it’s all theoretical; in verse four he confesses that he’s singing from his own experience: “Well, this man loves a woman / I gave you everything I had / Tryin' to hold on to your precious love / Baby, please don't treat me bad.” He’s not accusing her, not exactly, but he does have a sickening sense that he’s going to get the shaft.

But (emotionally speaking -- not musically!) it's all downhill from there. Now that he's opened that door, even though he reverts to the third person, it’s clear he’s dwelling on his own situation: “She can bring him such misery / If she plays him for a fool / He's the last one to know / Lovin' eyes can't ever see.” Is she cheating on him? Or, in the final verse, is he the one cheating: “When a man loves a woman / He can do no wrong / He can never own some other girl.” We don’t know; probably even he doesn’t know – that’s how muddled up you get when you’re in love.

Whatever’s going on, there’s pain and heartache here, that’s for sure. But as Percy Sledge sings it, there’s not one minute of blame or regret. He knew coming in that the path of true love wouldn’t be smooth – but it’s still the most glorious thing in the world. And if you can’t get that, then you don’t deserve to be in love.

Reverb Thursday

Apparently this is a thing now on Facebook -- Throwback Thursday. Everybody's doing it. But I'm not like everybody else, so I'll call mine Reverb Thursday...and try to remember every week to post an updated version of an earlier blog post about a song I love. So why not start with a Kinky favorite?

"Holiday Romance" / The Kinks
Might as well give in to it.

The thing is, when I regress into non-stop Kinks listening, it's not the hits like "You Really Got Me" and "Waterloo Sunset" -- I'm talking oddities like "Holiday Romance." This is Ray Davies at his music hall best, with corny strings and tap dance rhythms and campy voices and all. It's a novelty song from their Soap Opera album, right smack in the middle of Ray's theatrical period. Even on Soap Opera, a high-concept story about an ordinary man who is transformed into a star (or is the other way around?), "Holiday Romance" is a strange interlude.

It's one of Ray's many escapist fantasies -- a tale of a flirtation at a dowdy seaside resort, with its own weird sort of Edwardian naughty-postcards charm. It's all about trying on other lives, a tried-and-true Ray Davies theme. He lapses fondly into clever Noel Coward-esque patter, with a histrionic upbeat: "I -- had -- a -- brrreak for a week / So I booked my seat / And confirmed my reservation." You can almost imagine his arched eyebrows as he sets the scene "at a quiet little seaside / ho-tel." The indelible way he sings that "ho-tel" -- well, I tell you, that's how we tell a true Kinks fan, if he or she sings that line just so. No other intonation will do.

Our hero arrives at the resort "just in time for the dinner gong / Ding-dong!" If this were a movie, it'd be in black-and-white, but stylishly lit; the staginess of it all almost fits better into a silent movie, or one of those herky-jerky little films you'd watch on a scope at an old-timey amusement arcade.

The shot zooms in on his love interest: "Then I saw Lavinia / Standing at the bottom of the stairs / And I fell for Lavinia / The moment that I saw her standing there." Echo of the early Beatles song? Maybe, but even closer is this song's affinity with Magical Mystery Tour's deliberately nostalgic "Your Mother Should Know." ("Let's all get up and dance to a song / That was a hit before your mother was born..."). The difference is that Ray doesn't bother with the ironic parentheses -- he just projects himself right into that other era and goes for it.

There's something deliciously fey about the mincing way Ray sings, "Lavinia looked so divine / As she walked up to the table to dine / And then Lavinia's eyes met /Mine!" Ah, that falsetto trill at the end is just priceless; Tiny Tim couldn't have done better. With all due histrionics, he wonders, with a suitable flutter in his voice, "Can this be love / Can this be lovey-dove / Or just a holiday romance?" He jumps up to another register to reiterate, "Can this be long-lost love at last / Or is it just a flash in the pan?"

His excitement is so endearingly innocent, an innocence he carries on as they dance ("after cheese and liqueurs) to the hotel band ("We did the foxtrot, samba, and danced through the night"). In later verses, they stroll on the beach and drink lemonade, and he says to himself, with a frisson of delight, "I thought, 'I must be on a winner'." That's probably my favorite line, followed closely by "And my holiday treat was / Com-plete." How he manages to make all this sound so lascivious and yet so quaint is beyond genius.

It's a hazy out-of-time idyll, even for our hero, who knows perfectly well that this will only last for the week. He ties it all up with a lovely comic bow at the end, when, in a Monty-Pythonish female warble, Lavinia pushes him away and trills, "Better stop, / My husband's coming to collect me today." Breaking his rhyme scheme, his syncopation, completely puncturing his balloon, she appears in her own skin for the first time, and Ray lets the mask slip just enough for us to wonder if she's actually a silly cow. But who cares? It's such a tidy ending! With a cascading embroidery of strings, he pans away, waving a handkerchief in farewell. Nothing will ever spoil the perfection of this little romance. No ties, no regrets -- ah, that's what we all need, isn't it?

Okay, it's not the first song I'd play to try to convert somebody to being a Kinks fan. But this is the sort of stuff that made a Kinks fan of me, for better or worse. What a hopeless case I am.

"Scenes From An Italian Restaurant" / Billy Joel

Am I a Billy Joel fan?  I can't say I am.

This album, The Stranger, is the only one I ever bought and the only one I ever listened to. Although, truth be told, I listened to it a lot during the year I lived in Arlington, Virginia, an odd lacuna between grad school in England and the life I was meant to live in Manhattan. All bets were off for that year, as I made a reluctant re-entry into American life. With few friends in town, and little commitment to life in the D.C. area, I spent a lot of time writing and filled my turntable with uncharacteristic records like Steve Miller's The Joker and Fleetwood Mac's Rumours (okay, me and everybody else in 1977) and The Band's Greatest Hits.  I'd like to say this was a precursor to my 21st-century interest in Americana, but that would be utter bullcrap. It was just what I happened to have in the house.

But this Billy Joel album? For a few months there, it really spoke to me.

And now, 37 years later, I have heard this song -- not "Just the Way You Are," not "Vienna," not "Only the Good Die Young," not "She's Always a Woman," but this particular song -- on random sound systems and radio stations three times in the past week. After not hearing it at all for decades.

What gives?

First of all -- 7 minutes and 36 freaking seconds? Who does that anymore? Our modern attention spans are way too short for this, but people let me tell you -- in the vinyl 1970s they did it ALL THE TIME. Because they could -- who was gonna bother lifting the tone arm and skipping a track? So we just sat through it. And yes, that meant we sat through some awful self-indulgent crap. But in this case, not so much.

Because it's really a suite, a succession of songs tracing a storyline. The opening -- "A bottle of white, bottle of red / Perhaps a bottle of rose instead" -- sets the scene, taking a table at the restaurant. But soon we move on to the album's hero's story -- "Got a good job / Got a good wife" -- a nice follow-up to the album's opening track, "Moving Out (Anthony's Song)." Everything is hunky-dory, with saxes and clarinets and Billy's rapid-fire piano wizardry.

And then he shifts to a little human-interest observation -- the story that's really at the heart of this song, though cleverly framed with the restaurant stuff. "Brenda and Eddie were the popular steadies / And the king and the queen of the prom / Riding round with the cartop down and the radio on/ Nobody looked any finer / Always more of a hit at the parkway diner / We never knew we could want more than that out of life / Sure, and Brenda and Eddie would always know how to survive." I didn't grow up on Billy Joel's Long Island, but I know my equivalent -- "Jack and Diane" by John Mellencamp.

But oh, Billy J doesn't leave Brenda and Eddie in the limbo of could-have-been -- no, he leads them all the way through their co-habitation, the wedding, the furniture bought on time at Sears, the squabbles -- "they started to fight when the money got tight / And they just didn't count on the tears" -- well, who DOES count on the tears?

And so it ended as a million other marriages do, with a divorce. (All of this taking place in the summer of '75, mind you.) And then, "The king and the queen went back to the green / But you can never go back there again." Because, as Thomas Wolfe said, you can't go home again, and all the kids (LIKE OUR HERO) who idolized these paragons of popularity have moved on already. Too bad, Brenda and Eddie.

Full circle: We come back to the bottle of red, bottle of white, only a good deal more boozy in the reprise. (I picture Eddie at the bar, drowning his considerable sorrows.)  We're still at the restaurant, still in Long Island, but now perhaps we see the folks at the tables around us a little bit differently. They've got back stories now, and those back stories are laden with disappointment and inevitable regret. But -- here's the kicker, and the reason for the story's layers -- those of us who weren't prom kings and queens, but who are making it okay? We should feel damn proud of ourselves.

And in 1977, as a recent college graduate with no boyfriend and no freaking idea what I was going to do with my life -- well, that was a message I was relieved to listen to.

Note to self: In the intervening years, I had become so cynical about Billy Joel's talents as a social commentator. But what was I thinking?

Maybe he didn't keep it up record after record, but on The Stranger?  Home run, slam dunk, touchdown. Boo yah.