Since We Seem to Love Talking About John Lennon

"Girl" / The Beatles

Well, we just happen to have another Rubber Soul track that should be worth discussing.

This was, after all, the album where the Beatles had to rise to the challenge, to stretch themselves beyond the pop love song mould; Bob Dylan (and Donovan -- let's not forget Donovan) had laid down the gauntlet for a more literary kind of rock song.

While I rarely find Rolling Stone relevant anymore, here's a smart assessment of that crucial moment in rock history. (This was "the album where the Beatles became the Beatles" -- well, so says a male writer born in 1966 who can have no idea of what it felt like in 1964 to hear "I Saw Her Standing There" for the first time.) But I digress...

I made this video for discussion purposes, just so you can listen to the track as I blather on. I'm sure you all already own it in one form or another (if you're like me, you own it in vinyl, CD, cassette, AND 8-track tape).

Okey-dokey. Sources tell me that this was the last track recorded (at Abbey Road Studios, naturally) for this album, and it was John's clever parry, trying to top Paul's clearly genius track "Michelle." If "Michelle" was going to be French, "Girl" was going to get European as hell, with Greek bazoukis and Viennese mandolins and accordions. (Although, depending upon whom you talk to, it was Paul who added the bazoukis.) Mid-tempo, minor key, but with a way more chromatic melodic line, as was John's wont.  

But that's all beside the point: Let's focus on the yearning of this track, the longing for love. John tarts it up with intellectual constructs (those memorable lines: "Was she taught when she was young that pain would lead to pleasure / Did she understand it when they said / That a man must break his back to earn his day of leisure.") Had John been reading Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Working Class? Possibly. But bottom line? He really wanted a woman who could engage with him on another level. "She's the kind of girl you want so much it makes you sorry / Yet you don't regret a single day." This song was written after "Norwegian Wood" and he had already evolved.  He hadn't yet met Yoko Ono -- that would happen in 1966 -- but he was primed for something meaningful.

Although when we really look at this girl -- isn't she kind of a bitch? "And she promises the earth to me / And I believe her / After all this time I don't know why." Even worse, in that chantingly monotonic bridge: "She's the kind of girl who puts you down when friends are there / You feel a fool / When you say she's looking good she acts as if it's understood she's cool / Oooh-ooh, oooh-ooh..." 

So let's get real. What do you remember most about this track? It's the rawness of John's vocals, collapsing into those lush harmonies, and that staggeringly sexy intake of breath. Was he sucking in his frustration or just taking a toke (this was the Beatles greatest pothead album)? 

And then there's the bridge, where whatever the lyrics say about "she's the kind of girl who yadda yadda yadda, " ALL we ever heard was the Beatles gleefully singing "tit-tit-tit-tit." And we were their fans, and we were in on it.

I wanted to be that kind of girl. Except she didn't actually seem, you know, to be someone I could be. But if Paul and John wanted that kind of girl . . . well . . . 

And the first song up is . . .

"Norwegian Wood" / The Beatles

Yowsa.  I promised myself I'd write a post on the first song that came up on my shuffle . . . and what comes up?  This iconic Beatles song that I've avoided writing about for years. 

 I've never known what to make of this song, Oh, yeah, I can dig the folk-rock sound, especially with George layering in some early sitar; and my (perhaps puerile) fascination with 1960s Swinging London gives the song's casual sexual encounter a lip-frosted mini-skirted dimension of glamour. (Cue up clips from Darling.) But still . . .

Received wisdom has it that John Lennon (who by the way was married at the time) wrote this song after a baffling evening with a liberated woman journalist. And with the pressure on for the Beatles to be more "Dylanesque," John was no doubt reaching for allusive cryptic lyrics and social commentary. So here was an obvious target: A Girl Who Wouldn't Play By the Rules -- a chick who was even more elusive than the guys who wanted to make time with her -- for the Beatles, working-class kids from provincial Liverpool, feminists like this must have seemed like a strange new breed of woman.

But I have to say -- while we were programmed to love everything the Beatles did, this song drives home a wedge of doubt.

And it's not just John. Though for years John claimed this song was totally his, evidence has it that Paul (yes, my Paulie, my true love) conspired to write the middle eight: "She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh / I told her I didn't and crawled off to sleep in the bath." So now she's the bread-winner and he's the free spirit, and that sounds just fine to me -- but I'm guessing that the Beatles couldn't go for that.

What if John -- trapped in that spare Danish Modern flat with this clever liberated woman -- simply could not handle her feminism?

"So I lit a fire / Isn't it good / Norwegian wood?"        

Seriously? That's arson. Because she was a "nasty woman"?

Anybody have another take? Because it's a beautiful song and I sure would like to continue loving it....

An End of October Shuffle

Do the Shuffle 

Click on the song titles, darling, to get some video of the songs in question.

1. "I Don't Want to Do Wrong" / Glady Knight & the Pips
From If I Were Your Woman (1971)
When the cat's away . . . well, she doesn't want to stray, honest she doesn't, but . . . and as this luscious Motowner grooves on, those sexy slow-dance chord changes take us deeper and deeper into who's doing who wrong. Just listen to the angel and the devil arguing over her sequined shoulders. Mmn-hmn.

2. "Fallin' & Flyin'" / Jeff Bridges and Colin Farrell
From Crazy Heart (2010)
Another shot of moral ambiguity from the shuffle gods. I have such a thing for both these actors; I could watch this clip from the film Crazy Heart over and over and over. Bridges' character Bad Blake (said to be based on "the king of Western Swing" Hank Thompson) writes the songs, while his protegee, Tommy Sweet (Farrell) makes the big bucks. But the film is so much richer than that, and this Stephen Bruton-Gary Nicholson track captures the whole push-pull of fame and ambition and self-destruction. ("Funny how falling feels like flying for a little while" -- is that not a genius line?) Plus -- who knew Colin Farrell could sing?

3. "Train Ride to Caroline" / Miss Tess
From Darling, Oh Darling (2009)
First of all, if you don't know Miss Tess's music  you should. Second -- who uses an oboe in modern music? For that alone, she's got my vote. Third, she's Boston, she's Nashville, she's a whole encyclopedia of roots music, and with a piercingly true voice to die for, It's jazz, it's cabaret, it's whatever you want.

4. "What Love Can Do" / John Hiatt
From Same Old Man (2008)
John Hiatt goes deeper for me than anybody. Anybody. (Indy, we were kids, the nuns, the neighborhood, say no more.)  Here's his paean to long-time married love, and it completely wipes the slate clean.

5. "Cancer" / Joe Jackson
From Night and Day (1982)
In 1982, we were too young to worry about cancer; we worried about AIDS. Now we worry about cancer and we still worry about AIDS. I love Joe Jackson to the bottom of my soul, and the Latin groove of this track sucks me into its vortex every time.

6. "I'll Be Long Gone" / Boz Scaggs
From Boz Scaggs  (1969)
Oh, the 1969 mindset, where it was cool to be free and easy and "make your own way" to "make your life shine." But there's a copasetic quality to this track that excuses all the moral ambiguity. (See Gladys Knight, entry #1...)

7. "Old Jarrow" / Brinsley Schwarz 
From Despite It All (1970)
I love these guys, I really do. Not just Nick Lowe (bestilll my heart) but the whole groovy band. The redeeming value of this track mostly lies in . . .well, there's may not be much of a redeeming value here, but it's a cool folk-country-rock track that you'd enjoy listening to. So do.

8. "No Distance Left to Run" / Blur 
From 13 (1999)
A psychedelic break-up song par excellence. Not to go all TMZ on you, but the pain of Damon Albarn's split from Justine Frischmann reverberates throughout this woozy track.

 9. "Flight" / Jill Sobule
From Dottie's Charms (2014)
"Flight, flight, I never should have caught that flight!" And so the regrets pile up. The ever-delightful Miss Sobule can do moral ambiguity with the best of them, pepping it up with some sparkling backbeat and deadpan humor.

10. "I'm a Man" / The Yardbirds
From Five Live Yardbirds (1964)
A rave-up version of the Ellis McDaniel song courtesy of Jeff Beck and the Yardbirds. Feel free to add all the moral ambiguity you wish -- don't cost nothing.

Teddy Thompson & Kelly Jones 

"Don't Remind Me"

Okay; I myself would never have known about this album (Little Windows, 2016) if it hadn't been for songwriter Bill DeMain -- who co-wrote every track -- plugging the thing on Facebook. But knowing Bill's talent, I took a chance -- and wow, was I gobsmacked by this record. So I'm urging you to check it out; you won't be disappointed, In the fractured music biz of these dark dark days, a Facebook post is sometimes the only way you'll find out about these gems. 

Teddy, as it happens, has musical DNA up the wazoo, being the son of the gifted British musicians Richard and Linda Thompson (erst of Fairport Convention, and on and on from there). On the other hand, Kelly is just a gal from Virginia with pipes to die for. Note: this isn't the Welsh Kelly Jones, the guy from Stereophonics. No disrespect to him, but I think if he were involved in this project it would be something entirely different.

From the outset, the purpose of this album was to riff on the 1950s "countrypolitan" style that snuck pop influences into Nashville C&W. Strings, lush legatos, movie-music emotions -- the whole nine yards. That's the sound that my girl Patsy Cline was moving toward before she died in that awful plane crash in 1963, and Ray Charles did his own part in bringing R&B into the same camp. ("Georgia"? "Cryin' Time"? There's got to be some reason why these are my favorite Ray Charles tracks.)

But the track this most reminds me of is "Since I Don't Have You," a doo-wop hit in 1958 for the Skyliners, which Guns and Roses also (bizarrely) covered in 1994. The version I'm most familiar with, though, is Ricky Nelson's, from his 1965 album Best Always. It's drop-dead lovely -- and you can't tell me that Teddy and Kelly aren't channeling that ripe emotion here.  

Oh, yeah, it's a mood piece. He's thumbing through his memories, and coming up with mostly broken dreams. That shuffling tempo is drenched with regret and lassitude, and Teddy and Kelly's harmonies are plangent as hell, sliding in and out of crunching dissonance.

I adore how the chorus modulates into that winsome plea -- "Don't remind me." Stevie Elliot's electric guitar draws out the tremulous emotion, spinning the web of regret.

Oh, please don't rub salt in the wound. Or, if you must --

Z Is For...

The last of our 26 artists, A to Z -- and who else could it be but the band who recorded the first single I ever bought, back in 1964?

The Zombies / "I Love You"

I love the Zombies.  Love them, love them, love them.  Loved them then, love them now.

In August 1965, this track, written by bassist-songwriter Chris White, was the B-side of "Whenever You're Ready." A measure of how good the Zombies were in their all-too-brief 1960s career is how often this B-side has been covered since then.

Meanwhile, this video has led me down a whole 'nother rabbit hole. The images star the brilliant Rita Tushingham, whose performances in such seminal 1960s British films as A Taste of Honey, Girl With Green Eyes, and The Knack...And How to Get It were linchpins in that cinematic revolution. (If there's anything I love more than British pop of the mid-1960s, it's British cinema of the mid-1960s.) I've watched this video over and over, trying to pinpoint which film these clips are from. And finally I've had to come to terms with the fact that no one else is as obsessive as I am when it comes to Brit Nouvelle Vague circa 1965 and I had better just move on to the topic at hand. Which is, after all, THE ZOMBIES.

The Zombies had two extraordinary things going for them -- Colin Blunstone's incredibly ethereal voice, and Rod Argent's keyboard wizardry. What Chris White concocted in this song is a jazz-soaked number that gave both those assets a chance to shine.

The formula is devastatingly simple. Over and over, the singers repeat "I love you," numbly, dumbly. When you're hog-tied by infatuation, that's all you can do. Then the combo snaps into a crashing halt, to let the lead singer urgently emote: "And I don't know what to say!"

He's so sunk in desire, he can scarcely think. "My words should explain / But the words won't come." And the chords -- mostly minor key -- shift into conditional mode as he laments: "I should tell you just how I feel / And I keep tryin' / But something holds me back when / I try to tell you."

Tied up in knots? Anyone who's ever been an anguished adolescent (and that's just about all of us) can relate to that.

But finding a musical expression of that is something else. The Zombies were always the earnest, anguished suburban boys of the BritBeat scene. In this devastatingly perfect number, they forever lay their claim to that territory. Which is as good a note as any upon which to end this serendipitous series of posts.

Y Is For...

26 artists, A to Z.

The Yardbirds / "Heart Full of Soul"

I was too young to "get" this band; I only know them from my older brother Holt's LPs. They were darker and more complex than the Beatles, the gods of my 1965 musical universe. But given time...

The most arresting element hits you right from the start: that spacey-sounding guitar. I’d never heard a sitar before – remember, this was five months before George Harrison’s sitar on “Norwegian Wood”; the Stones’ “Paint It Black” wouldn’t come out until the next year. But Jeff Beck didn't need a sitar; he got the same exotic effect just using a fuzz box on his guitar. It sounded creepy, and psychedelic, and I don’t know what else.

It’s a pretty tortured set of lyrics too: “Sick at heart and lonely, / Deep in dark despair/ [oh-oh-oh-oh oh] / Thinking one thought only / Where is she, tell me where / [oh-oh-oh-oh-oh].” I love how those back-up oh’s stagger up the minor scale and then seemingly spiral off into space. Keith Relf’s lead vocal sounds so haggard, like he’s been up late smoking and drinking, nursing his wounded heart. In 1965, most bands perpetuated the fiction that love would make us happy; quite the opposite here.

Apparently the girl’s lost interest in him, but he’s not giving up, as he insists in the chorus: “And I know / if she had me back again / Well I would never make her sad.”

All those shifting uneasy chords, and then he lays out his most important credential: “I've got a heart full of soul.” The back-up harmonies modulate mystically through no less than six chords on “heart”; his heart is just full to bursting, isn’t it? In one stroke, he turns my pity into dizzy attraction. A guy who’s this full of passion deserves to get the girl.

Well, love isn't that easy; half a beat after “soul,” that hypnotic guitar line slices through like a scimitar, drawing us into the next verse, and more pain: “She's been gone such a long time / Longer than I can bear / [oh-oh-oh-oh-oh] / But if she says she wants me / Tell her that I'll be there / [oh-oh-o] / And if she says to you / She don’t love me/ [oh-oh-oh-oh-oh] / Just give her my message / Tell her of my plea.”

By the end of the song, nothing’s been resolved; he’s still aching, still miserable. But me, I’ve got shivers running up my spine. No wonder I avoided this when I was 11. But now that I'm a grown-up? I like it just fine.

X Is For . . .

26 artists, A to Z.

XTC / "Stupidly Happy"

Yes, I really was that clueless. For years, whenever I heard the name of this band, I thought they were rappers. Y'know, like Run DMC or N.W.A. Never mind that they were English and started recording under that name in 1977, way before the rap era. I guess I have an excuse -- they were never that big in the States, and after 1982 they stopped touring due to Andy Partridge's crippling stage fright. They kept recording, but became increasingly a cult taste. Well, that wouldn't have been a problem for me; there's nothing I like better than a cult band. (I am, after all, a lifelong Kinks fan.) Still, if no one I knew was listening to these guys...

But thanks to my Kinkette friend Julie, I became enlightened in 2007 or so, and XTC is now firmly ensconced in my regular rotation. Quirky, British, literate, funny, more than a little off-kilter musically -- well, that's the sort of stuff I just eat up.   

This is from their 2000 album WaspStar -- which is really the second half of their 1999 album Apple Venus. By then, the band had shrunk to just Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding, plus session musicians.  (No need for a full band if you never perform live.) 

As I recall, this was the first of their songs I ever heard, the one that convinced me to listen to more. Sneaky little number, this.

Those crunchy buzzsaw guitars set us up for some real rock 'n' roll, y'know, innit? But Andy Partridge's almost fey vocals float over the top, as he marvels, "I'm stupidly happy / Everything's fine / I'm stupidly happy / My heart's pumping wine."  He describes his "idiot grin," says he's "coming unscrewed," and offers the final proof of being unhinged -- "The world's making sense." 

So maybe it's stupid to be so happy? I wonder. Is that the subtext behind the grating guitar riffs? Is he like a Benny Hill video halfwit, a dim Monty Python gumby with his handkerchief knotted around his head? 

But then -- that free-wheeling swooping melody wins me over, especially in those lyrically sinuous bridges. First he tunes into the natural world: "All the birds of the air call your name / As they land on my kitchen roof / All the fish in the lake do the same / Should you need extra proof."

And in the second bridge, the ties to his music are even clearer: "All the lights of the cars in the town / Form the strings of a big guitar / I'm a giant to play you a tune / For wherever you are." 

He's like Gulliver in Gulliver's Travels, a giant striding the world, He's feeling strong enough to take on the Devil; he's invincible.  Ah, yes, it's love -- her love -- that makes him so happy that's he's almost stupid. (Which is a very different thing from feeling happy only because he is stupid.) 

The final word comes from Andy Partridge himself:  "The dumbest but happiest song I ever wrote. I found the one riff that Keith Richard hadn't. Hopefully says in music what the singer (me) experiences. I'm in love and in a happy groove."

That clinches it for me.  I'll vote for happy.