When I was a young pup, my ideas of adulthood were completely based on my parents, movies and music. Seeing early 90s films like Singles, Swingers, Indecent Proposal, Reality Bites, and Pretty Women with my older teenage sister gave me a good idea of what people did in their twenties: drink/smoke a lot, have business meetings in which business was not discussed, have sex- sometimes for money, also: do nothing (NO wonder our economy is tanking now!!!!) Add to that my mom and I dropping my sister off in the minivan at clubs on Hollywood Blvd ("I'm coming back in two hours for you! You better not go anywhere but this all-age punk club!). Anyhow, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what would go on. Little did I know that punk rock would consist of Blink 182 by the time I hit high school. The punk clubs my sister went to didn't even exist anymore. Not that I liked punk that much anyway. I was more interested in the 70s R&B and Disco. I got "old school" compilations whenever I was allowed a CD purchase. "Hollywood Swingers" was one of those songs that made me yearn for adulthood. This song always accompanied the easy-breezy twenties of my childhood imagination. Maybe it's because of the song's repetition and length or how the thematic contents are about "making it in Hollywood" Maybe it's cause at the time it sounded like what i thought of as a jazz song (a genre I associated with old people), but I inexplicable thought of this song as grown-up.
In my dreams I had a spacious apartment, throw elaborate multi-course dinner parties and looked like Bridget Fonda. Guys like Ethan Hawke came over to discuss philosophy. Vince Vaughn would pick me up for swing dancing. AND THIS SONG WAS ALWAYS PLAYING IN THE BACKGROUND. Many things have changed since then. The idea of discussing Kant/Camus makes me want to barf in my mouth even with a hot guy. I don't even know if places to swing dance exist. Vince Vaughn is a fatty frat boy now. BUT, this Kool & the Gang jam still seems... sophisticated.
Plenty of songs suffer from one form or another of mistaken identity, but few get as badly mangled on the internet as rock and country standard "Drift Away". It has a commonly misidentified title (often thought to be "Give Me the Beat, Boys") and a mis-heard lyric that makes the song seem like a brilliant PR move for Mike Love ("Give me the Beach Boys"). You'll see a lot of sources claiming it as a Doobie Brothers song, but good luck finding one labeled as such that isn't actually the hit version by crossover savant Dobie Gray. The Rolling Stones cover is, bizarrely, frequently attributed to "The Beatles featuring the Rolling Stones", when it's difficult even to pretend that you're hearing a Beatle anywhere on the track.
Sifting through all the confusing misinformation about "Drift Away", you'll often come across a bit of trivia maddeningly tossed off and rarely explored, reading something like, "Written by Mentor Williams and first recorded by John Henry Kurtz..." before chugging right along to the part where Dobie Gray takes the song to number 5. As in, "John Henry who the hell is that guy?" He doesn't have a wikipedia entry, and his presence in the allmusic guide is as insignificant as any of the track's fairly anonymous backup singers. None of his music (allegedly comprising several albums on ABC) is in print or available for sale online. He appears to be a virtual nobody, just some guy who happened to get his hands on a future smash hit and promptly vanished into thin air.
But he had to have been somebody. Or at least known somebody. The list of guys who played on his "Reunion" album reads like a who's who of early '70s session wizards, from Skunk Baxter and Kenny Loggins to lesser known but equally heavy hitters like Country Joe sideman David Bennett Cohen, one-time Steely Dan keyboardist Michael Omartian, and Jim Gordon, famous first for his solid drumming with such acts as Delaney & Bonnie and second for suffering a schizophrenic episode that led to the murder of his mother. Helmed by A&R man Steve Barri (who signed such acts as Three Dog Night, The James Gang and Dusty Springfield) and armed with a cover of Loggins' "Danny's Song" and the newly crafted "Drift Away", Kurtz' effort had every chance to succeed. Instead, it barely rates a footnote in Dobie Gray's bio.
This might lead the educated listener to conclude that the song must sound like a gigantic pile of garbage, which, to be fair, it does not. The pace is more sluggish than on the more familiar variant, while Kurtz does his best with a decent country rock voice, even if his phrasing is a bit mannered. It doesn't help that the only apparent way to hear the song online is via some youtube audio that sounds like it was captured by placing a micro-cassette recorder inside a tank of water next to a turntable speaker. Nevertheless, it's clearly a pretty good try, but it doesn't come close to Gray's classic interpretation.
And, it turns out, John Henry Kurtz didn't really need his music career. A jack of many trades, Kurtz did a lot of acting, landing several roles on Broadway (such as a turn as Burbage in Marlowe), and bit parts on TV shows like The Cosby Mysteries. He carved a niche for himself as a voiceover artist, announcing for The NBC Nightly News, Court TV and countless ads. He was even a force in the Civil War reenactment community, donating a lot of artifacts from his personal collection for Ken Burns' documentary, and is fondly remembered as a Falstaffian character who once accidentally drank a cup of dirty socks. In the end, the fact that he was the first to record "Drift Away" didn't rate a mention in his obit.
One of the dirty little secrets of really, really devout Christianity is that many of those folks have the same fascination with the dark, the freaky, and the macabre as the rest of us degenerates. Sure, none of them are consciously aware of it, and they’ll shy away unless it’s wrapped in the proper moral and spiritual message. Having been told how to put a positive spin on the apparent horror in front of them, though, they can gawk away to their hearts’ content, secure in the knowledge that they are not being seduced away from virtue by Satan, and don’t have to feel guilty because they are thinking the correct thoughts in response.
The Book of Job tells the tale of a bet between Satan and the vengeful Israelite version of God, in which God tortures one of his happiest and most faithful followers to prove that Job will never renounce Him. Quite why a supposedly omnipotent being is so emotionally insecure is never explained. But this story is the starting point for most Biblical explanations of why bad things happen to good people – we don’t fucking know, and we just have to accept that we can never know His ways, and shut up and deal with whatever shit He dumps on our heads, without ever renouncing our faith in Him. (There is also the White People Alternative, which holds that bad things never happen to good people, because good people always follow the correct set of rules and never give Mean Sky Daddy a reason to punish them. As a result, everyone exerts total control over every aspect of their lives, and everything bad is probably your fault. But I digress.) So, desperate for heroes to fulfill this preconceived narrative about dealing with disaster, America gave rise to a small cottage industry of gospel musicians who overcame horrible injuries or physical handicaps to sing the praises of their Lord.
Merrill Womach is a dude who had his entire face burned off in a plane crash in 1961. Helpfully, there is an after-crash photo in the gatefold of his 1974 album Happy Again, to illustrate the full extent of God's test of Womach's faith, and also to freak the fuck out of you. A trained singer, Womach had been working as an undertaker, and started a company which provided music for funeral homes. Womach had his face (mostly) rebuilt through numerous surgeries (his doctor is also pictured on the back cover), and returned to singing several years later. He became an inspirational story on the gospel circuit, and released a steady stream of albums on small labels from the late ‘60s through the early ‘80s.
To hear Womach sing the title track of that album, there are no traces of his accident. He performs with the same obvious training and technique you might hear in the vibrato-heavy croons of ‘50s and ‘60s pop singers (the ones who bore NO RELATION to rock OR roll). In fact, you can almost hear him fall a little behind the beat at times, as he strives to make sure each extended note has had the proper technique applied to it.
The real weirdness comes in SEEING Womach. Though it’s remarkable how far he’s come since that gratuitously graphic crash photo, he has still clearly been the victim of a horrible injury. Yes, thanks to his religious faith, Womach has been able to maintain his optimism even after all that’s happened to him, and I doubt that I would be able to do the same, were it to happen to me. But to watch Womach walking around the burn unit of a hospital (in the clip below), patting everyone on the shoulder, performing a sunnily optimistic song called “Happy Again,” everything about his lyrics and his mannerism suggesting no room for doubt at all about how things will turn out for the best…and then to behold the sudden crashing zoom into Womach’s face about 1:05 in…oh dear goodness. Perhaps I am naught but a jaded cynic, but to me, any devout Christian who can convince themselves that their interest in Womach is pure – without a trace of circus-sideshow rubbernecking – is painfully unaware of what it means to inhabit the mind of a human. You cannot NOT react. Your primitive instincts have programmed you to make split-second perceptions to avoid danger, thanks to millions of years of evolution (ah, there’s the disconnect!). I don’t care how inspiring or admirable or sympathetic you find him – when you first see him, you are still gawking in horror, just like the rest of us reprobates, and thanking God it wasn't you.
When your thought system devotes itself to repressing rather than recognizing the subconscious (in all its spiritually dangerous uncontrollability), it is much more difficult to peer beneath the surface of the media product you’ve assembled, read the subtext, and notice when you are forcing or undercutting your message. Even apart from jarring zooms. All of Merrill’s little fist pumps remind me of a crazy guy I once saw on a busy street corner, holding religious signs, trying to witness for Jesus by dancing around with his eyes shut and his face raised to heaven in what he clearly imagined was an expression of joy, but which was so self-conscious that in practice, he came off like someone you’d kill if he so much as looked at your children. Now Merrill doesn’t look crazy, but wow, is he trying hard to sell you on this one. This is not a man who’ll be admitting anything negative, either to you or to himself, even if the real song in his heart is one called “Crippling Post-Traumatic Depression,” because that might kill the miracle. There’s also the fact that every patient in the burn ward looks better than Womach, and wouldn’t appear to need much reassurance – at least, not once they’ve seen Merrill.
Leave it to Lemmy to find the purest expression of this darkest schadenfreude in the delightfully frank “Them Not Me,” a track from Motorhead’s 1997 album Overnight Sensation. “Did you see the accident, the road is red with blood/Funny how it makes you feel really, really good,” he gurgles to open the song, with the kind of fearless honesty that American religion just can’t seem to muster, and a clear-eyed focus on what is instead of what should be. The verses are all about traffic accidents, and when you consider the sheer volume of automobile-related injuries and fatalities, it does make you wonder if America might be a better place if our economy didn’t rely so heavily on that shit. NOT THAT THE CORPORATE MAINSTREAM MEDIA WILL ALLOW YOU TO READ THESE SUBVERSIVE SENTIMENTS!!!! I expect a well-funded smear campaign to be waged against me if this blog’s readership ever climbs above 500. Anyway, the point is, you will learn more about real life from Lemmy than you will from churches, schools, television, and Bazooka Joe wrappers combined.
Notes on the video clip: It’s from a half-hour documentary on Womach, He Restoreth My Soul, which – as noted on his album cover – is indeed a “color motion picture”! Certainly a strong selling point for anything released in 1975. It was directed by the Rev. Mel White, who would later come out of the closet and become a prominent advocate for gay rights in the evangelical Christian community. White’s son, Mike, would go on to a successful career in Hollywood, writing the screenplays for School of Rock, Nacho Libre, The Good Girl, Chuck and Buck, and – somehow appropriately – Dead Man on Campus.
Louis Prima shares a lot in common with the boys in the famous Rat Pack: talented singer, Italian-American, had a long running Vegas show, drank/smoke a ton, and loved the ladies. However, what separated him from the bunch was the fact that he just doesn't come off as COOL. The Rat Pack have endured as the coolest group of swingin' cats some 50+ years later. Louis Prima endures as....the orangutan from "The Jungle Book"? Definitely not hip, but lovable!
In "Banana Split", Louis describes the big ice cream delight that the soda jerk must conjure for his baby, including precious lines like "stack her up with crazy goo...cause that's the stuff she likes to wade right through." In this jam, Prima joyfully sings to his co-star and wife, Keely Smith (who he snapped up when she was a not-legal teen... Jerry-Lee-Lewis-y much?) in 1959's film "Hey Boy! Hey Girl!" Songwriter Stan Irwin asked Prima for a song title and he shouted off the top of his head, "Banana Split for my Baby!" Growing up in New Orleans, one could easily imagine little Louis lapping up a delicious ice cream and loudly proclaiming its goodness. That's the thing that makes me like Louie better than all those cool cats. He wasn't afraid to make a complete fool of himself. Yet at the same time he was a brilliant singer and horn player. His vocal phrasing never ceases to please. And don't tell me Dean Martin was funny. He may have made jokes while sipping his martini and smoking his cigar, but he wasn't a FUNNY guy. Louis mugged for the camera while saying "Give her two spoons, she'll eat it with both hands" in a way that's sounds completely innocent and completely dirty at the same time. That, my friends, is comedic genius.
When you think of Marilyn Monroe, you think sex icon first, then mistress, then tragedy, THEN actress, and then MAYBE, just MAYBE, you'll remember she recorded some songs other than "Happy Birthday Mr. President." She didn't so much sing as formulate words around her heaving breaths (and breasts). However, "I'm Through with Love" is a great demonstrate of her shocking vulnerability that's so lacking from today's pop tarts. Even though our current media is an over-share-machine, there's no emotionality. If you want, you could see what uh, Lindsay Lohan* drank for breakfast, and what color her vomit is later that night. But what's going on beneath that makeup-caked face? We don't know at all.
In this number, man, we really FEEL what Marilyn is going through. It's a pretty emotional listen. There ain't no autotune to cover up that exquisite pain. She's definitely through with love. And why shouldn't she be? By 1959, Marilyn had already been tossed around by sleazy Hollywood dudes (not to mention the industry itself) and baseball bully Joe DiMaggio. She hadn't hit the Kennedys yet but...sheesh. Rough life! I'm not even going to get into her childhood. A lot of saddy sad break-up songs come across as phony, but this one really smacks you in the gut. Lyrics like "goodbye to spring and all it meant to me" sounds hauntingly real. She was a-boozin' and a pill poppin' up the wazoo at this point. She was past the point of no return. And to think this was in the soundtrack for one of the best COMEDIES of all time, "Some Like it Hot"! So next time you really want to feel the awful feeling of love lost, set aside the bullshit emo, and go to this song. Marilyn's quivering voice will carry you through the heartbreak.
*I am soooo not comparing Lohan to Monroe. She's just the what-a-mess celeb whose pictures are popping up everywhere at this moment in spring 2010.
I’m hard pressed to think of a song from the recording-centric rock era that's as well-known, yet as infrequently heard (in its original hit recording), as David Seville's "Witch Doctor." When was the last time you heard it (I guess it was on the soundtrack of the new Alvin and the Chipmunks, but I won't assume you watched that even if you're a parent)? When was the last time you heard it played on oldies radio? Did you EVER hear it played on oldies radio? Does oldies radio as we once knew it even exist anymore, or is everything now just “best of the ‘60s and ‘70s”? More importantly, why are songs that were recorded during my lifetime getting played on those “oldies” stations? And why won’t those filthy children get off my fucking lawn?
Anyhow, that nonsense refrain is far more recognizable in itself, as opposed to “the chorus of a song called ‘Witch Doctor’ by that Armenian guy who went on to create Alvin and the Chipmunks.” Whenever you hear it, it’s being sung by someone at a party or a barbecue or an awkward family reunion or something. Or, you’re a kid, and one of your parents busts it out completely at random. In all my 35 years of life, the first time I ever heard the actual recording of “Witch Doctor,” complete with the proto-Chipmunks voice manipulation, was last night, when I decided to write a review of it and looked it up on Youtube. And you can say that’s my fault for never having bought a Dr. Demento compilation, and I’ll agree with you, but still. How did that happen? How did a novelty song that was so dependent on a recording-studio gimmick get so completely divorced from its technological origins, and become a song that people sing all by itself, just for the hell of it?
Hell, for that matter, “Witch Doctor” is barely even a song – it’s more a hook, repeated over and over and over and over again, with the perfunctory verses (typically only three lines – David Seville couldn’t even be bothered to come up with two rhyming couplets) serving simply as a quick change-up between the myriad repetitions of that goddamn hook. In other words, here is the structural blueprint for nearly every song Kiss ever recorded. I can't believe they didn't use this as the basis for a Crazy Frog follow-up.
NOTE: Late 20th/early 21st century methods of critical analysis will naturally demand a critique of whether the cultural assumptions underlying “Witch Doctor” contain elements of racism. I’m not going to waste anybody’s time on this; you can just look at the fucking artwork. All you have to do is change the caption to "Barack Obama" and blammo, instant tea party rally.
Of all the no-brainer top-tier most important country artists of all time, George Jones gets the smallest amount of love from non-country fans. Everyone knows Hank Williams, both Jr. and Sr. (I’ll let you guess who gets more respect). Rock fans know Johnny Cash for his brooding “Man in Black” image. All potheads know Willie Nelson. Merle Haggard has a far more memorable name. ‘80s TV fans know Waylon Jennings via The Dukes of Hazzard, and perhaps the somewhat less remembered Buck Owens from his time on Hee Haw. But George Jones? Generic name, no great outside claim to fame, no link to any hip modern subcultures, not known for writing his own material. Meh, no matter, he’s just the greatest pure singer in country history.
When he wasn’t recording the saddest country ballads of all time (Exhibit A: “He Stopped Loving Her Today”) or drunk-driving his riding lawnmower into town to pick up more vodka, Jones lightened the mood of his records (not to mention the alcoholic haze of his life) with a lot of wacky novelty songs. Perhaps the least comprehensible of these is the title track of his 1966 Musicor album I’m a People. “I’m a People” was penned by Dallas Frazier, the songwriter also responsible for the Hollywood Argyles’ comic-book caveman ode “Alley Oop,” the Oak Ridge Boys’ deathless “Elvira,” and, oddly, the sweeping ballad “There Goes My Everything,” recorded by the likes of Engelbert Humperdinck and Fat Elvis.
It’s a challenge just to figure out what the subject of “I’m a People” is, not least because Jones really plays up the country twang in his vocal reading. If you can understand everything he’s saying in the verses without the aid of a lyric sheet, you can probably also understand what Boomhower is saying on King of the Hill. But once you’ve got that figured out, the song still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Basically, Jones spends the verses bitching about how he’s not a monkey, then spends the chorus giving an overlong spelling lesson about how to assemble the word “people,” taking extra time to describe some of the letters in case folks might not recognize them (you need a “big skinny L,” for example).
The chorus being the focal point of every conventionally structured song, it’s hard to imagine “I’m a People” ever becoming anyone’s favorite sing-along. But it gets even weirder when you try to understand just what the verses are on about. Jones starts the song fantasizing about being a monkey, and in the second set of couplets, it isn’t clear whether he’s still imagining his workday as a monkey or whether he’s grinning and humming and taking cash as a human shopkeeper, or whatever profession he’s engaged in. After the first chorus, Jones complains that monkeys don’t have to go downtown and ask for jobs and get turned down. All right, we’ve all been there, but then Jones flies into a sudden and violent fit of self-loathing, turning his rage inward and threatening to smash himself. By the last verse, the narrator has skipped out on what scant responsibilities he’s still entrusted with in real life to go to the zoo, where you’ll find him “diggin’ on you know who.” From this coy hint, we can only assume that Jones is standing outside the monkey cages, likely with a look on his face recalling Private Pyle from Full Metal Jacket.
So to recap the narrator’s mental state: 1) blurred lines between real and fantasy selves; 2) emotionally unstable and prone to violent impulses; 3) unable to contribute to society; 4) obsessively repeats to himself the spelling of one particular word while identifying himself as a “creature”; 5) apparently stalking a monkey at the zoo. And thus we arrive at the true meaning of “I’m a People”: a harrowing portrait of a working-class breakdown into serious mental illness, no doubt precipitated and exacerbated by oppressive economic conditions. Wall Street, take note what you have wrought upon America!
There are certain bands that have a certain stigma attached to them. Say, if you were to be a "big Grateful Dead" fan (known commonly as Deadheads), there's a more than likely chance you are into the "ultimate experience and transcendent nature of the ganja", or some such stoner baloney. Same goes for Phish and Dave Matthews Band. However, those are drug connotations. Other band associations can be attitude-based. I don't know a "They Might Be Giants" album-owner that isn't a total goofball. The Smiths are another band whose superfans fall into a specific emotional category: those who love to whimper. Don't get me wrong, I love The Smiths, but I don't think they're the end-all be-all. The kind of people who take Moz that seriously tend to be a sad lot. I mean, how could you not be a bit dreary hearing that mournful voice all the time? That's why it's so great hearing a Smiths jam taken out of the context of Morrissey.
With his powerhouse vocals, sexy British belter Daniel Merriweather and pop producer extraordinaire Mark Ronson (the man behind Amy Winehouse) take "Stop Me" and add some much needed testosterone. Take the opening lyric: "Stop me, oh oh oh Stop me, Stop me if you think that you've heard this one before...nothings changed, I still love you, oh I still love you, only slightly, only slightly less than I used to my love." Moz sang it like he's COMPLAINING that he's still in love with you and he's just so EMBARRASSED about it. Call the whambulance. Daniel Merriweather comes along and breathes a new meaning into the same lyrics. When Daniel sings the exact same line, he makes it seem like his love for you is something to be proud of. In fact, you bloody well TRY and stop him. He'd probably cut you. Add in that strong motown drum fill plus a booming horn section, and you've got yourself an empowering jam. Yeah, you may have messed up Daniel Merriweather emotionally, but that's not going to turn him into some sniveling cry baby. He may be dying on the inside, but he can MAN UP about his feelings to the world, regardless of his suffering. As the video accurately depicts, if we all went around sobbing, we wouldn't be able to move through the tears on the street because they would be flood-inducing.
I was going to include the video here, but embedding ain't allowed. Here's the youtube link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRG55KnZkqc
song posted below.
American culture is currently based on FEAR. We're all so goddamn anxious to earn that dollar! Find a husband! Bang that chick! Avoid that terrorist attack! Be cool! Dress right! Find Jesus! It's really rather exhausting. Popular music right now functions in the same way. It explodes in your face, barely pausing or giving you a moment to breath. It's all BOOM BOOM POW, TIK TOK or JUST DANCE. Pop music, like the dating world, has basically eliminated the courtship process. It's a "bad romance" (har har) kind of situation where the dude is basically a "womanizer" (Okay! I'll stop with this). Even Nashville got mechanized. If you can't look to country music for heartfelt emotion, something has gone seriously awry. Don't you dare tell me Carrie Swift Chesney is heartfelt.
Anyhow, even though he's not popular anymore, you still got to love Chris Isaak for continuing to tour and make his sweet music. In this hurricane age of autotune, Isaak's purebred vocals cuts through the storm. It's a shame THE KIDS THESE DAYS don't understand that emotion can be conveyed through the sound of a real voice. I bet the youngins' now think that a slow jam by Akon signals tenderness.
2009's "Take My Heart", is everything you never hear in music produced today: Hawaiian guitar, multi-part rich harmonies, and complex chord progressions. This song isn't just about some personal relationship. Chris, along with his baby blues, are pleading with you to accept his old world music warmth. This track was off of his first album in 7 years. He's begging you to buy his brand of delicate macho rockabilly. And I don't care if you are a boy or girl, you can't say no to Chris Isaak. Twin Peaks, that hot Wicked Games video where he rolls around in the sand with the model, and a song in a Kubrick film? AND a voice made of melted butter? Look at the girl in the album cover picture. She's alone at the carnival of life, she's helpless...she's YOU! There is Chris Isaak's disembodied head, frowning. He can't get through to her! Stupidly, this album didn't climb the charts. If Chris Isaak isn't good enough for you, America, to hand your heart over to him.... well you're not worth courtin'!
We are a diverse team of musicologists who have developed an exclusive algorithm we use to determine the one million best songs ever written. We then leverage the extraordinary power of advanced computational technology to bring the top one million to you, listed in precise order, via this web log.
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When I was a young pup, my ideas of adulthood were completely based on my parents, movies and music. Seeing early 90s films like Singles, Swingers, Indecent Proposal, Reality Bites, and Pretty Women with my older teenage sister gave me a good idea of what people did in their twenties: drink/smoke a lot, have business meetings in which business was not discussed, have sex- sometimes for money, also: do nothing (NO wonder our economy is tanking now!!!!) Add to that my mom and I dropping my sister off in the minivan at clubs on Hollywood Blvd ("I'm coming back in two hours for you! You better not go anywhere but this all-age punk club!). Anyhow, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what would go on. Little did I know that punk rock would consist of Blink 182 by the time I hit high school. The punk clubs my sister went to didn't even exist anymore. Not that I liked punk that much anyway. I was more interested in the 70s R&B and Disco. I got "old school" compilations whenever I was allowed a CD purchase. "Hollywood Swingers" was one of those songs that made me yearn for adulthood. This song always accompanied the easy-breezy twenties of my childhood imagination. Maybe it's because of the song's repetition and length or how the thematic contents are about "making it in Hollywood" Maybe it's cause at the time it sounded like what i thought of as a jazz song (a genre I associated with old people), but I inexplicable thought of this song as grown-up.
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