Respect to John Fogarty – when he found out people were mishearing the line “there’s a bad moon on the rise” in "Bad Moon Rising" he would often sing Respect to John Fogarty – when he found out people were mishearing the line “there’s a bad moon on the rise” in "Bad Moon Rising" he would often sing what they thought it was – “there’s a bathroom on the right.” Does anyone pay any attention to modern lyrics? I would have thought no, but the Swifties apparently know every word of every song.
This book covers 1900 to 1975 and omits with a sigh of regret all folk, country, blues and rock, so no Beatles, Dylan, Stones, Hank Williams, none of that. This is a book of what has been called The Great American Songbook, which really only got started in 1925, so we are talking about 50 years of great songs here. That’s a lot of years.
There’s one song out of the thousand-odd here which was performed by the Rolling Stones.
The big five great lyricists are Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein. But there are hundreds of others who threw in one or two timeless classics. All these writers all churned out a whole lot of rubbish as well, naturally, it was their day job – three songs by Thursday afternoon, one comic piece please. A guy named Leo Robin wrote "My Cutey’s Due at Two-to-Two Today", which you would probably pay not to hear, but then he also wrote the devastating "Thanks for the Memory" (of sentimental verse, nothing in my purse, and chuckles when the preacher said ‘For better or for worse’).
And this vast compendium does seem to include quite a lot of the less familiar and frankly dubious titles – did you hear "Bungalow in Qougue", "I Wonder Why She Kept on Saying Si-Si-Si-Senor", "Let’s Take a Walk Around the Block", "My Handy Man Ain’t Handy No More", "When Yuba Plays the Rumba on the Tuba", "When I Take my Sugar to Tea", "Nobody Makes a Pass at Me" or "Shall we Join the Ladies" being revived by Rod Stewart or Michael Buble any time recently ? Nope. If you deleted all the totally forgotten songs from this big book it would be one third the size.
The language of these songs ranges from the elevated literary flourishes of
Now laughing friends deride tears I cannot hide ("Smoke gets in your Eyes")
to wonderful bursts of antique slang
Angels come from everywhere with lots of jack ("There’s no business like Show Business")
to frank innuendoes
The rich get rich and the poor get children ("Ain’t we got Fun")
and the frankly surprisingl
Some get a kick from cocaine ("I Get a Kick out of You", 1934)
Otherwise ordinary lyrics can ignite with one single wonderful line
You go to my head With a smile that makes my temperature rise Like a summer with a thousand Julys
And
When love congeals it soon reveals The faint aroma of performing seals
And they’re resplendent with lines that seem like they ought to have been already written by Dante or Milton or somebody :
Some enchanted evening you may see a stranger across a crowded room
The sigh of midnight trains in empty stations
There wasn’t a thing left to say the night we called it a day
We’re drinking my friend to the end of a brief episode
And there are terrible lines in good songs too! From "Sophisticated Lady" :
Dancing, dining with a man in a restaurant Is that all you really want?
They like throw in the odd tongue-twister too
Spangled gowns upon a bevy Of high browns from down the levee All misfits, puttin’ on the Ritz
Or
I’m bromidic and bright as a moon-happy night pouring light on the dew
("A Wonderful Guy" - any other song that used the word bromidic?)
And they casually throw in some off-hand devastating psychological observations :
There’s someone I’m trying so hard to forget – Don’t you want to forget someone too?
They have earcatching opening lines - from the same song "It's All Right With Me"
It’s the wrong time and the wrong place Though your face is charming it’s the wrong face
They wrote introductions to their songs, which were binned by later singers. Here’s the introduction to a very well-known song – can you spot it :
The sun is shining, the grass is green, the orange and palm trees sway There’s never been such a day in Beverly Hills LA
They had a total mania for cramming as many rhymes into as tiny a space as possible, like this –
Naughty, bawdy Gaudy, sporty Forty-Second Street
Or
Why should a sheik learn how to speak Latin and Greek badly? Give him a neat motto complete – “Say it with feet Gladly!” ("The Varsity Drag")
Or
On the first of May it is moving day. Spring is here so blow your job, throw your job away Now’s the time to trust to your wanderlust In the city’s dust you wait – must you wait? Just you wait. ("Mountain Greenery")
Or
I never want to hear From any cheer- Ful Polyannas Who tell you fate Supplies a mate – It’s all bananas (But Not for Me)
Which brings me to : rhyme as humour. In "Little Girl from Little Rock" :
I was young and determined I was wined and dined and ermined
Or
Summer journeys to Niagara And to other places aggra -vate all our cares. We’ll save our fares. ("Manhattan")
And
The lovely loving and the hateful hates The conversation with the flying plates ("I Wish I Were in Love Again")
And
Take off that gloomy mask of tragedy It’s not your style (now comes the outrageous contorted rhyme) You’ll look so good you’ll be glad you de- Cided to smile ("Put on a Happy Face")
YOU'VE CHANGED
The Broadway musical/Tin Pan Alley hegemony over popular song was demolished by early brutal rock and roll
Long Tall Sally she’s built for speed Got everything that Uncle John need
and the two pronged attack of the Beatles and Bob Dylan made a new Rule Number One : write your own songs. The editors here marvel over Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and Noel Coward – they actually wrote the music too! How extraordinary! These days it's the other way round.
These Great American Songs are almost never serious, almost always lighthearted, wry, self-mocking, rueful, wistful. This is not so surprising, they mainly came from Broadway entertainments or movies. It was the post-rock infusion from serious folk music that introduced a whole new register of possibilities. The handful of serious songs in this book are "Old Man River", "Buddy Can you Spare a Dime", "My Forgotten Man", "Strange Fruit" and "Gloomy Sunday".
OBSESSIONS
The songwriters had a few obsessions. They liked to poke fun at ethnic stereotypes, and this calls forth one of the very few comments the editors allow themselves:
The only genre that seems really alien is the race song of the first decades… luckily none of those we encountered had any merit… Later songs that might make one slightly uncomfortable today – Peggy Lee’s Manana say – are so clearly good-natured, so little mean-spirited, that their merits seem to outweigh one’s mild embarrassment about them.
That said, we still have plenty of comedy South American/Mexico songs here
"I Yi Yi Yi Yi (I Like you Very Much)" "South America Take it Away" "They’ve got an Awful Lot of Coffee in Brazil"
They were also obsessed with Paris
"You Don’t Know Paree" "I Love Paris in the Springtime" "The Last Time I Saw Paris" "April in Paris" "Paris is Not the Same"
To the point where someone wrote a song called
"Another Song About Paris"
And they loved to write about Spring
"Younger than Springtime" "Spring will be a little late this year" "Spring is Here" "Spring can really hang you up the most"
INFANTILISM
There was one tendency in some of these lyrics that struck me as slightly gross, and I could believe would put off a modern listener, and that’s baby talk.
"Embraceable You"
Don’t be a naughty baby, come to papa – do My sweet embraceable you
"You Make Me Feel So Young"
Do I seem as cheerful as a schoolboy playing hooky? Do I seem to gurgle like a baby with a cookie?
You and I are just like a couple of tots Running across a meadow picking up lots of forget-me-nots
"Misty"
Look at me, I’m as helpless as a kitten up a tree
"How Long Has This Been Going On"
As a tot when I trotted in little velvet panties
"Glad to be Unhappy"
Like a straying baby lamb with no mammy and no pappy I’m so unhappy
"Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered"
I’m wild again, beguiled again A simpering, whimpering child again
This is just ugh, please.
SOME RANDOM OBSERVATIONS
There are songs with totally out of date lyrics – "A Fine Romance". There are great songs with totally rubbish lyrics - "Skylark". There are songs with boring nothing lyrics which become completely magical when a voice and an arrangement are added – "The Folks who Live on the Hill".
And : a few songs in here have the wrong lyrics or chunks of them are missing ! "Fings Ain’t What they Used to Be" has a different set than the one on the hit record; "Thanks for the Memory" is almost completely different to the Bob Hope/Shirley Ross version ; "On the Acheson Topeka & Santa Fe" is missing 90%. Well, this is nitpicking in a book of 700 pages. It’s great !
AN ANECDOTE FROM ANOTHER BOOK
Harry Woods was a songwriter, but he had a violent temper.
He once got into a barroom brawl that was so bad somebody called the police. They found Woods sitting astride his adversary clutching him by the throat with his good hand and pounding his head. “Who is that horrible man?” a woman asked. One of Woods’ drinking pals piped up “That’s Harry Woods. He wrote 'Try a Little Tenderness'.”
It’s almost appropriate : a carcrash of a book telling the story of a trainwreck of a group. Oh my goodness me, where do I start ?
Well, how about witIt’s almost appropriate : a carcrash of a book telling the story of a trainwreck of a group. Oh my goodness me, where do I start ?
Well, how about with the weird un-edited-out repetitions :
Page 8 : it was a bizarre amalgam of private Catholic school and military academy Page 9 : it was a bizarre combination of private Catholic school and pseudo-military academy
Page 140 : Cass and Rusty got jobs waiting tables to bring in some much-needed income Page 142 : She and Rusty had taken waitressing jobs to provide some much-needed income
And then there’s the head-scratching sentences like
They twisted, hully-gullied, and ponied along with the music and balanced their ominousness rock band counterparts with sex appeal. (p156)
or
On the surface, it must have seemed a bit surreptitious to John and Michelle and Derek easily let her say what she was thinking (p249)
Huh, what ? And then we have occasional clangers like this
Denny’s hair, though still long, had been professionally quaffed with sideburns that ran at least an inch past his earlobes. (p247)
I thought – quaffed? That’s an old fashioned word meaning to drink something. Wait ! I have it! He means coiffed! It sounds the same !
All right, let’s stop being such a grammar nazi. Let’s concentrate on the prose itself :
He found his sexual release through gangbangs with a few neighborhood trollops. (p18)
In what era could that ever have been an acceptable sentence. And then we have these passages which appear to have strayed over from a Jackie Collins novel :
Michelle would prepare with a light foundation to cover her freckles and eyeliner to highlight her baby blues. She got her hair done regularly at Tamar’s hairdresser, and twice a week, rinsed it with lemon juice to make it look richer and fuller. (p61)
He couldn’t help but admire her fair skin glistening in the azure blue waters of Cinnamon Bay and how the sun shone on her long blonde hair. (p132)
He and Michelle were still up celebrating until Denny crept over the sliding door that led to the balcony and, with a devilish grin, beckoned Michelle to follow him. She knew what was on his mind and followed willingly. (p170)
He sings with the desperate senses of a spurned lover that only he could muster (p190)
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But wait ! Where is Scott Shea getting all this terrific amount of granular detail from? How does he know about Michelle’s lemon rinses and Denny’s earlobes? In most biographies there are lots of notes crammed in at the back detailing all the books & mags referenced and interviews made. Scott mentions briefly that he interviewed 8 people (none of the M&Ps of course). And then there’s two autobiographies (by John and Michelle) and one previous oral history. So the overwhelming detail (“handy Denny converted their wall oven into a hot plate”) must come from those sources, plus the usual contemporary articles.
Frequently Scott gets completely carried away when a famous person is encountered - when Mia Farrow hoves into view we get a few pages of her biography – and when John Phillips gets involved in the Monterey Pop Festival we get 66 pages about it, every single act is described (p243-309). I know it was a Significant Event but this is too much, and I don’t mean “too much, man”.
And yet, I read the whole thing compulsively. It was a couldn’t look away kind of thing. All the sex drugs and blissful harmony (really, you can’t call the M&Ps rock and roll). Ironic indeed, all that harmony proceeding from such an inharmonious collection of unhappy souls.
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Current three favourite M&Ps songs : "Safe in my Garden"
Cops out with the megaphones Telling people stay inside their home Man, can't they see the world's on fire
"Dedicated to the One I Love", (this is not so much a version of a 50s oldie as a complete re-imagining, and so brilliantly done) ; and "Look Through my Window", not much of a hit, why I can’t imagine. But what with all the drugs and personal chaos it’s quite surprising they managed to stay together for four years and put out a series of great singles, six of which are probably all that anyone remembers.
I feel I should also point out to potential readers that there’s a story about Queen Elizabeth II on page 22 which I frankly don’t believe, I think John Phillips made it up, and the famous incest story gets dropped onto the very last two pages – you can hear Scott thinking “ugh, I suppose I have to mention this”. Well, I suppose he did.
Gruesome book about a gruesome group who produced a handful of immortal records.
He can be a little bit cheeky, can Michel. One reason you may be reading his book
is that you’re not that interested in music at all, but you l[image]
He can be a little bit cheeky, can Michel. One reason you may be reading his book
is that you’re not that interested in music at all, but you loved The Crimson Petal and the White or Under the Skin or The Book of New Strange Things and, in the absence of any more novels by Michel Faber, you thought you’d give my non-fiction a try.
I loved all three of his novels and I’m a music fan, so this book was in my hands as soon as I saw it.
WE ARE NOT ADULT ORIENTATED
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What this book isn’t is Michel Faber’s 100 Favourite Records and why you should like them. But I am hoping that he will rapidly produce a follow-up called Michel Faber’s 100 Favourite Records And Why You Should Like Them. What this book is is a whole lot of essays on all kinds of interesting aspects of music such as why people who don’t like music at all are considered to be freaks*, whether there is a hierarchy of greatness in music, the sadness of not being able to sing, the macho ridiculousness of very loud concerts**, music and babies, music and elephants, and so on. Some way more interesting than others. I skipped over the little babies and the elephants.
He has a chapter on how we are supposed to deal with music we love when it is made by men we loathe*** subtitled “On Rolf Harris, R Kelly and Morrissey” and one which trashes vinyl snobbery and one which says autotune is perfectly fine, and so is lipsynching the vocals at live gigs (Aretha never had to leap and cavort like a ballerina whilst hitting every big note). Meaning that the Milli Vanilli scandal was fashioned out of pure naivete. And a melancholy chapter about how the charity shops are silting up with the MOR albums bought in the 60s and 70s, brought in by 50 and 60 year olds when their 80 and 90 year old parents have died.
THOUGH THE WORLD IS MY OYSTER IT’S ONLY A SHELL
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Michel has some pleasantly waspish observations to make about this stuff called music. He is keen for us to understand that it’s mostly used as a mental room spray and is not listened to as a thing in itself:
The sort of engagement with music in which the person focuses on the music for its own sake, rather than “having it on” in the background, during some other activity, accounts for just 2 percent of all listening
And whilst being a fan of avantgarde stuff like Einstürzende Neubauten and even Revolution 9 on the White Album he has a perfectly old fogey-style get-off-my-lawn rantlet about this modern rubbish (modern = the last 20 years) :
In the 21st century, even those records which are deemed to be “catchy” are seldom melodious in the way that songs by Cole Porter or The Beatles or even Nirvana were. Typically, they rely on a perseverating pattern of two or three notes, which the songwriters of yesteryear would’ve regarded as a mere fragment rather than a tune or a riff worthy of the name.
And his out and proud tirade against classical music and all its insufferable superiority is such fun. All those prestige orchestras…are nothing more than tribute bands
Ha haah! That is, just like Nerdvana or Pink Fraud, they try to perfectly reproduce the sounds of their heroes, in their case Beethoven and Mahler and so on.
AIN’T NO SWEET MAN WORTH THE SALT OF MY TEARS
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He has a chapter on music that makes him cry when he really isn’t a crier. There was one part of this chapter that nearly made me cry – he quotes these lines from a sad Sandy Denny song:
And maybe, by the evening, we’ll be laughing Just wait and see All the changes there’ll be By the time it gets dark
And he adds this note :
Readers may be interested to know what was involved in quoting these lyrics for you And he gives the history of which big companies successively owned the copyright to Sandy’s song. In the end, Warner Chappell charged me £1000 to quote from the song. A thousand quid for those three lines? They ain’t Shakespeare you know! I would have told Warner Chappell to shove their thousand quid where the sun don’t shine.
I was wondering which song would be most likely to draw tears from my ducts and I think it would be "The Green Fields of France" by Davy Arthur and the Fureys :
Well, how do you do, Private Willie McBride? Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside? And rest for a while in the warm summer sun I've been walking all day, and I'm nearly done I see by your gravestone you were only nineteen When you joined the great fallen in 1916
… it all gets too much….
WILL I LOOK BACK AND SAY THAT I WISH I HADN'T DONE WHAT I DID?
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This is of course RECOMMENDED, like a few great evenings with a dear friend chattering about everything and anything but mostly about that magical stuff that can cause ecstasy and pain, love and regret, excitations and melancholia and make new worlds appear in a second, and sometimes all of this at once.
Notes
*Vladimir Nabokov: Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds. …the concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in small doses and flay me in larger ones.
**The ultimate in contemporary absurdity is a concert where the performers and the audience are all wearing ear plugs. Such concerts are already happening, partly because capitalism loves to create new problems with expensive solutions.
***For a fuller debate see Monsters : A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer...more
For fans of early country aka old time aka hillbilly music this is just wonderful. If your toe ever tapped to a tune by a 20s string band you need thiFor fans of early country aka old time aka hillbilly music this is just wonderful. If your toe ever tapped to a tune by a 20s string band you need this book! It’s a dream come true. The main text is only 270 pages long but you have to read it real slooooowwwww and you have to listen to each record as it comes up. They’re all on youtube if you were wondering. There is a two or three page essay about each of these 78 78s (see what he did there…) and each is packed diamond-hard with information about these obscure acts – we all know Fiddlin’ John Carson and Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family and the Bentley Boys but here we find Three Tobacco Tags, Ridgel’s Fountain Citians, A A Gray and Seven Foot Dilly and Happy Bud Harrison.
He covers the waterfront, meaning the wide span of white Southern music recorded between 1923 and 1932 mostly with a sprinkling going up to 1940. So as well as the usual bust-downs, turkey trots, rags and stomps we have topical songs (Woman’s Suffrage, You Can’t Make a Monkey out of Me), murder ballads based on real cases (The Death of Floyd Collins, The Bluefield Murder), cowboy ballads (When the Work’s all Done This Fall), sacred songs (Where We’ll Never Grow Old, Just Over the River), parlour songs from the previous century (Sweet Bunch of Daisies), comedy turns (I’m a Stern Old Bachelor*, When the Roses Bloom for the Bootlegger, Who Broke the Lock on the Hen-House Door?, Prosperity is Just Around Which Corner?), comedy sketches (A Corn Licker Still in Georgia Parts 1 and 2), satires on local conditions (Eleven Cents Cotton Forty Cent Meat Parts 1 and 2, Down on Penny’s Farm) – so it's not all rocketing fast fiddle and guitar music.
There are also many delightful pix.
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The DeZurik Sisters. Have to hear them to believe them. They yodelled, but that is putting it mildly.
*I change my socks three times a year with no one to complain ...more
And you may find yourself reading a really pretentious book about Talking Heads And you may ask yourself- well...How did I get here? And you may ask youAnd you may find yourself reading a really pretentious book about Talking Heads And you may ask yourself- well...How did I get here? And you may ask yourself Where is that good book about Talking Heads that I wanted to read? And you may tell yourself This is isn’t it!
And you may ask yourself What is all this nonsense? And you may ask yourself Who thought this was worth publishing? And you may ask yourself Am I right?...Am I wrong? And you may tell yourself I’m right!
And you may hear the voice of Jonathan Lethem saying MY GOD!...WHAT HAVE I DONE?...more
Tom Breihan is a great writer about pop music, garrulous, fact-filled, excitable and never dull. I never heard of him until he started writing a columTom Breihan is a great writer about pop music, garrulous, fact-filled, excitable and never dull. I never heard of him until he started writing a column in Stereogum about every USA number one record since the Hot 100 was initiated in by Billboard magazine in August 1958. At that point they decided to compile the three different charts into one and call it THE hot 100. I don’t know why it took them so long to think of such an obvious idea.
So Tom Breihan’s blog covers ever single number one and this book selects 20 out of the 1160 (as of December 2023) to put in the spotlight. Why these ones?
These aren’t the best Hot 100 hits in history…instead, these are the songs that marked new movements in pop music evolution – the ones that immediately made the previous weeks’ hits sound like relics.
So we’re talking about major significance here.
Here’s a quick summary.
1.The Twist by Chubby Checker (1960) . Because the Billboard Hot 100 didn’t begin in 1955 with Rock Around the Clock – obviously it should have – and instead the first Number One was Poor Little Fool by Ricky Nelson, a song which does not ring down through the ages, this book begins rather lamely with Chubby Checker and his dance craze. Well, it was a GIANT dance craze, that can’t be disputed. But to say the truth, I was not convinced of the importance of twisting twisting till you tear the house down.
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2. Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow by the Shirelles (1960). How the awesome Brill Building songwriters forged a musical language involving mostly girl groups and black singers, which lasted until
3. I Want to Hold Your Hand by the Beatles (1963). Tom misses the pop explosion that was Elvis (I really think he should have chucked out Chubby and drafted in Elvis) so this is the first undeniable youthquake he writes about. Pity the poor music writer who has to find some small shred of originality in his contemplation of this phenomenon. It’s not easy.
4. Where Did Our Love Go by the Supremes (1964): how Motown, after a stuttering start, turned into a hit machine and The Sound of Young America ™
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5. Mr Tambourine Man by The Byrds (1965): how something called “folk music” was grafted on to pop music and vastly expanded the lyrical and musical palette. Well Tom Dooley was folk but Mr Tambourine Man wasn’t, even though the f word was endlessly used, but it was something utterly different to what went before. Its influence could be baleful – without Dylan there wouldn’t have been one of the worst songs ever to get to number one : Eve of Destruction (“My blood’s so mad, feels like coagulatin’/And I’m sittin’ here just contemplatin’). You got to take the rough with the smooth.
6. Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys (1966): a bit of a dodgy chapter I think – this record was so extreme it didn’t change the world of pop music, people just gaped and moved on. Also, Tom says that after GV Brian Wilson “went into seclusion and was eventually institutionalized” which I think is not accurate at all.
7. Rock Your Baby by George McCrae (1974): the rise and sudden fall of disco.
8. Dreams by Fleetwood Mac (1977) : how the album as outsize event began, the album being Rumours.
9. Don’t You Want Me by the Human League (1981) : the rise of MTV. Okay, I never bothered with MTV but I see how significant it was.
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10. Billie Jean by Michael Jackson (1983): obviously Beatles and Jacko must be in this book. Whilst celebrating the brilliance of the music, writers now have to deal with the unhappy legacy, it can’t be avoided.
11. When Doves Cry by Prince (1984): how Prince explained to the industry what synergy was – for a while in 1984 he had the number one single, the number one album and the number one movie at the same time. Nobody else ever did this before or since.
12.You Give Love a Bad Name by Bon Jovi (1986): how hard rock became pop and how many genres of rock never sold singles at all, such as grunge.
13. Vision of Love by Mariah Carey (1990) : how Mariah rewrote the way pop divas could and should sing, and introduced the wonderful world of melisma to our eardrums, for good or for evil. And how Mariah sold and sold and sold to the extent where she is the only artist remotely capable of overtaking the Beatles’ total of 20 American Number Ones – she has 19. Baby, one more time and you’ll be equal. Mind you, it took the Beatles 6 years to do it, and it took Mariah 29 years to get hers, but let’s not be churlish.
14. Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice (1990) : the rise of rap music and how it was seen as a novelty at first, like this record, which was, of course, recorded by a white guy, reminding me that the first jazz band to be recorded, in 1917, was white – The Original Dixieland Jass Band; Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. (Very pedantic note : when they were recorded the spelling of the name of the music was jass, later they changed their band name. )
15. Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down by Puff Daddy (1997): how rap moved into the centre of popular music, after being on the fringes or being paraded as a novelty for ten years.
16. Baby One More Time by Britney Spears (1998) : the rise and rise and rise of Max Martin, the Swedish songwriter & producer who’s written nearly as many number ones as Lennon & McCartney and how many citizens have ever heard of the guy. This is a strange and almost sinister story. Are we being secretly controlled by the Illuminati?
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17.Buy U a Drank by T-Pain (2007) : Autotune
18. Crank That by Soulja Boy Tell’em (2007): How the internet changed everything and now you can get hits made by some kid in his bedroom.
19. Black Beatles by Rae Sremmurd (2016) : this was the soundtrack of the mannequin Challenge which was a social media thing. Way over my head.
20 Dynamite by BTS (2020) : the rise of K-Pop
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*
I see at least one other reviewer has said that Tom’s blog is way more interesting, amusing and friendly than this book and I think it’s true, these essays are so crammed with facts and trajectories and subcultures and technologies and whatall. But it’s still good! On the blog Tom has just started writing up the number ones of 2012 so by my calculations it will be… er… wait…. Hmmm… a real long time before he catches up with the present, because when he gets to the present it will be way in the past and there will be more future that’s then past. Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future and time future contained in time past. This goes without saying....more
This is the fifth major history of popular music in ten years that has fallen into my clutches. Here’s how they rolled :
Yeah Yeah Yeah by Bob Stanley This is the fifth major history of popular music in ten years that has fallen into my clutches. Here’s how they rolled :
Yeah Yeah Yeah by Bob Stanley (2013), my favourite, a brilliant funny spot-on history that goes from 1950 to 2000
Electric Shock! By Peter Doggett (2015), my least favourite. This goes further back, to 1890, and finishes around 2000; he spends a great many pages on the technical stuff that made the music we love possible and shaped the way it got to us, you know, gramophones and radio and napster, all very important but sort of dull
A History of Rock and Roll in 500 Songs by Andrew Hickey (2019 onwards), a vast project taking 50 songs per volume (two published but a whole lot more available on AH’s podcast). The whole thing will go from 1938 (arbitrary choice of “first rock & roll record”) to 2000. This project focuses on the performers and their twisted tangles detailed histories; ultra-nerdy but kind of essential.
Let’s Do It by Bob Stanley (2022) which is Bob’s less hilarious but still great prequel to the first book, covering the period 1900 to 1960 approx.
These are all VERY LARGE books, none under 450 unsmall pages. So now we have Kelefa Sanneh’s contribution. He takes in the period 1950 to 2020 and chops it into the history of seven genres. You can see immediately that punk is given 60 pages and R&B is given 70 pages, and punk is a noisy tiny sect that critics love but nobody buys, and R&B is practically half of all popular music, which everybody loves because you just can’t escape it; so this book it written from the heart, and no bad thing. It turns out Kelefa Sanneh was himself a punk in his early years. Surprise.
When you write about genres and their audiences it can get a bit like trying to describe the movements of shoals of fish – why do they suddenly turn this way and that way, why do they split and merge. There’s an awful lot of “rock and roll became the mainstream, but some of it didn’t, R&B became pop music, there was no difference, but actually, there was a difference, but it was hard to describe”.
You can immediately tell when someone is rapping, but you can’t always tell when someone is singing R&B, as opposed to singing pop.
It often seemed like KS’s entire book is about things that are hard to describe. Sorry to say that there seemed to be a fair bit of repetition and an oppressive feeling that this book was, well, too long because KS felt he needed to talk about Green Day, and Black Sheep, and Barbara Mandrell, and Uncle Tupelo, Jimmy Buffett, Skrewdriver, Cannibal Corpse and so forth, all the time making sweeping inclusive conversational sometimes convincing and sometimes not generalisations.
By the way I might say that if Cannibal Corpse and James Taylor can both be described as types of rock music, we may conclude the word is no longer of much use.
I will end with two interesting talking points.
DID THEY JUMP OR WERE THEY PUSHED?
Rock And roll was R&B only faster and cruder. Who were the great originals? Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Bo Diddley, Little Richard – all black – plus Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis. But very quickly, almost overnight, black musicians abandoned rock & roll. From the 1960s onward how many black rock bands were there? None. Kelefa says :
I don’t think it is necessary to lament this evolution. Genres change, and the existence of predominantly black genres in America, a majority-white country, basically ensured, as a mathematical certainty, that there would also be predominantly white genres. Why shouldn’t rock & roll have become one of them?
A LESSON IN LOGIC : NIPPLEGATE
The author provides a splendid example of what is meant by the phrase “correlation is not causation” in logic.
Before Nipplegate, every Janet Jackson album since Control had spun off at least two top ten singles; after Nipplegate, she never had another big hit.
He says Nipplegate ended JJ’s career as a hitmaker. But surely, it was ended because her next albums just weren’t as good. You’re not telling me that a flash of flesh makes all Americans vow never to buy another record by the fleshflasher. Which by the way she didn’t flash herself, it was Justin Timberlake that done it.
A most remarkable coincidence happened - I bought this little book second hand on Amazon like I always do. Naturally when you do that you have no ideaA most remarkable coincidence happened - I bought this little book second hand on Amazon like I always do. Naturally when you do that you have no idea where the book will come from and you don't even notice most of the time - could be anywhere in the country. Imagine my surprise when I noticed this book came from Percival Road, Sherwood - just around the corner from my house. The seller could have walked down their street and put it in my letterbox in three minutes. Strange.
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As for Abba I wanted to read a strong defense of a popular phenomenon I actively dislike (being an elitist) - this quote from a 1977 critic sums them up :
they play common-denominator music watered-down and sweetened until it's bland enough to offend nobody. Then they take this bland mixture and chop it into neat three minute segments, tart it up to disguise the lack of substance, polish it until it shines... and sell it by the million to people who'll never look below the glittering surface.
The response to such withering might be "and what's wrong with that? We love the tarting up, the polish, the shiny silly surfaces and the manically sad or manically happy singalong choruses written in meaning-free non-specific English-as-second-language". And Elisabeth Vincentelli was content to skate over the surface most of the time. I suppose that was only appropriate.
All the reviews get this exactly right – great musician writes cautious memoir. I can’t complain too much, I suppose. It surely would have been excrucAll the reviews get this exactly right – great musician writes cautious memoir. I can’t complain too much, I suppose. It surely would have been excruciating, for example, to explain why his marriage to Linda went wrong (she has been much more forthright in her various public comments, and none of it is complimentary). But if you’re going to brush these emotional dramas aside, your memoir will be a list of guitars I bought, band member changes, albums I recorded, tours I toured, hotels I hated and cool musicians I met. RT is one of my all time favourites and I liked his friendly voice, it was all very interesting, up to page 195 then it fell to bits very badly.
RT became fascinated by Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam, and joined a small Sufi sect, and dragged along his wife :
Linda followed me into Islam a few months later, and I hoped it was because her heart called her to it, and not out of fear of losing me
But Richard, didn’t you ask her, then or later? Don’t you now know the answer to that?
Scrupulously avoiding hindsight is one thing but skating over the surface of difficult situations is another. Joining an ascetic sect is a massive lifestyle change – he says that for a year he gave up music and became a carpet dealer because of Islam – and from interviews Linda has done over the years it seems it was a terribly difficult thing for her. We get no insight into the life of a serious follower of Sufi living in a Sufi commune, and the memoir grinds to a sudden very ramshackle halt in 1976 (not 1975).
The following gives you a good idea of the style of this memoir:
Seth Weinberger was the only guy I ever saw challenge Joe Butler for chick magnet statThe following gives you a good idea of the style of this memoir:
Seth Weinberger was the only guy I ever saw challenge Joe Butler for chick magnet status. It was fun to watch Seth and Joe go into competition mode whenever a hottie or two would come on the scene.
And a few pages later
Ruth was tall and not skinny but also not overweight
So we will not be reading Hotter than a Match Head for its literary qualities.
A DEFINITION OF THE WORD ARBITRARY
There is a 480 page biography of Tiny Tim and an 864 page memoir by Captain Beefheart’s drummer but Hotter than a Match Head is the only book about the unsung Lovin’ Spoonful, as far as I know. It’s an as-told-to account by the bass player, and about 100 of these 300 pages is all about Steve Boone, not the Lovin’ Spoonful. In a short space of time, 1965-8, they made a lot of essential records because they had John Sebastian writing the songs, and he was great. He should have written this book, but Steve Boone did. Music memoirs and biographies are so random, and they all have to be approached with extreme caution because so many of them are terrible - people with dented brains trying to extract grains of coherence from musicians in even worse shape than they are. The lifestyle isn’t conducive to scholarly clarity. We have to take what we can get, but we don’t have to like it.
SUMMER IN THE CITY
The story of this song demonstrates the haphazard nature of song royalties. It’s one of the all time great singles, everybody knows it. According to Steve Boone, it began life as “It’s a Different World”, a bossa nova tune written by Mark Sebastian, John’s 14 year old brother. Brother John took the best bits of its lyric and melody and fused them with a variation on a riff he’d heard a session pianist named Artie Schroek play. Then he wrote more lyrics. They rehearsed it and they knew it needed something else, a middle eight or a bridge, something. Steve Boone says :
I had this thing I’d been noodling with at the piano, this kind of jazzy figure that had a weird time signature and sounded a little bit like George Gershwin…. As we were deciding how to complete the song John said “Hey, what about Steven’s piano thing?”
And boom, this decision to incorporate the little piano phrase in the pause before the song bursts back into life (you remember - just after the sound effects of drilling and car horns) put thousands of dollars into Steve’s pocket over the years, because he was given a composer credit along with the Sebastian brothers. Note that nobody thought to credit Artie Schroek.
Going on 50 years since its release, I am grateful to report that I continue to receive a steady income from my one-third royalty on “Summer in the City”.
Compare that with, let’s say, George Martin’s brilliant string arrangement on "Eleanor Rigby", or his baroque piano break on "In My Life" – did he get a composer credit? Not on your life. He got an arranger’s fee.
LOVE WILL TEAR US APART BUT DRUGS WILL BORE US TO DEATH
After the Spoonful ends in 1969 Steve Boone continues living and we get 100 pages of his extremely tedious adventures as a drug smuggler and proud owner of a yacht and proud owner of several cars. Spoonful fans can safely skip all that. Actually Spoonful fans can probably skip this whole book. This band deserves something better.
A splendid survey of the whole concept of the tribute album, with this particular Leonard Cohen one at the centre of the investigation. It was one of A splendid survey of the whole concept of the tribute album, with this particular Leonard Cohen one at the centre of the investigation. It was one of only two tribute albums that actually changed the life of the tributee**. The story can be summarized – Cohen spends five years (!he said) writing Hallelujah and releases it on Various Positions (1984). He was at a low point in his career and the album wasn’t even released in the USA until some years later. Hallelujah is universally ignored. In 1991 editors of a French music magazine decided to put together this tribute album. John Cale agreed to do a track and the one he picked was Hallelujah. But the public was still untroubled. Then Jeff Buckley heard I’m Your Fan and released his stunning version on Grace in 1994. At that point everyone heard it and before long Hallelujah had become the big-song cliché on every tv X Factor/ American Idol show, leading to a ridiculous situation in 2008 when Alexandra Burke won the (British) X Factor & released Hallelujah as her first single which went to number one and in protest against Simon Cowell & his evil empire, anti-fans organized a mass-buying of Jeff Buckley’s version, which ended up as No 2 behind Ms Burke’s.
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There are tribute albums which are labours of love and there are corporately organized affairs too. And – rather shockingly – there are tribute albums organized by the artist themselves! I didn’t know that!
Van Morrison was an early adopter, personally selecting the artists on 1994’s No Prima Donna: The Songs of Van Morrison.
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These 33 1/3 books are soooo cute but they can bite – some are plain awful. But this one is a very good one, if you’re interested in this esoteric subject.
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TEN FAVOURITE COVERS
Baby Blue : Kayla Williams (Beach Boys) We Can’t Stop : Post Modern Jukebox (Miley Cyrus) I Saw The Light : The The (Hank Williams) The Piano Has Been Drinking : Dan Hicks (Tom Waits) Candy Says : Anthony And The Johnsons (Velvet Underground) Don’t Worry Baby : Foxes And Fossils (Beach Boys) Abba Zaba : Voices Of Africa (Beefheart) Abandoned Love : Everly Brothers (Bob Dylan) I’ve Forgotten More than You'll Ever Know : Bob Dylan (Sonny James) Long Tall Sally : Beatles (Little Richard)
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**the other one being Common Thread : Songs of the Eagles, which led to the Eagles reforming....more
Done! I'm almost as impressed with myself for reading this enormous volume of 530 large pages as I am with Andrew Hickey's massive obsessiveness and sDone! I'm almost as impressed with myself for reading this enormous volume of 530 large pages as I am with Andrew Hickey's massive obsessiveness and steely determination. He listened to every single single released before 1959 A side and B side, read every dubious autobiography by every 50s musician and every previous book on pop music, crosschecked every statement and found most of them to be egregious lies, and singlehandedly attempted to get all the facts straight and all the unsung originals dragged out of the darkness and handed the correct amount of praise and the great villains appropriately booed offstage. It's exhausting, it's like the rock & roll version of Peter Marshall's History of the English Reformation.
Recommended.
Now onto Volume 2.
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Original review :
1. This is a case where I have to give out FIVE FAT SPARKLING STARS before I’ve finished the book because it will take me forever to read it (530 black-hole dense information-soaked pages, like a very chatty encyclopedia) but it’s obvious this is a great book on one of my favourite subjects and I just can’t wait till I finish it to tell all you fellow pop obsessives to get this now!
2. This book gave me an OMG moment akin to when the astronomers figured out that those little whiteish smudges weren’t distant stars at all but galaxies. Galaxies!!!! Galaxies like grains of sand.
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Because when I got this I knew from the title that it was volume one so I kind of vaguely figured 250 songs in the first volume, the rest in volume two, which is out already I think, but THEN, I looked at the back cover and it said “Volume one looks at fifty songs that made up the origins of rock and roll” – er, FIFTY? Yeah, when I read the introduction it became clear – there will be TEN volumes like this, TEN 500 page whoppers, this will take at least another TEN years for Andrew Hickey to finish…. ULP!! This is stirringly ambitious. (Compare 1001 Songs You Must Hear Before You Die – 950 pages – or Dave Marsh’s The Heart of Rock and Soul : The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made – 720 pages – both great books by the way - and you can see that Andrew Hickey’s project is on a whole other scale. It will be 5000 pages plus long.
3. The whole thing is one of those podcast-into-book enterprises we are fairly familiar with, and yes, each chapter does read like a transcript, but Andrew is a very affable enthusiastic companion bubbling along like a fresh spring of facts, factlets and facticles that, given the murk in which the music biz is constantly enmired, like Mordor, are always full of curious turns and gambols and perversities, all presented with elan and authority, and never dull.
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4. Andrew is very clear about the misogynistic nature of the biz and more distressingly of many individuals we will meet along the way :
I am going to have to deal with a lot of abusers, sex criminals, and even a few murderers. You simply can’t tell the history of rock and roll without talking about Ike Turner, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Phil Spector, Jimmy Page… I could go on. But suffice to say that I think the assumption one should make when talking about rock music is that any man discussed in it is a monster unless proved otherwise… but in order for this to be a history of rock music and not a prurient history of misogynistic crime I’m probably not going to mention every awful thing these people do.
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5. The five hundred songs cover late-1930s up to 1999 and stop there because Andrew believes, and I’ve heard this many times before, and I think it’s true, that “rock and roll as a cultural forcer is, it is safe to say, dead”. What that means is material for a whole interesting 30 page essay with footnotes; but what it means here is that Andrew can assess the whole rock era from start to finish because it’s finished.
What a project! I’ll be reading this and succeeding volumes for years (I hope). I first met Andrew on the page as the author of three books on the Beach Boys’ discography. Those were very good but I didn’t figure this kid as rock’s Edward Gibbon. Rave on, Andrew.
Here we have a paradox : this is obviously a 5 star book, but I’m not sure who is going to love it. I thought I would be Bob Stanley’s perfect reader,Here we have a paradox : this is obviously a 5 star book, but I’m not sure who is going to love it. I thought I would be Bob Stanley’s perfect reader, as I was for his brilliant book Yeah Yeah Yeah. But it turned out to be more complicated.
Well, I really am the perfect reader for this huge 600-large-pages beast, I don’t know anyone more obsessed with old music than me and this book is all about old music. What is old music? Before Elvis. But here’s the thing. To vast numbers of people now, old music is anything from the last century. In my mind Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby is old music but for increasing numbers of people the Beatles, Stones, Jimi Hendrix, rock music as a whole, that’s old music.
Recently Rolling Stone Magazine updated its 500 Best Albums list, it does so every ten years or so. This one looked very different to the previous one. I stumbled over the musings of a guy on youtube who does vids under the name Classic Album Reviews. He said that for the 300 people who were polled for this new list, it seems that the music he loves (classic rock)
no longer resonates in the contemporary vernacular. We have to accept that classic rock no longer beavers away in the collective unconscious of those who have been brought up on more urban music, shall we say. I used to think that the music I was listening to was timeless. It’s quite a bitter pill to swallow to accept that maybe I’m wrong, that perhaps one day this music will cease to have any cultural relevance to a new generation of music listeners. And I’d be lying if I said that doesn’t sadden me deeply.
Same sentiments would have been expressed, more bitterly, more angrily, when obnoxious nasty screaming vulgar cretinously simpleminded rock and roll burst forth in the mid 50s – here’s Frank Sinatra himself on the subject:
My only deep sorrow is the unrelenting insistence of recording and motion picture companies upon purveying the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear—naturally I refer to the bulk of rock ‘n’ roll.
And this is very understandable, the violent blare of Little Richard sounded ghastly to a generation marinated in the exquisite wordplay of the great American songbook. Roll over Beethoven, and roll over Cole Porter too. And now roll over Paul McCartney and tell Bob Dylan the news. And soon Michael Jackson can roll over too.
Bob Stanley’s previous book Yeah Yeah Yeah (the only thing I don’t like about it was the title) told the story of pop music from 1950 to around 2000 and all its readers were going to have a pretty good memory of most of what he was talking about. This was the history of the soundtrack to our lives. But Let’s Do It is the soundtrack to our great-grandparents’ and our grandparents’ lives.
You might optimistically think that pop before rock and roll would be all Great American Songbook plus jazz and blues. But there was a lot more. There was so much dreck! Irving Berlin wrote White Christmas, Cheek to Cheek, Let’s Face the Music and Dance and Steppin’ Out with my Baby but he also wrote Run Home and Tell Your Mother, Pick Pick Pick on the Mandolin Antonio, Oh How that German Could Love and Look Out for that Bolsheviki Man. Which have mercifully been forgotten.
So much of the music Bob Stanley lovingly details here is gone, baby, gone like snow on the water. We do have one hundred years of recorded music now, and this is a very great thing, but not too many people are gonna be asking Spotify to play Rudy Vallee, the Boswell Sisters, Sophie Tucker, Ma Rainey, Whispering Jack Smith, Spade Cooley, Jeanette McDonald, Ivor Novello, Noel Coward, Dick Haymes, Jo Stafford or Fats Waller. Maybe they should, but I don't think they will.
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A good example of what I mean is the still vaguely famous (I think) Bing Crosby. He was the biggest star from the 30s to the 50s, hundreds of hits, millions of records sold. Now he means nearly nothing. We know White Christmas. What else? Well, didn’t he do a weird duet with David Bowie? Oh yes – The Little Drummer Boy, pa ruppa pum pum. His name used to be routinely used to indicate the opposite of that which was cool, the opposite of rock. Now he isn’t even an insult, as distant as a 14th century pope.
I found 75% of this book really fascinating. There are some problems. One problem is that jazz pretty much took over pop music for decades and jazz is a whole gigantic subject other writers can do better than Bob. But he wrangles his unruly herd of genres very well. Another little problem was that because he was already very familiar with pop since Elvis, his previous book is so much funnier and full of delicious sharp digs. This one, not so much, he’s much more respectful, because he didn’t grow up with it. And he tries so hard to appreciate the stuff he clearly doesn't like.
In a book this size, there are plenty of eye-goggling items I discovered. Here’s my favourite.
THE MARITAL HISTORY OF BOB WILLS, THE KING OF WESTERN SWING
At the age of 30 this very successful bandleader seems to have gone a little crazy. He divorced his first wife after nine years, then married number 2 in 1936. He divorced her later that same year. In 1938 he married number 3, and later that same year he divorced her. But even later that same year he remarried her! But then the next year he divorced her for the second time. He married wife number 4 that same year, 1939 and later that busy year divorced her. Finally in 1942 he married wife number 5 and, completely exhausted, gave up divorcing and marrying and had 4 children instead.
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PLAYLIST - SOME FAVOURITES FROM PREHISTORY
1925 : Poor Little Rich Girl - Noel Coward 1926 : White House Blues – Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers 1927 : The Black Bottom – Johnny Hamp and his Kentucky Serenaders 1928 : There Ain’t No Man worth the Salt of my Tears – Paul Whiteman Orchestra 1929 : Tuck Away my Lonesome Blues – Jimmie Rodgers 1930 : Church I’m Fully Saved Today – Blind Willie Johnson 1931 : Flambee Montalbanaise – Gus Viseur 1932 : The Clouds will Soon Roll By – Ambrose and his Orchestra 1933: These Foolish Things – Leslie (Hutch) Hutchinson 1934 : Goodbye Old Paint – Jess Morris 1935 : Love is the Sweetest Thing – Al Bowlly 1936 : Let Yourself Go – Ginger Rogers 1937 : Rockin’ Chair – Paul Robeson 1938 : Sleep my Baby Sleep – Judy Garland 1939 : My Prayer – The Ink Spots 1940 : Along the Navajo Trail – Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters 1941 : Gloomy Sunday – Billie Holiday 1942 : It Started All Over Again – Jo Stafford and the Pied Pipers 1943 : Boscastle Breakdown : Tintagel & Boscastle Players 1944 : Angelina/Zooma Zooma – Louis Prima 1945 : Tell Me Why you Like Roosevelt – Otis Jackson 1946 : La Mer – Charles Trenet 1947 : Wealth Won’t Save your Soul – Hank Williams 1948 : Rock the Joint Boogie – Big Joe Turner 1949 : Riders in the Sky – Vaughan Monroe 1950 : The Fat Man – Fats Domino 1951 : There Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold my Body Down – Brother Claude Ely 1952 : Vaya Con Dios – Les Paul and Mary Ford 1953 : Crying in the Chapel – Sonny Till and the Orioles 1954 : Sh-Boom (Life Could be a Dream) – The Chords 1955 : Pledging my Love – Johnny Ace
Based on a rather impertinent review of the first edition of this magnum opus, the author contacted me and voila, Pardon me for bragging loudly
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Based on a rather impertinent review of the first edition of this magnum opus, the author contacted me and voila, the result is as you can see....
So this is the largest, most expanded, most extravagant comprehensive edition of the awe inspiring John Fahey Handbook and replaces all previous editions, reviews of which are here
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