She Loves You, the Beatles (1963)

Ringo Starr drum roll, please. The time is upon us. Tomorrow, February 9, 2014, it will be 50 years to the day since John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr took possession of the molecules previously known as Wendy Schweiger and rearranged them into a Wendy Schweiger whose veins suddenly coursed with more endorphins than she had experienced in all of the preceding years. 

I wasn't planning on it, being the morose sort, but I was powerless against it. Just be in the presence of a song like She Loves You, the third of five songs the Beatles sang on their first Ed Sullivan Show appearance - and tell me how it is possible to maintain the status quo after that.

This is a song that, after all this time, and with all of the sophistication that later developed in their repertoire, still represents the best of what the Beatles had to offer humanity. It started for me with their singing - a force of nature that shook me to my core. In those early days, the boys could sing in perfect unison, and then shift to vocals laden with counterpoint, where you can, say, pick out Paul's voice over John's though they are very interdependent and unison-like. It was - and is - like an elixir.

As regards Ed Sullivan, the anticipation had been building for months. I lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, where it happened that another girl in town, Marsha Albert, begged Carroll James, a DJ at WWDC, to get a hold of I Want to Hold Your Hand, after she saw a segment about them on CBS News. Somehow James managed to snag a copy of it from the UK before Capitol Records released it in the U.S., and the song took off like wildfire, putting Capitol in a bit of a pickle as they'd been dragging their feet on the domestic release. Although they'd set a date, it was a month away and they were royally hacked off at being scooped.

Between that and the news that the exotic Liverpudlian lads were coming to America in February, I was going a bit bonkers with excitement. To this day I'm not quite sure precisely what happened to cause such a furor in advance; whatever it was, though, I lapped it up like a person dying of thirst. It was a life force - the salvation of music that underpins my life to this day. 

Truly, what do you say about a song that you first heard when you were 11, and 50 years later, it makes you feel exactly the same as you felt then? That's She Loves You. Everything about it explodes with greatness - the vocals, the drumming, the guitars, the lyrics, the yeah-yeah-yeahs, the woos. They are so locked into each other, so tight as a band - they were just kids but beyond their years by the time they hit U.S. soil. And we paid them for their efforts in total adoration. When you listen to the performance on the show, the audience hysterics were at their peak for this song. Absolute pandemonium.

Yes, there were hormones involved. But 50 years later, with considerably fewer hormones in play, nothing has changed. NOTHING.

Anyone Who Had a Heart - RIP Hal David

Knowing I love you so 
Anyone who had a heart 
Would take me in his arms 
And love me too

Every generation should have its celebrated songwriting teams - artists who churn out hit after hit that become part of the soundtrack of our lives. There's something comforting about knowing they're out there, working to reflect back to us our daily joys and sorrows, keeping us wondering what they're going to do next.

The Baby Boomer generation was lucky to have two prolific teams who put their distinctive stamp on our times - John Lennon and Paul McCartney, of course, and Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Bacharach and David were the classic style of team - one wrote the lyrics, the other composed the song. As lyricist, Hal David, who died yesterday at 91, had a knack for putting words together that captured the feelings we all had.

They wrote so many songs it would be impossible to pick my favorite. Their songs were everywhere when I was growing up, and I associate different ones with different things. But where lyrics alone are concerned, I did zero in on one when I heard the news of David's death, and that is Anyone Who Had a Heart from 1963. It makes me cry every time I hear it, like right now, and why? Because it just nails heartbreak. It's the simplest composition, but the words he selected were the perfect ones. There were no better ones.

Bacharach-David songs never seemed formulaic, and looking on Hal David's website, I believe I've found at least half of the reason for that. Here are his own words about how he wrote lyrics:

In writing I search for believability, simplicity and emotional impact. Believability is the easiest of the three to accomplish. One thing a lyricist must learn is not to fall in love with his own lines. Once you learn that, you can walk away from the lyric and look at it with a reasonable degree of objectivity. I often discard a good line because it is inconsistent with the basic idea. If the line happens to be witty or sad in a particularly fresh way it hurts me to take it out. But that's part of the pain of writing. 

Simplicity is much harder to achieve. It is easy to be simple and bad. Being simple and good is very difficult. The sophisticated Cole Porter, the earthy Irving Berlin, the poetic Oscar Hammerstein, and the witty Lorenz Hart all have one thing in common - simplicity, the kind that is good. I must also mention a special favorite of mine, Johnny Mercer. Whether he is being poetic or humorous, he is never complicated. I seek this elusive thing called simplicity always. I hope I sometimes achieve it. 

Above all, I try to create an emotion to which others can respond. Unless I can create an emotion to which I can respond, I throw the lyric away. Although I cannot know how others will react, I assume that if it moves me it may do the same for them. Sometimes I am right, sometimes I am wrong. 

Anyone Who Had A Heart had many things going for it - a brilliant composer in Bacharach and the sublime voice of Dionne Warwick, for starters. But David hit the trifecta here with his lyrics - they had believability, simplicity and emotional impact in spades. 

I won't recount his life here - there's a good obituary on him in today's New York Times, with many facts about him that I did not know. RIP Hal David.

Cry Baby, Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters (1963)

My new best friend, Pandora, continues to knock 'em out of the park, with discoveries daily without too much effort on my part. Today's offering is Garnet Mimms.

I love me a good torch song, and one of my favorites has always been Janis Joplin's Cry Baby. As it turns out, though, her version was a cover. The original torch singer on this was a man, Garnett Mimms, and the song was written for him specifically. The divine Mr. Mimms version charted first, and it landed high on the R&B and pop charts (this was just a year before I was really listening to music though so I never heard it). This guy had pipes! Why am I just now discovering him?  Everything I'm reading says he was "criminally underappreciated."

Ignorance of the provenance of many songs is rampant, and combating that ignorance - including my own - has become one of my greatest motivations for continuing this blog. I don't watch American Idol, but I just saw a piece stemming from a 2009 performance of Cry Baby by Allison Iraheta.  Simon Cowell referred to the song in front of 30 million viewers as Joplin's song. A gigantic missed opportunity to say whose song it really was, especially since he is still alive, and has spent many years since leaving the music business ministering to his own church flock in Philadelphia as well as to prison inmates.  

Mimms was born in West Virginia but moved to Philadelphia after high school graduation.  He idolized Jackie Wilson and Sam Cooke, and it shows. Around Philly, Mimms sang with various gospel ensembles and then made the usual move to secular music, forming a doo-wop group called the Gainors with Howard Tate (here's their biggest hit, The Secret). New York called to Mimms, though, where producers Jerry Ragovoy and Bert Berns wrote Cry Baby to showcase his spectacular gospel-inflected voice. It skyrocketed to success. (Ragovoy is the same guy who wrote Time Is On My Side and Piece of My Heart, songs that were recorded by black artists before they were covered by white.)

Just after that, however, something happened that conspired to keep Mimms in the background. Late in 1963, and continuing until early 1965, Billboard suspended its R&B chart, maintaining that the crossover phenomenon largely spurred by Motown's ascent made the pop chart fully representative of the spectrum of popular music at that time. An interesting concept, but a British Invasion-Motown collision in 1964 made it virtually impossible for other R&B acts to get the attention they deserved. And so it was with Garnett Mimms. 

Once Billboard restored the R&B charts, Mimms regained some traction with I'll Take Good Care of You, but getting singles on the radar screen was a losing enterprise after that. He went to the UK and performed with Jimi Hendrix there; he tried funk in the 70s. But he never again had the momentum that he did with Cry Baby.

Still, I have friends who not only remember him but saw him live in 1966. My music pals Jim and Chuck were two of those who were blessed to see Mimms in a big soul revue here in Akron, Ohio, headlined by Otis Redding. The mind reels just thinking about what the entirety of that experience must have been like. On the same freaking bill were the likes of James Carr, Percy Sledge and Sam and Dave. 

I'll play Mimms out with another great Ragovoy song that he recorded, As Long As I Have You, a dynamic ditty that one Robert Plant would probably have a lot to say about since he's covered it for years in Band of Joy, early Led Zeppelin and Priory of Brion. The rest of us have probably never heard of it, because it was no more than a forgotten LP track until the advent of YouTube. That's just wrong, but there's no time like the present to come up to speed. 

And I'm not done yet - two years ago, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a great story on Mimms and a new recording he was enticed to do, Is Anybody Out There?  Not sure what might have happened in the intervening two years, but I see I have more research to do ...  

Pipeline, Chantays (1963)

Today I was going to write about some morose seasonal affective disordery thing like Hazy Shade of Winter by Simon and Garfunkel (even though it's sunny for the second day in a row), but then I thought, why wallow in the fact that we have months of crap weather still to endure and instead go for the complete fantasy?  The surf music category!

I've been listening to a lot of early instrumental music lately thanks to a Richard Thompson shout-out to Hank Marvin of the Shadows (about whom I'll probably write another time) and was poring over forgottenhits.com which has lists galore, including the best instrumentals. One I had especially nostalgic feelings for leapt out, so today, Pipeline is on the menu. By the Chantays.  I have no idea who they were/are, but we're about to find out.

According to their Facebook page (because it turns out they are playing together nearly 50 years later and have a need to get the word out!), the song was written by original members Bob Spickard and Brian Carman. They still perform with their original drummer, Bob Welch, and long-time members Ricky Lewis and Brian Nussle.  Growing up in Orange County, California, they formed a band while in high school as boys will sometimes do, and the rest is history. 

If I had my life to live over again, I would have wanted to be a surfer chick.  It would have been a whole other life, and I'd be a completely different sort of person.  Good thing, bad thing ... you decide.  I just know that it's a life that suggests a more carefree existence than the one I have lived or lived when I was young, and why wouldn't that sound sweet any day of the week?

Pipeline is considered to be the first instrumental surf-rock hit, with the Beach Boys' Surfin' Safari (1962) the first with vocals. But the seeds were sown in 1961 by Dick Dale (and the Del-Tones), a guitar shredder who played one of the first Fender Stratocasters through a 15-inch JBL D130F speaker and created the sound that instrumentalists the world over have tried to duplicate, something he described as close to what he heard in his head when he was surfing.  His sonic embellishments were pioneering and, as a southpaw, he did it all while playing his guitar upside down and backwards - without restringing it.  

Dale's Let's Go Trippin' was considered the first surf song ever recorded, but it was only a regional hit - and not in my region. (And "trippin'" did not refer to dropping acid but going on a road trip to find the best surf.)

Pipeline has been a surf rock standard for decades, and isn't likely to die on the vine anytime soon. I played it today for the first time in eons.  It made me happy like it did the first time I heard it as a mere child. Let me tell you, when you're landlocked and surrounded by icicles a foot long, a music-induced surfing high can be very therapeutic.

And now I leave you with this great find:  a 1987 collaboration between Dick Dale and Stevie Ray Vaughn on a cover of Pipeline for the soundtrack of a Frankie Avalon-Annette Funicello beach flick sendup, Back to the Beach - somehow this was nominated for a Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental.  Hi-fricking-larious!

 

Christmas (Baby Please Come Home), Darlene Love (1963)

It's a big night for music on TV - Richard Thompson, Levon Helm, Nick Lowe and Allen Toussaint on Spectacle: Elvis Costello With ... , and for the 23nd year, Darlene Love, age 68, belting Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) for a thrilled David Letterman audience.   

Written by Phil Spector, Jeff Barry and the late Ellie Greenwich, Christmas was the only original number on an LP of 13 secular holiday songs Spector gave his trademark Wall of Sound treatment in 1963.  Performed by Love, the Ronettes and the Crystals, his regular stable of artists, their efforts received little notice at the time, justifiably eclipsed by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy the same day it was released.

As luck would have it, however, Christmas has metamorphosed into a holiday classic with a cult following. First seen on Letterman's show in 1986, when it was still on NBC, Love has performed the song with Paul Shaffer and the band, along with various luminaries as additional musicians and backup singers, every year since, except for 2007, when the writer's strike brought television to a screeching halt.  A lot of people were disappointed that the strike could not be resolved in time for this show to go on - such a tradition it has become - or at least that some special dispensation could not be made for it to go on despite the labor dispute. 

Of those I have seen, Love's 2005 performance is my favorite.  That's the year she was on Broadway in Hairspray and she just tore the song up with her gorgeous powerhouse voice. (Ellie Greenwich was one of the backup singers that year.)  Whether she is singing in front of others or behind them, she is a one-woman wall of sound, and arguably one of the hardest working women in the music industry, a fact acknowledged by her nomination this year to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (this is not her year to be inducted, however).    

If you've never seen the Letterman gig, don't miss another year.  It's worth every glorious second.

Pride and Joy, Marvin Gaye (1963)

"Marvin could caress a song like no other singer. He could even bring tears to the eyes of the upper crust." - Frankie Gaye, in his memoir about his brother Marvin Gaye

It is not always a good thing to learn too much about artists whose work we admire and who were so influential in shaping the music of the times in which we've lived.

I definitely felt that way this past week when, in search of a tidbit about the Temptations' Paul Williams that I had heard might be lurking in a book about Marvin Gaye's life, I ended up listening to six CDs about a man who was about as tormented a human being as one could possibly imagine.

I refer to the audiobook version of Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye, by David Ritz. I knew I wasn't going to read it because rarely is that genre of book well written by any definition of the term. So since the length of my daily commute just cries out for ways to keep me entertained, I slogged through the set, hoping I'd find what I was looking for about Paul (I didn't) and learning more about Gaye's life, about which I knew just the usual highlights (or lowlights).

I don't want to disparage the man; his body of work was a gift to our generation. But after listening to his story, I must say I'm surprised he wasn't killed sooner than he was. Hell, I wanted to kill him - he was insufferable. His own worst enemy, he was a colossal mess of a human being and brought misery to many in his private life. As it was stated in the book, he "turned blessings into burdens." And that would be putting it mildly. Like Michael Jackson, he was extremely disturbed, brought on in part by a lifelong terrible relationship with his father and massively conflicted feelings about his animal vs. his spiritual nature. He desperately needed psychological help he never got.

But his music, for all his relentless despair, was sublime, and his sensibilities enabled him to be comfortable working in different genres. His first top 10 single, Pride and Joy, is an example of how swinging Gaye could be - certainly a lightweight sort of song, compared to, say, his masterpiece What's Going On, but as he interpreted it, it was fabulous. It was inspired by his feelings for his first wife, Anna Gordy (Berry's daughter, yikes I meant sister, thanks J!!) and made Gaye Motown's most successful solo artist to that point, bringing with it pressures that he could never surmount.

Written by Gaye, Norman Whitfield and Mickey Stevenson, Pride and Joy also features Martha and the Vandellas. Singing background was one of the ways the girls earned their keep around Motown until they could get their lucky break (see my earlier post on Heat Wave to learn more about them).

In these early days, Marvin was a paragon of cool - it's pointed out in Divided Soul that he actually aspired to be a crooner like Frank Sinatra or Nat King Cole more than he did a soul man. He admired singers who were extremely relaxed like Perry Como and Dean Martin. In Gaye's case, his relaxed persona may have stemmed in part from the fact that he was never straight, but that's another story. The fact is, he had a silky, emotional voice that oozed with style, very reminiscent of Sam Cooke, whom he idolized. If you want to dissect it a bit, YouTube has an a cappella version of Pride and Joy that's a lovely novelty - you can really immerse yourself in his voice. Enjoy!

Don't Think Twice, It's All Right, Bob Dylan (1963)

"The learning process for artists of all stripes usually follows the path of imitate, assimilate, then innovate. If an artist is struck by something in his or her chosen art form, there is an all-consuming desire to absorb everything about it. During the process of assimilation the artist's output will be an imitation of the beloved form. In the end, for the uniquely gifted, there will be innovation." - Suze Rotolo, A Freewheelin' Time

There are many reasons why living the creative life isn't for the faint of heart. One of them is, especially if you're particularly prolific, that sooner or later you will be accused of ripping someone else off.

I just finished reading A Freewheelin' Time, the memoir by former Bob Dylan sweetheart Suze Rotolo (pictured above). I recommend it to anyone who is a Dylan enthusiast and/or is interested in the Greenwich Village folk scene in its heyday and the politics of the early 60s - it's a fascinating read. It's been on my list for awhile so I whipped through it in honor of Bob's 68th birthday last weekend (!). Yeah, he's 68, people.

One of the many worthy songs from his second album - recorded during the height of Dylan's relationship with Rotolo - is Don't Think Twice, It's All Right. This painfully stark song shines a light on the awful ambivalence one experiences when a relationship is crumbling and will probably end because the necessary foundation for its survival is too compromised.

Dylan composed the song while he was with Rotolo during the time that she had exiled herself indefinitely in Italy studying art. It was not clear when she would return to him - although she did, for awhile - and Rotolo writes that Dylan, while coaxing her to return in lovestruck letter after lovestruck letter, was publicly spreading bile among their friends about how this defection was adversely affecting him. I saw at least one book reference that Rotolo's successor, Joan Baez, later dueted with Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, apparently introducing the song in some thinly veiled uncharitable terms while Rotolo was in the audience. Living under that microscope was one of many reasons Rotolo did not feel she could continue in the relationship.

According to various sources, Dylan is alleged to have lifted some of the backbone of Don't Think Twice from Paul Clayton, a friend and fellow folkie, who recorded Who's Gonna Buy You Ribbons (When I'm Gone) in 1960. Litigation ensued, during which Clayton's song was demonstrated to be similar to a traditional song in the public domain, possibly originating with Marybird McAllister, called Who's Gonna Buy You Chickens When I'm Gone. No harm, no fowl, I guess. Although there seem to be a lot of people who feel Dylan has been, through his career, deficient in giving credit where credit is due, in Cameron Crowe's liner notes to 1985's Biograph, Dylan does acknowledge the "riff" being Clayton's (by then, he had long since died, however).

I don't pretend to know anything about how intellectual property is protected in the music industry. I think it would be extraordinarily difficult to prove many claims that are made, however. Art being art, and if it has left the confines of one's solitary conjuring of it, is inherently susceptible to morphing into new organisms. As my friend Wade opined last week on the same topic, artists who've built on works that went before "... weren't ripping anybody off - they were just contributing to the communal mosaic, seeing connections where nobody else saw them." (And he's a lawyer!) That is the folk tradition, after all. I guess if you're Bob Dylan, others' judgments will forever be projected upon you.

Check out this electric version of Don't Think Twice with Bob and Eric Clapton! Depending on which comment you read on YouTube, in true Rashomonesque fashion, this took place either at Madison Square Garden in 1999 or Carnegie Hall in 2004.

I'll end with a great Dylan quote from an article in the November 2008 issue of Uncut, in which Bob is asked by one of his sound engineers, Chris Shaw, after hearing a completely reinvented version of It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding), whether he ever plays it like the original recording. And Bob replies: "Well, y'know, a record is just a recording of what you were doing that day. You don't wanna live the same day over and over again, now. Do ya?"

I Saw Her Standing There, The Beatles (1963)

On far too many days of late, the cumulative effect of all the things that are pervasively wrong in the world, close to home and far away, weighs far too heavily on my psyche. Made worse by the sense that there is almost nothing that can be done to right many of the wrongs - or nothing that will be done, in any case - it's hard to look forward to a better day.

That's when the balm of music seems to have its most profound effect. And there are few songs that are as therapeutic as I Saw Her Standing There. Yeah, it's 45 years old, but every time I hear it, it sounds new. And it transports me into a realm where it's possible to believe that something good could be just around the corner.

A YouTube commenter writes about the song, "The rock'n'roll bass riff. Cool guitar solo dripping with reverb. Rock-solid drumming. Tight, soaring harmonies. Never ever let it be said that The Beatles couldn't rock!"

I certainly would never say that. I'm not sure which Beatles song was the first one I ever heard - it could have been this one - but regardless, I know that whatever I was doing at the precise moment Paul McCartney's 1-2-3-4 count-off assaulted my ears became supremely unimportant. (Count-offs ordinarily would have been edited out in the studio but Beatles producer George Martin intuited the shift in the zeitgeist that was about to occur and left it in - an inspired decision.)

I've said before that many of my favorite Beatles songs were the earliest, the ones that were steeped in their seminal influences. From The Beatles as Musicians: The Quarry Men through Rubber Soul by Walter Everett, we learn that Paul's persistent (ostinato) bassline here was an homage to a similar one in Chuck Berry's I'm Talking About You (here they are performing it in Hamburg in 1962) and that many of the guitar licks from Little Richard's Ooh! My Soul were incorporated as well, primarily by George Harrison. The Beatles' joyful interpretations of the works of their musical heroes exposed young America to whole new galaxies of rhythm and melody that made us happy to be alive.

And even on a bad day - they still do.

Heat Wave, Martha and the Vandellas (1963)

It's not so much irony as justice that, on the first Motown song I'm selecting, the first 29 seconds featured neither Martha nor the Vandellas, but rather the funky-fabulous backbeat and stylings of the then-uncredited Motown house band we only now know to be the Funk Brothers. Just try to remain inert in the face of drummer "Pistol" Allen's four on the floor drum rhythms. (See Allen's obituary in the Independent for some priceless background on him and life as a session musician under Berry Gordy.) It can't be done!

Any Motown enthusiast who hasn't seen the documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown is missing a real treat; it's a labor of love by writer Allan Slutsky and director Paul Justman, who dedicated themselves to telling the story of "this unheralded group of musicians (who) had played on more number one hits than the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, Elvis and the Beatles combined - which makes them the greatest hit machine in the history of popular music."

Heat Wave was one of the first Motown songs to chart big, and deservedly so. Martha Reeves had worked for peanuts as a secretary at Motown hoping for the day when she could bust out into the limelight with her gritty, ebullient take on life and love. Far less sugar-coated and more soulful than most of the other girl groups, Martha and the Vandellas put all the cards on the table: "is this the way love's supposed to be ... it's like a heatwave burning in my heart ... can't keep from crying ... it's tearing me apart."

According to Gerri Hirshey's seminal history of soul music, "Nowhere to Run," the entire Heat Wave album was cut in a few hours. Says Reeves, "We flew in from Baltimore after doing five shows. We got in around midnight and went right into the studio. Recorded that whole album, then did three songs, backup, for Marvin Gaye. We all had to get shots for our throats because they were suffering from overuse. Understand, I'm not complaining. If I were that age, and the circumstances were the same, I'd gladly do it again. You know how it is. You do stupid, dangerous things when you're really in love. And if you're swept away by it, you don't stop for one minute to think. You say, 'Go get it, girl,' and you don't look back."