This blog consists of a number of essays each written about a different song, along with a link to my cover version of the song in question. I did one a month last year, and you can find them all in the archive.
The earlier postings are focused on the recording rather than the writing. 'Caroline No' was a recreation of the instrumental backing track for the song in a midi program (with my voice and Brian Wilson's added on top). Both 'Don't Talk' and 'Life on Mars' were also a direct transcription of the original recordings (I don't know how many hours I must have wasted trying to decipher the fiddly piano on 'Life on Mars'). 'The Beast in Me' is more of a reinterpretation.
Starting with 'Stones in My Passway' and "She Said' I concentrated more on the writing. My main objective was to write about songs as music rather than talking about the people making it. I did this because most music writing about any sort of popular music doesn't really discuss the music as music and I wanted to address that.
Monday, 19 May 2008
Saturday, 22 December 2007
December's Essay 'The End'
I was intending to conclude the year and this series of essays with one entitled ‘The End’. I even wrote a first draft, which I can’t find. It was to be about what I was going to call 'the epic rock song'. ‘The End’, which concluded the Doors first record released in 1966, was one of the earliest and best examples. As usual, I was planning to record a cover version. Instead I’m going to commemorate the end of the year and the end of this project with what I can remember writing about ‘The End’ mixing in some other year end thoughts along with this link to a comedy skit that I did at the Turning Point on December 9th with fellow Marc Farre band mate Amelia Robinson.
www.hughhales-tooke.com/music/HHT's_unnatural_act.m4a
Epic rock songs, ranging from ‘Stairway to Heaven’ on Led Zeppelin’s fourth record released in 1971, to the concluding track on CBGB’s era New York band, Television’s 1977 debut record ‘Marquee Moon’, often concluded a record and were significantly longer, and hence different in structure to the other songs on the record. They weren’t necessarily making use of more elaborate chord changes than any of the other songs, but allowed, if not for solos, then for contrasting or at least stretched out instrumental parts, setting up the dramatic crescendo at the end of the song.
‘The End’ was more than this. It was, as the title suggests, a reference to all endings: both the ending of a record, and mortality and, viewed kindly, was an ambitious attempt to arrive at a song form better adapted to such big themes than the three minute pop song. Viewed unkindly, the words are pretentious, striving hard to sound apocalyptic, making it a natural choice for the soundtrack of ‘Apocalypse Now’ (the only Vietnam Vet I ever knew dismissed the film as bombastic nonsense).
‘The End‘ is also an excuse to take a look at endings in books and film – in those media that make use of plot, and that have a beginning, middle and end. How strange that the Three Act Drama should be such a universal structure in books and film, and hence so important in mediating our experience, when as a form it seems so untrue to life. It isn’t just that majority of stories have a clear ‘through-line’ leading to a dramatic resolution, it’s that this resolution – often the most dramatic moment - occurs towards the end of the story.
If our lives do have a through-line, or to express the idea in more real-life terms, ‘a point’, as anyone writing a memoir will tell you, it isn’t necessarily that obvious, and even without taking a Freudian view, the most dramatic moments in a life often occur in the first third of the overall span. This applies to such things as scientific and artistic breakthroughs, and also, more typically, to childbirth or being sent off to war.
It is my belief that there are implicit side effects stemming from the ubiquity of the Three Act Drama, both on life and on art. In art, this is experienced most keenly in that comparatively small anti-climactic space between denouement and the final lines, or title sequence at the conclusion of a story. In life, educated as we are by fiction, the effects of the Three Act Drama are felt in the frustrating absence of ‘a point’ and, as a result, the perception that events have no meaning. For meaning, it seems to me, has become synonymous with, if not the climactic moment in the story when the goal has been attained and all has been revealed, with what movie writers call a ‘Turning Point’, when the protagonist, having been a coward until now, punches the bully in the face, or when having been a drunk for the first twenty minutes of the film, the hero chucks the whiskey bottle out the window and gets himself together.
Music doesn’t have the same impact on our understanding of our lives as literature and film, although like them, it is also a journey through time and has much else in common. Like storytelling, music depends on the build up and then the release of tension. In accomplishing this, pop songs in particular, like ‘plot-driven’ pop movies, have always walked the line between the satisfying use of very familiar mechanisms and threadbare cliché. Seen in this context, ‘The End’ was a startling, innovatory break from convention.
The organ is of the most salient elements of ‘The End’ and of music by the Doors in general. Typically, the organ hasn’t featured as prominently in rock arrangements before or since. It lends a churchy aspect not just to the sound of music, but thematically. Just as ‘The End’ aspired to be something more than a pop song, Jim Morrison aspired to be rather more than the man at the microphone. He had a natural predisposition to being a rock god. He was divinely good looking. It would be true to say that the idea of male beauty hadn’t occurred to me before I saw the famous picture of Jim Morrison, bare torso, arms outstretched like Christ on the cross.
By the mid-Seventies,longer rock songs became the excuse for everyone in the band to take a solo, reaching a nadir when even the drummer got to pound away for twenty minutes. The recording of ‘The End’ is long and allows for soloing, giving it a more free-form feeling compared to the chart songs of the time and most of the other songs that comprise the record, but there is a strong sense of design in the progression from the initial sung statement; in the solos which sound structured; in a section where the structure breaks down and the music follows what is intended to sound like an improvised story, and at the conclusion when the instruments surge following Jim Morrison's climactic sung scream.
It doesn’t seem relevant to me to know how much of the playing on ‘The End’ was improvised and applied only to the take used on the record and that take alone. Improvised or not, ‘The End’ depends on the musicians playing off one another just as musicians need to do when improvising. This was at the beginning of a progression in rock music from a time when a musician simply learned a part and stuck to it. The Doors were even more unusual in that Jim Morrison was interested in improvisation on the part of the singer. In concert, this gave him scope to gauge the audience response and react accordingly. Perhaps this was a part of the growing interest in bringing a wider frame of reference to rock music. It allowed Jim Morrison and others to draw on work going on in other fields and not just their peers and immediate predecessors in pop music.
Jim Morrison aspired to be a poet and had, by the standards of middle class America at the time, other esoteric interests. My conjecture is that he wouldn't have found, for example, the comparison between a rock star working the audience and a shaman absurdly pretentious as we might do today, instead he would, I'm guessing, be far more concerned about whether or not he was the Jim Morrison of legend or not. As a result, like other rock giants from the Sixties he seems to be on a bigger scale than even today’s best-known stars.
Too bad if this seems like a digression, but one of the elements that I want to introduce into this argument is ‘Experience’ by Martin Amis. It isn’t a topical book. The only reason it features in a retrospective look at the past year is because my girlfriend, Meg, came across a copy tossed out on the street. I read it once and liked it so much I immediately read it a second time. Scanning the WNYC website for book recommendations, I was pleased to see that Richard Ford, a writer’s writer – one considered good by fellow heavyweights – had picked it as the last book to have had a significant impact on him. It certainly threw me for a loop. There are a series of interesting anecdotes involving Christopher Hitchens, who struck me as an opinionated blowhard during the run up to the Iraq invasion, but whom Amis considers a prodigious intellect, and a number of stories concerning the author’s realtionship to his father Kingsley, also a renowned writer, who was a very funny man indeed. It is acutely observed, and very well written, packing an emotional punch absent in even the author’s most celebrated fiction such as ‘Money’ or ‘London Fields’.
One of the through lines in the memoir is the disappearance of the author’s cousin Lucy Partington who was abducted by the serial killer Frederick West. It is the kind of thing most people only read about in lurid newspaper articles, see covered in sensationalist tv news, or consume as the plot in a Hollywood film. These fail even to begin to describe the impact of such an event on everyone concerned, whereas Martin Amis evokes the magnitude of the horror, the feeling of loss, and of the world being knocked off its axis by an evil man, all the while keeping everything on a credible human scale.
In 1966 a rock song about an Oedipal killer had novelty at least and hence it is unfair to lump ‘The End’ in with all the subsequent film depictions of serial killers made for entertainment purposes - even though, in my view, it is a similar kind of product in spirit. What you can say in its favor is that it adds up to a coherent statement combining words and music. It has a free form sort of feeling but a very thought out impact. The climax of the song comes when Morrison says, “Mother I want to…” before producing a sort of sung scream over the surging instrumental backing. Compared to other rock songs of the time it is an imaginative departure from a typical song structure – innovatory even – and it’s highly dramatic, but in contrast to the parts of ‘Experience’ dealing with Lucy Partington, it is hard to imagine anyone being genuinely affected by it: Unlike 'Experience' it doesn't actually evoke the world it describes.
'Experience’ serves as a reminder that moving the audience is what lies beyond technical proficiency, or being innovatory, or anything else. I need that reminder. These days, in such a crowded world, an artist feels under tremendous pressure to, on the one hand, attract attention by coming up with something that will set him apart from the field, while at the same time keeping his efforts within tacitly approved guidelines, which is to say the unspoken consensus about what’s hot and what’s not: whatever mysterious factors decree that magic realism in fiction, for example, has no currency, whereas realism, and highly researched, quasi-journalistic novels are where it’s at; that painting in Fine Art is out, but that art making use of photographic imagery is in – or vice versa. In this sense, all art is pop, and not just those media historically considered pop art, such as pop music and Hollywood films.
The practitioner has to resist the tendency to think of his art strategically, looking over his shoulder at the competition while he makes his move. The best art always seems blissfully free of these considerations even when it is far from blissful. These essays have concerned songs that seem free from contrivance. Was this partly because they come from a time before everyone seemed to be a media expert and attuned to the subtle emanations of approval and disapproval from the arbiters of taste? When culture seemed less mapped and hence allowed more freedom for everything to take its own shape.
When I think of even the moderately well known bands of my youth, good and bad, they seem so diverse in an unintentional, effortless sort of way in comparison to the sort of range we see now. Even these smaller bands seemed like the head of their own singular stylistic tribe. Though I had no fondness for his music, the tights-wearing, flute-playing Jethro Tull seemed to his own distinct sort of species. Today's so- called 'Indie' rock, even if I like the sound more, is in contrast, far more pureed, as if it has been put through a knowing, self-conscious filter that our rock predecessors hadn't yet evolved.
If my dystopian view of the future didn't also apply to the past, I might legitimately be dubbed a 'nostalgist. I have seen the word bandied about a lot recently, but one sure sign that I am not is that I'm sick of all things Bob Dylan. It isn't just that Todd Haynes film is pretentious and stupid, frankly I couldn't give a shit about Dylan turning electric in 1965 and can't see why anyone would be in the least bit interested. The Sixties was a long time ago. Hey folks we've got our own war to protest, and our own big reason - not instead of nukes but in addition to them - to worry about our extinction. It's high time we all moved on - time we saw that if the Sixties was a battle won, we have subsequently just about lost the war to entrenched moneyed self-interest.
The biggest failure of contemporary rock music, and art in general, is that it seems so disconnected from the times we live in. Perhaps this is why it seems so lacking in heft and why the people making it seem so small in stature. It seems busy with nothing more than it's own artfulness, propagation, and distribution - symptomatic of the age of iphenomena when 'revolutionary' means previously unimaginable abundance instead of in any way thinking 'different'- this is the End.
www.hughhales-tooke.com/music/HHT's_unnatural_act.m4a
Epic rock songs, ranging from ‘Stairway to Heaven’ on Led Zeppelin’s fourth record released in 1971, to the concluding track on CBGB’s era New York band, Television’s 1977 debut record ‘Marquee Moon’, often concluded a record and were significantly longer, and hence different in structure to the other songs on the record. They weren’t necessarily making use of more elaborate chord changes than any of the other songs, but allowed, if not for solos, then for contrasting or at least stretched out instrumental parts, setting up the dramatic crescendo at the end of the song.
‘The End’ was more than this. It was, as the title suggests, a reference to all endings: both the ending of a record, and mortality and, viewed kindly, was an ambitious attempt to arrive at a song form better adapted to such big themes than the three minute pop song. Viewed unkindly, the words are pretentious, striving hard to sound apocalyptic, making it a natural choice for the soundtrack of ‘Apocalypse Now’ (the only Vietnam Vet I ever knew dismissed the film as bombastic nonsense).
‘The End‘ is also an excuse to take a look at endings in books and film – in those media that make use of plot, and that have a beginning, middle and end. How strange that the Three Act Drama should be such a universal structure in books and film, and hence so important in mediating our experience, when as a form it seems so untrue to life. It isn’t just that majority of stories have a clear ‘through-line’ leading to a dramatic resolution, it’s that this resolution – often the most dramatic moment - occurs towards the end of the story.
If our lives do have a through-line, or to express the idea in more real-life terms, ‘a point’, as anyone writing a memoir will tell you, it isn’t necessarily that obvious, and even without taking a Freudian view, the most dramatic moments in a life often occur in the first third of the overall span. This applies to such things as scientific and artistic breakthroughs, and also, more typically, to childbirth or being sent off to war.
It is my belief that there are implicit side effects stemming from the ubiquity of the Three Act Drama, both on life and on art. In art, this is experienced most keenly in that comparatively small anti-climactic space between denouement and the final lines, or title sequence at the conclusion of a story. In life, educated as we are by fiction, the effects of the Three Act Drama are felt in the frustrating absence of ‘a point’ and, as a result, the perception that events have no meaning. For meaning, it seems to me, has become synonymous with, if not the climactic moment in the story when the goal has been attained and all has been revealed, with what movie writers call a ‘Turning Point’, when the protagonist, having been a coward until now, punches the bully in the face, or when having been a drunk for the first twenty minutes of the film, the hero chucks the whiskey bottle out the window and gets himself together.
Music doesn’t have the same impact on our understanding of our lives as literature and film, although like them, it is also a journey through time and has much else in common. Like storytelling, music depends on the build up and then the release of tension. In accomplishing this, pop songs in particular, like ‘plot-driven’ pop movies, have always walked the line between the satisfying use of very familiar mechanisms and threadbare cliché. Seen in this context, ‘The End’ was a startling, innovatory break from convention.
The organ is of the most salient elements of ‘The End’ and of music by the Doors in general. Typically, the organ hasn’t featured as prominently in rock arrangements before or since. It lends a churchy aspect not just to the sound of music, but thematically. Just as ‘The End’ aspired to be something more than a pop song, Jim Morrison aspired to be rather more than the man at the microphone. He had a natural predisposition to being a rock god. He was divinely good looking. It would be true to say that the idea of male beauty hadn’t occurred to me before I saw the famous picture of Jim Morrison, bare torso, arms outstretched like Christ on the cross.
By the mid-Seventies,longer rock songs became the excuse for everyone in the band to take a solo, reaching a nadir when even the drummer got to pound away for twenty minutes. The recording of ‘The End’ is long and allows for soloing, giving it a more free-form feeling compared to the chart songs of the time and most of the other songs that comprise the record, but there is a strong sense of design in the progression from the initial sung statement; in the solos which sound structured; in a section where the structure breaks down and the music follows what is intended to sound like an improvised story, and at the conclusion when the instruments surge following Jim Morrison's climactic sung scream.
It doesn’t seem relevant to me to know how much of the playing on ‘The End’ was improvised and applied only to the take used on the record and that take alone. Improvised or not, ‘The End’ depends on the musicians playing off one another just as musicians need to do when improvising. This was at the beginning of a progression in rock music from a time when a musician simply learned a part and stuck to it. The Doors were even more unusual in that Jim Morrison was interested in improvisation on the part of the singer. In concert, this gave him scope to gauge the audience response and react accordingly. Perhaps this was a part of the growing interest in bringing a wider frame of reference to rock music. It allowed Jim Morrison and others to draw on work going on in other fields and not just their peers and immediate predecessors in pop music.
Jim Morrison aspired to be a poet and had, by the standards of middle class America at the time, other esoteric interests. My conjecture is that he wouldn't have found, for example, the comparison between a rock star working the audience and a shaman absurdly pretentious as we might do today, instead he would, I'm guessing, be far more concerned about whether or not he was the Jim Morrison of legend or not. As a result, like other rock giants from the Sixties he seems to be on a bigger scale than even today’s best-known stars.
Too bad if this seems like a digression, but one of the elements that I want to introduce into this argument is ‘Experience’ by Martin Amis. It isn’t a topical book. The only reason it features in a retrospective look at the past year is because my girlfriend, Meg, came across a copy tossed out on the street. I read it once and liked it so much I immediately read it a second time. Scanning the WNYC website for book recommendations, I was pleased to see that Richard Ford, a writer’s writer – one considered good by fellow heavyweights – had picked it as the last book to have had a significant impact on him. It certainly threw me for a loop. There are a series of interesting anecdotes involving Christopher Hitchens, who struck me as an opinionated blowhard during the run up to the Iraq invasion, but whom Amis considers a prodigious intellect, and a number of stories concerning the author’s realtionship to his father Kingsley, also a renowned writer, who was a very funny man indeed. It is acutely observed, and very well written, packing an emotional punch absent in even the author’s most celebrated fiction such as ‘Money’ or ‘London Fields’.
One of the through lines in the memoir is the disappearance of the author’s cousin Lucy Partington who was abducted by the serial killer Frederick West. It is the kind of thing most people only read about in lurid newspaper articles, see covered in sensationalist tv news, or consume as the plot in a Hollywood film. These fail even to begin to describe the impact of such an event on everyone concerned, whereas Martin Amis evokes the magnitude of the horror, the feeling of loss, and of the world being knocked off its axis by an evil man, all the while keeping everything on a credible human scale.
In 1966 a rock song about an Oedipal killer had novelty at least and hence it is unfair to lump ‘The End’ in with all the subsequent film depictions of serial killers made for entertainment purposes - even though, in my view, it is a similar kind of product in spirit. What you can say in its favor is that it adds up to a coherent statement combining words and music. It has a free form sort of feeling but a very thought out impact. The climax of the song comes when Morrison says, “Mother I want to…” before producing a sort of sung scream over the surging instrumental backing. Compared to other rock songs of the time it is an imaginative departure from a typical song structure – innovatory even – and it’s highly dramatic, but in contrast to the parts of ‘Experience’ dealing with Lucy Partington, it is hard to imagine anyone being genuinely affected by it: Unlike 'Experience' it doesn't actually evoke the world it describes.
'Experience’ serves as a reminder that moving the audience is what lies beyond technical proficiency, or being innovatory, or anything else. I need that reminder. These days, in such a crowded world, an artist feels under tremendous pressure to, on the one hand, attract attention by coming up with something that will set him apart from the field, while at the same time keeping his efforts within tacitly approved guidelines, which is to say the unspoken consensus about what’s hot and what’s not: whatever mysterious factors decree that magic realism in fiction, for example, has no currency, whereas realism, and highly researched, quasi-journalistic novels are where it’s at; that painting in Fine Art is out, but that art making use of photographic imagery is in – or vice versa. In this sense, all art is pop, and not just those media historically considered pop art, such as pop music and Hollywood films.
The practitioner has to resist the tendency to think of his art strategically, looking over his shoulder at the competition while he makes his move. The best art always seems blissfully free of these considerations even when it is far from blissful. These essays have concerned songs that seem free from contrivance. Was this partly because they come from a time before everyone seemed to be a media expert and attuned to the subtle emanations of approval and disapproval from the arbiters of taste? When culture seemed less mapped and hence allowed more freedom for everything to take its own shape.
When I think of even the moderately well known bands of my youth, good and bad, they seem so diverse in an unintentional, effortless sort of way in comparison to the sort of range we see now. Even these smaller bands seemed like the head of their own singular stylistic tribe. Though I had no fondness for his music, the tights-wearing, flute-playing Jethro Tull seemed to his own distinct sort of species. Today's so- called 'Indie' rock, even if I like the sound more, is in contrast, far more pureed, as if it has been put through a knowing, self-conscious filter that our rock predecessors hadn't yet evolved.
If my dystopian view of the future didn't also apply to the past, I might legitimately be dubbed a 'nostalgist. I have seen the word bandied about a lot recently, but one sure sign that I am not is that I'm sick of all things Bob Dylan. It isn't just that Todd Haynes film is pretentious and stupid, frankly I couldn't give a shit about Dylan turning electric in 1965 and can't see why anyone would be in the least bit interested. The Sixties was a long time ago. Hey folks we've got our own war to protest, and our own big reason - not instead of nukes but in addition to them - to worry about our extinction. It's high time we all moved on - time we saw that if the Sixties was a battle won, we have subsequently just about lost the war to entrenched moneyed self-interest.
The biggest failure of contemporary rock music, and art in general, is that it seems so disconnected from the times we live in. Perhaps this is why it seems so lacking in heft and why the people making it seem so small in stature. It seems busy with nothing more than it's own artfulness, propagation, and distribution - symptomatic of the age of iphenomena when 'revolutionary' means previously unimaginable abundance instead of in any way thinking 'different'- this is the End.
Wednesday, 21 November 2007
November's essay and music on 'All Tomorrow's Parties'
This month the essay is accompanied by a video clip which can be seen by going to
http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=21903752
I wasn't planning to write about this month's song, 'All Tomorrow's Parties', but then I ended up playing it at a recent solo show in Philadelphia, and as my musical effort has been diverted elsewhere recently, the video tape of the performance has become the de facto musical offering for the month, and the Velvet Underground the subject of the accompanying essay.
Having written about a Beatles song, in part because they were such a big part of my upbringing, it may seem strange to have avoided writing about the Velvet Underground on the grounds that they are so ubiquitous, but in a recent 'Time Out' survey of top New York bands - meaning both the best New York bands and those that are most closely associated with New York - the Velvet Underground were in the number one slot. A lot has already been written about the Velvet Underground. Having lived in New York for almost twenty-five years, not too much time ever goes by before something or other: a reference in a magazine, on the radio, or simply walking down the street, has brought them to mind. , and Lou Reed, their leading light, despite having lost most of the artistic qualities that made him perhaps the most famous cult figure in rock music, is still the subject of many an interview.
While I envy young people their youth, which I imagine to be far more eventful than my own, I doubt that it is possible for a kid these days to experience anything quite like the surprise that I did as thirteen year old while watching the English chart show 'Top of the Pops', when the extraordinarily androgynous looking David Bowie knelt down, apparently nibbling on Mick Ronson's guitar strings (at crotch level). The sound of the Velvet Underground was as much of a surprise.The chart music of the Sixties and early Seventies was no preparation for it, and as it wasn't played on the radio, my reaction playing the record for the record for the first time was amazement. I hadn't heard anything remotely like it before. I wonder if it is possible any longer for a kid anywhere these days to have a 'what the hell was that?' type of reaction to a mere sound recording.
Time and repeated exposure has made the 'The Velvet Underground and Nico' seem more conventional, but when I first heard it, it was so overwhelmingly about the sound - the sonic palette - I didn't experience it as a record consisting of a songs. The salient impression of even the most conventional songs on the record, such as
the deceptively sweet 'Sunday Morning' that starts the record, was the potent atmosphere that it created. This was analogous to the mood in a book or a film. The tinkling of the xylophone, against the bass guitar line in 'Sunday Morning' perfectly evoked a gray, empty Sunday morning feeling.
The singing on the record is also very much about the sound of the voices. The sound of Nico's voice - her accent - in 'Femme Fatale' is so inextricably bound up with the meaning of the words, that it simply isn't possible for anyone else to seem credible singing it. The same can be said for 'I'm Waiting for the Man', which no one, including an older Lou Reed, can sing without seeming ridiculous. In part this was because he was so convincingly the user depicted in this song, just as Nico was so believable as a femme fatale, but as with the songs Nico sings, the sound of Lou Reed's voice, and the sound of the overall arrangement, is at least as important in evoking the world of the song as the literal meaning of the words.
It is this consideration for the sound in the arrangements that unifies material ranging from conventionally structured songs such as 'Sunday Morning', and 'I'm Waiting for the Man', which has a verse leading to a refrain, to the more free-form 'Heroin' culminating in the extremely experimental 'European Son' closing the record.
In addition to being an extremely good rhythm guitar part - which is to say, highly rhythmic - 'I'm Waiting for the Man' makes use of a very particular sort of distortion on the guitar. That you couldn't simply go out and buy any number of effects units at a time was a lot less convenient, but it must have made this sort of choice much more thoughtful. Certainly the sound is unique to this record.: it is extremely trebly, giving precise definition every time the strings are struck, but
a fuzz effect sustains the sound, becoming more apparent as it decays. The effect is of staccato bursts - a sort of 'te tow' - that perfectly compliments - aggressively punctuating - the sung line.
The second guitar plays linear lead lines over the top, which also have an extremely hard, brittle, treble sound. But this isn't the kind of linear lead solo based on a blues scale, or like the sort of chord arpeggios you hear in finger-style guitar accompaniment, but rather a sort of hybrid: single note lines picked out of chord shapes. It isn't complex, but it's very potent, bringing to mind a sort of metallic filigree.
John Cale was 'classically-trained' - to wheel out the cliche applied to any pop music who ever went near a violin aged eight - but rather than featuring in any bravura instrumental contribution, in my view, he most probably helped provide an expanded frame of reference for what a rock band might be and a willingness to experiment. This is evident not just in the longer songs that have improvisational passages, but in just this sort of consideration for sound. On this record the
Velvet Underground eschew the kind of drum kit that has been, and continues to be, so integral to the sound of most rock music. Instead of a kick drum and the slap of the snare creating a crisp back beat, Mo Tucker uses what sounds like the bass
drum in a marching band. This is very noticeable in 'All Tomorrow's Parties'. The sort of boom-chick sound produced by the drum kit on most rock recordings made by interspersing drum beats with the click of the drumsticks on the cymbals, has been re-imagined in the primitive sounding thud of the drum and shake of a tambourine.
Perhaps it is this unifying sonic aspect, which helps make the record so perfect, bringing together very different types of song so that the recording as a whole seems varied but has a pervasive atmosphere as engrossing as film. That you could be drawn into a recording as in a film was an exciting discovery and began a whole new way of listening to music, that preceded, but was augmented by the joys of smoking dope. In the sense that I was completely absorbed in the music and paying close attention to it, this was a more critical response to music than I have had before or since, but it wasn't analytic. I would often focus on a particular instrument through an entire song, or even an entire song noticing the way that the bass guitar part on 'Sunday Morning' relates to the sung part, but, perhaps not being classically trained, I experience what the bass plays at the end of each line, not as a sequence of notes but as a swell - and this was half mental, visual picture and half bodily sensation.
Needless to say, 'The Velvet Underground and Nico' wasn't the only record I listened to in this way, although remained the most potent - creating a world more vividly than almost any other record. The only other contender was 'Forever Changes' by Love, which has a unique and unifying consideration for sound, and which also, like a film, draws you into the (much sunnier) world that it creates.
http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=21903752
I wasn't planning to write about this month's song, 'All Tomorrow's Parties', but then I ended up playing it at a recent solo show in Philadelphia, and as my musical effort has been diverted elsewhere recently, the video tape of the performance has become the de facto musical offering for the month, and the Velvet Underground the subject of the accompanying essay.
Having written about a Beatles song, in part because they were such a big part of my upbringing, it may seem strange to have avoided writing about the Velvet Underground on the grounds that they are so ubiquitous, but in a recent 'Time Out' survey of top New York bands - meaning both the best New York bands and those that are most closely associated with New York - the Velvet Underground were in the number one slot. A lot has already been written about the Velvet Underground. Having lived in New York for almost twenty-five years, not too much time ever goes by before something or other: a reference in a magazine, on the radio, or simply walking down the street, has brought them to mind. , and Lou Reed, their leading light, despite having lost most of the artistic qualities that made him perhaps the most famous cult figure in rock music, is still the subject of many an interview.
While I envy young people their youth, which I imagine to be far more eventful than my own, I doubt that it is possible for a kid these days to experience anything quite like the surprise that I did as thirteen year old while watching the English chart show 'Top of the Pops', when the extraordinarily androgynous looking David Bowie knelt down, apparently nibbling on Mick Ronson's guitar strings (at crotch level). The sound of the Velvet Underground was as much of a surprise.The chart music of the Sixties and early Seventies was no preparation for it, and as it wasn't played on the radio, my reaction playing the record for the record for the first time was amazement. I hadn't heard anything remotely like it before. I wonder if it is possible any longer for a kid anywhere these days to have a 'what the hell was that?' type of reaction to a mere sound recording.
Time and repeated exposure has made the 'The Velvet Underground and Nico' seem more conventional, but when I first heard it, it was so overwhelmingly about the sound - the sonic palette - I didn't experience it as a record consisting of a songs. The salient impression of even the most conventional songs on the record, such as
the deceptively sweet 'Sunday Morning' that starts the record, was the potent atmosphere that it created. This was analogous to the mood in a book or a film. The tinkling of the xylophone, against the bass guitar line in 'Sunday Morning' perfectly evoked a gray, empty Sunday morning feeling.
The singing on the record is also very much about the sound of the voices. The sound of Nico's voice - her accent - in 'Femme Fatale' is so inextricably bound up with the meaning of the words, that it simply isn't possible for anyone else to seem credible singing it. The same can be said for 'I'm Waiting for the Man', which no one, including an older Lou Reed, can sing without seeming ridiculous. In part this was because he was so convincingly the user depicted in this song, just as Nico was so believable as a femme fatale, but as with the songs Nico sings, the sound of Lou Reed's voice, and the sound of the overall arrangement, is at least as important in evoking the world of the song as the literal meaning of the words.
It is this consideration for the sound in the arrangements that unifies material ranging from conventionally structured songs such as 'Sunday Morning', and 'I'm Waiting for the Man', which has a verse leading to a refrain, to the more free-form 'Heroin' culminating in the extremely experimental 'European Son' closing the record.
In addition to being an extremely good rhythm guitar part - which is to say, highly rhythmic - 'I'm Waiting for the Man' makes use of a very particular sort of distortion on the guitar. That you couldn't simply go out and buy any number of effects units at a time was a lot less convenient, but it must have made this sort of choice much more thoughtful. Certainly the sound is unique to this record.: it is extremely trebly, giving precise definition every time the strings are struck, but
a fuzz effect sustains the sound, becoming more apparent as it decays. The effect is of staccato bursts - a sort of 'te tow' - that perfectly compliments - aggressively punctuating - the sung line.
The second guitar plays linear lead lines over the top, which also have an extremely hard, brittle, treble sound. But this isn't the kind of linear lead solo based on a blues scale, or like the sort of chord arpeggios you hear in finger-style guitar accompaniment, but rather a sort of hybrid: single note lines picked out of chord shapes. It isn't complex, but it's very potent, bringing to mind a sort of metallic filigree.
John Cale was 'classically-trained' - to wheel out the cliche applied to any pop music who ever went near a violin aged eight - but rather than featuring in any bravura instrumental contribution, in my view, he most probably helped provide an expanded frame of reference for what a rock band might be and a willingness to experiment. This is evident not just in the longer songs that have improvisational passages, but in just this sort of consideration for sound. On this record the
Velvet Underground eschew the kind of drum kit that has been, and continues to be, so integral to the sound of most rock music. Instead of a kick drum and the slap of the snare creating a crisp back beat, Mo Tucker uses what sounds like the bass
drum in a marching band. This is very noticeable in 'All Tomorrow's Parties'. The sort of boom-chick sound produced by the drum kit on most rock recordings made by interspersing drum beats with the click of the drumsticks on the cymbals, has been re-imagined in the primitive sounding thud of the drum and shake of a tambourine.
Perhaps it is this unifying sonic aspect, which helps make the record so perfect, bringing together very different types of song so that the recording as a whole seems varied but has a pervasive atmosphere as engrossing as film. That you could be drawn into a recording as in a film was an exciting discovery and began a whole new way of listening to music, that preceded, but was augmented by the joys of smoking dope. In the sense that I was completely absorbed in the music and paying close attention to it, this was a more critical response to music than I have had before or since, but it wasn't analytic. I would often focus on a particular instrument through an entire song, or even an entire song noticing the way that the bass guitar part on 'Sunday Morning' relates to the sung part, but, perhaps not being classically trained, I experience what the bass plays at the end of each line, not as a sequence of notes but as a swell - and this was half mental, visual picture and half bodily sensation.
Needless to say, 'The Velvet Underground and Nico' wasn't the only record I listened to in this way, although remained the most potent - creating a world more vividly than almost any other record. The only other contender was 'Forever Changes' by Love, which has a unique and unifying consideration for sound, and which also, like a film, draws you into the (much sunnier) world that it creates.
Wednesday, 10 October 2007
October's Music and Essay on "Janie Jones"
Music file at
http://www.hughhales-tooke.com/music/janiejones.mp3
My interest in pop music was at its height when punk rock swept over Britain, and in retrospect, I think it has had a big effect on my overall outlook, and my attitude toward making artwork in particular, well after I'd stopped listening to the music.
Punk was, along with socialism, part of the fabric of a society that no longer exists. Punks were fiercely critical of the welfare state, excoriating it for the lack of opportunity, and yet was entirely dependent on it for weekly ‘dole’ checks. They were at the extreme end of a society that, compared to today, was less geared to accruing wealth. Margaret Thatcher and her push to make Britain more of a competitive market economy would have made her their natural enemy and I have to keep having reminding myself that punk had come and almost gone before she came to power in 1979.
Punks had even less of a coherent philosophy than hippies whom they loathed as much as the monarchy, politicians, and to a lesser degree everyone else in-between, for being frauds. One notable exception being reggae bands. Their's was an inverted idealism: everyone was a sellout, especially rock stars who had come to fame in the Sixties, such as Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, and to a lesser degree the Who (for whom a lot of punk bands still had a soft spot). These bands they branded ‘dinosaurs’. From my point of view, It wasn't so much that punk rock was better than what was going on in music at the time, so much as an awareness that something new and energetic was happening which made other rock music, all of a sudden, seem irrelevant.
For all the bleakness of the outlook, there was something implicitly inclusive about the punk disregard for musicianship (U2 formed at the tail end of punk and it was this spirit that informed their choice of name). But, on the other hand, this may have been one of the reasons why, thirty years on, it doesn't seem to have left a huge musical legacy.
Punk was was implicitly self-destructive and hence was relatively short-lived: as the better known punk bands became popular enough to start generating some money, it was hard for them to adjust to the idea that, having poured scorn on the rock icons who preceded them, this is what they were becoming. Neither was the anarchic spirit of punk rock easily captured in a recording studio, and collections of songs were even more problematic. Punks even sneered at the term ‘album’ as sounding like hippie-speak, so it is no coincidence that the string of singles released by the Sex Pistols gives the best idea of what all the fuss was about.
The biggest influence on punk rock was the American band the Ramones, who provided a template for the Sex Pistols and the Clash - and through them, all the hundreds of bands that sprang up over the country. ‘Spiral Scratch’ by the Buzzcocks, released in 1976, was also extremely influential in early punk circles, and can lay claim to being the seminal punk recording, but when it was first released there weren't very many copies, with the result that, like most people, I heard about it well before I actually heard it.
Perhaps the only true punk album was by the Clash. It was released after Spiral Scratch but compared to other punk groups the Clash were quick to record their first collection of songs, and this alone gave it a defining role. But when I listen to it now, it still has the feeling of rawness and urgency that made the best punk music so vital.
There is a tremendous feeling of something about to happen in Janie Jones, the opening song on the record. I wanted to cover it because I still think it is one of the great album openers of all time. It's such a strong statement. It's the kind of song, like Elvis Presley's 'That's All Right' where you can say it's heralding a new era in pop music.
At about 200 beats per minute, it sounded incredibly fast, and, on first hearing, about as tuneful as a (trebly) chainsaw. It wasn't until I heard it a second time, months later, and someone complained that the singing sounded like a bunch of football hooligans, that I was converted.
For the first eight bars Joe Strummer sings against a drumbeat, and to begin with, a single clipped down-stroke on the guitar, effectively a cappella. His voice is almost absent musical pitch and the melody, such as it is, sticks close to the same note. The overall effect is a curious mixture of chant; childhood taunt and even a dog barking. The listener has already been tensing in the expectation of a change to a different chord when the bass comes in playing E flat in eighth notes, which at this tempo are an insistent throb, and the entire cycle repeats again.
Each verse begins in this way, with the same effect. It's an incredibly simple but powerful mechanism. The two other chords largely provide a brief respite, and a way to get back to the first chord so that it can be worked in the same way again. At the end of the song, the guitar (and bass) twice dip down to from E flat to C minor and back up again introducing a melodic component and then Mick Jones’ voice comes in to conclude the song. His voice is much higher, more melodic and plaintive than Joe Strummer's and the Clash made repeated use of this contrast.
Often songs written on the guitar use chords that have ‘open’ strings as they are more resonant. That Janie Jones is in E flat – not a key particularly suited to the guitar – indicates that this it was composed using barre chords (probably an A shape slid up the neck to the sixth fret). Along with the tempo of the songs, this was another way English punk bands were indebted to the Ramones, who exemplified a bare-bones approach to guitar playing, sliding the same barred E or A shape up and down the neck of the guitar keeping musical know-how to a minimum.
Mick Jones looked suspiciously like a guitar hero all along and the Clash survived long enough to almost become rock stars, but it turned out that, even aside from the contradictory notion of punk rock stars the Clash and Sex Pistols were even more dogged by hard drugs than dinosaur rock bands.
Many people consider ‘London Calling’, the Clash’s third record, released in 1979, their best record, but for me, its embrace of America and different musical genres was good, but standard rock and roll posturing and it strays too far from the fierce punk pride of ‘I'm so bored of the USA’ which, along with 'Janie Jones' and so many of the other songs on that first record were such an antidote to the complacency of life (and music) in mid-Seventies Britain.
http://www.hughhales-tooke.com/music/janiejones.mp3
My interest in pop music was at its height when punk rock swept over Britain, and in retrospect, I think it has had a big effect on my overall outlook, and my attitude toward making artwork in particular, well after I'd stopped listening to the music.
Punk was, along with socialism, part of the fabric of a society that no longer exists. Punks were fiercely critical of the welfare state, excoriating it for the lack of opportunity, and yet was entirely dependent on it for weekly ‘dole’ checks. They were at the extreme end of a society that, compared to today, was less geared to accruing wealth. Margaret Thatcher and her push to make Britain more of a competitive market economy would have made her their natural enemy and I have to keep having reminding myself that punk had come and almost gone before she came to power in 1979.
Punks had even less of a coherent philosophy than hippies whom they loathed as much as the monarchy, politicians, and to a lesser degree everyone else in-between, for being frauds. One notable exception being reggae bands. Their's was an inverted idealism: everyone was a sellout, especially rock stars who had come to fame in the Sixties, such as Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, and to a lesser degree the Who (for whom a lot of punk bands still had a soft spot). These bands they branded ‘dinosaurs’. From my point of view, It wasn't so much that punk rock was better than what was going on in music at the time, so much as an awareness that something new and energetic was happening which made other rock music, all of a sudden, seem irrelevant.
For all the bleakness of the outlook, there was something implicitly inclusive about the punk disregard for musicianship (U2 formed at the tail end of punk and it was this spirit that informed their choice of name). But, on the other hand, this may have been one of the reasons why, thirty years on, it doesn't seem to have left a huge musical legacy.
Punk was was implicitly self-destructive and hence was relatively short-lived: as the better known punk bands became popular enough to start generating some money, it was hard for them to adjust to the idea that, having poured scorn on the rock icons who preceded them, this is what they were becoming. Neither was the anarchic spirit of punk rock easily captured in a recording studio, and collections of songs were even more problematic. Punks even sneered at the term ‘album’ as sounding like hippie-speak, so it is no coincidence that the string of singles released by the Sex Pistols gives the best idea of what all the fuss was about.
The biggest influence on punk rock was the American band the Ramones, who provided a template for the Sex Pistols and the Clash - and through them, all the hundreds of bands that sprang up over the country. ‘Spiral Scratch’ by the Buzzcocks, released in 1976, was also extremely influential in early punk circles, and can lay claim to being the seminal punk recording, but when it was first released there weren't very many copies, with the result that, like most people, I heard about it well before I actually heard it.
Perhaps the only true punk album was by the Clash. It was released after Spiral Scratch but compared to other punk groups the Clash were quick to record their first collection of songs, and this alone gave it a defining role. But when I listen to it now, it still has the feeling of rawness and urgency that made the best punk music so vital.
There is a tremendous feeling of something about to happen in Janie Jones, the opening song on the record. I wanted to cover it because I still think it is one of the great album openers of all time. It's such a strong statement. It's the kind of song, like Elvis Presley's 'That's All Right' where you can say it's heralding a new era in pop music.
At about 200 beats per minute, it sounded incredibly fast, and, on first hearing, about as tuneful as a (trebly) chainsaw. It wasn't until I heard it a second time, months later, and someone complained that the singing sounded like a bunch of football hooligans, that I was converted.
For the first eight bars Joe Strummer sings against a drumbeat, and to begin with, a single clipped down-stroke on the guitar, effectively a cappella. His voice is almost absent musical pitch and the melody, such as it is, sticks close to the same note. The overall effect is a curious mixture of chant; childhood taunt and even a dog barking. The listener has already been tensing in the expectation of a change to a different chord when the bass comes in playing E flat in eighth notes, which at this tempo are an insistent throb, and the entire cycle repeats again.
Each verse begins in this way, with the same effect. It's an incredibly simple but powerful mechanism. The two other chords largely provide a brief respite, and a way to get back to the first chord so that it can be worked in the same way again. At the end of the song, the guitar (and bass) twice dip down to from E flat to C minor and back up again introducing a melodic component and then Mick Jones’ voice comes in to conclude the song. His voice is much higher, more melodic and plaintive than Joe Strummer's and the Clash made repeated use of this contrast.
Often songs written on the guitar use chords that have ‘open’ strings as they are more resonant. That Janie Jones is in E flat – not a key particularly suited to the guitar – indicates that this it was composed using barre chords (probably an A shape slid up the neck to the sixth fret). Along with the tempo of the songs, this was another way English punk bands were indebted to the Ramones, who exemplified a bare-bones approach to guitar playing, sliding the same barred E or A shape up and down the neck of the guitar keeping musical know-how to a minimum.
Mick Jones looked suspiciously like a guitar hero all along and the Clash survived long enough to almost become rock stars, but it turned out that, even aside from the contradictory notion of punk rock stars the Clash and Sex Pistols were even more dogged by hard drugs than dinosaur rock bands.
Many people consider ‘London Calling’, the Clash’s third record, released in 1979, their best record, but for me, its embrace of America and different musical genres was good, but standard rock and roll posturing and it strays too far from the fierce punk pride of ‘I'm so bored of the USA’ which, along with 'Janie Jones' and so many of the other songs on that first record were such an antidote to the complacency of life (and music) in mid-Seventies Britain.
Sunday, 2 September 2007
September's Music and Essay: "Thunderball", Tom Jones, Sex and Schmaltz
I have just posted 4 of my own, original songs at
http://www.myspace.com/losttrain
Below are links to the music accompanying this article.
http://www.hughhales-tooke.com/music/thunderball
http://www.hughhales-tooke.com/music/thelookoflove.mp3
http://www.hughhales-tooke.com/music/auprivave.mp3
Even as a small boy, when I first heard the strains of ‘What’s New Pussycat’ or ‘It’s Not Unusual’, I knew that Tom Jones was ‘schmaltz’, which, coming to think of it, must make schmaltz the first Yiddish word that I ever encountered. The Oxford English Dictionary explains that it is “from German Schmaltz ‘dripping lard” meaning “sentmentality,esp.in music, drama etc”, but for me the definition was broader, it was more like the aural equivalent of kitsch (a word I didn’t hear until much later), meaning, the OED agrees, ‘garish, tasteless or sentimental’.
All of the pop music of the pre Beatles era sounded like schmaltz to me: crooners such as Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Andy Williams; the movie Elvis; and Broadway show-tunes in particular. It used to induce a quasi-physical reaction in me. Tom Jones and Engleburt Humperdink - the stars over whose attributes giant ladies hanging out the laundry used to argue – were, in my view, the continuation of this nauseating schmaltzy tradition. Hugely popular, they were far more topical and hence more present and vivid than their forebears, but although they came to popularity amidst the Beatles, Stones, Who and Kinks, they never seemed to be of that generation of pop groups, but emerged from some timeless, showbiz limbo.
Although I had a visceral dislike of his music, forty years on, I have to admit that, with the exception of the Beatles, Tom Jones had as much of impact on my life as any of any of the pop groups of the time. Well before I knew that this bit went into that bit, through close quarters observation of the aforementioned big ladies hanging out the laundry, and the nudge, nudge, wink, wink that went along with any mention of his name, I deduced that Tom Jones had to with whatever it was that men and women (although very definitely not my parents) got up to behind closed doors. He was, I realized, the paragon of male allure - and I am not sure I have ever recovered from this discovery.
It is fitting that Tom Jones should have recorded the theme song to the film, ‘Thunderball’. Sean Connery, who played James Bond, was a film star who, like Tom Jones, had what was referred to on TV at the time, as ‘sex-appeal’, and although I greatly preferred James Bond, it seemed to me that they were both operating in the similar territory (in a world populated by voluptuous women) - you could tell from the similarities in their manly accouterments. They shared the same manly, hairy chest, gold wristwatch, driving-glove aesthetic. They both also caused an extreme reaction in women. After only the most fleeting contact they were either frenzied in their excitement (Tom Jones), or rendered as docile as a sleepwalker (James Bond).
Tom Jones and the Bond films shared a streak of self-mockery. On the topic of his sex appeal, Tom Jones has always been self-deprecating - without denying that he has it.
“I just pump up the tires,” he remarked, implanting an image in mind from which I will, most probably, never be free, “and the husbands get to ride the bike home.”
Increasingly, the Bond films were peppered with absurd innuendos, most obviously in the names of the female characters (Pussy Galore) and the quips – mid-action - seemed to acknowledge the improbability of what was going on, but remarkably, despite all this, Sean Connery made Bond credible – an essential ingredient in being a sex symbol.
The Tom Jones/James Bond pairing fits in other ways too. The Bond themes songs, like Tom Jones, were a throwback to the previous generation. Bond was emphatically not American and yet the theme songs were more reminiscent of the kind of American, big band arrangement of the Rat Pack era rather than British pop of the Nineteen-Sixties. Early on in the decade a crooner singing ‘From Russia With Love’ didn’t seem anachronistic, but well after the Beatles had become superstars Shirley Bassey continued in the same showbiz vein with ‘Goldfinger’. The arrangement for ‘Thunderball’ follows suit.
Unlike his pop band contemporaries, who were writing their own songs, Tom Jones was still working in the showbiz world of the professional songsmith – and he was at their mercy. After scanning the words to ‘Thunderball’ Tom Jones famously asked, “What the bloody hell is it anyway?”
That ‘She Loves You’ was formulaic was evident to anyone with hearing, but it sounded fresh, and authentic, whereas Tom Jones’ sang material redolent of the airless world of songs written in cubicles by professional songwriters.
Even to a six-year-old the work of career songwriters such as ‘My Favorite Things’ from the ‘Sound of Music’ reeked of phoniness. Who, apart from an effete lyricist, gets cheered up by the thought of ‘brown paper packages tied up with string’? But you didn’t even have to think about what the words meant. It is remarkable how much of is transmitted through the sound of a song alone. Show-tunes sounded fake.
From the first moment I heard the sound of Frank Sinatra, and before knowing anything about him, I reacted to the almost violent swagger in his voice. More mature consideration only confirmed this. The horror of the showbiz worldview – the ‘Ugly American’ tourist of the Nineteen-Fifties traveling business class – is vividly encapsulated by the words of ‘Come Fly With Me’.
Come fly with me come fly let’s fly away
If you can use some exotic booze, there’s a bar in far Bombay
(And how about ‘weather-wise it’s such a lovely day’ for redundancy and inelegance)
Before the Sixties, being a performer – showbiz – wasn’t about presenting an authentic version of your self (your views, your life) to the world. Tom Jones had far more in common with Frank Sinatra in this respect than the Beatles, or, more to the point, Otis Redding. That Tom Jones had ability as a singer was undeniable, and even the way in which he sang has a lot in common with the R&B singers emerging in the Sixties, but he was always a performer. Even if Otis Redding didn’t write the song he was singing, the words coming out of his mouth sounded like they might have been his own. This notion of authenticity became central not just to R&B (what is ‘Soul’ otherwise?) but to pop music of all kinds.
When did I begin to change my opinion about some of the above, and reconcile myself with Tom Jones? Comparatively recently although it’s been years since Sixties pop groups have sounded fresh and immediate. There has been plenty of time in which to have grown tired of the same musical clichés repeated over and over, for the pop star schtick to have become wearisome and for the artificiality and the posturing to have become at least as absurd looking as anything from the showbiz tradition. In fact, currently popular music of all types – Bono and good causes aside - is little more than a continuation of that show-biz entertainment tradition.
In time, the words, not just to ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ by the Beatles, but to hits like ‘Satisfaction’ by the Rolling Stones, and ‘All Day and All of The Night’ by the Kinks, seem as limited in outlook – and more juvenile - than any Frank Sinatra song you care to mention. In comparison, the words to a Broadway show-tune such as ‘Somewhere’ have come to seem sharp, tough and worldly. It is more dimensional in other ways too. The way that the music in ‘Somewhere’ reflects the subject of the song is masterful. The aspiration and the desire to escape is expressed in the lyrics is also conveyed by the leap (of a Minor Seventh) between the first two words, ‘There’s a’ (place for us).
There is still a place in my heart for a group such as the Kinks. They never sound livelier than when played directly after lounge music. Their songs are a great musical antidote to the over-sweet, indeterminate sound of a jazz guitar, using chords that are so harmonically complex that they seem to lead everywhere and nowhere. The problem is that, by now, there are hundreds of songs that depend on the same simple structures pioneered by the Kinks and their ilk, and even the originals, let alone all those that have followed, have come to sound extremely predictable.
A classic show tune such as ‘I got Rhythm’ by George and Ira Gershwin follows a much less predictable pattern. Along with Irving Berlin and Hoagey Carmichael, to name a few, these songwriters the tools enabling songs to take unexpected turns, and to find indirect ways of leading up to the catchy choruses.
Show-tunes and songs in the showbiz tradition tend to make use of a wider variety of chords - although these jazz chords are often far from sweet. It occurred to me recently that rock songs have a raw power and energy often related to sheer volume whereas jazz is raw through dissonance (and speed, as in the example of the Charlie Parker tune linked to this essay). Even at low volume Charlie Parker's be-bop recordings are not ‘easy listening’ and experimental Jazz has only got more abrasive since.
In addition to the Dominant Sevenths that are ubiquitous to all music (including the most basic pop as well blues progressions) jazz makes use of a big variety of dissonant chords of that type: Seventh chords that are tweaked by dickering around with the component notes of the chord (sharpened flattened or sharpened Fifths) or those with added notes on top - which is how you arrive at Ninths, Elevenths and Thirteenths chords. All of these chords are members of the same family, with the same function, but create different shadings of dissonance.
You don’t have to dig too deep beneath the surface of even a Burt Bacharach song, someone who has made a career of saccharine sweet jazz inflected pop tunes, (in fact you only have to strip away the vocals) and at times you will hear a surprisingly dissonant chord in the accompaniment. One chord in the ‘Look of Love’ was so stridently dissonant, and such a departure from my understanding of harmony, that I kept checking and rechecking the sheet music to see that I had got it right (there is a link to my piano transcription of the song at the top of the essay). Played at stadium volume it would enough to make even the most die-hard thrash metal fan wince.
Two of my favorite songs in my Tom Jones greatest hits collection, ‘Once There was a Time’ and ‘With These Hands’ are songs in the same jazz inflected pop vein – showbiz arrangements that make use of comparatively complex chord changes. ‘With These hands’ even feature the classic key change mid song, allowing Tom Jones to up the ante in his vocal performance. It’s a cliché in the barnstorming tradition. From my current perspective, making a distinction between Tom Jones for this kind of showmanship and any number of R&B singers (including Otis Redding) for using the same tricks has come to seem like inverse-discrimination.
Had I been old enough to be more conscious of soul music in the Sixties, I dare say I would have dismissed Tom Jones as an ersatz version of the real thing, but I might have been quicker to see the obvious showmanship in the performances of even the most soulful singers who came to fame in the Nineteen-Sixties and the continuity with the showbiz tradition – well before the lapse of greats such as Aretha Franklin into her own brand of vapid showbiz limbo.
That Tom Jones, unlike any number of pop stars, has never taken himself too seriously (much less harbored any messianic tendencies), encouraged me to view him more kindly in recent years, influencing my perception (and enjoyment) of his material. If not pathos, there is much more warmth and humanity to what he does than I ever gave him credit for. I used to hate ‘It’s Not Unusual’. The words sounded so much like the product of professional songwriters, and the arrangement sounded so schmaltzy, but these days this isn’t my salient impression. It’s sounds genuinely joyful - a romp - just a young man at the top of his game having a blast.
As the ‘Thunderball’ story illustrates, Tom Jones knew daft lyrics when he saw them, but I have come to think that his commitment to a song is a testament to him as a performer and not simply cheap showbiz chicanery. He transforms the extremely silly words of ‘Thunderball’, embodying the fantastic attributes of the man described in them, and like Sean Connery in the film, miraculously lends it credibility.
The first line of the song is, ‘he always runs while others walk’, and yet I have never experienced the song as being sung by Tom Jones about somebody else; Tom Jones has always been the protagonist in the song. It is a classic Tom Jones performance, depending both on his considerable chops as a singer and also on his credibility as a sex symbol. Imagine Matt Munro, who sang ‘From Russia With Love’, trying to deliver the song - or even one of the great crooners like Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett.
The humor implicit in the idea of me singing ‘Thunderball’ was one of the reasons I first considered covering it. When I sing it, I do not inhabit the role of the protagonist in the song. In my version, I am very definitely singing about someone else (this man who ‘strikes like Thunderball’). It seems to me, that simply by my singing the song, the nasty, threatening aspects of the character implicit in the words are brought. In my hands, the man in the song is revealed as in turn: macho, preening, needy, avaricious, fed-up and, evidently, poised to punch you at any moment. If you were shopping around for a life partner, my favorite line, ‘his needs are more so he gives less’ might tip you off that this he is not ideal relationship material.
There was also humor in the idea of translating a massive, brash, big band arrangement to an acoustic guitar, but something similar happened. The implicit darkness of the arrangement - all of the jazzy dissonant chords, such as the one traced by the strings between verses in the original version - seem to be made darker by my playing them on a solo guitar.
I had been trying to master Finger-Style blues guitar playing for a number of years before it occurred to me to work out version of ‘Thunderball’. This technique depends on using the low strings on the guitar to play a bass pattern while you pick around the chords. ‘Thunderball’ just happened to fall under my fingers in a certain way, presenting not just an interesting chord sequence but also a strong bass pattern reminding me of a Bossa Nova. It drew my attention to obvious, which is that the rhythm in the song is altogether more sinuous and sexy than a straight-ahead rock beat.
Working out the song also allowed me to appreciate that the melody and the chords supporting it are not typical, while sounding like they couldn’t be any other way. Under the first line the chords go from A minor to G major, which is very standard for songs in a minor key, but on the second line the chords are B flat major (‘he acts while other men just) and then E major (on ‘talk’), which to my ears (accustomed to years and years of pop/rock music) sounds just a little odd. I hope that this will not be my Epitaph.
If you have found your way to the end of this essay, I would really appreciate you posting a response on my blog, and if you enjoy it or the music, please spread the word to anyone you know who might like it. Many thanks.
http://www.myspace.com/losttrain
Below are links to the music accompanying this article.
http://www.hughhales-tooke.com/music/thunderball
http://www.hughhales-tooke.com/music/thelookoflove.mp3
http://www.hughhales-tooke.com/music/auprivave.mp3
Even as a small boy, when I first heard the strains of ‘What’s New Pussycat’ or ‘It’s Not Unusual’, I knew that Tom Jones was ‘schmaltz’, which, coming to think of it, must make schmaltz the first Yiddish word that I ever encountered. The Oxford English Dictionary explains that it is “from German Schmaltz ‘dripping lard” meaning “sentmentality,esp.in music, drama etc”, but for me the definition was broader, it was more like the aural equivalent of kitsch (a word I didn’t hear until much later), meaning, the OED agrees, ‘garish, tasteless or sentimental’.
All of the pop music of the pre Beatles era sounded like schmaltz to me: crooners such as Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Andy Williams; the movie Elvis; and Broadway show-tunes in particular. It used to induce a quasi-physical reaction in me. Tom Jones and Engleburt Humperdink - the stars over whose attributes giant ladies hanging out the laundry used to argue – were, in my view, the continuation of this nauseating schmaltzy tradition. Hugely popular, they were far more topical and hence more present and vivid than their forebears, but although they came to popularity amidst the Beatles, Stones, Who and Kinks, they never seemed to be of that generation of pop groups, but emerged from some timeless, showbiz limbo.
Although I had a visceral dislike of his music, forty years on, I have to admit that, with the exception of the Beatles, Tom Jones had as much of impact on my life as any of any of the pop groups of the time. Well before I knew that this bit went into that bit, through close quarters observation of the aforementioned big ladies hanging out the laundry, and the nudge, nudge, wink, wink that went along with any mention of his name, I deduced that Tom Jones had to with whatever it was that men and women (although very definitely not my parents) got up to behind closed doors. He was, I realized, the paragon of male allure - and I am not sure I have ever recovered from this discovery.
It is fitting that Tom Jones should have recorded the theme song to the film, ‘Thunderball’. Sean Connery, who played James Bond, was a film star who, like Tom Jones, had what was referred to on TV at the time, as ‘sex-appeal’, and although I greatly preferred James Bond, it seemed to me that they were both operating in the similar territory (in a world populated by voluptuous women) - you could tell from the similarities in their manly accouterments. They shared the same manly, hairy chest, gold wristwatch, driving-glove aesthetic. They both also caused an extreme reaction in women. After only the most fleeting contact they were either frenzied in their excitement (Tom Jones), or rendered as docile as a sleepwalker (James Bond).
Tom Jones and the Bond films shared a streak of self-mockery. On the topic of his sex appeal, Tom Jones has always been self-deprecating - without denying that he has it.
“I just pump up the tires,” he remarked, implanting an image in mind from which I will, most probably, never be free, “and the husbands get to ride the bike home.”
Increasingly, the Bond films were peppered with absurd innuendos, most obviously in the names of the female characters (Pussy Galore) and the quips – mid-action - seemed to acknowledge the improbability of what was going on, but remarkably, despite all this, Sean Connery made Bond credible – an essential ingredient in being a sex symbol.
The Tom Jones/James Bond pairing fits in other ways too. The Bond themes songs, like Tom Jones, were a throwback to the previous generation. Bond was emphatically not American and yet the theme songs were more reminiscent of the kind of American, big band arrangement of the Rat Pack era rather than British pop of the Nineteen-Sixties. Early on in the decade a crooner singing ‘From Russia With Love’ didn’t seem anachronistic, but well after the Beatles had become superstars Shirley Bassey continued in the same showbiz vein with ‘Goldfinger’. The arrangement for ‘Thunderball’ follows suit.
Unlike his pop band contemporaries, who were writing their own songs, Tom Jones was still working in the showbiz world of the professional songsmith – and he was at their mercy. After scanning the words to ‘Thunderball’ Tom Jones famously asked, “What the bloody hell is it anyway?”
That ‘She Loves You’ was formulaic was evident to anyone with hearing, but it sounded fresh, and authentic, whereas Tom Jones’ sang material redolent of the airless world of songs written in cubicles by professional songwriters.
Even to a six-year-old the work of career songwriters such as ‘My Favorite Things’ from the ‘Sound of Music’ reeked of phoniness. Who, apart from an effete lyricist, gets cheered up by the thought of ‘brown paper packages tied up with string’? But you didn’t even have to think about what the words meant. It is remarkable how much of is transmitted through the sound of a song alone. Show-tunes sounded fake.
From the first moment I heard the sound of Frank Sinatra, and before knowing anything about him, I reacted to the almost violent swagger in his voice. More mature consideration only confirmed this. The horror of the showbiz worldview – the ‘Ugly American’ tourist of the Nineteen-Fifties traveling business class – is vividly encapsulated by the words of ‘Come Fly With Me’.
Come fly with me come fly let’s fly away
If you can use some exotic booze, there’s a bar in far Bombay
(And how about ‘weather-wise it’s such a lovely day’ for redundancy and inelegance)
Before the Sixties, being a performer – showbiz – wasn’t about presenting an authentic version of your self (your views, your life) to the world. Tom Jones had far more in common with Frank Sinatra in this respect than the Beatles, or, more to the point, Otis Redding. That Tom Jones had ability as a singer was undeniable, and even the way in which he sang has a lot in common with the R&B singers emerging in the Sixties, but he was always a performer. Even if Otis Redding didn’t write the song he was singing, the words coming out of his mouth sounded like they might have been his own. This notion of authenticity became central not just to R&B (what is ‘Soul’ otherwise?) but to pop music of all kinds.
When did I begin to change my opinion about some of the above, and reconcile myself with Tom Jones? Comparatively recently although it’s been years since Sixties pop groups have sounded fresh and immediate. There has been plenty of time in which to have grown tired of the same musical clichés repeated over and over, for the pop star schtick to have become wearisome and for the artificiality and the posturing to have become at least as absurd looking as anything from the showbiz tradition. In fact, currently popular music of all types – Bono and good causes aside - is little more than a continuation of that show-biz entertainment tradition.
In time, the words, not just to ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ by the Beatles, but to hits like ‘Satisfaction’ by the Rolling Stones, and ‘All Day and All of The Night’ by the Kinks, seem as limited in outlook – and more juvenile - than any Frank Sinatra song you care to mention. In comparison, the words to a Broadway show-tune such as ‘Somewhere’ have come to seem sharp, tough and worldly. It is more dimensional in other ways too. The way that the music in ‘Somewhere’ reflects the subject of the song is masterful. The aspiration and the desire to escape is expressed in the lyrics is also conveyed by the leap (of a Minor Seventh) between the first two words, ‘There’s a’ (place for us).
There is still a place in my heart for a group such as the Kinks. They never sound livelier than when played directly after lounge music. Their songs are a great musical antidote to the over-sweet, indeterminate sound of a jazz guitar, using chords that are so harmonically complex that they seem to lead everywhere and nowhere. The problem is that, by now, there are hundreds of songs that depend on the same simple structures pioneered by the Kinks and their ilk, and even the originals, let alone all those that have followed, have come to sound extremely predictable.
A classic show tune such as ‘I got Rhythm’ by George and Ira Gershwin follows a much less predictable pattern. Along with Irving Berlin and Hoagey Carmichael, to name a few, these songwriters the tools enabling songs to take unexpected turns, and to find indirect ways of leading up to the catchy choruses.
Show-tunes and songs in the showbiz tradition tend to make use of a wider variety of chords - although these jazz chords are often far from sweet. It occurred to me recently that rock songs have a raw power and energy often related to sheer volume whereas jazz is raw through dissonance (and speed, as in the example of the Charlie Parker tune linked to this essay). Even at low volume Charlie Parker's be-bop recordings are not ‘easy listening’ and experimental Jazz has only got more abrasive since.
In addition to the Dominant Sevenths that are ubiquitous to all music (including the most basic pop as well blues progressions) jazz makes use of a big variety of dissonant chords of that type: Seventh chords that are tweaked by dickering around with the component notes of the chord (sharpened flattened or sharpened Fifths) or those with added notes on top - which is how you arrive at Ninths, Elevenths and Thirteenths chords. All of these chords are members of the same family, with the same function, but create different shadings of dissonance.
You don’t have to dig too deep beneath the surface of even a Burt Bacharach song, someone who has made a career of saccharine sweet jazz inflected pop tunes, (in fact you only have to strip away the vocals) and at times you will hear a surprisingly dissonant chord in the accompaniment. One chord in the ‘Look of Love’ was so stridently dissonant, and such a departure from my understanding of harmony, that I kept checking and rechecking the sheet music to see that I had got it right (there is a link to my piano transcription of the song at the top of the essay). Played at stadium volume it would enough to make even the most die-hard thrash metal fan wince.
Two of my favorite songs in my Tom Jones greatest hits collection, ‘Once There was a Time’ and ‘With These Hands’ are songs in the same jazz inflected pop vein – showbiz arrangements that make use of comparatively complex chord changes. ‘With These hands’ even feature the classic key change mid song, allowing Tom Jones to up the ante in his vocal performance. It’s a cliché in the barnstorming tradition. From my current perspective, making a distinction between Tom Jones for this kind of showmanship and any number of R&B singers (including Otis Redding) for using the same tricks has come to seem like inverse-discrimination.
Had I been old enough to be more conscious of soul music in the Sixties, I dare say I would have dismissed Tom Jones as an ersatz version of the real thing, but I might have been quicker to see the obvious showmanship in the performances of even the most soulful singers who came to fame in the Nineteen-Sixties and the continuity with the showbiz tradition – well before the lapse of greats such as Aretha Franklin into her own brand of vapid showbiz limbo.
That Tom Jones, unlike any number of pop stars, has never taken himself too seriously (much less harbored any messianic tendencies), encouraged me to view him more kindly in recent years, influencing my perception (and enjoyment) of his material. If not pathos, there is much more warmth and humanity to what he does than I ever gave him credit for. I used to hate ‘It’s Not Unusual’. The words sounded so much like the product of professional songwriters, and the arrangement sounded so schmaltzy, but these days this isn’t my salient impression. It’s sounds genuinely joyful - a romp - just a young man at the top of his game having a blast.
As the ‘Thunderball’ story illustrates, Tom Jones knew daft lyrics when he saw them, but I have come to think that his commitment to a song is a testament to him as a performer and not simply cheap showbiz chicanery. He transforms the extremely silly words of ‘Thunderball’, embodying the fantastic attributes of the man described in them, and like Sean Connery in the film, miraculously lends it credibility.
The first line of the song is, ‘he always runs while others walk’, and yet I have never experienced the song as being sung by Tom Jones about somebody else; Tom Jones has always been the protagonist in the song. It is a classic Tom Jones performance, depending both on his considerable chops as a singer and also on his credibility as a sex symbol. Imagine Matt Munro, who sang ‘From Russia With Love’, trying to deliver the song - or even one of the great crooners like Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett.
The humor implicit in the idea of me singing ‘Thunderball’ was one of the reasons I first considered covering it. When I sing it, I do not inhabit the role of the protagonist in the song. In my version, I am very definitely singing about someone else (this man who ‘strikes like Thunderball’). It seems to me, that simply by my singing the song, the nasty, threatening aspects of the character implicit in the words are brought. In my hands, the man in the song is revealed as in turn: macho, preening, needy, avaricious, fed-up and, evidently, poised to punch you at any moment. If you were shopping around for a life partner, my favorite line, ‘his needs are more so he gives less’ might tip you off that this he is not ideal relationship material.
There was also humor in the idea of translating a massive, brash, big band arrangement to an acoustic guitar, but something similar happened. The implicit darkness of the arrangement - all of the jazzy dissonant chords, such as the one traced by the strings between verses in the original version - seem to be made darker by my playing them on a solo guitar.
I had been trying to master Finger-Style blues guitar playing for a number of years before it occurred to me to work out version of ‘Thunderball’. This technique depends on using the low strings on the guitar to play a bass pattern while you pick around the chords. ‘Thunderball’ just happened to fall under my fingers in a certain way, presenting not just an interesting chord sequence but also a strong bass pattern reminding me of a Bossa Nova. It drew my attention to obvious, which is that the rhythm in the song is altogether more sinuous and sexy than a straight-ahead rock beat.
Working out the song also allowed me to appreciate that the melody and the chords supporting it are not typical, while sounding like they couldn’t be any other way. Under the first line the chords go from A minor to G major, which is very standard for songs in a minor key, but on the second line the chords are B flat major (‘he acts while other men just) and then E major (on ‘talk’), which to my ears (accustomed to years and years of pop/rock music) sounds just a little odd. I hope that this will not be my Epitaph.
If you have found your way to the end of this essay, I would really appreciate you posting a response on my blog, and if you enjoy it or the music, please spread the word to anyone you know who might like it. Many thanks.
Friday, 31 August 2007
June's Music and Essay on "Stones in my Passway"
Music file at
http://www.hughhales-tooke.com/music/stones.mp3
In the accompanying mp3 file, Robert Johnson is on the left, and my guitar transcription is on the right.
The first time Keith Richards heard a Robert Johnson recording, he asked his friend, Brian Jones, who the other guy was playing with him. I experienced exactly the same thing. The separation between the thud of the bass part and the sound made by the treble strings is so pronounced, that it does sound like at least two different guitar parts*
After the linear intro, which Robert Johnson plays with a bottleneck, the first chord of this song ('Stones in My Passway') exemplifies what is mysterious about Robert Johnson's guitar playing. My starting point was a transcription by Woody Mann who suggests the song was played in a G tuning. Like a lot of blues musicians, Robert Johnson often made use of tunings other than the standard, classical one. This was in part so that a major chord could be easily created using a bottleneck or a single finger making a barre going straight across the strings, but in his hands open tunings also have the effect of giving simple chords unexpected (often dissonant) shadings. I must have spent half an hour trying to decipher the first chord alone. I keep hearing different notes in it. How he produces the sound is still a mystery to me.
When I first heard a Robert Johnson record, my most salient impression was that the instrument accompanying the voice wasn't a guitar. It sounded like a completely different instrument to me. Even the chords that are strummed sound more like a piano where the notes in a chord are hit simultaneously, rather than plucked sequentially like the strings on a guitar.
Years later, after a long time spent in the music wilderness, no longer able to relate to rock music, or at least to call it my own, and in search of something more ‘authentic,’ I decided to find out more about rural, acoustic blues music and I acquired a number of instructional guitar videotapes on the topic.
One of the interesting discoveries was that, in contrast to the image of the blues-rock guitar god burning up and down the fret-board, in acoustic blues, the hand plucking the strings, demands at least as much skill as the one on the fret-board.
In finger-style playing, the thumb plays the bass strings, functioning like the left hand on a piano. Some blues musicians like Mississippi John Hurt typically used alternating patterns across the fourth, fifth and sixth strings, giving the rhythm a jaunty quality. Other musicians, such as Mance Lipscombe, make use of a bass note played on the same string throughout (I have heard this described as a ‘monotonic bass’) which gives his songs a more insistent, driving feeling. In both styles, the first finger, or possibly first and second fingers, play the higher treble strings.
As with other acoustic blues musicians, the fingering on the fret-board in Robert Johnson's songs is comparatively simple. It is the way that the strings are plucked, strummed and deadened, which contributes a great deal to the particular sonority of his playing.
The variation in the sound depends not only on whether the strings are strummed, or plucked, but also on whether the strum is a down-stroke or an upstroke. Similarly, a bass string sounds completely different depending on whether it is struck and allowed to ring, or if it is muted. The bass in Robert Johnson's playing is muted but also surprisingly loud, giving it a percussive, colorless quality, from which the pitch of the note has largely been extracted. The treble strings, as noted before, are the opposite, their ringing overtones suggesting more notes than have actually been struck, giving them a much richer, and also, untypical harmonic shading. The chords often have a discordant, eerie quality, which along with a great deal of rhythmic variation, help to make the songs seem much more unpredictable than the ubiquitous blues pattern we know so well – even though, in terms of the basis structure, this is exactly what they are.
It is something of a disappointment to me that after all the time spent trying, though I have largely matched the rhythmic aspect of Robert Johnson's playing, and may even have got the tuning and fingering on the fret-board largely correct, when Robert Johnson mutes a bass string, it produces an idiosyncratic, deadened bass sound; when I do so, it produces something of the same effect, but there remains something about the sound which tells you that it's the sound of a hand muting the bass string. This is also true for the chords – mine always sound like chords strummed or plucked on the guitar, Robert Johnson's are just sound -- so much so that, as I said before, at first, I wasn't even sure that they were produced by a guitar. Therein lies the small and yet enormous difference -- but on the other hand, unlike Robert Johnson, I didn't sell my soul to the Devil in exchange for a unique guitar style – which brings me to a few tidbits around the music.
I suspect that even a dirt-poor, white, itinerant, musician working in the Nineteen-Forties might have left more of a paper trail than Robert Johnson, and wonder if this isn't in part due to racism. There is, according to the television documentary I saw, very little physical evidence left of the life Robert Johnson led. Even though he dies a comparatively short time ago, there isn't much to go on so as to triangulate the juke-joint where he died, much less the crossroads where he did his deal with the devil.
B.B.King, the last of the generation to have begun playing music in the South before moving north and strapping on an electric guitar, claims to have seen Robert Johnson playing amidst a circle of people in a forest glade. It's a story I heard such a long time ago, at this point, I am unsure about how much I am contributing to it, but, according to my recollection, B.B described the peculiar, spooky, grip Robert Johnson had on the crowd. Another musician whose name I can't remember, said of Johnson, that when he wasn't drunk, which was seldom (I remember that, particular, unexpected turn of phrase), he wasn't too bad a guy.
Even without the character references, there's a whiff of sulfur around Robert Johnson. The song entitled ‘Me and the Devil,’ is the most conspicuous reference to his preoccupation with the Devil, but you only have to scan the words to his songs to see how often the Devil crops up. My attraction to the songs was principally the guitar playing, but being a frightened Catholic boy at heart, to whom the Devil always seemed much more tangible than God the Father, or even Jesus for that matter, Robert Johnson's interest in the Devil added a layer of intrigue.
There are other qualities in Robert Johnson that I see in myself. For a man who was, by all accounts such a big bad man, there is a naked, vulnerable, self-pitying streak in the words to his songs. He sometimes features himself as a ‘poor Bob’ character in his songs, as he does in the third verse of ‘Stones in my Passway.’ Neither does he have the clichéd, husky, masculine voice that is thought to characterize the blues. He doesn't sound like a 'Hoochie-coochie man.' In fact, his voice is thin and plaintive – slightly strangled even – more like Billie Holiday than Muddy Waters.
The vulnerability of his voice makes it seem authentic as opposed to the projection of a macho stagey sort of persona, helping to distinguish a song such as '32-20' from the everyday misogyny implicit in other songs from a pre politically correct era. The threat is genuinely nasty.
‘I send for my baby, man, and she don't come,
all the doctors in Hot Springs sure can't help her none’
Often, as in a lot of blues songs, the words in Robert Johnson's songs seem fairly formulaic, but there are many other evocative lines. I chose to cover ‘Stones in my Passway’ partly because of the title. I might have chosen ‘Hellhound on my Trail’ for the same reason. I also love the image of ‘blues falling down like hail,’ from that song, which is enhanced by a particularly strange, descending, linear figure on the guitar.
Some of the lines are probably the result of having to fit in with a rhyming scheme, and maybe on occasion, can be attributed to my mishearing the recording. For this reason, I have been reluctant to look up the words to ‘Kind Hearted Woman’ (one of Robert Johnson's best guitar arrangements), which tells of ‘a kind hearted woman’ who ‘studies evil all the time.’ It's a notion that, like much about Robert Johnson's music, lingers in the mind after you've stopped listening to it.
*This is separation between the bass part and melody is illustrated particularly clearly in the fourth verse of the attached song, when the walking bass is interspersed with treble notes.
http://www.hughhales-tooke.com/music/stones.mp3
In the accompanying mp3 file, Robert Johnson is on the left, and my guitar transcription is on the right.
The first time Keith Richards heard a Robert Johnson recording, he asked his friend, Brian Jones, who the other guy was playing with him. I experienced exactly the same thing. The separation between the thud of the bass part and the sound made by the treble strings is so pronounced, that it does sound like at least two different guitar parts*
After the linear intro, which Robert Johnson plays with a bottleneck, the first chord of this song ('Stones in My Passway') exemplifies what is mysterious about Robert Johnson's guitar playing. My starting point was a transcription by Woody Mann who suggests the song was played in a G tuning. Like a lot of blues musicians, Robert Johnson often made use of tunings other than the standard, classical one. This was in part so that a major chord could be easily created using a bottleneck or a single finger making a barre going straight across the strings, but in his hands open tunings also have the effect of giving simple chords unexpected (often dissonant) shadings. I must have spent half an hour trying to decipher the first chord alone. I keep hearing different notes in it. How he produces the sound is still a mystery to me.
When I first heard a Robert Johnson record, my most salient impression was that the instrument accompanying the voice wasn't a guitar. It sounded like a completely different instrument to me. Even the chords that are strummed sound more like a piano where the notes in a chord are hit simultaneously, rather than plucked sequentially like the strings on a guitar.
Years later, after a long time spent in the music wilderness, no longer able to relate to rock music, or at least to call it my own, and in search of something more ‘authentic,’ I decided to find out more about rural, acoustic blues music and I acquired a number of instructional guitar videotapes on the topic.
One of the interesting discoveries was that, in contrast to the image of the blues-rock guitar god burning up and down the fret-board, in acoustic blues, the hand plucking the strings, demands at least as much skill as the one on the fret-board.
In finger-style playing, the thumb plays the bass strings, functioning like the left hand on a piano. Some blues musicians like Mississippi John Hurt typically used alternating patterns across the fourth, fifth and sixth strings, giving the rhythm a jaunty quality. Other musicians, such as Mance Lipscombe, make use of a bass note played on the same string throughout (I have heard this described as a ‘monotonic bass’) which gives his songs a more insistent, driving feeling. In both styles, the first finger, or possibly first and second fingers, play the higher treble strings.
As with other acoustic blues musicians, the fingering on the fret-board in Robert Johnson's songs is comparatively simple. It is the way that the strings are plucked, strummed and deadened, which contributes a great deal to the particular sonority of his playing.
The variation in the sound depends not only on whether the strings are strummed, or plucked, but also on whether the strum is a down-stroke or an upstroke. Similarly, a bass string sounds completely different depending on whether it is struck and allowed to ring, or if it is muted. The bass in Robert Johnson's playing is muted but also surprisingly loud, giving it a percussive, colorless quality, from which the pitch of the note has largely been extracted. The treble strings, as noted before, are the opposite, their ringing overtones suggesting more notes than have actually been struck, giving them a much richer, and also, untypical harmonic shading. The chords often have a discordant, eerie quality, which along with a great deal of rhythmic variation, help to make the songs seem much more unpredictable than the ubiquitous blues pattern we know so well – even though, in terms of the basis structure, this is exactly what they are.
It is something of a disappointment to me that after all the time spent trying, though I have largely matched the rhythmic aspect of Robert Johnson's playing, and may even have got the tuning and fingering on the fret-board largely correct, when Robert Johnson mutes a bass string, it produces an idiosyncratic, deadened bass sound; when I do so, it produces something of the same effect, but there remains something about the sound which tells you that it's the sound of a hand muting the bass string. This is also true for the chords – mine always sound like chords strummed or plucked on the guitar, Robert Johnson's are just sound -- so much so that, as I said before, at first, I wasn't even sure that they were produced by a guitar. Therein lies the small and yet enormous difference -- but on the other hand, unlike Robert Johnson, I didn't sell my soul to the Devil in exchange for a unique guitar style – which brings me to a few tidbits around the music.
I suspect that even a dirt-poor, white, itinerant, musician working in the Nineteen-Forties might have left more of a paper trail than Robert Johnson, and wonder if this isn't in part due to racism. There is, according to the television documentary I saw, very little physical evidence left of the life Robert Johnson led. Even though he dies a comparatively short time ago, there isn't much to go on so as to triangulate the juke-joint where he died, much less the crossroads where he did his deal with the devil.
B.B.King, the last of the generation to have begun playing music in the South before moving north and strapping on an electric guitar, claims to have seen Robert Johnson playing amidst a circle of people in a forest glade. It's a story I heard such a long time ago, at this point, I am unsure about how much I am contributing to it, but, according to my recollection, B.B described the peculiar, spooky, grip Robert Johnson had on the crowd. Another musician whose name I can't remember, said of Johnson, that when he wasn't drunk, which was seldom (I remember that, particular, unexpected turn of phrase), he wasn't too bad a guy.
Even without the character references, there's a whiff of sulfur around Robert Johnson. The song entitled ‘Me and the Devil,’ is the most conspicuous reference to his preoccupation with the Devil, but you only have to scan the words to his songs to see how often the Devil crops up. My attraction to the songs was principally the guitar playing, but being a frightened Catholic boy at heart, to whom the Devil always seemed much more tangible than God the Father, or even Jesus for that matter, Robert Johnson's interest in the Devil added a layer of intrigue.
There are other qualities in Robert Johnson that I see in myself. For a man who was, by all accounts such a big bad man, there is a naked, vulnerable, self-pitying streak in the words to his songs. He sometimes features himself as a ‘poor Bob’ character in his songs, as he does in the third verse of ‘Stones in my Passway.’ Neither does he have the clichéd, husky, masculine voice that is thought to characterize the blues. He doesn't sound like a 'Hoochie-coochie man.' In fact, his voice is thin and plaintive – slightly strangled even – more like Billie Holiday than Muddy Waters.
The vulnerability of his voice makes it seem authentic as opposed to the projection of a macho stagey sort of persona, helping to distinguish a song such as '32-20' from the everyday misogyny implicit in other songs from a pre politically correct era. The threat is genuinely nasty.
‘I send for my baby, man, and she don't come,
all the doctors in Hot Springs sure can't help her none’
Often, as in a lot of blues songs, the words in Robert Johnson's songs seem fairly formulaic, but there are many other evocative lines. I chose to cover ‘Stones in my Passway’ partly because of the title. I might have chosen ‘Hellhound on my Trail’ for the same reason. I also love the image of ‘blues falling down like hail,’ from that song, which is enhanced by a particularly strange, descending, linear figure on the guitar.
Some of the lines are probably the result of having to fit in with a rhyming scheme, and maybe on occasion, can be attributed to my mishearing the recording. For this reason, I have been reluctant to look up the words to ‘Kind Hearted Woman’ (one of Robert Johnson's best guitar arrangements), which tells of ‘a kind hearted woman’ who ‘studies evil all the time.’ It's a notion that, like much about Robert Johnson's music, lingers in the mind after you've stopped listening to it.
*This is separation between the bass part and melody is illustrated particularly clearly in the fourth verse of the attached song, when the walking bass is interspersed with treble notes.
Thursday, 30 August 2007
May's Music and Essay: "Life on Mars"
Music file at
http:www.hughhales-tooke.com/music/mars.mp3
'Life on Mars' makes me feel nostalgic for a summer long ago when I was on shore leave from an 'adventure holiday' on Drake's island in the middle of Plymouth (or was it Portsmouth?) harbor - my mother thinking that this type of holiday would be a character building experience.
It was the year when the promise of sex was evoked for the first time through a sensory blend of the smell of the sea and sun tan oil and the sight of chubby, white- skinned girls in bikinis. The soundtrack to this moment was 'Life on Mars' blaring out of a transistor radio.
There was something elegiac sounding about 'Life on Mars' even when it was released. It has always brought movie soundtracks to mind. Perhaps this was an idea implanted by the words, even though I had forgotten that they talk of a girl ‘hooked to the silver screen’. It is an idea also suggested by the 'epic' orchestration and the structure of the song.
In transcribing it, the breaks between verse and chorus seem obvious, but up until now, the form of the song has always seemed amorphous, with everything flowing along without clear breaks. Could it partly have been that the image of ‘sailors fighting in the dance-halls’, in the first line of the chorus, was so untypical, that despite the crescendo in the music, it didn’t signal ‘chorus’? Neither does the music progress typically. It has a circular sort of arc, building upwards in half steps towards the chorus from the line about the film being ‘a saddening bore', and descends again the same way as Bowie sings ‘Mars’ - not your typical three chord trick.
I hadn't ever noticed the similarities to 'Bohemian Rhapsody' until it struck me that the guitar solo in 'Life On Mars' sounded like Brian May of Queen, but once I'd made the comparison, it was had to get out of my mind. Both songs clearly aspire to be something other than a three minute pop song and they are both over the top in an operatic sort of way, but for all the mannerism 'Life on Mars' transcends pastiche to arrive at an authentic vision. In my view, Bowie's best songs have always had this strange kind of chemistry.
Enjoy the darling buds of May,
http:www.hughhales-tooke.com/music/mars.mp3
'Life on Mars' makes me feel nostalgic for a summer long ago when I was on shore leave from an 'adventure holiday' on Drake's island in the middle of Plymouth (or was it Portsmouth?) harbor - my mother thinking that this type of holiday would be a character building experience.
It was the year when the promise of sex was evoked for the first time through a sensory blend of the smell of the sea and sun tan oil and the sight of chubby, white- skinned girls in bikinis. The soundtrack to this moment was 'Life on Mars' blaring out of a transistor radio.
There was something elegiac sounding about 'Life on Mars' even when it was released. It has always brought movie soundtracks to mind. Perhaps this was an idea implanted by the words, even though I had forgotten that they talk of a girl ‘hooked to the silver screen’. It is an idea also suggested by the 'epic' orchestration and the structure of the song.
In transcribing it, the breaks between verse and chorus seem obvious, but up until now, the form of the song has always seemed amorphous, with everything flowing along without clear breaks. Could it partly have been that the image of ‘sailors fighting in the dance-halls’, in the first line of the chorus, was so untypical, that despite the crescendo in the music, it didn’t signal ‘chorus’? Neither does the music progress typically. It has a circular sort of arc, building upwards in half steps towards the chorus from the line about the film being ‘a saddening bore', and descends again the same way as Bowie sings ‘Mars’ - not your typical three chord trick.
I hadn't ever noticed the similarities to 'Bohemian Rhapsody' until it struck me that the guitar solo in 'Life On Mars' sounded like Brian May of Queen, but once I'd made the comparison, it was had to get out of my mind. Both songs clearly aspire to be something other than a three minute pop song and they are both over the top in an operatic sort of way, but for all the mannerism 'Life on Mars' transcends pastiche to arrive at an authentic vision. In my view, Bowie's best songs have always had this strange kind of chemistry.
Enjoy the darling buds of May,
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