April 21, 2008
A Musical Exercise: 6 from the '60s.
The rationale behind all this.
And now 6 songs from the '60s, in chronological order:
1. Irma Thomas, "It's Raining"
1962
This is the second-greatest slow-dance song ever – second only to "Sabor a Mi" (also from a great movie, Wayne Wang's Chan Is Missing, and a decade later, John Sayles' Lone Star). Real-life spouses Roberto Benigni and Nicoletta Braschi danced to "It's Raining" at the end of Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law, and it was my first time to hear it.
I call it only the second-greatest because it's not really a slow-dance song. Irma Thomas is very much alone; if she's dancing at all, it's with herself. But you at least expect the song to end -- especially with the cheerful "drip drop" refrain echoing throughout -- with a knock on the door, or a sweep of the headlights across the window. Instead, there's a slight emotional shift -- just a little one, but it means everything -- in the third stanza: you think she's just waiting for an absent lover, but you realize the lover has left for good. And so she's left (and so are we) with a silent resignation, a surrender to the raindrops. "I guess I'll just go crazy tonight." What a last line.
Amazon link to the compilation Sweet Soul Queen of New Orleans
----------
2. The Spencer Davis Group, "Every Little Bit Hurts (Live)"
1965
I don't know the circumstances of this recording – probably a small club, people not paying much attention. And everyone messes up a bit, actually: Steve Winwood simply repeats the same stanza he sang earlier, the piano comes in a little late, the guitar plays the wrong chord at some point, an amp or speaker or something falls to the stage floor at 1:35. I have this image of Winwood singing his heart out while everything collapses around him.
The song -- a Brenda Holloway hit in 1964 written by Ed Cobb (who also wrote Gloria Jones' "Tainted Love") -- is anchored by a crystalline agony in Winwood's voice. He cries, he sighs, "yet you won't let me go," he sings, but we wonder who really keeps holding on.
Amazon link to the compilation Live Anthology 1965-1968
----------
3. The Beach Boys, "Wouldn't It Be Nice"
from the 1966 album Pet Sounds
It starts with a melody taken straight from a carnival roundabout, with an accordion thrown in. I've always wondered whether it was meant to sound parodic. But no, it's pure innocence, bursting with the thrill of youth and the wishful dreams of adulthood; divorced, no pun intended, from reality, the natural bloom of an endless summer. The song finally peaks with a crescendo of professions of love, and the romantic sweep makes you almost forget that the song ends with a parting ("Good night my baby / Sleep tight my baby").
Indeed, the song is driven by a simple, almost unassailable logic:
We could be married,
And then we'd be happy,
perhaps an equation that only young people in love could truly believe, and it's a testament to the Beach Boys' wide-eyed, eternal youth that you, jaded and older and carrying more baggage than you'd like to admit, even while you're listening to the overplayed song on the supermarket speakers as you pay for your groceries, can have faith in this if only for a moment.
----------
4. The Beatles, "And Your Bird Can Sing"
from the 1966 album Revolver
When I was nine or ten the Beatles stole into my life. (Even before that, when I was three or four, apparently I used to dance to these four musical thieves, boogying down in the living room while my mom put "Taxman" on the turntable, my toes digging into the green carpet.)
But that year I was nine, an entirely new universe burst open from the speakers, a moptopped riot in my ear. Issuing forth from the hi-fi was this magic, the way colonial officials would enchant natives with phonographs, transfixing them with the ghost of the machine inside.
It was at that age that I was turned on -- not in the late '60s sense, for this was 1980 and I was too young and barely conscious of drugs -- but miraculously electrified, jolted, opened to a new magical sphere of listening and hearing and comprehending, as if my nine-year old skinny self had waited all that time for "Nowhere Man" or "Girl" or "A Hard Day's Night". Of course I understood none of it, and its relative emotional simplicities were still lost on a kid who was still deep into "The Electric Company" or Saturday-morning cartoons.
It was the young Beatles -- the baby-faced Paul McCartney -- that my mother adored. So did I, really -- singing along to "Yesterday", though I can't stand it now. My mother dismissed everything after Revolver – even Sgt. Pepper's was too noisy, too chaotic -- and it was more than a decade later that I really began to appreciate the joy of the White Album, of Lennon's acid tenor keening through the grooves. But Revolver was (and is) the touchstone, something my mother and I still share. I think she would pick "Here There and Everywhere" as her favorite; for me though, it's "And Your Bird Can Sing."
The lyrics, whatever they may mean, hover around the edge of comprehension and unattainability ("you can't see me", "you can't hear me"), but the guitar is not beseeching; it soars and dips in and out of the song with utter delight. "And Your Bird Can Sing" has a guitar solo that would be prolonged in other people's hands, but here it's cut deliciously short to fit the strictures of a pop single, with an insistent guitar riff sneaking through the bridge and chorus, running through my blood.
Twenty years later it is still Revolver that reaches out to a much older self. But in the car when I'm singing along to "And Your Bird Can Sing", it still feels like I'm nine years old.
----------
5. Van Morrison, "Sweet Thing"
from the 1968 album Astral Weeks
There is a kind of corniness in the jarringly dated slang ("Hey it's me, I'm dynamite", "just to dig it all") that shakes you out of its timelessness -- Edenic images, promises of eternal youth, all the flutes and plucked strings and guitars, but it reminds the listener, who may look at Big Ivan now and see what looks like a portly, perhaps crotchety, old man, that he was once a wavy-haired hippie troubadour poet, dappled with freckles and spring foliage, the musical descendant of Yeats. It's the words that makes the song slip back and forth from 1968 to an eternal present, where Morrison continues to murmur to his "sugar baby." I don't know what everything in the song means, if not a song of praise to the gift of a woman's arms, but, as Morrison sings, "I'll be satisfied not to read in between the lines."
----------
6. The Beatles, "Here Comes The Sun"
from the 1969 album Abbey Road
If you ask me, the utter beauty of this song alone (okay, this and "Something") almost solidifies an argument for George Harrison as the coolest Beatle. (Plus he was in Monty Python's Life of Brian.)
This is the saddest happy song ever, lighter than all your melancholies, radiantly lit from within.
----------