Didn’t I just write something about the B-52′s being a serious and well-respected band? Yeah I said something of that nature, but I don’t recall what it was exactly. Sometimes there’s some seriousness that creeps in; sometimes the B-52′s are just a ridiculous, silly party band who wear huge wigs and dance badly in low budget videos. They’re idiosyncratic, all right. They’re campy, they’re fun, they’re good musicians, they substitute humor for big ideas, they’re great for dancing, they’re weird and they dress bad on purpose. And ‘good stuff’ is shaving cream.
And now for something completely different. Harry Nilsson serenading Hugh Hefner with a children’s song. Everything about this is so 60′s. It was, after all, the moment when Hugh Hefner and his stable of floozies were right with the times, not an anachronistic and increasingly creepy throwback to old-school chauvinism. Harry Nilsson, for his part, was always viewed as a bit of a novelty. Though he was a master of the pop melody and had a voice that could flit easily between many musical styles, he was always unabashedly and unhiply in love with the romantic, occasionally schmaltzy magic of movie music and the standards. He was making a living selling tunes to popular acts like The Monkees and Three Dog Night, but his heart lay not in the pop charts. He was influenced by the tunes crooned by singing lovers in Hollywood musicals from decades before his time. A thoroughly uncool field of interest in the 60′s. Doing covers at the time was considered a sign of failure – you weren’t on a very high level artistically if you couldn’t come up with your own material. It wasn’t until the early seventies that high level artists like David Bowie and Bryan Ferry cautiously introduced the idea of interpretive covers as their own artistic achievement. But those two were working firmly in the pop canon, mining hits from only a few years before. Nilsson went straight for the real deal in 1973, recording an album of Irving Berlin and Kalmar/Ruby covers. There wasn’t much of an audience for those songs then, and Harry’s efforts went unsung by critics and buyers. It’s only recently that everyone and their cousin’s dog has decided they need to try Sinatra’s shoes on for size. Harry Nilsson was always not quite with his times, and he always just missed the acclaim and success he richly deserved.
I once saw, in the days of print media when such things were much more impressive, this song topping some humorist’s list of the most terrible songs ever recorded. To be specific, this was in the nineties, the humorist was Dave Barry, and he dedicated several columns to exploring what the called “the issue of song badness”. In those days when most people still read their humor columns on paper, a column that someone had taken the trouble to type and publish still had some semblance of credibility, even if the author was Dave Barry. Personally, I loved Barry’s column and agreed with most of his opinions on song badness. But it was a little shocking to find a song that I’d always adored considered one of the all-time worst. With a little thought though, I had to admit, Good Morning Starshine is pretty retarded. Lyrically and musically it not only fails to reach the wit and thoughtfulness of James Rado and Jerome Ragni’s other work, but doesn’t even reach the high standards required by some of the lesser Muppets. But such objective critical question aside, it still somehow never fails to make me happy. Perhaps because Hair is such a great movie that anything associated with it is bathed in reflected affection, or because its own shameless silliness is inherently charming in and of itself, but Good Morning Starshine might be the best bad song we all love to sing along to.
A piece of the great American songbook, done many times, but never better than by Billie Holiday. The second most famous version of Good Morning Heartache is by Diana Ross, who played Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues. Ross’s voice is, if anything, too beautiful and her delivery to perfect to do the song justice. Her performance is impeccable but short on soul. Ross doesn’t allow her voice to crack with sorrow the way Holiday does. Billie Holiday truly sounds like she’s been drinking coffee and crying all night. She’s in control now, but in a moment she may break down in tears again. Diana Ross is simply the wrong artist to tackle such emotional material; she’s too much of a glitzy star, one who seems to have forgotten her rough beginnings and got used to being Berry Gordy’s overgroomed poodle. This song is for artists like Holiday and Etta James, who never stopped being haunted by their own heartaches and mistakes.
Take a moment to be astounded once again. John Lennon got the idea for this song after watching a Kellogg’s Cornflakes commercial. A commercial jingle may seem like the last place anyone would draw inspiration from and if you did the results would surely be awful, but this is John Lennon we’re talking about. On Sgt Pepper he also found creative spark in a vintage circus poster and his son’s school art project. One could be tempted to say that finding fascination in mundane little things is just typical of a mind steeped in psychedelic drugs. It’s conventional wisdom to dismiss some of the brilliance of Sgt Pepper as drug-induced, but I believe that’s wrong. The Beatles weren’t using drugs to enhance their creative performance. On the contrary, they took drugs because they were already wildly creative and thirsty for fresh ways to see the world. Drugs, psychedelic or not, don’t do anything to bring about creativity if it isn’t already there. The Beatles were influenced and inspired by what they ingested, indubitably, but they were already brilliant and would have gone on being so without the aid of Dr. Robert.
Also, take a moment to celebrate what would have been George Harrison’s 69th birthday. Though technically, as he revealed shortly before his death, it’s was actually yesterday a little before midnight.
It’s no secret I enjoy Elvis, to some people’s chagrin. No shame, no apologies. I get Elvis, but I’m not sure I get Elvis fans. Here’s a true story. There’s a nice little gift shop near where I live that sells a diverse variety of goodies, from jewelry and vintage clothes, to handmade soap to sports merchandise. There’s dozens of little booths that vendors rent or sublease, or whatever the term would be, and one of them (which I’ve often bought from) is devoted to Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe memorabilia. I’m not exactly sure why Elvis and Marilyn have posthumously been made a couple, but they always seem to go together. Perhaps because they were, in style and cultural impact, the most remembered icons of the 1950′s. Or because both led troubled, drug-addled lives and died young. I don’t think they knew each other or moved in the same circles in life, but who knows maybe they harbored a mutual respect towards one another. The point is, where there’s Elvis memorabilia, there’s Marilyn and vice-versa. So here I am, shopping for something emblazoned with the image of Marilyn Monroe, when I see my favorite booth being restocked, by middle-aged couple both in full icon regalia. He with jet black pompadour and massive muttonchops; she in tight sweater, platinum hair and much too much red lipstick. They were nice and seemingly normal in everything except appearance. He declared with all confidence that “nobody doesn’t like Elvis.” As somebody who threw herself a Lady Gaga dress-up birthday party, I have no place to judge people who still, after all those years and tawdry revelations, want nothing more that to look like The King. Not only do these people run a business devoted to selling Elvis and Marilyn branded crap, they also have to be Elvis and Marilyn. It doesn’t matter that these stars have been dead far longer than I’ve been alive. They still exert an inexorable pull that inspires worship and emulation, from beyond the grave. Truly, it’s as if the concept of material existence is immaterial. Elvis is alive. Inside of his fans, that is.
1989 found Lou Reed at his most politically engaged. Boy, was Lou pissed! The entire New York album swings from rage to depression over the state of the world. Everything from the devastation of the AIDS epidemic to the devastation of urban poverty, the devastation of the environment, and worst of all, the uselessness and corruption of the political process. Listening closely to New York it’s hard not to get the impression that everyone and everything is hopelessly fucked, the world is a mess, a disaster, people are dying, the world is dying and there’s nothing to be done about it. On this track, Reed aims his pen at Kurt Waldheim, at the time the president of Austria and a former member of the Nazi party. Also mentioned is Jesse Jackson, an inflammatory figure in the 80′s who ran for president on a diversity/tolerance platform despite having in the past supported the distinctly racist and radical Nation of Islam. And of, course, the Pope, who can do no right. Reed was all riled up about the hypocrisy of politics, and it seemed like a hopeless situation indeed. But, comfortingly or not, all of those formerly hateful figures have passed from relevance. Jesse Jackson doesn’t wield nearly the influence he used to, John Paul II has died and been replaced with – guess what! – a former member of the Nazi party, and no one cares who the president of Austria might happen to be. Lou Reed hasn’t been so outspoken since then. After New York he settled back into writing in a more personal style, still sensitive to social issues, but no longer dropping names. I wonder how he feels about our current, seemingly hopeless, morass. If he were to write a second New York, who and what would he rage at? Or would raging at the fools in power today be too easy, redundant in the age of internet commentary? Does anybody need an outspoken, angry record album the way we needed New York in 1989?
High up on my list of personal heroes is the woman who calls herself Amanda Fucking Palmer. That she adopted the middle name Fucking is a sign of what a balls-to-the-wall personality she is. To me, she represents a fully liberated life, as an artist and as a woman. Artistically, The Dresden Dolls have thrived without major label support, using social media to connect with fans and having the freedom to whatever they want when they feel like it. Which is as it should be. There’s nothing a major record label can or would do for an act so idiosyncratic. There’s no selling what Palmer calls “Brechtian punk cabaret” to a mainstream audience, and they people who love that sort of thing tend to find it for themselves. Obviously, Amanda Fucking Palmer doesn’t make the bazillions of dollars an Adele does, but I suspect she’d turn down any bazillion that meant she had be anything other than her own gonzo self. She’s liberated herself from all that. I also have to admire her gleeful disregard for standard beauty norms. This is a woman who wrote and recorded a song about pubic hair. She shaves her eyebrows but not her armpits, regularly shows up at events half naked, performs in her underwear, with mussed up hair and smeared lipstick and loves every second. Having seen her up close, I can tell you, she’s a beautiful woman. She could easily dress up pretty and go on TV a lot and be a piano singer/songwriter like ten million others from Tori to Regina. But she’s decided to stand up for unconventional beauty and real self-expression, to be a loud, cursing, sometimes crazy, hairy, oddball, totally free artist.
Kris Kristofferson may sound like a crusty good ‘ole boy, but he’s always fallen squarely on the countercultural side of things. As a songwriter and as an actor he’s built an image as a bit of an outlaw, but a sensitive one. Besides the bruising love songs he’s famous for (Me and Bobby McGee, Help Me Make It Through the Night, etc) he’s often satirizing the establishment. Songs like Blame It On The Stones and The Law Is For Protection are witheringly sarcastic critiques of a cruel and hypocritical mainstream culture. On Good Christian Soldier Kristofferson combines his counter-culture views with the emotional impact his love songs. It’s an anti-war song that’s not political. He’s not pointing fingers at the errors of any government, blaming any churches or demonizing the men who do the fighting. He’s just telling of the human cost of war, the faith and innocence lost in the face of unimaginable destruction. In an era when veteran of the Vietnam War were often treated with contempt by anti-war protesters, Kristofferson took a sympathetic stance. I also like the sympathy he shows for the old-fashioned Christian values of his hero. (I won’t use the word ‘conservative’ as it has become too politically loaded) I don’t know if the divide between Christian and secular communities was as militant in 1971 as it is today, but it’s a fair guess that aspiring to be a soldier for Christ was considered hopelessly backwards and unhip, even to sing about. In writing about a young Okie boy who wants nothing but to serve the Lord and finds himself losing his faith in the Vietnam jungle instead, Kristofferson makes an anti-war point without overtly taking political sides, but using simple humanist empathy. Kristofferson is a performer who defies the expectations of strict labeling, who’s drawn as much from William Blake as the Grand ‘Ole Opry, but he cut his teeth in Nashville and he stands as a reminder of an era when country music was relevant and had an independent spirit. Though it’s hard to name any nowadays songwriter in any genre who approaches Kristofferson in intelligence and heart.
Think it’s impossible to recapture that old spark? Not so! This is the best Blondie song since their Parallel Lines heyday. Blondie started strong, making the most euphoric rock known to man in the late seventies, but on their last two albums in the 80′s it felt like they’d lost their touch. They disbanded and though Debbie Harry pursued a solo career, she couldn’t quite match the verve and energy of her younger self. It was surprising that their comeback was so good. It hasn’t been all solid, but Good Boys matches every best Blondie moment. It would seem improbable that they could ever write another song to compare to Heart of Glass, but this is it. And it’s true – good boys never win.
Recent Comments