And the award for Most Depressing Old Pop Song goes to Marlene Dietrich. If such a thing did exist, Dietrich would have a cabinet full of them (right next to the liquor). Sunshine and lollipops she was not. There have been plenty of stars who hid kinky personal lives underneath a wholesome image, but Dietrich never made that pretense. That’s not to say that she wasn’t a classy person who kept her life as private as possible. She created an image that hinted at dark and sexy secrets, which was not at odds with her personality, unlike many stars who were shepherded into portraying an image they didn’t even relate to. Singing some of the raunchiest and/or darkest songs that could slip past the Hayes Code was part of that.
This is when my crotchety geezer self complains that they don’t make music like they used to and cranks up the Buddy Holly. My rational younger self realizes that a lot of innovations have occurred since then, and many of them have been for the better. But when you put on something really great from the 50′s, like a Buddy Holly classic, it’s hard not to wonder what all that innovation was for, anyway. Because four or five guys with instruments in a studio was all anyone needed back then, and look how great they sounded. On the other hand, without innovation, would we have Blondie and their cover of this song? If anything, it’s even better than the original.
Here’s another one of David Bowie’s super camp covers of classic songs from Pinups. The original artist was Billy Boy Arnold, a minor Chicago blues musician who played with Bo Diddley. That’s probably not the version David Bowie heard and loved, though. That would be The Yardbirds’ version. I might be in a small minority here, but I think that The Yardbirds, though they sure knew how to pick guitarists, were one of the less interesting British Invasion bands. They played a sped-up blues-rock, and they played in well, but without the soulfulness of The Animals, the theatricality of The Who or the raw sex appeal of The Rolling Stones. Their cover of Arnold’s song was good, but not particularly memorable. No question, the original, being the original, is more authentic. David Bowie’s cover, though it hasn’t gone down in history as one of his greatest songs, is way on the other end of the spectrum from Billy Boy. It’s amped-up and dramatic, almost a pastiche of the British Invasion sound, and miles away from being recognizable blues. What Bowie’s intentions, aside from having a little fun in the studio, might have been, I don’t know. Maybe he wanted to make some kind of meta statement about musical identity and transformation. There’s a library’s worth of thesis papers waiting to be written about those things. For example, I could take off and write my thesis about David Bowie, a working class young British lad, appropriating American black identity via the already Anglified blues of The Yardbirds, and transmogrifying it into a pansexual non-gender-normative empowerment identity using his own hyper-camp androgynous image as the conduit, concurrently taking the musical language of racial delineation and turning it into a language of sexual and gender role transformation and identity creation. But that would be a pretentious thing to write. What he really did was take an obscure blues song and made it really gay.
Here’s a classic we all know and love, from the golden days of rock and roll. Johnny Cash is a country music great who is beloved by people who hate country music. Like me. That’s partly because in the fifties, there wasn’t a gaping divide between styles of music. Rock came from blues and country and soul and gospel, and sometimes it was hard to see the lines between all of those things. Artists who started out with both feet in one camp would stick a foot or two in another. So Cash is equally valid as an old school country man or one of the founders of rock music, or as folk singer. Another reason he is so admired when others of his generation have been relegated to the remainder bin? No, not because he got a Hollywood movie and they didn’t. It’s just that you can’t help but admire the man’s career trajectory. He found fame in the fifties, one of the most exciting times in musical history, and took his place as one of rock’s biggest influences. Then he suffered a decline, as his simple, down-home musical style became less relevant with the psychedelic revolution and all the other changes that came about. His personal problems were legendary, and that made his music suffer. He made some awful, irrelevant records and played the hillbilly hoedown circuit for a buck. Not exactly unusual. Plenty of drug damaged former stars, left behind by popular tastes, have been reduced to playing state fairs and opening for lesser talents. What’s unusual about Johnny Cash is his comeback. Not only did he live long enough to be swept back to popularity, he had an artistic rebirth. From the mid-nineties into the 2000′s Cash, knowing himself to be terminally ill, made a series of records – The American Recordings – immediately hailed as a career best. Right up until his death in 2003, he was writing and recording his best work in decades. The shadow of death seemed to drive him to say everything he’d always needed to say as an artist. I can’t think of any other musician who knew he was dying and used the time he had left to share his final thoughts. You truly have to look up to a man who drew his greatest inspiration from hard-won end of life wisdom and his own mortality.
Here is a song that has made an interesting journey from deep obscurity to cultural ubiquity. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins was never exactly a mainstream entertainer, as you can guess from his both his name and his visage. His willingness to play to racial stereotype by dressing up as a witch doctor didn’t help him with being taken seriously as an artist. He was seen as a novelty act and it wasn’t until much later that he became celebrated as one of the great innovators who helped invent rock’n'roll. Although the ooga-booga act looks like degrading minstrelsy to modern eyes, it can just as easily be seen as a massive fuck you to white society and assimilation. At a time when black performers who wished to be heard by mainstream audiences had to conform to a very strict image – clean, wholesome, well mannered, soft spoken, nonthreatening - taking up the image of a voodoo man or witch doctor was highly rebellious. That didn’t help Hawkins chart any hits. In fact, his I Put A Spell on You was banned from radio play for being to suggestive. It wasn’t until Creedence Clearwater Revival’s version became a hit in 1968 that the song truly invaded the public consciousness. Since then it’s become one of those songs that every two-bit garage band plays to earn their stripes. It’s been recorded by everybody and their dog, to the point of exhaustion. With artists ranging from Nina Simone to Marilyn Manson, there’s a very wide range of cover quality. My favorite one, not surprisingly, is Bryan Ferry’s. Because while nearly everyone else tries to copy the blues-rock sound of CCR, Ferry made it into a sexy, downtempo groove, which incidentally is how Hawkins originally envisioned the song (until he and his band got so drunk during the record they had no recollection the next day of what they had done.)
What a naughty song! It’s all about fucking sailors, if you didn’t get that. Not a real acceptable topic in the 1950s. Of course, only Marlene Dietrich could get away with something like that. For her to brag about not coming home at night, well, that suited her femme fatale persona just fine. Not to mention that people’s sense of propriety took a nosedive during the war years. Servicing service members was just another part of the war effort, a morale booster for everyone involved. Because folks naturally get sluttier when they’re living in the constant shadow of obliteration. Marlene Dietrich became a glamorous personification of the ballsy, tough wartime woman, a woman who worked as hard as a man and knew how to cut loose afterwards. Dietrich was as free spirited and liberated a broad as the times allowed. Heck, she was a wild one even by today’s standards. But she never allowed her sexy persona get in the way of being taken seriously, or being seen as a moral person. She certainly proved herself a hero in WWII. Having lived and worked in America since 1930, she became a citizen in 1939, refusing Hitler’s invitation to return to the motherland. Throughout the war she sold more war bonds than any other star, traveled to the front lines to entertain the troops and worked with the OSS on musical propaganda. For that work she earned the Medal of Freedom, being the first woman to receive that honor. I don’t know if this song was originally recorded in that era, or if she recorded it at the time she filmed Witness for the Prosecution in 1957, but I think it’s a great bawdy memento of the times either way.
I know this song from the album Full Moon by Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge. Kris and Rita aren’t married anymore, but while they were their passion was wonderfully evident in their duets. Some were tales of heartache, but this one is a joyful ode to enduring love. Unfortunately, Kris and Rita’s version is not on YouTube, so I was forced to dig around and discover something new. Namely, The Browns (shown above hobnobbing it up with Elvis), a country and folk group popular in the fifties. They were known for their tight harmonies, and you can hear why. Jim Ed and Maxine Brown were siblings, hence Maxine’s eye-rolling demeanor in the video. (There was also another sister, Bonnie, excluded here by the duet format.) The lack of that newlywed passion doesn’t make it any less romantic of a song, though.
The thing about the great American standards is, they’ve been incarnated by so many singers in so many different styles that there’s bound to be at least one version that’s up your street. It’s also a bit confusing, not knowing who to attribute a song to. We’ve become used to, in our age of the singer/songwriter, to associate a song with one artist. It’s shocking enough if a cover version outshines the original. A song with no established original and no particular defining moment is hard wrap our heads around. On the other hand, it’s fun to stumble upon different iterations of the same song, each one its own statement, independent of others, and often with different lyrics. How Long Has This Been Going On? was written by George & Ira Gershwin in 1927 for the musical Funny Face. Probably the most familiar version is Audrey Hepburn singing it in the 1957 film. Unfortunately, Hepburn wasn’t much of a singer, so film fans aren’t getting a very good introduction to the song itself. There are plenty of versions to choose from including Judy Garland, Sarah Vaughan, Ray Charles and Rufus Wainwright. I have a soft spot for Ella Fitzgerald and her low-key rendition. Fitzgerald’s singing had an emotional authority that many singers with prettier voices just lacked. She makes it into a very sad song, whilst it was rather a happy one in the musical. While I also like what Vaughan and Garland did with it, my favorite has to be Carmen McRae’s playful take. She makes it sassy and brassy, and to modern ears, I recommend MJ Cole’s remix.
Classic Elvis – it’s great musicianship, you can dance to it, and it’s from when he was young and sexy. It’s very of its time, too. Makes you think back to life in the 1950′s. Though chances are, if you’re reading this, you haven’t been alive that long, but it makes you want to imagine it. And that’s where musical artifacts come in. You can listen to the voice of a dead man, preserved and unchanged through decades, still as vital as ever. What if stars’ voices died with them, when they died? What would be left of our recent history. How would we preserve and remember our cultural changes? We’d be lost. Without the ability to pull out and play an Elvis record, we would have no connection to that time. It would be lost, time out of mind, as the people who lived it became fewer and fewer. So try and appreciate what we’ve got and be glad we can preserve the dead.
Classic. Even if you’re not an Elvis fan, you have to agree. There’s lots of reasons not to like Elvis; his vulgarity, his despicable cultus, his wholehearted swandive into self-parody, the bad movies, the jumpsuits, etc. Some people even like to scapegoat him for co-opting black music for white consumption, which is unfair. That was just how the music industry worked in those days and it wasn’t his fault. But even people who are turned off by the whole Elvis mythos find it hard to deny the man’s charisma. It’s also hard to deny how flat-out good those early performances of his were. The moves, the swagger, the grin, that voice. When Elvis hit America, it was like nothing anyone had ever seen. Nobody moved like that. It’s true also, like some detractors say, that Elvis was a through and through a teen idol, that’s not exactly the grave insult they think it is. He was an entertainer who came of age at a time when entertainers were just that – he didn’t think of himself as an artist or a creator or a figure of great political import. He was there to sing and dance and make young girls squeal. Although that way of thinking may be the reason why his choice of material was ofttimes poor, it was the typical way of thinking for stars of his era. Before the sixties, actors and singers did the projects their managers told them to do and weren’t expected to have ideas of their own. At that time, the singer’s job was to interpret the songs he was given, and Elvis was great at that. Don’t forget what a great vocalist he was, when he had good material, and even when he didn’t. When you go back to those early hits of his, it’s impossible to deny they were great.
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