Every Great Song Ever

The Shangri-Las: “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” (Red Bird RB 10-008, 1964)

Writer/producer Shadow Morton died on Valentine’s Day. This is the first song he ever wrote or produced.

Morton wasn’t really a songwriter in 1964, but he wanted to be one, and the fact that he’d never put a note down on paper didn’t stop him from visiting the Brill Building, where his old girlfriend, Ellie Greenwich, worked as part of a very successful writer/producer duo with Jeff Barry. He told them he’d written a bunch of potential hits.

Barry saw through it and challenged him to bring in a demo. I don’t imagine he thought he’d hear anything like this. Barry and Greenwich knew something about teen drama and writing hits. They’d been working with Phil Spector since 1962. They wrote “Da Doo Ron Ron,” “Be My Baby,” “Then He Kissed Me,” and “Baby I Love You,” four songs that essentially defined the girl group sound, at least until The Supremes broke big a couple of years later.

So Shadow Morton, still known as George at the time, left the Brill Building and drove to the beach. With seagulls calling outside, he sat in his car and wrote “Remember (Walking in the Sand).” The Shangri-Las were singing in clubs after a couple of flop singles and had no record contract at the time, and he convinced them to cut a demo of the song with him (Billy Joel, working sessions in his pre-Atila days, played piano on the demo).

I’m trying to picture Jeff Barry listening to this in his office the following week. It wasn’t this exact recording, but it must have been clear how great it was, so Barry must have felt odd knowing that this guy who had obviously been bullshitting him a few days earlier had made good on his claims. Regardless, Barry got Morton and the Shangri-Las contracts with Red Bird, a little-remembered but amazingly successful label where Barry and Greenwich were the lead producers.

“Remember” got to #5, and it launched the Shangri-Las to sudden stardom. This song really gets me—it is uncommonly dark for its time. Morton had taken the big drama of the Spector-produced girl groups and twisted it into detailed, harrowing melodrama. The girl narrating this song is distraught over losing her lover, man she has not seen for a year and who has now sent her a letter telling her he’s found someone else. What a jerk.

In Mary Weiss, Morton found the perfect actress to deliver his lines—she nails the desperation of the prechorus, sputtering “let me think, let me think/what can I do” with utter desperation as the chord sequence spirals down three beats at a time.

And then the gulls come.

This would be a brilliant song in almost any arrangement, but the thing that always sticks with me most is the seagulls that creep into the chorus, which is weirdly the quietest part of the song. They start out way in the background, but they get louder as the chorus goes on, and the effect is chilling.

This is not some sunny beach scene—it is pretty much that awful, hot-feeling kind of headache you get when you realize things have gone terribly wrong and there is nothing you can do about it, transformed into music. Possibly, it’s the same feeling Morton had as he left the Brill Building knowing he had no songs with which to answer Barry’s challenge.

What you do with panic makes a big difference to the kind of life you lead. If it swallows you whole, as it appears to do with this song’s poor narrator, it may be the end of you. But if you can harness it to spur creation, as Morton did, it might lead to something great.

Morton rode high for a few years as a writer and producer in the mid-60s, then had a fair amount of success during the 60s/70s transition years producing hard rock and proto-prog bands, including Vanilla Fudge, whose biggest hit was a grotesque heavy rock version of a girl group hit (the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On”), and Iron Butterfly, who played their infamous 17-minute version of “Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida” at Morton’s urging as he pretended to fix his mixing board (he was actually recording them without telling them).

He left music in the 70s and never really made a comeback. Unlike Phil Spector, he never did any legacy productions with John Lennon or the Ramones, and unlike David Axelrod, he never became a vogue household name or reliable sample fodder. But he did help make some of the best records of the 60s, and this is one of them.

everygreatsongever:

Donald Byrd: I’ve Longed And Searched For My Mother (I’m Tryin’ To Get Home, 1964)

For an album called I’m Tryin’ To Get Home, Donald Byrd’s tenth LP as a bandleader is for the most part remarkably celebratory. Like its predecessor, A New Perspective, it combines threads of cool jazz and gospel to create a seamless and singular sound. A few years later, Quincy Jones took this same kind of sound, dragged it further out of church and shot it into orbit on his great Walking In Space LP, but here it still has a strongly organic feel.

In the middle of all this joyous, wordless singing and upbeat jamming, though, is this song, “I’ve Longed And Searched For My Mother,” which is… I don’t know what you’d call it. A cosmic funeral march, perhaps. It twists the ebullience of the rest of the LP inside out, and for all its very intentional drama, it’s really a devastating piece of music.

Byrd takes the sound he’d developed and pulls it apart, strand by strand, isolating one female voice and setting her away from the background singers. The others may be there, cooing at the fringes, but she is alone. He has the saxes playing at the very bottom of their range, where the tone is naturally rougher and less even, and he keeps his own trumpet muted at the outset, calling out from the distance. When he finally takes a solo, he doesn’t sing out—he sings inward. His trumpet sounds exhausted but determined.

It’s a modern tone poem. It doesn’t tell a story with a concrete beginning, middle and end, but it does nevertheless tell a complete story, taking you on a journey of ache.

Albums like this make me wonder why I don’t hear more about Byrd as a bandleader. He’s widely respected as a trumpeter, but the LPs he made under his own name aren’t usually considered must-hear entries in the jazz canon unless you’re already in deep. I suspect some hardcore jazz heads never forgave him for the records he made in the 70s with the Blackbyrds, a fusion group he assembled from among his best students as he was teaching music at the university level. It’s also awfully hard to make a dent in jazz’s front line when it’s populated by guys like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Bill Evans and Dizzy Gillespie.

Regardless, the guy was a fantastic leader with lots of great, creative ideas, and exploring his catalog reveals some amazing stuff, from his hard bop days in the 50s all the way through the Blackbyrds. His roughest fusion record, 1971’s Ethiopian Knights, is a favorite of mine.

I’ve loved this song for years, but there’s a reason I chose to write about it today.

Byrd was born Donaldson Toussaint L’Ouverture Byrd II in 1932. He grew up in Detroit, was a music major at Wayne State University, and went on to a brilliant and prolific career leading his own bands and playing with Coltrane, Art Blakey, Lionel Hampton (while he was still in high school!), Herbie Hancock, Paul Chambers, Horace Silver, Red Garland, Jackie McLean, Sonny Rollins and others. He was one of the last people to play with Eric Dolphy before the woodwind player’s untimely death from insulin shock.

And he taught his craft generously, to students at Oberlin, Rutgers, Howard and half a dozen other schools. He’s still going today at 77, living in New Jersey.

And as for me, I just moved to the Detroit area so my wife could teach at Wayne State. And there is something about this piece of music that matches the journey of Byrd’s home city over the last five decades. Detroit’s population peaked in 1950. Things were already changing by the time Byrd recorded this fourteen years later—the ‘67 riots weren’t the beginning of the end like we’re often told. They were a step along the way.

And of course, you’ve seen the photos of abandoned homes and factories, and the vacant lots, and you’ve heard about the white flight and the hollowing of the city’s core. But I’ve been around this place a little now, and I can tell you it’s not all bad. The suburbs and the city still have their backs turned to each other, and there’s a lot to be done, but the thought of doing it makes Detroit an uncommonly exciting place to be these days.

And that’s the bit I left out of my description of the song above—the edge of hope. It has the ring of a long, exhausting journey that hasn’t reached its destination yet. You don’t know where else it will take you, but the future just might carry you home. And that’s something to look forward to.

Donald Byrd passed away last week, and I’ve been wanting to do a proper remembrance post. Re-sharing this will have to do for the moment.

The Troggs: “I Can’t Control Myself” (Page One POF 001, 1966)

Troggs vocalist Reg Presley died today after a bout with cancer. He was 71.

Back in middle school, we had a music appreciation class, and there was a program of old songs cut together in a big medley marketed under the title “Rock On!” that we all learned to sing in unison. “Wild Thing” was one of those songs, and I remember even back then thinking that it sounded so much rougher and uglier than the other stuff in the program. 

Years later, during college, I was sitting in my dorm room listening to the cut-price Troggs compilation I’d just bought and I realized what the primary difference was: on their early recordings, The Troggs had no cymbals. Check out “I Can’t Control Myself.” The drums are just thudding snare, tom tom and kick. There’s no ride dividing the pulse, no crash for accents, just Ronnie Bond’s raw pounding to back up the basic chords and Presley’s lascivious vocal, which was too much for a lot of radio stations in its day. 

The Troggs formed in Andover, England as the Troglodytes, a fitting name for their sound. they got picked up by the manager of the Kinks and shortened it, then joined the Kinks as progenitors of a basic sound you could legitimately call a precursor of punk. Both bands moved on quickly, but once the genie was out of the bottle, it wasn’t going back in. 

The Troggs got some cymbals and made the pop gem “With a Girl Like You,” their only UK #1 (“Wild Thing” topped the US chart), then slid sideways into something like psychedelia with “Night of the Long Grass” and “Love Is All Around.” By 1969, they’d fallen to the back of the pack and called it quits. 

The members stayed in music, though, and they reunited less than a year later to toil in obscurity, making albums sporadically. The final one was an unlikely 1991 collaboration with members of REM called Athens Andover, which I used to see in used bins, though I’ve never heard it. 

Presley had to finally leave music two years ago after his lung cancer diagnosis, but otherwise, he stuck at it his whole life and left some great stuff behind. Press play on that primal yowl one more time. 

Beacon Street Union: “May I Light your Cigarette” (The Clown Died in Marvin Gardens, 1968)

Beacon Street is one of the major avenues of Boston, running from the base of Beacon Hill, near the Massachusetts state capital through Back Bay and Copley Square into Brookline, past Boston College and out to Newton. During my freshman year of college, I once rode the entire length of it as the passenger in a Jeep being driven way too fast by a person whose idiocy knew much greater depths than I’d yet discovered. 

It’s a beautiful road, though, to the extent that roads can be beautiful. It runs through the entire urban transect, from lanes shadowed by tall buildings to full-on suburbia and small remnants of the pastoral Boston hinterland of old. Beacon Street Union was a Boston band, sometimes cited as one of the early Bosstown Sound groups; I should note that I don’t really think the Bosstown Sound was a real thing. It’s more a name people cooked to try and apply coherence to a bunch of pretty disparate-sounding bands. 

They all went to Boston University, and their music ranged from pretty ordinary rock and roll covers and standard-issue beat to much stranger stuff. The Clown Died In Marvin Gardens, the second of the two albums they released in 1968 (they released a third in 1970 under the name Eagle after moving to New York) is a weird jumble of all their tendencies. Side one features a Doors-y waltz, a chamber pop oddity, a jarring and not very good cover of “Blue Suede Shoes,” a hint of funky soul, and some gestures toward psychedelia.

Flip it to side two, and you were confronted with this. “May I Light Your Cigarette” is a plain odd soundscape-and-spoken-word piece that’s as unsettling as anything else I’ve heard from 1968. John Lincoln Wright’s nonchalant delivery makes the vocal sound structureless at first, but it keeps coming around to the same beats, there are hidden internal rhymes all over the place, and it turns out to have a well-considered organization.  It’s followed by a wild, 17-minute version of “Baby Please Don’t Go.”

“May I Light Your Cigarette” resonates with me in a way that’s hard to describe. All that wobbly guitar and the unpredictable rise and fall of the vocal remind me a bit of walking through Boston at night in the winter, with the wind hard in your face and your collar up on your cheeks. There’s a very specific image of smokers on a sidewalk that comes to me when I listen to it—I see the red brick facades of the portion of Beacon Street that runs through Back Bay as they shiver and draw in the smoke.

I must have witnessed that exact scene a hundred times in the four years I lived in Boston, so it’s no stretch. The sidewalks of Boston are wonderfully busy places. Its skyscrapers aside, Boston has managed to maintain a human enough sense of scale that the streets are usually filled with people walking where they need to go. That’s one of the things I miss about it. I haven’t been back in eleven years, and I haven’t found another city quite like it.

Liner Note

Weirdly, the deceased clown on the album cover is the same clown that appears on the cover of The Doors’ Strange Days. 

Scott McKenzie: “San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair)” (The Voice of Scott McKenzie, 1967)

Every once in a while, pop culture attempts to mythologize a place or time become self-fulfilling. That’s what happened with this song. Written by John Phillips of the Mamas & Papas for McKenzie to celebrate what Phillips saw as the birth of a vital subculture whose ideals promised a better world, the song actually inspired people to go to San Francisco.

So many people came to San Francisco in the late 60s, in fact, that they drove a lot of the original flower-wearing hippies out as the Haight-Ashbury district was overrun by people trying to glom on to the moment. That’s hardly McKenzie and Phillips’ fault, though. Their song was written as a tribute to the counterculture, but recorded as a pop hit in waiting, with Hal Blaine on drums and booming production that gave McKenzie’s great voice a nearly perfect vehicle.

McKenzie and Phillips knew each other from their childhoods on the East Coast and had sung together in a folk trio called the Journeymen before Phillips rose to fame with the Mamas & Papas, so Phillips knew the voice he was writing for. 

I’ve loved this song since I was a kid—I can see how someone in a little, uptight middle American town might have heard it in 1967 and said, “yeah, I should go there and figure out a new way to live.” McKenzie’s vocal is powerful but not showy, a charismatic travel agent for a city he didn’t live in and a generation he wasn’t part of (he was born before World War II). 

Even the album cover left a lot of room for his voice—there he is, singing, but he’s all the way down in the corner, with a big, black field of negative space that he can pour his vocal into. 

McKenzie died last year at 73, but he’ll live for a long time in this song, an emissary of the pre-mythologized 60s that have been handed down to us by radio. 

Marva Whitney: “What Do I Have to Do (To Prove My Love to You)” (King 45-KNG 002, 1968)

A quick post in remembrance of Marva Whitney, who passed away last week at the age of 68. She’d been performing for 65 years. That’s right. Her career began at age three, when she started singing with a family gospel group. 

It peaked in the late 60s, during her short but fruitful association with James Brown. For a few years, she was his soul sister #1, and together, they cut a handful of monster funk tracks, including this one, which still sounds wicked all these years later.

Whitney also recorded for the Isley Brothers’ label (one of her singles prior to signing with them had been a response to “It’s Your Thing”), and spent most of the 90s touring with a cadre of other former Brown disciples. She recorded a single in 2006 with Japan’s great Osaka Monaurail, which fashions itself in the mold of Brown’s early 70s recordings.

In 2009, she had a stroke on stage in Australia, but came back at age 66. You can feel her power on “What Do I Have to Do.”

Fontella Bass: “Since I Fell for You” (The ‘New’ Look, 1965)

Last week, two great soul singers, Fontella Bass and Marva Whitney, left us. Whitney, who I’ll come back to tomorrow, wasn’t well-known to the general public, but Bass was, if only for the one massive hit that cemented her as a radio staple for nearly five decades.

That hit, 1965’s “Rescue Me,” endures because it deserves to—everything about it is memorable. Bass might have had more like it, but there were complications. She co-wrote the song, but received no credit and subsequently no royalties. This happened to a lot of performers in her day (and she was doubly subject to discrimination, being a black woman), but Bass was among the few who stood up for herself.

It was the right thing to do, but it killed her momentum as a performer—she didn’t release another album until 1972’s funky Free, by which point her moment had passed, commercially. Artistically, though, she did some great work, and her two 1970 collaborations with the Art Ensemble of Chicago (she was married to AEOC member Lester Bowie), recorded while they were living in France, are awesome, inspiring records full of audacious ideas courageously executed.

Bass stepped away from music after Free failed to sell and focused on raising the four children she had with Bowie. She stepped back in during the 90s, though, recording and performing occasionally; in the 00s, she was responsible for most of the highlights on two albums by the Cinematic Orchestra. 

“Since I Fell For You” was on the same LP that included “Rescue Me,” and I think it may be my favorite recording of hers. She could belt with the best of them, but I love the range she shows here. She shows her power on the refrain, but also a delicate touch in the verses that makes me think she could have had a hell of a career if she’d had the support she deserved. 

Frank Wilson: “Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)” (Soul S-35019, 1965)

Frank Wilson died yesterday at the age of 71. It wasn’t widely reported because Wilson wasn’t particularly famous, but he did have a pretty interesting entry among the footnotes of American popular music. 

WIlson was a songwriter and producer. Born in Texas, he grew up in LA, and when the Motown Recording Company opened its LA branch in 1965, Wilson joined the team. That same year, he recorded “Do I Love You (Indeed I Do).” Berry Gordy didn’t especially like it, and Wilson wanted to focus on producing, so the 250 test pressings of the 45 that would have been Soul S-35019 were ordered destroyed. 

Somehow, a couple of copies escaped annihilation (one of these sold recently for over $25,000), and the song was extensively bootlegged in Britain, where it became a favorite of the Northern Soul scene. So a song that was never supposed to see the light of day became the soundtrack for kids dancing all night at Wigan Casino.

Wilson produced records for Brenda Holloway, The Four Tops, the Supremes, the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and the Miracles, among others for Motown, and also had his own publishing companies. He quit Motown after a decade behind the boards there, became born again, entered the ministry, and ended up writing some big-selling inspirational books (he also kept making music—his last credit was in 2006 for John Legend).

His lone solo recording, rescued from oblivion by some unknown twist of fate, is all the inspiration I need from him, though. That pedal guitar part, the charging rhythm, the color saturation of the orchestration, and Wilson’s own vocals, hanging on for dear life, are so obviously the makings of a classic, that the song couldn’t help becoming one in spite of the long odds. 

Isaac Hayes: “Walk on By” (Hot Buttered Soul, 1969)

You may have already heard that lyricist Hal David, author of numerous hits with Burt Bacharach, died yesterday at age 91. That’s a good, long life for a guy who was never a household name even as his songs played in households all over the world. He seems to have been a pretty well-adjusted guy, content with his role behind the scenes even as his main songwriting partner, Bacharach,  became famous in his own right.

David and Bacharach are heavily identified with the 60s, when their distinctive brand of lightweight pop music was all over the radio—they’re as emblematic of the decade as hippies and psychedelia, at least. Strip away the fluffy orchestration, though, and you’re left with some songs that explore love and loss as skillfully as any. 

That’s one of the reasons I love Isaac Hayes’ epic take on one of the duo’s signature songs, “Walk on By.” Hayes re-orchestrates the song with heavy strings and trippy fuzz guitar and sings it with a love-destroyed anguish that foregrounds the emotion locked in the words. Dionne Warwick’s version is good, but sounds oddly private—this blows it up to widescreen size and replaces quiet drama with melodrama. 

I wish I knew what David thought of this reading—I can’t find an interview where he’s asked about it.