Every Great Song Ever

George Jones: “The Grand Tour” (The Grand Tour, 1974)

No one did heartbreak quite like George Jones. It’s hard to think of another songwriter that got dumped so regularly and with such exquisitely detailed emotion.

He did that for about sixty years, and along the way his voice became the prototype for hundreds of other country singers. He had a great voice, but his songs worked as much for his delivery, which felt honest no matter how cleverly the phrase it was carrying turned.

He was 81 when he passed away yesterday. I’ve seen a lot of people express surprise that he made it to such an old age, but what can you say? The man’s liver was stout, and his songs turned the tables on everything awful about life with subtle humor. Let a few tears fall in your beer and raise your glass to him.

The Temptations: “Law of the Land” (Masterpiece, 1973)

Last week, we lost both Richard Street and Damon Harris of the Temptations. Both were members of the group during the early 70s, when Norman Whitfield used them as one of his vehicles for psychedelic soul experimentation, and they can be heard trading lines on classics including “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” “Superstar (Remember How You Got Where You Are)” and “Funky Music Sho Nuff Turns Me On.”

Harris was brought into the group to replace Eddie Kendricks, whose distinctive falsetto was a centerpiece of some of the Tempts’ biggest hits, and he stayed for four years, long enough to make a big mark. It must have been amazing for him-he’d started his career singing in a group called the Young Tempts, a Temptations tribute, and he was the kid of the group nearly ten years younger than the rest. He was born Otis Harris, but changed his name to Damon to join the group—Otis Williams wanted to be the only Otis.

Street joined in 1971, replacing Paul Williams, whose deteriorating health and spiraling addiction forced him out of music and to a tragic early death by his own hand. He’d been with Motown for a while by that point as a member of the Monitors and a staffer in Quality Control, and believe it or not, he was the first native-born Detroiter to sing with the Temptations. Everyone else had been born in the South. 

While Harris’ tenure with the group was brief but brilliant, Street remained through 1993, staying through some of the group’s leanest years after joining them near their peak.

By most reports, the Temptations didn’t really enjoy singing Norman Whitfield’s message tracks—the longer-tenured members especially preferred singing harmony, and Kendricks left the group over the direction Whitfield took them in. You wouldn’t naturally guess that from listening to the way they attack storming funk numbers like “Law of the Land,” and this phase of the group’s career was arguably more influential than the pre-“Cloud Nine” string of harmony-laden hits they had in the mid-60s. 

Harris had some minor success in the late 70s singing with Philly soul outfit Impact, then left music for a decade to go to college. He and Street were reunited in the 90s singing together in a Temptations revue that toured separately from the official group. Harris also founded his own cancer charity after being diagnosed with the prostate cancer that finally took his life last month. He was 62. Street was 70.

Kevin Ayers: “Interview” (Bananamour, 1973)

I was sad to hear of the death of Kevin Ayers last month. Ayers was one of the great eccentrics of pop music, the kind of guy who’d make whatever record he felt like making and let it sell if people wanted to buy it. He didn’t enjoy self-promotion and became a sort of archetypal cult figure because of it.

I went back and forth over which song to feature in his honor, and finally decided on “Interview,” a song about hating self-promotion and the rigamarole of life as a professional musician. It’s not bilious like so many songs in this vein, though—Ayers keeps it playful, implying that he’ll give a better interview in exchange for a bribe.

Ayers’ solo career isn’t perfect. His albums have a lot of oddball ideas on them, and they don’t all fly, but they do sketch out a charming vision of a world in which psychedelia never lost its grip on the pop charts and skewed humor was a coin in the everyday currency of rock and roll.

Whimsy was important to Ayers’ music. He came from the so-called Canterbury scene,where he spent the mid-60s playing in The Wilde Flowers, a band that at various points also included the founders of Caravan, Gong, and Soft Machine, which Ayers was a member of for two years before striking out on his own.

These groups played cerebral rock music that drew heavily from jazz for its structures, but for all its up-front virtuosity, it was mostly lacking in the overt masculinity most of the era’s prog and blues rock. It was whimsical and witty, given to abstraction and occasional nonsense, and not afraid to give an album a title like “Bananamour.”

If you can’t see it in the jpg on your feed, yes, the cover does feature two bananas in love in the lower right corner. For a while, Ayers referred to his band as “The Whole World,” as in “Kevin Ayers and the Whole World,” which I always loved as a band name because of the way it includes the listener in the creative process.

Ayers spent much of the 90s and early 00s sequestered in southern France, but came back in 2007 with the poignant farewell LP The Unfairground, which featured old colleagues as well as large cast of younger indie rock musicians. Never much of a touring musician, Ayers let it be the final word. He died in his sleep on February 18th, back in southern France.

Shiver: “Tough As Nails” (Shiver, 1972) 

I don’t know exactly when or how it happened, but as I got older, I developed a taste for heavy rock. It wasn’t something I ever liked when I was younger. I listened to tons of classic rock, but didn’t start liking Led Zeppelin until my mid-20s. My friends’ metal albums in high school and middle did nothing for me (that hasn’t changed much, honestly).

It feels like I’ve done this backward—you’re supposed to get into all this loud, thundering music when you’re young, disillusioned and rowdy, except I’ve never been rowdy at all, and I’ve always felt that I had a pretty healthy relationship with my disillusionment. Outside of Hendrix, Nirvana, and maybe Pink Floyd’s “The Nile Song,” straight-up hard rock just wasn’t a thing that interested me when I was supposed to be interested in it. I got into it through the back door beginning in my late 20s, when my interest in old psychedelia and progressive rock led me to a few bands, and then I sat down and really listened to Black Sabbath and could hardly believe I’d been ignoring them for so long.

So it was with a historian’s ear that I first probed the depths of late 60s and early 70s hard rock, with a sampling of the 80s and 90s thrown in. I followed recommendations, took shots in the dark, and listened intently, trying to figure out what was going on in there that I suddenly liked so much. And then a funny thing happened: I started just enjoying it on the visceral level you’re supposed to enjoy most of it on. Like, just cranking the heaviest stuff I could find in the car and feeling it surge through me and trying to remind myself not to speed too much. 

It’s a good feeling for someone who’s made a life out of over-thinking everything. Let go. Feel the music instead of considering it. I guess I did that with funk first, but funk and hard rock fill two different holes in my life, with maybe a little bit of overlap. This is different from giving in to the emotion of music—I’d been doing that since I spent all those cumulative hours lying on my bed listening to “Wish You Were Here” detail-for-detail as though it would somehow help me merge with the great weight of longing at its core, which felt oddly similar to my own feelings about what I wanted out of life.

Today, I found this track by San Francisco’s Shiver, recorded in 1972, but hidden from the world until Shadoks put it out decades later. It’s a ragged, raging, live-in-the-studio instrumental, and when I first listened to it, all I could do was wonder where it had been all my life. They play with the kind of abandon I wish I was capable of, out of control, but totally in control. It radiates confidence, and it is teeth-cracking, wall-smashing heavy. 

Shiver was a power trio of guitarist/screamer Frank Twist, drummer Don Peck, and bassist Neil Peron—they were fried hippies playing brutal music in a city burning out on peace and love in Nixon’s America, their music more in tune with the blasted hard rock coming out of places like Detroit than anything you’d tie to Saturdays in the park with Timothy Leary. If they had local heroes, it had to be Blue Cheer. 

They had a fourth member before they made these recordings, a guy with a hook for a hand who used the hook to play slide guitar, which is something to visualize. From the sound of “Tough As Nails,” Twist did not need another guitarist in the band. The guy could shred. The whole band could play, but none of them ever seem to have gained much of a profile outside Shiver, which was a blip on the 70s rock radar that an air traffic controller could have easily dismissed as a wayward chickadee. 

There are a lot of comps of 60s and 70s rock bands that never put out a record during their time together, and I have listened to a lot of them. More often than not, it’s pretty clear why the music was previously unreleased. But every now and then you get one like this, where you can only imagine reasons the band never got out of the starting gate. Shiver seems to have been a wrong place-wrong time proposition. They gave it everything they had when they got their one chance to put their troglodytic bomp on record—Twist shouts so hard on the vocal tracks that his mic feeds back. 

I had problems with a mild heart condition when I was a teenager, and ever since, there’s rarely been a moment when I wasn’t aware of the base biology of my body—keeping track of my own blood moving through my vessels makes it hard to get to sleep some nights, and the aches and pains that come more frequently as your age gets higher have exacerbated that tendency. Somehow, the blood pumping through this music, so close to the surface, makes me feel more comfortable with that. I’ll bet that’s something Peck, Peron and Twist never figured on when they rolled the tape and played their guts out back in ‘72.

Mandrill: “Hang Loose” (Composite Truth, 1972)

One of the three brothers who founded the great funk band Mandrill, Louis Wilson, died yesterday. Lou, Carlos, and Rick Wilson were the core of the band, and also its horn section/vocal section. Born in Panama, they grew up in Brooklyn, and all three of them were still involved in Mandrill, as were several of the non-Wilson original members. 

The band showcased a pioneering blend of swampy funk and rock pyrotechnics that samplers simply loved in the 90s. Any cursory trawl across a half-dozen hip-hop records from the first half of that decade will turn up a snippet of at least one of their old tracks. The “Peace and Love” suite has been sampled at least a dozen times. 

I can’t think of anything that samples “Hang Loose,” so somebody really ought to get on that. I love that knocking rhythm. And the Wilson brothers’ horns play things so cool against their traded-off vocals, which get gritty talking about poverty. They give guitarist Omar Mesa plenty of room for a burning solo in the middle.

If I have no idea if the band will keep performing live without one of the Wilsons gone. It’s hard to imagine them stopping—they’ve been at it for so long. If they do keep going, it won’t quite be the same without Sweet Lou.

Genesis: “Get ‘Em Out By Friday” (Foxtrot, 1972)

School starts again tomorrow for what should be my penultimate semester working toward a master’s degree in urban planning (summer project notwithstanding). I’ve enjoyed studying the subject and will hopefully be able to find good work in the field at some point this year, beyond what I’m doing now. 

On my last free weekend before heading back, I figured I’d have some fun and put together a mix of urban planning-related songs that I’ll post a bit later this evening. For the moment, though, a song that I cut from the mix to get it down to CD length.

Genesis often hid social commentary in lyrics that seemed to be about science fiction and fantasy. “Get ‘Em Out By Friday” is one song where they didn’t hide it very well—it’s transparently about the common practice of large British landlords in the 60s and 70s of winkling. 

Winkling was essentially an end-run around controlled rents. Landlords and their agents would evict tenants or coax them to leave so they could jack up rents for the next people who moved in. Often, they’d pay an honorarium for the tenant to move somewhere else—in the song, the landlord’s agent finds poor Mrs. Barrow a place to move to. Later in the song, the same landlord buys that place and raises her rent again. 

This is the kind of problem that planners are often called upon to address, or, in some notorious cases (such as Yonkers, New York’s zoning policy in the 80s), they’ve actually had a hand in reinforcing exclusionary housing policy. 

Planning is sort of a vaguely defined field, but that’s by necessity. Generally, we deal with the uses of land, but it’s never as simple as putting some lines and pretty colors on a map. People live on that map, and any time you move a line or change a color, it’s people you effect.

I love the depth and nuance of the way Peter Gabriel’s lyrics use storytelling to illuminate a genuine and pressing problem in British housing policy. The rest of the songs I chose all address the relationship between people and spaces in one way or another. Some are explicit, some more subtle, and they wander from the ghetto to the burbs and back. Check the next post for the link.

The Johnny Otis Show: “Watts Breakaway” (Cuttin’ Up, 1970)

I didn’t hear about it at the time, but nearly a year, ago Johnny Otis passed away at age 90. He wasn’t a marquee name, so his death wasn’t widely reported, but he had a strangely huge influence for a musician so relatively little-known.

Born Iaonnis Alexandres Veliotes in 1921, he was the son of an immigrant grocery store owner. The store was located in a mostly black neighborhood of Berkley, California, and early in his life, Otis found himself identifying far more with the culture of his black neighbors than with mainstream America. He played drums in swing orchestras, crossing paths with Illinois Jacquet and Lester Young, and founded his own band as World War II came to a close—his version of “Harlem Nocturne” was among the most successful and best versions of the standard ever recorded. 

That band launched the career of Wynonie Harris of “Good Rockin’ Tonight” fame, and Otis had a hand in the rise of several other r&b stars, including Etta James, Jackie Wilson, Little Willie John, Johnny Ace, and Esther Phillips. His own singles topped the US r&b chart four times—1958’s “Willie & the Hand Jive” is the most enduring of these—but he was never content with just leading a band and producing. 

He operated a handful of music venues during his life, the last of which was a hybrid grocery store/blues club, which I imagine would have made his father proud. He played sessions and wrote songs—he’s the drummer on Big Mama Thornton’s version of “Hound Dog” and wrote “Every Beat of My Heart,” which was a huge hit for Gladys & Knights & the Pips in 1961. 

He dabbled in politics but never won elected office, though his brother Nicholas served as ambassador to first Jordan (under Carter) and later Egypt (under Reagan). He did A&R for King Records, and was a well-loved disc jockey during two different times of his life. He also pastored his own church for a while, an odd vocation for a guy who once recorded an album of pornographic songs under the name Snatch & the Poontangs.

He made that record the same year he recorded “Watts Breakaway” with his band the Johnny Otis Show. This song is infectiously funky, and even features a great, self-effacing exchange in which Otis asks vocalist Delmar Evans why he can’t do his own dance as well as the singer. 

Oh yes, and he was also the father of the great guitarist Shuggie Otis. Talk about a life. This guy lived it like it was going out of style. A full seventy years of doing what you love is something anyone could aspire to. 

Pink Floyd: “Embryo” (1970/07/16 Paris Cinema, London, Peel Session)

It’s pretty easy for me to know what the biggest event of 2013 will be for me: I’m going to be a father in June. My wife and I are a modern couple. We got married over ten years ago, and now, in our early 30s, we’re just getting to the parenthood phase. Seems like a lot of people I know are doing that (or waiting even longer).

Are we ready? Damn, is anyone ever really ready to be a parent? I don’t think it’s something you can ever fully prepare for. You read up on life stages and what to expect, but parenthood is still something that happens literally in an instant (hopefully not a terribly long one for the mother’s sake). One moment you are not a parent. The next you are. The nine months of pregnancy doesn’t ease you into it at all.

I’m looking forward to it. I’ll with deal with whatever happens. People ask me, “do you want a boy or a girl?” I don’t care. It’s not as though I’d value the child any differently if it were one or the other. I’d like a healthy child. But if there is some health problem, well, we’ll deal with that too.

We won’t know the gender for a few more weeks, but once we do, I guess I’ll start thinking about names and how I might raise that child in a way that helps them flourish. In the long run, that’s all I really want: for the child I have to have the best life possible for that child. It’s not an easy thing to achieve, but I’ll try.

(Source: yeeshkulmk2)