And that is how little time elapsed between the release of Please, Please Me on 11 January 1963 and the release of Strawberry Fields Forever on 13 February 1967.
That is how little time it took for The Beatles to re-define pop music TWICE.
Having blown away years of musical torpor and stagnancy with their harmonies and harmonica, their calls and responses and undeniable joie de vivre, The Beatles rode a four-year wave of insanity before being forced to retreat to the recording studio.
When they emerged from that exile with Strawberry Fields Forever (and the almost-but-not-quite-as-scintillating Penny Lane), they had re-written the rule book again. In doing so, they undoubtedly lost some of their audience: those ten-year-olds in January 1963 were still only 14 and not many 14-year-olds could cope with the loss of the lovable Moptops and the emergence in their stead of this weird-sounding band.
Because 213 weeks is not a long time at all.
The UK picture sleeve for The Beatles’ 1967 double A-side single, Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane
It is a scientifically proven and well known fact that Strawberry Fields Forever contains precisely 4,825 sublime moments in its four minutes and five seconds: McCartney’s Mellotron introduction [0:00-0:09]; Lennon’s “Cranberry sauce!” during the second fade out [4:00-4:03]; the backwards cymbals [2:13-2:29]; the stabbing of the brass section [1:55-1:56]; the blissful interjections of Harrison’s newly acquired swordmandel [1:19-1:21 and 2:05-2:08]; Ringo’s astounding drumming [from 0:12]; the reversed tape [3:37-4:00]; the Morse Code [0:15-0:20]; the fake fade out [3:22-3:37]; the variations in time signature; the entire lyric; you name it.
And, of course, The Big Edit [at 1:00]. Everyone knows the story - two takes, recorded at different tempos and in different keys, painstakingly merged into one coherent finished product by producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick.
It is no less aurally impressive for all that retelling; unless you are directed to the precise moment of the Big Edit (between “I’m” and “going” at the start of the second refrain), it’s almost imperceptible. It’s relatively easy to do things like this when you’ve got a massive computer-driven desk at your fingertips; it’s something else entirely when it’s just you, a razor blade and a manually-operated variable speed reel-to-reel tape player.
Sound engineer Geoff Emerick receives a Grammy award from Ringo Starr in March
1968 for his work on the sessions for the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
album, sessions that began on 24 November 1966 with the recording of Strawberry Fields Forever
And yet none of this innovation is the SMIP that has brought tears to my eyes on more than one occasion. Strawberry Fields Forever’s SMIP belongs to the sixteenth-century stringed instrument, the violoncello.
In the spring of 1982, a music teacher tried to convince me to learn to play the cello.
It was never going to happen: the instrument was alien to me - I simply could not relate to it. While I knew that cellos existed, I could not then point to a piece of music to which one was an integral part. My parents owned no classical music records, they did not listen to Radio 3: it was something for which I genuinely had no reference point.
I wanted to learn the piano - an instrument that sat in the corner of every pub, bar or hotel and was always on stage alongside my favourite singers and groups. There were no piano lesson slots available when I joined the school for the summer term of 1982, so I was left with the cello. But being stuck with a big violin between my knees was never going to cut it for me. I was a shabby student who didn’t practice, didn’t try and didn’t care.
Had my music teacher tried to inspire me not with names such as Bach, Beethoven, Elgar and Haydn but with names such as Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr I might have been more motivated. Had he gaffer-taped a pair of headphones to my head and forced me to listen repeatedly to Strawberry Fields Forever my interest in the cello might have been more profound.
Blessed with a producer, orchestrator and arranger as gifted as George Martin, The Beatles had a resource denied to their peers, one they mined for all it was worth: the baroque, Bach-like harpsichord bridge to In My Life was, for example, written (uncredited) and performed by Martin. Cellos littered Beatles songs - 1965’s Yesterday (astonishingly only an album track in the UK) featured a string quartet while the 1966 single, Eleanor Rigby, contained no “rock” instruments at all, the band replaced by a string octet.
George Martin in the Abbey Road studio with Paul and Ringo, c.1968
While John Lennon might not have known too much about counterpoint, Martin did. When tasked with providing an arrangement of strings and brass to enhance and embellish Strawberry Fields Forever, Martin employed the technique in the song’s third verse to stunning effect.
For thirteen delightful seconds [2:17-2:30] across eight glorious bars, 32 gorgeous strokes of a cello’s bow weave above, below and around Lennon’s nonsense - “I think I know/ I mean, ah, yes/ But it’s all wrong/ That is I think I disagree” - and define conclusively what represents beauty in pop music.
Were I permitted to pick the last sound I would ever hear (and could not choose the voices of my loved ones), it would be this segment of this song.
Whether you believe him or not The Minister persists in maintaining that, between roughly 1968 and 1973, Neil Diamond was perhaps the best, most underrated and most innovative pop songwriter around.
In 1968 Diamond acrimoniously left Bang Records - the company that made hits of Solitary Man, Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon, Thank The Lord For The Night Time, Kentucky Woman and Cherry, Cherry - to hook up with UNI after Bang’s owner Bert Burns refused to give The Artiste his creative head.
Diamond’s first releases for UNI bombed spectacularly. Introspective, autobiographical ballad Brooklyn Roads - a million miles from the bubblegum of Cherry, Cherry - peaked at 58 on the Billboard chart; Latino-infused rocker Two-Bit Manchild made it no higher than 66; and the anodyne singalong country number Sunday Sun crested two places lower still. The album from which all three were taken - Velvet Gloves And Spit, its back cover bearing a picture of a leather-jacketed but shirtless Diamond leaning on an armless tailor’s mannequin (as horrifying a visual proposition as it sounds) - failed even to make the Billboard Top 200 album chart.
Diamond, New York, c.1968
(inner sleeve of Bang Records’ 1973 Double Gold compilation)
Today, such a run would almost certainly spell the end of the careers not just of the singer in question but also of the record company executive who signed him. The music industry in the late Sixties was a very, very different beast.
So it was in January 1969 that a sallow, Brooklyn-born Jew decamped from New York to Memphis to record at American Sound Studios, where house band The Memphis Boys awaited to commit to tape a gospel number (complete with mid-song sermon by a fictional preacher) that would be lead single from an album that would be released with this artwork:
Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show - the album:
further evidence of Diamond’s shirtless late-60s tendencies
(Click here for larger front and rear covers if you dare)
It’s probably not a business plan that would meet with Simon Cowell’s approval…
The Memphis Boys may not have the name recognition of their Memphis neighbours Booker T. & The MGs, Alabama’s Muscle Shoals house band or Motown’s Funk Brothers, but their pedigree is unimpeachable.
In 1967 The Memphis Boys had propelled Aretha Franklin to superstardom thanks to her and their reinterpretation of Otis Redding’s Respect; a few months before Diamond arrived the band had backed Dusty Springfield on her seminal Dusty In Memphis album; the next session at American Sound after Diamond’s was for Elvis Presley, who would record with The Memphis Boys Suspicious Minds and In The Ghetto. In their heyday, American Sound and The Memphis Boys created 122 Billboard hit singles in the three years from 1967.
American Sound Studios, Memphis, Tennessee, derelict in the
1980s before it was demolished to make way for a parking lot
The Memphis Boys comprised organist Bobby Emmons, pianist Bobby Wood, drummer Gene Chrisman; bassist Mike Leech; and guitarist Reggie Young. They were produced by Stax-alumnus Chips Moman and Tommy Cogbill (who would also sometimes play bass).
The Memphis Boys with the King in 1969
Whether the song was originally designed by Diamond as parody, pastiche or homage (his own explanation of the song’s genesis has varied down the years), these good ole Southern boys understood gospel revivalism and in one of the happy coincidences that litter the history of pop music, the right song found the right musicians at the right time in the right place.
From Wood’s opening chords [0:00-0:084], played above Emmons’ gentle organ and [from 0:04] Leech’s pulsating bass, this record catches the ear. It didn’t - and still doesn’t - sound like anything else on the radio. Whether we’re in a Harlem church hall or a revivalist tent we don’t yet know, but this is not vanilla pop music.
While it doesn’t quite rival “Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom” as pop’s greatest opening line, Diamond immediately paints the picture:
Hot August night
And the leaves hangin’ down
And the grass on the ground smellin’ sweet
[0:08-0:16]
Wood and Leech propel matters along [0:16-0:22] until more of the canvas is unveiled:
Move up the road
To the outside of town
And the sound of that good gospel beat
[0:22-0:30]
Then Wood signals a change in mood [at 0:33], Leech cuts out the fancy stuff, the backing singers start to “Woooooo” and the build to the chorus begins:
Sits a ragged tent, where there ain’t no trees
And that gospel group tellin’ you me…
[0:35-0:46]
Having gently kept time throughout the first verse, now Chrisman cuts loose [0:45-0:47] to demonstrate why he’s possibly the finest rock drummer whose name you’ve never heard and we reach one of the daftest choruses ever laid down on tape, underpinned by Emmons’ pulsing organ riff.
It’s Love, Brother Love’s, say, Brother Love’s Travellin’ Salvation Show!
(Halle! Halle!)
Pack up the babies and grab the old ladies
And everyone goes
‘Cos everyone knows
Brother Love’s shows
[0:47-1:02]
This is mental. Absolutely crackers. And superb. Which is why we stop it dead in its tracks and, with the help of trombones punctuating the sultry summer night air, we continue to paint the wider picture:
Room gets suddenly still
And when you almost bet you can hear yourself sweat
He walks in.
Eyes black as coal
And when he lifts his face every ear in the place is on him.
Startin’ soft and slow, like a small earthquake;
And when he lets go, half the valley shakes
[1:09-1:48]
And when Chrisman starts beating the crap out of that drumkit again [1:47-1:48] you know what’s coming around again:
It’s Love, Brother Love’s, say, Brother Love’s Travellin’ Salvation Show!
(Halle! Halle!)
Pack up the babies and grab the old ladies
And everyone goes
‘Cos everyone knows
Brother Love’s shows
(Hallelujah!)
[1:48-2:04]
Was this really the same man that had written I’m A Believer, sitting at number one for The Monkees precisely two years earlier in January 1967? Where had this come from?
BROTHERS!
[2:06]
To quote Keanu Reeves: “Whoa.”
I-I-I SAID BROTHERS!
[2:09-2:10]
What the fuck?
NOW, YOU’VE GOT YOURSELF TWO GOOD HANDS:
AND WHEN YOUR BROTHER IS TROUBLED
YOU GOT TO REACH OUT YOUR ONE HAND FOR HIM
‘COS THAT’S WHAT IT’S THERE FOR;
AND WHEN YOUR HEART IS TROUBLED
YOU GOT TO REACH OUT YOUR OTHER HAND,
REACH IT OUT TO THE MAN UP THERE -
‘COS THAT’S WHAT HE’S THERE FOR.
[2:12-2:30]
He’s freaked out. The New York Jew is sermonising in the middle of the song like a Southern Baptist. You can’t do this on a pop song.
Take my hand in yours,
Walk with me this day.
In my heart I know
I will never stray.
[2:32-2:45]
He’s calmed down again. We’re back in familiar territory - singing instead of screaming. Soothing piano chords atop the organ. That’s a bit better.
No, it’s not. He’s off again - smacking a tambourine - and this time he’s got the girls in tow:
Chrisman must have got through three snare drum skins in those six seconds alone. Leech is no longer just playing his bass - he’s positively spanking its strings. And at 2:53 the trumpet heralds the crescendo of the final choruses.
During this final part of the song, the kitchen sink is thrown at the master tape in a manner that even Phil Spector would admire. Diamond has thrown off all pretence of decorum and is simply yelping out the words to the chorus.
If one of the many criticisms laid at Diamond’s door is that his vocals too often lack soul - that his performances do not reflect the passion at the heart of pop music - his critics are not familiar with much of his output from this time.
This is a sultry and sexy performance, the singer throbbing within the music’s groove. This is a vocal that is utterly convincing, particularly as the song swells through the choruses and when Diamond adopts the persona of Brother Love for the “sermon”.
There is, appropriately, a fervour to the production, arrangement and the playing of this music - and the singing reflects that fervour. The coarseness in Diamond’s voice is undeniable and, if anything, the disappointment is that the record fades a little too soon - might there have been a full-blown vocal wigout if we’d gone round the chorus one more time?
As it is, our SMIP prefaces the final chorus we hear. Repeat to fade. And what a fade. Lost in the moment, gasping for air, Diamond’s voice involuntarily leaps an octave.
I-I SAID!
[3:06]
The “I” becomes a half-strangled, half-screamed howl. He’s in a different place - a magical, mysterious place only music can go - where the only thing that matters is staying atop the cacophony of drums, cymbals, piano, organs, gospel choristers, trumpets, trombones and tambourines that make up the final 40 seconds of one of the strangest, yet most seductive, singles of Neil Diamond’s career.
At the healing hands of Brother Love, that career was reborn. Released on 22 February 1969, Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show would reach number 22 on the Billboard Hot 100, ending an almost two-year-long run of six single releases that had failed to hit the top 40. Diamond’s live performances were also revived by that good gospel beat, Brother Love becoming his set’s closing number to this day. (A peerless, stripped-down live version can be heard on Diamond’s March 1970 album Gold: Recorded Live At The Troubador.)
Neil Diamond, March 1970, backstage
at The Troubador club, Los Angeles
[While this paragraph is for completists only, this particular completist would like to note that the best version of Brother Love's Travelling Salvation Show is rarer than hen's teeth in this digital era. The single was mixed in mono, with double-tracked vocals and more prominent brass and percussion than the album's stereo mix. The mono mix is more fevered, urgent and intense... and unavailable outside the original 7", despite being the version that compelled people to listen to the song in the first place. Every available Diamond compilation features the album mix. While the vocal yelp that comprises this SMIP is fully evident in the version featured below, the album mix is nevertheless a flatter and less thrilling concoction than the one featured on the 7"-diameter piece of vinyl sitting in the Minister's now-never-opened record box.]
Emboldened by the creative and commercial success he rediscovered in Memphis, Diamond would return to American Sound in March 1969 to record Sweet Caroline, Emmons in the process improvising one of pop’s catchiest and most distinctive introductions.
You think you know the rest of the Neil Diamond story.
Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee’s a mystery gi-i-i-i-rl!
[4:05-4:15]
For Ministers of a certain age, Roy Orbison was one of many childhood musical figures of fun.
Through the mid to late Seventies, the same old faces would do the rounds of awful light entertainment shows, miming to one of two or three prehistoric hits to pay the mortgage.
If it was Gene Pitney, it meant we were about to hear Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa or Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart. Lonnie Donegan’s dad was a dustman or had something to do with a gap in Cumberland. Tom Jones didn’t exist outside the narrow confines of What’s New, Pussycat?, It’s Not Unusual or The Green, Green Grass Of Home. And Shirley Bassey would send me running from the room before she could bellow the second syllable of Goldfinger or Big Spender.
The final column around which British variety TV shows were built in 1970s Britain was Roy Orbison. Every few months he’d turn up, standing motionless, dressed head to toe in black, eyes and any emotion hidden behind sunglasses, miming the bizarre and alien cadences of Only The Lonely, Crying or Oh, Pretty Woman (”Mercy!”) before silently sloping away once more. For some reason, there did not seem to be a more disconsolate human being on the planet.
Contrary to the Minister’s recollection,
Roy Orbison did sometimes wear
something other than black in the Seventies
I’m sure I even recall Orbison turning up on more than one edition of The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, which might as well have been filmed at the Working Men’s Club at the top of my street (a glass of shandy and a packet of salt and vinegar on a Saturday afternoon while my grandfather watched the ITV Seven) and was mainly noted for Bernard Manning crooning pre-war ballads most weeks. (Yes, really.)
Like Diana Dors’ predictable chat show innuendo these singers seemed principally to exist, without discernible contemporary achievement, to remind adults of a bygone time when they had to make their own entertainment by candlelight. Nothing more, nothing less - the routine never changed and these people had nothing original or relevant to offer me. The BBC strike in late 1978 and the four-month-long ITV strike of 1979 at least meant we had to find something else to watch for a while…
WIth the benefit of hindsight and maturity - though I still have nothing good to say about Shirley Bassey - I’ve come to realise that Pitney and Orbison were great songwriters, that Donegan is the bridge between rock’n'roll and The Beatles, that Jones was a brilliant entertainer and - above everything else - that Roy Orbison possessed one of the two best white male voices in pop music.
Roy Orbison, smiling
(almost certainly pre-1966)
If you look up the adjective ‘tragic’ in a dictionary of popular culture, the definition is replaced by a picture of Roy Orbison: if he looked disconsolate and sounded desolate, it was because he had every right to be. When Orbison sang that he was crying or that it was over, he knew what every word of it meant: his wife died in a motorcycle accident in 1966 and less than two years later his house burnt to the ground, killing two of his three sons.
Writing in the wonderful The Heart Of Rock And Soul, Dave Marsh says of Orbison:
If Phil Spector is pop music’s truest romantic and John Fogarty its greatest fatalist, Roy Orbison stands as its ultimate stoic. Maybe he wore those shades all the time to disguise the fact that he never blinked no matter what you threw at him… Orbison was different than any other rock star of his period. He was relatively middle-class, college-educated and on easier terms with more kinds of music - opera and Mexican ballad singing, for instance - than any of his peers. His songs possess a psychological complexity that is commonly believed not to have existed in pop music until Dylan and the Beatles… No other singer with this much range displays anything like Orbison’s complete emotional commitment - when Roy sings ‘from this moment I’ll be crying,’ there’s no reason to believe that the tears will ever stop.
According to Dylan, writing in the sleeve notes to the posthumous compilation The Very Best Of Roy Orbison:
Orbison… transcended all the genres. With Roy, you didn’t know if you were listening to mariachi or opera. He kept you on your toes… [He sang] his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal… His voice could jar a corpse, always leave you muttering to yourself something like, ‘Man, I don’t believe it’. His songs had songs within songs. Orbison was deadly serious - no pollywog and no fledgling juvenile. There wasn’t anything else on the radio like him.
Bolero, chanson, opera, mariachi, symphony - not words ordinarily associated with rock and roll, but all of which can be applied to Orbison’s oeuvre. No wonder it confused the young Minister.
Orbison placed nine singles within the Billboard Top Ten in the five years from 1960, with even greater chart success in Europe and Australia, but for twenty years after that Orbison floundered, consigned to the clubs and variety shows.
One of the unlikeliest musical career revivals ever began in 1986 when In Dreams featured in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet; a year later, another movie song - a re-recording of Crying with k.d. lang - would earn Orbison a Grammy Award; in 1988 Orbison would join Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne in The Travelling Wilburys and record Mystery Girl, his first album of new solo material in over a decade.
Orbison in 1988
After performing this new material in concert just a handful of times, Roy Orbison would die - literally of a broken heart - on 6 December 1988, at the age of just 52.
Mystery Girl was released two months later to levels of critical acclaim and commercial success that had eluded Orbison for two decades: The Travelling Wilburys Vol. 1 and Mystery Girl would simultaneously reside in the top five of the Billboard album chart in early 1989. A few months later, filming began on a Richard Gere-Julia Roberts movie that would introduce Orbison to a whole new generation, with Oh, Pretty Woman earning him the 1991 Grammy for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance.
In 1989, Orbison was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters’ Hall Of Fame and in 1998 he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. A year later, Only The Lonely and Oh, Pretty Woman were inducted into the Grammy Hall Of Fame; Crying joined them in 2002. In 2004, those three songs and In Dreams made Rolling Stone magazine’s 500 Greatest Songs Of All Time.
Mystery Girl is a splendidly fulfilling album, recalling Orbison’s heyday without sounding like self-pastiche. His voice soars as high and strong as ever within well constructed and sympathetically arranged songs. The most successful single from the album - You Got It - revives the timpani of It’s Over and the twanging guitar of Oh, Pretty Woman - and its co-author and producer Jeff Lynne for once resists the temptation to make his subject sound like the Electric Fucking Light Orchestra.
She’s A Mystery To Me (CD single)
The album’s crown jewel, though, is She’s A Mystery To Me, penned for Orbison by U2’s Messrs. Hewson and Evans. At the end of the Eighties, Bono and Edge had a penchant for penning persistent ballads, initially driven by gentle percussion and noodling guitars that build inexorably to a dramatic and climactic crescendo: She’s A Mystery To Me comes from the same place as The Joshua Tree’s With Or Without You (1987) and Rattle And Hum’s All I Want Is You (1988). It stands apart from its siblings, though, in that it swoops and soars across a wider span of octaves than Bono could ever manage himself, taking full advantage of Orbison’s magnificent range.
Like most of Bono’s output, the lyrics deserve barely a moment’s consideration; like a lot of Evans’ music of that period, it would drone tediously without a hearty vocal performance to propel it upwards.
It’s not until after the first verse that Orbison first begins to cut loose [1:00-1:10], but that’s only a tease. There is no chorus as such - merely the repetition of the line “She’s a mystery girl,” in a higher range - and first time around Orbison rocks even more gently than Val Doonican. Producer Bono allows the song to fall back to the verse and Orbison’s voice falls two full octaves for the next 40 seconds. From 1:55 to 2:15, we’re back at the ‘chorus’: his voice of necessity emboldened to rise above the rising waves of cymbals, guitar and piano, Orbison now takes the line out for four walks around the block and his power up to 50%.
Still we’re not where we need to be. We need to summon all our strength for the final push over the top, and a gently tinkling piano line atop Edge’s guitar motif gives us time to draw breath [2:17-2:22]. During the final verse, Bono introduces a string section [from 2:25] to swell the ranks further for the last battle; from 2:44 a snare drum signals the final stage of an introduction that takes three minutes and six seconds to take the listener to the Promised Land, the place where Roy draws in a lungful of air and lets rip. One final crash of cymbals [3:06] and our boy’s away.
Power, passion, vibrato and falsetto - from 3:07 Orbison gives it the ghostly, full-throated works for almost a minute. There is no question about this girl’s mystery when Roy seemingly lets the matter rest at 3:59.
But after a few seconds of the band playing on, the musicians almost audibly astonished by the singer’s efforts [3:59-4:05], The Big O hits the very highest note one last time - for two bars, across five full seconds [from 4:05] - and the hairs on the back of the neck stand up to applaud.
Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee’s a mystery gi-i-i-i-rl!
Singer and band spiritually and physically spent, that last word - extended to five distinct syllables [4:12-4:14] - masks their exhaustion. In those two seconds the percussion, guitar, piano and bass all fall silent. When Roy lets go the last sound he has, just a solitary violin string fading into the background [4:15-4:16] brings matters to a conclusion.
Neither Roy Orbison nor U2’s best song, She’s A Mystery To Me nevertheless archives two talents at the height of their games.
Immense, beautiful and haunting - there has been no other sound in pop music like Roy Orbison.
Conscious that I keep banging on about wanting to write about music more than I do here, this is my entry in Upstart Blogger’s Inner Circle competition in the popular music culture section.
Some SMIPs revolve around profound lyrics. Some SMIPs revolve around painstakingly constructed aural soundscapes. Some SMIPs warrant intricate dissection.
This SMIP isn’t like that.
This SMIP is just a mad bloke belting seven shades of shit out of his drum kit for 30 seconds.
The history of Blondie is a soap opera that has been recounted countless times by better and more authoritative writers than me. Suffice to say that today, 34 years on, only three of the seven founding members of a band then called Angel And The Snake are still standing - guitarist Chris Stein, vocalist and general deity Debbieorah Harry and drummer Clem Burke.
(Keyboard player Jimmy Destri retired in 2004; bassist Gary Valentine left in 1978 just as the band began to achieve success, replaced first by Frank Infante and then, when Infante took up second guitar duties, by Stockport’s own Nigel Harrison; singing sisters Tish and Eileen ‘Snooky’ Bellomo came and went very quickly.)
Burke - a rock’n'roll survivor who really has been there, seen it and done it all - is a whirling dervish, perpetual motion machine of a drummer. If it’s there to be hit, Burke’s going to hit it. Hard.
Where some of pop’s best and most successful drummers are there to hold things steady and blend into the background - the Charlie Watts and Larry Mullens of this parish - Burke sees himself as an entertainer first and foremost. Sticks are twirled, sticks are thrown, sticks are dropped: but you never forget he’s there.
“Clem had this attitude that he was Keith Moon and just
wanted to play EVERY drum ALL of the time. My first
challenge was to get him to play in time.”
- Blondie producer Mike Chapman
When Blondie first split up in 1982, Burke became one of pop’s most in-demand drummers: The Eurythmics, Iggy Pop, Joan Jett, Bob Dylan, Nancy Sinatra and The Ramones are just a few of the acts to have benefitted from Burke’s tub-thumping either in the studio or on tour before Blondie’s second coming in 1998.
When Jimmy Destri’s vintage Maria hit number one in February 1999, Blondie became the only American act to have UK number one singles in each of the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties. They may add to that record yet.
Nigel Harrison wrote the music for Union City Blue; Harry provided the lyric, inspired by the movie in which she was filming in 1979, Marcus Reichart’s extremely odd Union City and its location. (The song does not appear in the movie.)
Union City itself lies in the state of New Jersey and is the most densely populated city in the USA, with more than 67,000 citizens crammed into just 1¼ square miles. Joined to Manhattan by the Lincoln Tunnel, wave after wave of immigrants have made up Union City’s resolutely working class population, working in its docks (on which the main part of the song’s video was filmed, Burke and his drum kit banished to the upper deck) and manufacturing factories. The Union Dry Dock office building can be seen over Burke’s shoulder in the early shots of the video.
Harrison says:
“When I started it, I tried to come up with one of those anthemic flag and banner songs.”
He succeeded.
From the pulsating intro [0:00-0:16] to the full-on main riff [0:16-0:31] and Harry’s early moans of the first chorus - “Oh-ho, oh-ho: what are we gonna do?” [0:32-0:37] - this record is defiantly in the listener’s face.
When the band breaks things down after the second verse and third chorus [2:00-2:04 - four seconds and no drumming!] it’s almost an act of mercy, allowing the listener to gather breath and sensibility for a final push over the top.
Harrison’s bass [2:04] heralds in that last minute-long onslaught, a never-ending sonic wave of cymbals and drums breaking over a sea of guitars, while one of pop’s best female voices writhes around with trademark silk and steel phrasing.
The song repeats to fade - a song that doesn’t stop, a feeling that doesn’t end. ”What are we gonna do?” We are going to submit absolutely, Goddess Debbieorah - even if we’re eight years old and haven’t a clue what it is to which we are submitting.
There are fewer than 100 words in this song’s entire lyric (and half of those are indistinct - despite loving this record for almost 29 years I genuinely didn’t know the word “turquoise” featured [1:32] until I started researching this SMIP) and the recording is an archetypal straightforward guitar, drum and bass thrash with a bit of synth low in the mix [most prominent at 1:50-2:00].
Blondie - perhaps the best singles band in pop apart from The Beatles and ABBA - released a run of 13 almost flawless UK Top 15 hits in 5½ years.
Union City Blue, never released as a single in the States, was the lowest charting of their singles in that run, cresting at number 13 in December 1979.
It was the final record I bought before I was consigned to a two-year, four-month long pop-cultural exile in the Middle East. By the time I got back to the UK, Blondie were no more.
The unexpected reunion allowed me to fulfill one of my outstanding desires - to see the band live. On 22 November 1998 at the Lyceum Theatre in London the Minister was privileged to witness the re-formed Blondie launch their second coming. Harry exuded sass (there’s no other word for it) and the Minister dug the Mrs. Robinson vibe, at least until the Minister’s Wife slapped him a couple of times. The hits brought the house down and tears to the Minister’s eyes.
It would only later emerge that Harrison and Infante had been excluded from the reunion and unsuccessfully sued the other original members in an attempt to prevent them from using the name.
Union City Blue isn’t the band’s best record - that honour falls to the colossal Atomic (from the same album, Eat To The Beat) - but its throbbing intensity and Burke’s manic percussive noise propellingthe show along makes it one of the most perfect, singalong-at-the-top-of-your-voice driving records ever made. It’s what Monday morning commutes to work were made for.
“‘Union City [Blue]‘ is the most celebratory [song].
It could have almost any words to it, it just sounds so anthemic.”
- Debbieorah Harry, Platinum Blonde - A Portrait by Cathay Che
Norman Whitfield and Barratt Strong Are here to make everything right that’s wrong. Holland and Holland and Lamont Dozier, too, Are here to make it all OK with you. (Billy Bragg, Levi Stubbs’ Tears)
Holland-Dozier-Holland, Whitfield-Strong, Stevenson-Gaye-Hunter, Ashford-Simpson, Brown-Sansone-Calilli: the great Motown songwriting teams. Or at least that’s what I thought.
Most of us can rattle off some Holland-Dozier-Holland and Whitfield-Strong hits. Many of us know plenty of Stevenson-Gaye-Hunter and Ashford-Simpson songs, even if we can’t necessarily list them from memory.
Brown-Sansone-Calilli, though – not so much.
Michael Brown, Tony Sansone, Bob Calilli: the names stare out from many Motown compilations – and every Four Tops compilation – but eventually it dawned on me that these familiar-to-me names made just the sole contribution to the canon of the best label in history: The Four Tops’ legendary 1968 hit Walk Away Renee.
When the hit-making genii that were Lamont Dozier and Eddie and Brian Holland fell out with Motown chief Berry Gordy and left the label in late 1967 the most nervous act on the roster must have been The Four Tops.
Since finally hitting the charts in 1964 with the H-D-H composition Baby I Need Your Loving (after an entire decade of dues-paying), the group rode a flying carpet of H-D-H gold: I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch), It’s The Same Old Song, Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever, Reach Out, I’ll Be There, Standing In The Shadows Of Love, Bernadette, 7-Rooms Of Gloom… but now the magic sorcerers were gone. With no songwriters in the group, it seemed there may no longer be anywhere for The Four Tops and Levi Stubbs’ astonishing voice to turn.
Casting around for material, it seems The Four Tops chose to look outside Motown for inspiration; their first two post-H-D-H hits would prove to be reinterpretations of other people’s hits.
And so, with research, it came to pass – one of the foundation stones for my personal Tamla Motown devotion crumbled: The Four Tops’ legendary 1968 hit Walk Away Renee transpired to be a cover version.
In July 1966 The Left Banke – a so-called “baroque’n'roll” group, unafraid to wield violins, flutes and harpsichords – had scored a number five Billboard Hot 100 hit with Walk Away Renee, a song composed by Mike Brown, the band’s 16-year-old keyboard player (real name Michael Lookofsky) and Tony Sansone. Though credited as a writer, Bob Calilli wrote no part of the song.
Written in the winter of 1965, one month after Lookofsky first met Renee Fladen, it would prove the first of three paeans to Renee – the others being sophomore hit Pretty Ballerina and She May Call You Up Tonight, a track on the group’s debut album.
The Left Banke’s biography reads like a soap opera, perhaps only to be expected when its teenage prodigy songwriter was openly infatuated with and writing a series of songs inspired by the bass player’s ballerina girlfriend Renee Fladen, who would soon move on to date the band’s drummer before growing “uncomfortable” with the attention and splitting the scene.
Such was the turmoil within the group that the vocals for Walk Away Renee, provided by Carmelo Esteban Martin Caro (credited as Steve Martin), were recorded after Lookofsky first left the band. He rejoined only after the record became a hit but hung around only for one album and the initial recording sessions for the band’s second release. The Left Banke spluttered to a halt and neither Lookofsky nor Caro would scale the heights their initial entrance suggested.
The Left Banke’s original sounds like it could have been recorded by The Mamas & The Papas – indeed, Walk Away Renee’s flute solo (replaced with a muted trumpet by The Four Tops) was purportedly inspired by the arrangement of California Dreamin’.
Baroque it is not, but the arrangement, orchestration and Caro’s straining vocal certainly lend the song an air of youthful desolation missing from The Four Tops’ world-wearier, plaintive rendition.
I’d loved The Four Tops’ recording for as long as I can remember – not least because its lyric piqued my literary side, beginning not only a sentence but an entire story with the grammatically verboten “and” – but had not heard Bragg’s 1986 cover until I shared a student flat with a Bragg completist in my first year at university, 1991-2.
Exploring almost all my flatmate’s record collection over that academic year, I came across Levi Stubbs’ Tears, the lead single from Bragg’s third album, Talking With The Taxman About Poetry. Only his second top 40 hit, Levi Stubbs’ Tears had made number 29 in the summer of 1986; the album, recorded between March and July 1986 with the assistance of the likes of Kirsty MacColl, Hank Wangford, Johnny Marr and Bobby Valentino, became Bragg’s breakthrough release, making the UK album top ten.
Tucked away unprepossessingly on the B-side of Levi Stubbs’ Tears was a short and idiosyncratic track called Walk Away Renee (Version). While it might be considered a throwaway semi-novelty, two things cause it to stand out.
First, Johnny Marr’s gorgeous guitarwork; second, Bragg’s lyric – which might just be pop music’s most honest and self-deprecating account of first lust and the follies and embarrassments it induces.
Marr’s fourth introductory chord (0:12) sounds dissonant in comparison with what went before – much like the heady shock of first love. Bragg’s mordant estuary foghorn kicks in just a fraction of a second before that chord, disorienting the listener such that it is immediately clear that this is something different and unexpected from Britain’s foremost agitprop-rocker, something you were most unlikely to hear on the radio in 1986 unless you sought out the darker corners of John Peel’s or Andy Kershaw’s programmes.
Marr’s guitar vibrates and distorts under the weight of his fifth chord (0:17-0:18) and the strings sharply squeak between his fingers and the fretboard (0:19).
It’s only when Marr begins to pick out the melody (from 0:20) that you realise this is another interpretation of Lookofsky’s bittersweet missive to Renee, the girl of his best friend – the perfect backdrop for the nostalgic wordplay of Bragg’s lament.
It’s as lovely a melody as in any of its other incarnations, played delightfully by a briliant guitarist, but after the initial stages this SMIP is driven purely by Bragg’s lyrics and the feelings they evoke.
For even if the listener cannot directly empathise with Bragg’s boy whose nose begins to bleed just because he finally finds himself before The One (0:30), I’ve yet to find anybody who is unable to recognise within this short soliloquy an episode of youthful gaucheness that resonates deep within the memory bank of their own teenage years.
She began going out with Mr. Potato Head.
It was when I saw her in the car park
With his coat around her shoulders that I realised.
I went home and thought about the two of them together
Until the bath water went cold around me.
I thought about her eyes; and the curve of her breasts;
And about the point where their bodies met.
(1:06-1.28)
Who hasn’t, at one time or another, sat in that cooling bathtub brooding over a love slipping away? Who hasn’t, at one time or another, tortured themselves with mental images of the sexual pyrotechnics performed by their estranged inamorata and her new beau?
I said, “I’m the most illegible bachelor in town.”
And she said, “Yeah, that’s why I can never understand
Any of those silly letters you send me.”
(1:33-1:40)
Rob, one well-intentioned but not particularly gifted 14-year-old schoolfriend, diligently wrote out the entire lyric of Dire Straits’ Romeo & Juliet and sent it to Rebecca, the girl with whom he was breaking up.
Rebecca sent it on to a mutual friend with every one of Rob’s many spelling mistakes corrected in red ink. It subsequently made its way around the school.
I couldn’t stop thinking about her
And every time I switched on the radio
There was somebody else
Singing a song about the two of us.
(0:41-0:46)
Our Tune has tortured a nation for almost three full decades (it’s still, unbelievably, broadcast daily by Simon Bates on commercial radio) precisely because every relationship has a song, even if – as in the case of the Minister and The Minister’s Wife – the parties can’t agree on what it is (it’s between songs by No Doubt and Eternal).
It was just like being on a fast ride at the funfair;
The sort you want to get off because it’s scary
And then, as soon as you’re off, you wanna get straight back on again.
(0:49-0:56)
The Minister still clearly recalls the moment at which he became certain The Minister’s Wife would be sticking around for a while, as she sat recovering from the headrush of Space Mountain at Disneyland Paris and, still white from the fright, suddenly beamed, declared, “Let’s do it again!” and strode purposefully off to rejoin the back of the queue.
And, finally, the SMIP:
And then one day it happened:
She cut ‘er ‘air and I stopped lovin’ ‘er.
(1:42-1:48)
A funny punchine to a tragicomic tale but, with the benefit of hindsight and for the Minister at least, shockingly realistic.
1985 was far from a golden age for hair styling in the East Midlands, and one 14-year-old girl’s Saturday morning trip to the hairdresser’s – the result: a perm on top with a short, straight crop on the back – fair ruined the Minister’s Monday morning wait for the school bus and promptly burst a two-year-old bubble of unrequited love…
Marr’s fingers continue to spin up and down, across and around Lookofsky’s tune until the record fades, giving the listener 25 seconds to digest what has gone before, to think about those who walked away from him and those from whom he walked away, and the horror of the inexplicable hormone-fuelled antics and scrapes into which we got ourselves as kids.
Perhaps it’s not quite what the 16-year-old Michael Lookofsky intended as he longed for his Renee 40 years ago, but it’s certainly closer to reality.
Rolling Stone magazine placed Walk Away Renee at number 220 in its 500 Greatest Songs Of All Time.
Renee Fladen-Kamm is a music teacher and artist living in California.
Billy Bragg’s Walk Away Renee (Version):
The Left Banke perform the original Walk Away Renee on Dick Clark’s Where The Action Is in 1966:
Levi Stubbs struts his stuff with three other blokes on US television:
[Piano break]
It’s a town full of losers
And I’m pulling out of here to win
[3:40-3:48]
Some things undeniably hurt more - much more - than cars and girls. But mouthwatering as Paddy McAloon’s attack on Bruce Springsteen was and remains, hindsight suggests that the named object of McAloon’s castigation might have been among the least deserving of the swathe of blow-dried rock offenders congesting radio airwaves at the time it was written.
While the inflated 1984 production values of Born In The U.S.A. may have given Springsteen his biggest commercial success, it also represents his last truly bombastic studio release for 23 years. Though most of his subsequent albums continued to contain a smattering of straightforward rockers, few would have predicted at the dawn of the 1990s that Springsteen’s next big commercial success would be the Oscar-winning, minimalist lament The Streets Of Philadelphia or that the decade after 1995 would see The Boss release three acoustic folk albums.
Where Brucie’s dreams would soon turn to matters of more substance, those lesser mortals who swam in his wake in the Eighties - the preening prinnies and walking groins that made up the Van Halens, Bon Jovis, Motley Crues, Def Leppards and Guns’n’Roses of this parish - remained little more than hormone-fuelled cartoons from start to finish.
Rather than wishing ill on a songwriter whose work had always documented social realism amidst the drums and guitars, I’d like to think McAloon was railing more against the wider genre of formulaic AOR that provided the soundtrack to the “greed is good” culture of the mid- to late-Eighties (and which would be swept away by house, dance, R&B and rap).
While Born In The U.S.A. contains its share of cars and girls, re-examination suggests that the writer’s heart was barely engaged by either subject: a good number of the album’s songs were overtly political, while others are pale photocopies of the intense and urgent billets-doux Springsteen sent to lost loves a decade earlier. Indeed, it’s entirely possible that the apolitical songs on the album such as Bobby Jean and No Surrender represent an extended farewell to long-time E Street Band member ‘Little’ Steven van Zandt, whose (initial) swansong as a band member the album represented.
Yet McAloon singled out Springsteen by name and, as an intelligent and thoughtful writer, he almost certainly did so for a reason.
Perhaps McAloon wanted to warn The Boss there is something unedifying and more than a little embarrassing about a greying man of 40 inviting a teenage woman to “wrap her legs around his velvet rims and strap her hands across his engines” (what Nick Hornby accurately calls the moment at which Springsteen “tips into Meat Loaf territory”). You might just about be able to get away with that at 23, but…
Perhaps McAloon was warning Springsteen about the superannuated path down which he seemed to be heading. By 1989 the Rolling Stones and The Who had already become little more than jokes, dissolving and reuniting as monetary considerations dictated, giving a grateful planet the spectacle of multi-millionaires in their mid-40s singing about how they hoped they died before they got old and couldn’t get any satisfaction. Were Springsteen to continue to phone in anaemic Bobby Jeans another of the greatest beacons in pop history would fall into what the Minister calls the Death Or Glory Trap. To quote that song by The Clash (and who wouldn’t, given the chance?):
I believe in this - and it’s been tested by research:
He who fucks nuns will later join the Church.
In other words: if you continue to play the percentage game, Bruce, your value to the suits will be mind-blowing but your real worth will be no more than the rest of the artistically exhausted Jaggers, Claptons and Townshends cranking out the same old shit 100 nights each year to pay for the Caribbean islands, coke habits and trout farms.
(And yes, that’s the same Clash who licensed Should I Stay Or Should I Go? to Levi Strauss…)
Rightly or wrongly I don’t, however, believe for one moment McAloon was suggesting either that Springsteen’s early records were anything other than great rock’n’roll albums or that cars and girls have no place in pop music - those subjects are, as Born To Run proves, the very foundations of the most successful artistic genre to emerge in the twentieth century.
If the pop genre came into being as music by teenagers(-ish) for teenagers, how could it possibly fail to reflect the twin obsessions of most 15-year-old boys (in America, at least)? Indeed, the Minister would argue that (assuming they had been exposed to the work of the men in question) there was something unusual about a 15-year-old boy of his generation who didn’t believe that the real Holy Trinity was Bruce Springsteen, Joe Strummer and J. D. Salinger.
Perceived wisdom has it that the title track is the purest moment of pop genius on the Born To Run album. Perceived wisdom is wrong.
The album’s finest moment breaks every rule about running orders by appearing as side one, track one. Thunder Road is more than just the album’s lead song; it encapsulates the album’s entire message. It is the first example of a song that could be considered a SMIP in its entirety, lasting four minutes and 48 seconds.
Unveiled live in February 1975 under the title Wings For Wheels, so crucial did Springsteen consider the song to the album’s structure his initial plans had two different versions of Thunder Road acting as a bookends both opening and closing the record. The album’s concept was to feature a day in the life of a series of characters in the jungles of New Jersey, with an acoustic version of Thunder Road signifying morning and the full-band version closing the night’s proceedings.
The adjective most often applied to Thunder Road by reviewers is ‘cinematic’, appropriate insofar as it took its eventual title from a 1958 B-movie of the same name written by and starring Robert Mitchum.
Certainly, the song’s introduction - Springsteen’s laconic harmonica playing alongside Roy Bittan’s languid piano [0:00-0:15] - sets the tone for the story to be played out before us: we could not be anywhere else but America, the ubiquity of the instruments involved suggests we’re in a small American town, and the minor key and occasionally slack timing tell us that we are in for, at best, a bittersweet ride.
As Bittan’s timing solidifies and quickens for the introduction’s final two bars [0:15-0:18], the harmonica gives way to Springsteen’s voice. Atop a pretty, gentle piano riff come arguably pop music’s greatest opening lines:
The screen door slams, Mary’s dress waves.
Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays.
[0:18-0:31]
The screenplay is being written before our ears; the scene is set and we can hear the transistor radio to which Mary sways. For the first and, I trust, only time the Minister cites with approval Jeremy Vine:
The first line is ‘The screen door slams’ – that’s the opening to a novel, an incredible first line! You’ve immediately got him, standing at the end of the garden path, and she’s come out, and the door shuts behind her. Lyrically, that is the perfect opening to a song.
There is nothing new about Thunder Road’s story: it’s a simple tale of a man’s desperation to leave the small town that’s choking him and start over somewhere - anywhere - else as soon as he can, preferably in Mary’s company.
As Greil Marcus’s famous review of the Born To Run album for Rolling Stone magazine put it:
It is the drama that counts; the stories Springsteen is telling are nothing new, though no one has ever told them better or made them matter more. Their familiar romance is half their power: the promise and the threat of the night; the lure of the road; the quest for a chance worth taking and the lust to pay its price; girls glimpsed once at 80 miles and hour and never forgotten; the city streets as the last, permanent American frontier. We know the story: one thousand and one American nights, one long night of fear and love.
What is new is the majesty Springsteen and his band have brought to this story. Springsteen’s singing, his words and the band’s music have turned the dreams and failures two generations have dropped along the road into an epic - an epic that began when that car went over the cliff in Rebel Without A Cause. One feels that all it ever meant, all it ever had to say, is on this album, brought forth with a determination one would have thought was burnt out years ago. One feels that the music Springsteen has made from this long story has outstripped the story; that it is, in all its fire, a demand for something new.
There is an overwhelming sense of recognition: no, you’ve never heard anything like this before, but you understand it instantly, because this music - or Springsteen crying, singing wordlessly, moaning over the last guitar lines of Born To Run, or the astonishing chords that follow each verse of Jungleland, or the opening of Thunder Road - is what rock & roll is supposed to sound like.
“Oh-oh, come take my hand,” Springsteen sings, “Riding out to case the promised land.” And there, in a line, is Born To Run. You take what you find, but you never give up your demand for something better because you know, in your heart, you deserve it. That contradiction is what keeps Springsteen’s story, and the promised land’s, alive. Springsteen took what he found and made something better himself. This album is it.
The protagonist in Thunder Road, though, has a few years on the protagonist of Born To Run, the song:
Roy Orbison singing for the lonely -
Hey, that’s me and I want you only.
Don’t turn me home again,
I just can’t face myself alone again.
Don’t run back inside, darling:
You know just what I’m here for.
So you’re scared and you’re thinking
That maybe we ain’t that young anymore.
Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night.
You ain’t a beauty but, hey, you’re all right.
And that’s all right with me.
[0:32-1:11]
Not for this leading man any melodramatic declarations about wanting to die on the streets in an everlasting kiss. Time is moving on and there isn’t enough left for further prevarication. If he and Mary are to make their move, they’re going to have to do so tonight.
As the urgency of the moment intensifies, other instruments enter stage right. Drummer Max Weinberg keeps time with bass drum, a fill and then snare rim through the next section, in which Springsteen’s own guitar finds it voice. While not the SMIP, the next few seconds contain the loveliest use of reverse psychology, our champion’s call to action from Mary, ever laid down on tape:
You can hide ‘neath your covers
And study your pain,
Make crosses from your lovers,
Throw roses in the rain;
Waste your summer praying in vain
For a saviour to rise from these streets…
[1:14-1:27]
We’ve already made all the excuses; we’ve tried crossing our fingers and hoping for the best. It hasn’t worked, so:
What else can we do now?
[1:38-1:40]
With the help of all but one of the rest of the E Street Band in full flight - Little Steven on backing vocals, Weinberg belting at his full drum kit, Garry Tallent on bass and Danny Federici’s glockenspiel - he answers his own question:
Except roll down the window
And let the wind blow back your hair!
Well, the night’s busting open -
These two lanes will take us anywhere.
We got one last chance to make it real,
To trade in these wings on some wheels:
Climb in back,
Heaven’s waiting on down the tracks.
Oh-oh, come take my hand,
We’re riding out tonight to case the promised land.
[1.41-2:16]
The song’s title gets its only mention, the “two lanes” referred to above now described as “lying out there like a killer in the sun” [2:22-2:25]. And then we learn a little more about the protagonist’s beautifully naive plan:
Well, I got this guitar
And I learned how to make it talk.
And my car’s out back
If you’re ready to take that long walk
From your front porch to my front seat:
The door is open but the ride it ain’t free.
And I know you’re lonely
For words that I ain’t spoken -
But tonight we’ll be free,
All the promises will be broken.
[2:38-3:05]
And then we hear our protagonist’s final reason why Mary should head with him for the city. If a more bewitching lyrical passage exists in pop, I have yet to come across it (and I’m not sure I want to):
There were ghosts in the eyes
Of all the boys you sent away;
They haunt this dusty beach road
In the skeleton frames of burnt out Chevrolets.
They scream your name at night in the street,
Your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet.
And in the lonely cool before dawn
You hear their engines roaring on,
But when you get to the porch they’re gone
On the wind.
[3:05-3:37]
Throughout these bars the band has taken down the intensity a couple of notches, the drums have momentarily fallen quiet, and our man makes his final plea:
So, Mary, climb in -
[3:38-3:40]
And then our SMIP: an enchanting descending scale of minor key piano chords from Roy Bittan, ramping up the tension and hinting at the story’s imminent resolution, allowing our protagonist to draw breath for his closing, roared statement of intent:
It’s a town full of losers
And I’m pulling out of here to win!
[3:40-3:48]
After all this, you’d think the band would be as spent as the listener. Nothing of the sort. It’s only here, with a full minute left, that the final member of the E Street Band, Clarence Clemons, exercises his saxophone’s reed and valves. Weinberg lets out a one-bar drum fill and then Clemons lets rip. With the band back at full tilt, they repeat an eight-bar motif to fade.
A tour de force from first to last, Thunder Road sounds every bit as urgent today as it did when it was committed to tape at The Record Plant in New York in the spring of 1975. The arrangement and production - “Dylan as produced by Phil Spector” in the words of Nick Hornby - has not dated; the musicianship cannot be faulted; even Springsteen’s vocal (rarely his strongest point, and he admits he spends this particular song trying to emulate Roy Orbison) demonstrates atypical subtlety and nuance alongside the more usual power and bombast.
Springsteen achieved his ambition:
I wanted to make a record that would sound like Phil Spector. I wanted to write words like Dylan. I wanted my guitar to sound like Duane Eddy.
Yet the song contains the same central themes - a boy, a girl, a car, the symbolic freedom offered by the open road, an aspiration to leave a stagnating small town and a burning faith in the redemptive power of rock music - at which Cars And Girls sneered. Our man yearns for maturity but his chosen means of escape - his car and his guitar - remain the same tools by which many teenagers seek to attain eternal youth. Yet even McAloon would surely recognise that, whatever its subject matter, Thunder Road is a truly great record - fantastic music with a great story, realised spectacularly.
Thunder Road’s ambiguous conclusion suggests that even its author was uncertain of where our anti-hero was heading or how things would work out. The released studio version ends with the roar of confidence; yet Springsteen’s acoustic re-workings of the story end with a softer-sung intention imbued with the fear that he’s never going to win anything.
In Springsteen’s own words:
[The Born To Run album] really dealt with faith and a searching for answers. I laid out a set of values, a set of ideas, intangibles like faith and hope, belief in friendship and in a better way…In some ways I suppose it is [young man’s music], but also a good song takes years to find itself. When I go back and play Thunder Road… I can sing very comfortably from my vantage point because a lot of the music was about a loss of innocence, there’s innocence contained in you but there’s also innocence in the process of being lost. And that was the country at the time I wrote that music.
I wrote that music immediately preceding the end of the Vietnam war, when that feeling swept the country. A part of me was interested in music which contained that innocence, the Spector stuff, a lot of the Fifties and Sixties rock’n’roll, but I myself wasn’t one of those people. I realised I wasn’t one of my heroes, I was something else and I had to take that into consideration. So when I wrote that music and incorporated a lot of the things I loved from those particular years, I was also aware that I had to set in place something that acknowledged what had happened to me and everybody else where I lived.
A few months after Cars And Girls‘ release in 1988, Bruce Springsteen would share the bill on Amnesty International’s Human Rights Now world tour with Tracy Chapman. Her biggest hit concerned a boy, a girl, a car, the symbolic freedom offered by the open road and an aspiration to leave a stagnating small town…
You got a fast car:
I want a ticket to anywhere -
Maybe we make a deal,
Maybe together we can get somewhere.
Any place is better.
Starting from zero, got nothing to lose
Maybe we’ll make something,
But me, myself, I got nothing to prove.
You got a fast car:
And I got a plan to get us out of here…
We won’t have to drive too far -
Just ‘cross the border and into the city.
You and I can both get jobs
And finally see what it means to be living…
I remember when we were driving, driving in your car,
The speed so fast I felt like I was drunk;
City lights lay out before us,
And your arm felt nice wrapped ’round my shoulder,
And I had a feeling that I belonged,
And I had a feeling I could be someone…
You got a fast car:
But is it fast enough so [we] can fly away?
[We] gotta make a decision -
[We] leave tonight or live and die this way.
Some things undeniably hurt more - much more - than cars and girls. But in Popworld, if they’re all you’ve got, nothing else matters more.
Listen to the studio version of Thunder Road:
t’Internet allows us also to witness Wings For Wheels, from February 1975, containing a number of significant lyrical differences - among other things, bootlegs from early 1975 show that Mary had previously been named Christine, Chrissy and, as in this case, Angelina:
There are literally hundreds of versions of Thunder Road available but above all the Minister beseeches you to listen to this magical harmonica, piano and glockenspiel-only version from the Live 1975-85 box set recorded on 18 October 1975 at the Roxy Theatre, West Hollywood:
There is a school of thought that believes Patrick Joseph “Paddy” McAloon, the former leader, singer, guitarist and composer of Prefab Sprout, to be the best British songwriter of the Eighties. Never shy at coming forward, that school was initially cheer-led by Mr. McAloon himself, but the sheer consistency of quality of the music released by the band brought quite a few people around to his way of thinking.
Just one Top 10 single (The King Of Rock’n'Roll, number seven, 1988) and six other minor hits (none making the Top 20) suggests the band underachieved commercially but four of their albums made the album chart top ten. As the ad men later had it with Crowded House and James - you know more Prefab Sprout songs than you think: their first compilation, 1992’s A Life Of Surprises, hit number three.
Their breakthrough, sophomore album, 1985’s Steve McQueen (released as Two Wheels Good in the States), contained a breathtaking single in the sprawling, lush, romantic panorama created by When Love Breaks Down but it was a minor hit from the band’s fourth set, March 1988’s From Langley Park To Memphis (containing contributions from Stevie Wonder and Pete Townshend), an extended diatribe against America’s obsession with superficial celebrity, its very title ripping the piss out of the title of Springsteen’s debut album Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., that contains our sixth SMIP.
McAloon was particularly and rightly applauded for his lyrical style; like Elvis Costello before and Aimee Mann afterwards, McAloon subscribed to Lewis Carroll’s theory, “Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves”. Ironic, then, that his biggest hit should be a song with the chorus: “Hot dog, jumping frog, Alberquerque.”
But McAloon’s songs usually work, like Cocker’s, just as well as poems or prose. Cars And Girls is no exception, a vicious assault on Bruce Springsteen and his mid-Eighties AOR peers and their apparent penchants for nothing more than the subjects in the title.
Like all the best satire, Cars And Girls wraps itself in its target’s clothes: the poppy sound that propelled its fellow album track The King Of Rock’n'Roll up the charts would not have sounded entirely out of place on The Boss’s own over-produced offering Born In The U.S.A. (1984) - the prosecution offers up the anaemic Bobby Jean by way of evidence.
Opening with a repeated refrain of “Ba, ba, ba/ Sha do-dah do-dah” (0:00-0:13) by backing vocalist Wendy Smith, it is immediately clear that urine is being extracted. And then McAloon goes for the jugular.
Brucie dreams life’s a highway.
Too many roads bypass my way
Or they never begin… (0:14-0:25)
Does heaven wait all heavenly over the next horizon?
But look at us now - quit driving - some things hurt more,
Much more than cars and girls… (0:41-0:56)
Life’s a drive through a dust bowl…
Someone stops for directions;
Something responds deep in our engines (1:18-1:39)
These lines squeeze the vice around poor Bruce’s nuts just that little bit harder. It’s hard to know where Born To Run ends and Cars And Girls starts.
Sprung from cages out on Highway 9,
Chrome wheeled, fuel injected
And steppin’ out over the line[...]
Just wrap your legs ’round these velvet rims
And strap your hands across my engines[...]
Beyond the Palace hemi-powered drones
Scream down the boulevard.
The girls comb their hair in rearview mirrors
And the boys try to look so hard[...]
The highway’s jammed with broken heroes
On a last chance power drive.
But it’s Cars And Girls’ last verse that really twists the knife:
Little boy, got a hot rod -
Thinks it makes him some kind of new God.
Well, this is one race he won’t win
‘Cos life’s no cruise with a cool chick -
Too many folks feelin’ car sick, but it never pulls in.
Brucie’s thoughts - pretty streamers:
Guess this world needs its dreamers -
May they never wake up. (2:35-3:13)
Venom oozing from every line and we’ve still to meet the SMIP.
For all a writer’s lyrical artistry, sometimes a single word can be the most devastating.
Were this a Sublime Moment In Cinema, its equivalent would be Kristin Scott-Thomas dismissively sneering, “Slut,” through the side of her mouth when Hugh Grant first sets eyes on Andie Macdowell in Four Weddings And A Funeral.
But we’re in Popworld.
At 3:14, summoning up every bit of vitriol his skinny frame can muster McAloon sarcastically mimics the drawl of a hundred soft rockers - “Alright!” - to segue into the final chorus. A simple, single, humdrum word that features in countless anonymous, meaningless, pointless and soulless AOR recordings employed to say, ‘Have that, Brucie - and let’s see how long you’d last in Langley Park, County Durham on a Saturday night.’
(Seven years later another working class northerner, Jarvis Cocker, would use precisely the same device - twice (at 1:55 and particularly at 3:05) to slice through the fake brotherly love of a million Ecstasy poppers on Sorted For E’s And Wizz.)
Cars And Girls is not Prefab Sprout’s best song; it’s not even McAloon’s best lyric. But for the forensic accuracy in which it stabs its victim in the heart, it’s damned hard to beat. It reached only number 44 on the charts, thanks in part to a lack of radio airplay.
Prefab Sprout would go on to release two arguably better albums than From Langley Park… - 1990’s Jordan: The Comeback and 1997’s Andromeda Heights - but would never again skewer a target so effectively.
Never one to take the low road when a high one was available McAloon’s career is scattered with abandoned or unrealised projects (one, Behind The Veil, a double album based on the life of Michael Jackson scared even his most ardent fans), but he achieved a good deal of success as a songwriter - writing major hits for Jimmy Nail and album tracks for the likes of Dame Kylie Minogue - as well as penning a UK Eurovision entry and the theme song for the ITV series Where The Heart Is.
This was achieved against the backdrop of a progressive eye disorder that slowly destroyed McAloon’s retinas, necessitating a series of operations after which he could not see or read for an extended period. He turned to the radio for company and from that experience emerged in 2003 his first solo album, I Trawl The Megahertz, a mostly instrumental quasi-classical work interspersed with dialogue and narration - a highly distinct and challenging but ultimately rewarding piece of work.
A year later, as McAloon was working on reinterpreting some of the material from Steve McQueen to feature on a remastered re-release, he was struck down by Meniere’s Disease - a disorder of the inner ear - and lost a large part of his hearing.
Although it was reported last year that McAloon’s hearing has been restored to some extent, it is sadly possible that we have heard the last from this idiosyncratic and unmistakably English talent. We are fortunate, though, to have some lovely memories and at least one SMIP.
Thanks to YouTube’s disregard for intellectual property law, we can see the video for Cars And Girls here:
Of all the underappreciated legends of Sixties soul music Stephen Lee Cropper, a pasty-faced white boy born in October 1941 on a Missouri farm, perhaps leads the field. In 1950 the Cropper family moved to Memphis, Tennessee. A late musical starter, Cropper was ten when he played a guitar for the first time, getting his own instrument only when he was 14.
He soon became a founding member of the band The Royal Spades. The Royal Spades became The Mar-Keys. The Mar-Keys became one of the first Stax Records acts to make the charts, with 1961’s Last Night. Cropper left the Mar-Keys to become the A&R man for Stax, the Memphis-based Atlantic Records affiliate that ran neck-and-neck with, and often bested, Tamla Motown throughout the soul decade. Simultaneously he was a founding member of the Stax house band, Booker T. & The MGs, and became one of Stax’s lead producers.
While Motown’s The Funk Brothers were content to stand in the shadows of their label, the MGs – with Booker T. Jones on organ/piano, bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn and drummer Al Jackson, Jr. – were more than just any old house band. Best known in the UK for 1967’s Soul Limbo (the BBC’s long-time cricket coverage title music) and in the US for the 1962 hit Green Onions, the MGs were innovative hit makers in their own right, defined the Memphis Soul sound (alongside The Memphis Horns) and influenced the very best: The Beatles famously kissed Cropper’s hands when they met for the first time, claimed that they had based Day Tripper’s guitar riff on Duck Dunn’s bass line on Otis Redding’s original recording of Respect and initially intended to record the Revolver album in Stax’s Memphis studio. (In 1970 the MGs released the sublime album McLemore Avenue – named for the street on which Stax was located – reinterpreting The Beatles’ Abbey Road album as three instrumental suites.)
When not engaged in one of the above roles, Cropper also found the time to co-write singles such as Knock On Wood (with Eddie Floyd) and In The Midnight Hour (with Wilson Pickett) and strike up a formidable partnership with Otis Redding, with whom he composed (among many others) the hits Pain In My Heart, Mr. Pitiful and the sixth most-played record of all time on American radio, (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay. It is probably Cropper’s long-standing collaboration with Redding for which he is most lauded: “I don’t know what it is about Otis’s voice,” Cropper once said. “He just makes my guitar sound better.”
Redding’s cruelly early death in a 1967 plane crash marked the beginning of the end for Stax - the label had Cropper in the studio finishing Dock Of The Bay before Redding’s body had even been recovered. By 1971 the label had also lost Cropper, Booker T. and its star writers Issac Hayes and David Porter, as well as its distribution deal with Atlantic. But for that magnificent soul decade, the Stax star shone brighter than any other in the firmament – while Tamla had more hits (a scarcely credible 110 US top ten singles in the decade from 1961 to 1971), Stax made up in quality for what it lacked in quantity.
Cropper was at the heart of it all, but recently claimed he “really didn’t learn to play fluent lead guitar until after” he left Stax.
Shoot, guitarists are all different. For years I’d see guitarist come into the studio and change their guitar strings before each session. Man, I never changed my guitar strings! I’d let ’em stretch into place and play ’em forever. I’d even apply Chap Stick to my guitar strings to break ’em in and enable my fingers to slide across the neck. It just made the guitar sound so much better that way.
While undoubtedly underappreciated, it would be wrong to say that Cropper’s work has been entirely overlooked: he was voted the best living guitarist by fellow musicians in Mojo magazine in 1996. It is therefore ironic that some of his simplest guitar work should be the catalyst for the fifth SMIP.
Samuel Moore and David Prater – southern boys tutored in the ways of gospel – met in Florida in 1961, unsuccessfully recording for several years before being signed to Atlantic Records and handed off to Stax in 1965. Initially paired with Cropper as the act’s writer and producer (he co-wrote and produced four of their earliest Stax singles), it was chiefly with the later help of the MGs and songwriters/producers Isaac Hayes and David Porter that Sam & Dave created a sublime body of sweaty urban soul throughout the late Sixties that epitomizes Southern soul, at one stage making the Billboard R&B Top 20 with ten successive single releases, though familiarity and drug misuse quickly bred contempt to the extent that the duo barely spoke off-stage and the act was put out of its misery in 1970.
Sporadic reunions throughout the Seventies and the emergence of The Blues Brothers on Saturday Night Live (an act that heavily borrowed from Sam & Dave’s stage performances – Dan Aykroyd later said, “If there wasn’t a Sam Moore, there never would have been a Jake and Elwood.”) kept the act’s name in the public eye, despite the pair’s respective drug addictions (Prater would be arrested in 1987 for selling crack to an undercover policeman).
Written and produced by Hayes and Porter, 1967’s the swaggering calling card Soul Man featured all the members of Booker T. & the MGs (excepting Booker himself; Hayes filled in on piano) and The Memphis Horns. Cropper jangles an uncomplicated guitar riff in the key of G as an introduction (0:00-0:08) and the Memphis Horns add light and shade (from 0:08) while Sam and Dave’s shouted call and response sets out their stall to the object of their affection:
Good lovin’ – I got a truck load;
And when you get it – huh! – you got somethin’.
So don’t worry – ’cause I’m comin’…
(0:22-0:33)
So, honey, [I] said, “Don’t you fret,
’Cause you ain’t seen nothing yet”…
(1:00-1:07)
I was brought up on a side street – listen now!
I learned how to love before I could eat.
(1:25-1:33)
A simple slide guitar lick from Cropper (0:41) complements the chanted chorus (0:34-0:49) emphatically proclaiming Sam and Dave’s status as men well and truly of soul. During the second chorus (1:08-1:23) Sam yells out, “Play it, Steve!” (1:15) while Cropper reprises that simplest of four-note solos (1:14-1:16).
In the rich history of ad libs, yells and asides, the exuberance of Moore’s imploring of Cropper, recognising and immortalising the latter’s influence over Sixties soul, stands out. Recorded in the dying days of the age when most records were still recorded live in the studio, it represents a time when bands and vocalists alike could still lose themselves in their performance during a recording session.
While John Lennon’s manic mariner’s cackle heralding the final chorus in Yellow Submarine rarely fails to raise a smile and Michael Jackson’s yelps and vocal tics on the Off The Wall and Thriller albums can still excite, they were added to the track long after the musicians put down their instruments.
There remains something special about live pop music, something indefinable that can only be experienced properly at a gig but can sometimes be represented on the very best live albums. Ropy as the sound sometimes is, you can hear ‘it’ on live recordings such as Sam Cooke’s album Live At The Harlem Square Club, Otis Redding’s set at the Monterey Pop Festival, Neil Diamond’s Hot August Night, or Van Morrison’s It’s Too Late To Stop Now.
The days when acts sought to reproduce their live sound on vinyl have long since gone, but a trawl through those recordings made ‘as live’, before four-track recording studios became the norm, can – as with Soul Man – yield vast rewards.
The Soul Man single topped the Billboard R&B chart for seven weeks and made number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, but only scraped to number 24 in the UK – hardly surprising in a year when this country’s top three selling singles were all recorded by Engelbert Humperdinck.
The single won the 1967 Grammy Award for Best Performance by a Rhythm & Blues Group. Rolling Stone magazine listed Soul Man as one of its 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in 2005, and the Recording Industry Association of America placed it in its list of Songs of the Century. Sam & Dave’s recording of Soul Man was voted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999.
Steve Cropper became (and remains) a member of the Blues Brothers’ Band. He named his own label Play It, Steve Records and his website is at playitsteve.com.
Dave Prater died in a 1988 car accident; Sam Moore continues to live, love, thrive and survive as a very special soul singer.
Sam & Dave lip synch Soul Man on American television in 1967 here, including Sam’s “Play it, Steve!” exhortation:
To hear Soul Man’s incredible bass line played properly and accorded due prominence, watch David Dunn, “Duck” Dunn’s nephew, reprise his uncle’s efforts, accompanied by the Blues Brothers Band’s live recording:
Marie with the laughing eyes,
She tossed her hair and tantalised.
She came, she touched me, then she’d gone
Just like a summer breeze.
Chorus and brass band break
(0:54-1:11)
The SMIP project is proving illuminating in ways I hadn’t expected. Much of the (painstaking, time consuming) work is, of course, going on behind the Ministry’s doors and will come to light in good time or under the 30 year rule (whichever is the sooner).
But, by way of example, re-listening to things I haven’t heard for a while has demonstrated that one’s memory can all too easily play tricks on you. A decade ago, I’d have given you a Chinese burn had you dared to suggest that Good Enough by Dodgy or The Bluetones’ Slight Return were anything other than SMIPfests from start to finish.
They are not.
By Christ, they are not.
Oh, no. (And just trust me on this one: you really don’t want to go there…)
The Minister’s Wife was - as always - absolutely right. And it set me on a journey through the darker recesses of my iTunes Library to dig out some examples.
The first that sprang to mind was Neil Diamond’s first hit, Solitary Man. I am, unashamedly, a loud and proud Diamond fan. I don’t care what jibes are thrown at the Vegas kitsch cabaret act he has become - although I refer critics of said Diamond incarnation to his last album, 12 Songs (his best in 30 years), to learn precisely what songwriting is all about - but between 1966 and 1973 Neil Diamond wrote some of the best pop and rock songs ever and his range of work (eg his African Trilogy from 1970’s Tap Root Manuscript album) was as diverse as anything lauded to the skies when Paul Simon did it 16 years later.
Some of those songs will feature as SMIPs in due course. Solitary Man has proven versatile and durable enough to have been interpreted by acts as diverse as Chris Isaak, Johnny Cash, pseudo-metalheads HIM and bluegrass revivalists Crooked Fingers in just the past seven years. The original version remains the best, however, with a pair of trombones adding light and shade through the chorus and bridge of one of the darkest lyrics of Diamond’s career.
Then I recalled Together Alone by Crowded House, taken from the 1993 album of the same name. The SMIP in this particular track lies elsewhere (patience, children) but the simple sound of the brass ensemble - particularly in the context of underpinning the rest of this song’s arrangement - is particularly affecting.
Then the Minister’s Wife, in an act of wanton cruelty, forced him to sit through the “third season finale” of the execrable Grey’s Anatomy the other day. Featuring prominently on the show’s soundtrack was Within You from Ray LaMontagne’s second album, Till The Sun Turns Black.
While LaMontagne luckily falls within that sacred category of People Who Could Sing The Phone Book And Make It Sound Gorgeous, a small brass ensemble - alongside a string arrangement Sir George Martin would admire - in this instance enhances an audaciously simple song and trite lyric (”War is not the answer: the answer is within you. Love, love, love.” Repeat to fade.) to create an aural experience that is far from unpleasant.
In 1967 Hank Marvin wrote a simple little song called The Day I Met Marie. Being unable to hold a tune himself, Hank handed it to his mate Cliff, whose producer arranged it to incorporate a prominent brass band.
From an initially inauspicious opening of acoustic guitar, bass and Cliff’s ever-fragile vocal on the first verse (0:08-0.35), first trombone (at 0:28) and then trumpet (from 0:33) gently lift the second verse above the mundane until, at 0:46, a tuba begins to propel singer, musicians and listener inexorably towards the first chorus (at 0:54) and our SMIP.
And yes, the churlish could legitimately claim that a brass ensemble’s presence on a Cliff Richard record three years after he became born again raises too many Salvation Army marching band connotations for comfort, but the bottom line is that the chorus of this song is effortlessly infectious.
The sustained tuba bass notes that end the bridge (1:18-1:29) add a further little frisson of melodrama while Cliff tries to sing convincingly about being kissed by a woman.
It also helps that songs only lasted two minutes back in the Sixties. Because, after a quick third verse (1:31-1:53) and a second, less pulsating and slightly anticlimactic chorus (1:53-2:02), it’s all over.
And we smile.
And we move on.
The very essence - if you will permit me my Paul Morley moment - of simply great pop music.
The record briefly made number ten in September 1967, the great British public once more spectacularly fucking it up by choosing to put Engelbert Humperdinck’s noxious The Last Waltz at number one for about eight months.
Cliff formally split from The Shadows in 1968 before leading the United Kingdom to Eurovision failure with the heinous Congratulations. He would barely make another listenable record until he stumbled upon Miss You Nights and Devil Woman in quick succession in 1976.
Before directing you to YouTube, I would urge you to remember to listen to the song and not, er, watch the “dancing” in this clip of Cliff lip synching The Day I Met Marie in 1967:
To discover what the song sounds like when The Shadows themselves perform it (with Hank gamely singing lead, bless him) and how SMIP status genuinely necessitates a coming together of the right musicians, producer, arranger and performer at the right time and in the right manner, check out this surreal little clip from 1968 Australian TV:
It is one of the spooky coincidences of iPod ownership that my iPod’s shuffle function should this morning have played me SMIP #3, the day on which Anton Corbijn’s movie biography of Ian Curtis, Control, is released. (Another was my previous iPod’s unnatural attachment to Suzanne Vega’s Luka, something I was delighted changed when Apple had to replace my unit under warranty when its hard drive failed. I absolutely refute any suggestion that I threw that iPod against a wall when Ms. Vega’s voice piped up once too often.)
Atmosphere - initially entitled Chance - is perhaps not the best track to play to oneself while driving up the A1(M) to a job you despise at 6.45am on a dark, misty and chilly autumn morning, but there you go. It’s either that or I take the backroads and pass a road sign for a place called Souldrop. One way or the other, it’s hard to get fired up for another ten hours in the office…
It is practically impossible to separate Joy Division’s music from Ian Curtis’s mental illness: it is too easy to read into every line that Curtis’s lyrics and their Voice Of Doom delivery were a prolonged cry for help that went unheeded. The typical images of Curtis - monochromal, swathed in industrial shadows, or sweating and maniacally wide-eyed, lost in his music, on stage - reinforce the impression of a soul far deeper and darker than his bandmates or friends ever seemed to notice.
Curtis’s Wikipedia entry has it that “Many of Curtis’ writings were filled with cavernous-deep imagery of emotional isolation, death, alienation and urban degeneration.” Atmosphere is no different:
“My illusion, worn like a mask of self-hate, confronts and then dies. Don’t walk away. People like you find it easy…” (1:49-2:39)
It’s another Curtis lyric about desolate isolation. When a 23-year-old father hangs himself, how can lyrics like this have been anything but a desperate plea?
Shortly before his own recent death, Tony Wilson told a BBC documentary about Factory Records that two weeks before Curtis’s suicide he asked Curtis’s mistress, Annik Honore, what she thought of the band’s just-completed second album, Closer:
“She goes, ‘I’m terrified.’ I said, ‘What are you terrified of?’ She replies, ‘Don’t you understand? He means it.’ And I go, ‘No, he doesn’t mean it - it’s art.’ And guess what, he fucking meant it.”
Even had Curtis’s life not ended as and when it did it would be difficult to imagine a band whose output - lyrical and musical - so comprehensively introduced its audience to life’s bleakest aspects and enraged alienation. My Chemical Romance don’t know they’re born.
For me, Atmosphere’s appeal has remarkably little to do with Ian Curtis’s lyrics or his performance (which is nevertheless one of his best). This record’s chief appeal lies in its arrangement, production and, in particular, the shimmering keyboard flourishes (played by Bernard Sumner) that bookend each verse - “produced to sound like rays of light from the heavens, a beautiful contrast of light against the heavy rhythmic doom down below”, as allmusic.com’s Ned Raggett would have it.
The fondly shambolic presentation of Factory Records’ in-house producer, the late Martin Hannett, in Michael Winterbottom’s movie 24 Hour Party People and as the butt of countless documentarised anecdotes suggests just another producer in the “mad genius” vein of Phil Spector and Joe Meek. But, by Christ, he knew his way around a recording studio and a mixing desk. The bands may not always have liked Hannett’s finished product or the methods by which he achieved his recordings, but it is unthinkable now to imagine that he was anything less than a fifth, unofficial member of Joy Division, the midwife assisting the birth of Factory Records and a thousand legends and urban myths.
The surviving (rarely satisfactory) live recordings of Joy Division showcase aspects of the band that appear only infrequently in their studio work (thought both demonstrate that Morris merits serious consideration as one of the best drummers in rock and pop history - it’s perversely delicious that the song with which he is most associated, New Order’s Blue Monday, utilises a drum machine; how I would love to believe that the story in 24 Hour Party People of Hannett once making Morris play his drum kit on the studio roof was true), but Hannett’s studio work adds a dimension to the band’s songs that a more conventional producer would surely never have achieved.
Joy Division’s live sound depended largely on Sumner’s jagged guitar assault to create an industrial soundscape, augmented by Morris’s imperious timekeeping and crisp snare. Hannett’s studio recordings push Peter Hook’s bass and Morris’s drums more to the fore, bathing the latter in particular in reverb and echo. Sumner’s guitars were softened and quietened in the mix, complemented by his synthesiser work in a manner that, as a man with just the two arms, he obviously could not emulate on stage.
Atmosphere - recorded in October and November 1979, before the Closer sessions, but only released posthumously - represents, alongside Love Will Tear Us Apart, the first signs that Joy Division’s sound was evolving from its post-punk roots into (or at least making the occasional concession to) more mainstream rock.
Opening with Hook’s haunting bass line and Sumner’s layered synths, the record quickly combines Hook’s twists with ritualistic bursts from Morris’s drum kit (from 0:03), building to create an etheral aural canvas on which Curtis laid down an atypically controlled baritone performance (from 0:25). Sumner’s guitar is not even introduced until 3:21.
By the final, scintillating release of synthesizer and peal of chimes (4:01-4:03), those listeners to Atmosphere prepared to submit to its mesmerising meanderings should be crying, smiling or - best of all - both.
Drink, drugs and obesity did for Hannett, who suffered a fatal heart attack in 1991, aged 42. With the benefit of hindsight it is difficult to claim that he achieved anything of substance (pun intended) other than produce Joy Division’s studio work and New Order’s first album - but as Mr. Baby would have it: “Fuck it, that was a good life in the office.”
Hannett’s outstanding achievement, Atmosphere was voted by listeners to John Peel’s show as the best song of the millennium. There are higher accolades, but that’ll do.
