Jeff Matthews
Nov 29, 201728 min
2017 Editor’s Note:
“I
still remember that moment the first time Ringo played with us, ‘BANG!’ he
kicks in, it was an ‘Oh my God’ moment. I
remember we’re all looking at each other, like ‘Yeah this is it!’ Phew, I’m gettin’ very emotional…”—Paul McCartney
in ‘The Beatles: Eight Days a Week—The Touring Years.’
There is, or was, back in the day, an argument
among amateur drummers that went like this:
“Ringo sucked!”
“Are you kidding? Ringo was great!”
The drummers who dismissed Ringo were, by
our experience, younger, jazz-oriented drummers who were technically brilliant
and could not fathom why such a technically-limited drummer like Ringo had become rich and famous while they were stuck playing “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You” at weddings to pay the rent. They honestly didn’t get it.
The drummers who did get Ringo were, by our experience, older drummers of many
styles who knew how hard it is to do what Ringo did.
What Ringo did was play drums behind the three
best singers and songwriters who ever played together as a band, and to not
just keep the beat, but to match the mood to the music and drive the tempo without
getting in the way.
Listen to how Ringo sets the tone in “She
Loves You” with that opening floor-tom pattern, then brightens the sound when
the voices come in by laying into the snare and open high-hat. Simple stuff, technically—but really hard for
a drummer to execute.
Why?
Because drummers like to play shit loud and fast. They want you to know how good they are.
They demand to be heard.
Stewart Copeland, one of the best loud-and-fast drummers out there, likes to tell the young speed demons at drummer workshops that he is about to demonstrate the hardest thing a drummer can do—but instead of launching into a slamming 192 beats-per-minute polyphonic killer riff like he did with the Police on “Synchronicity
I,” Stewart just plays a verrrrrrry slow single-stroke pattern at a rock-steady
beat.
It disappoints the “Ringo sucked” crowd,
but it’s what all great drummers know: it’s really hard to keep it simple and not
overplay.
And that’s why, when Copeland’s former
bandmate Sting says, “a band is only as good as its drummer,” he means The
Beatles, too.
Which brings us to this season’s update to
our annual holiday song review, which is light on the Christmas songs and heavy
on the Beatles—but not because Sirius XM finally created a “Beatles Channel,”
the obvious absence of which we complained about in this virtual column way
back in 2011.
It’s because of the excellent Ron Howard
movie quoted at the top, “The Beatles: Eight Days a Week—The Touring Years,”
which among many other things just happens to document the Beatles’ role in desegregating U.S. concert
venues way back in 1964.
And you should see it.
Now the story about the desegregation of
the Jacksonville, Florida ‘Gator Bowl’ stadium occupies only a handful of the
106 minutes of backstage shots, home movies, televised concerts, interviews with
“the boys” and celebrity interviews documenting the arc of their live concert performances
from the early days in Hamburg to the madness of Shea Stadium and their final
concert at Candlestick, when the boys had become, as John Lennon said, a “freak-show” and quit touring. (It finishes, of course, with
nice footage of their final-final concert on the roof at Apple’s offices in
London.)
But the desegregation story is, we think,
the best part of the movie, because how they did it—unscripted, unplanned,
unpublicized—is so cool.
It just happened.
And it happened only because they demanded
it—all four Beatles, including Ringo, who had only been in the band two years at that point and just so happened to be your editor’s “favorite Beatle”
back in the day when every American kid in school had one, which is why we
started this with Ringo.
As Paul tells the filmmakers, the Beatles—before
the breakup—were a unit: “We had to ALL decide that we agreed on a thing…for
ANY idea to go through,” he says. Even George,
the most cynical after the breakup, says it this way: “As a band, we were tight…
We could argue a lot among ourselves, but we were very, very close…and in the
company of other people or other situations we’d always stick together.”
And they stuck together when a very major situation, segregation, entered the picture, as
radio reporter Larry Kane, who traveled with the boys on that 1964 tour,
recalled:
“I received a report from my station that
the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville was gonna be segregated, so I mentioned it to
them, in the interview…. They said if there was going to be segregation of any
kind, they weren’t going.”
Here’s how it actually went down in that interview, preserved on black-and-white film:
Larry Kane: “What about this comment that I heard about, mentioning racial
integration at the various performances?”
Paul McCartney: “We don’t like it if there’s any segregation or anything, because it
just seems mad to me.”
Kane: “Well
you’re gonna play Jacksonville, Florida, do you anticipate any kind of
difference in that opinion?”
McCartney: “Well I don’t know, really, it’d be a bit silly to segregate people, ‘cause
you know I think it’d be STUPID, you know, you can’t treat other human beings
like animals.”
Ringo Starr: “That’s the way we ALL feel.”
McCartney: “That’s the way we all feel, and the way a lot
of people in England feel. There’s
never any segregation at concerts in England, you know, and if in fact there
was we wouldn’t play ‘em.”
And that’s how The Beatles integrated American
concert venues on September 11, 1964, when they played to 20,000, black and white together, at the Gator
Bowl in Jacksonville, Florida.
Thanks, Boys.
And Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah
and a Good New Year to All!
—JM, November 29, 2017
2016 Editor’s Note:
The switch to all-holiday music
has started, and while we have not heard much new, it has, so far, been
mercifully light on the Michael
Bublé and wonderfully heavy on the Chrissie Hynde and Bing Crosby, although
with no sign of The Boss, yet.
Our beef this year is not with
the current roll of holiday songs, or with any of the rock biographies we’ve been
reading (Dee-Dee Ramone’s “Lobotomy: Surviving the Ramones,” is even
more hair-raising than Chrissie Hyndes’ book that
we called out last year, and that takes some doing); our beef is with
the SongFacts web site, which, as readers of this virtual column might imagine,
ranks right up there with Bloomberg, FactSet and the Wall Street Journal as
tools of our trade.
Specifically, how does
SongFacts not know that at 4 minutes 51 seconds into the Beatles’ “A Day in the
Life,” one of the chairs the four Beatles are sitting on as they
keep the extended final chord going on the two pianos at the Abbey
Road studio emits an audible
squeak, and a voice (we’ve always guessed Paul) says “Shhh!”?
This is surely more important
than the fact that the song was ranked as the Beatles’ best by some
random compilation, or that noted musician, singer, and drug-abuser David
Crosby was supposedly in the studio for the very first playback. (After
all, he could have actually been in Brazil that day and not remembered.)
Of course, to hear the
most famous squeak/shush in recorded history, the volume has to be turned up
extremely loud, i.e. well beyond what most
listeners would ever have their iPhone or stereo or radio cranked up to.
In fact, you have to go
to 11.
But that’s what it’s all about,
right?
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to All!
—JM, December 3, 2016
2015 Editor’s Note:
We have not heard much new in
the way of holiday music, so let’s turn straight to the rock and roll biography
scene—specifically Chrissie Hyndes’ autobiography, “Reckless: My Life as a
Pretender,” which is like witnessing a car wreck in book form.
While there’s plenty here that’s
harmless and bland (early days in Ohio, e.g.), there’s plenty that makes you
want to put the book away in a very dark place, and all you can think is, How
was she not part of “That stupid club,” as Kurt Cobain’s mother called it?
(Look it up, kids.)
Similarly depressing are
some movies we’ve been watching on Netflix—starting with the Levon Helms
biography, “Ain’t In It for My Health,” which minces no words when it comes to
his former bandmate and nemesis, the Canadian songwriter Robbie Robertson, who
squeezed out of Levon (the only American in The Band) vibrant scenes of
Americana (“The Weight,” and especially, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”)
without sharing the royalties.
Even more depressing than the
Hynes book and the Helms movie combined, however, is the Glenn
Campbell-gets-diagnosed-with-Alzheimers-while-you-watch film, “I’ll Be
Me.” Your editor saw Campbell perform at a Wall Street birthday bash
circa 1997, and he was clearly miserable throughout: flushed faced and
word-slurring, Campbell and his band blew through his greatest hits like Bob
Dylan on a bad day, and, embarrassingly to everybody in the room, kept calling
the host—whose name was Paul and who, when introducing the singer, nearly broke
down while talking about how much it meant having him perform—“Pete.”
But “I’ll Be Me” does a great
job highlighting Campbell’s background as a highly valued session
musician…and if you’re interested in knowing more about that era, you ought
to watch “The Wrecking Crew,” our last movie shout-out.
“The Wrecking Crew” was the name
of the L.A. session players behind The Byrds, The Beach Boys and classics like
“I Got You, Babe”—just listen to Hal Blaine’s slamming drums on the outro—and
the movie is a joyous look at the faces behind the instruments behind the
songs. Glen Campbell was a supremely talented guitarist for the
Wrecking Crew before he decided—to the initial amusement and later jealousy of
some of the Crew—go for the gold himself.
Suggestions on other movies (and
books) are encouraged in the comments below…after all, your editor
hasn’t finished compiling his Christmas list, if you get our drift…
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a
Good New Year to All!
—JM, December 3, 2015
2014 Editor’s Note:
Well, Michael Bublé’s computer
is still releasing holiday songs, which is the worst we can say about this
year’s holiday music survey. The best we can say—and it
is truly good news—is that The Boss’s hard-driving, live version of “Santa
Claus is Comin’ to Town,” done entirely without computer-aided Bublé-style
vocals, seems to be gaining much deserved traction.
Meanwhile, one of our previous
also-ran mentions in the What-Did-We-Do-To-Deserve-This? category, one Taylor
Swift, deserves a big boo-yah for telling the Spotify algorithms to stuff
it, pulling her entire catalogue from the automated listening
service—including, by definition, the song mentioned here last year, which
should be no tragedy to Spotify customers anyhow.
As for our usual review of the
latest rock memoirs, which tend to flood the bookshelves right about now—only
to turn up in the mark-down bins come spring, which is when your editor
actually buys them—the best read during brief trips to our local, increasingly
down-on-its-heals Barnes & Noble, has to be Mick Fleetwood’s “Play On.”
Fleetwood is one of the most
underrated drummers in rock music, being the kind who drives the beat without
histrionics and stays well behind the kit while the front-people do their thing
(it was Fleetwood and fellow Mac bassist John McVie who
rescued “Werewolves of London” for Warren Zevon and producer Jackson
Browne, after the house band could not make the song work) so his remembrances
of the formation of Fleetwood Mac are insightful and compelling even for
those—including your editor—who were never big Fleetwood Mac fans.
Merry Christmas, Happy
Hanukkah and a Good New Year to all!
—JM, December 19, 2014
2013 Editor’s Note: The most
unnerving aspect to this year’s holiday music survey is the unavoidable,
near-totalitarian presence of an insipid cover version of George Michael’s
already-plenty-insipid-for-our-taste-thank-you-very-much “Last Christmas,”
which, as we point out below has one of the most inane choruses ever written
(no mean feat there), which wouldn’t be so bad except it is repeated over and
over and over until you want to hand yourself over to Vladimir Putin’s security
forces and let them do their worst.
The perpetrator of this latest
holiday music outrage is, it turns out, Taylor Swift, about whom your editor
knows nothing except she adds exceedingly little to a song that needed plenty
of help to begin with.
But, as always with these annual
surveys, your editor digresses.
On the happier side of the music
world, this last year has seen a number of excellent new rock memoirs, of which
Kinks front-man and songwriting genius Ray Davies’ is the most interesting.
The centerpiece of the story
line in Ray’s “Americana” is his getting shot by a mugger in New Orleans
some years back, but interspersing that tale he manages to tell much of the
story of his career.
If you want to read how Ray came
up with classics like “Better Things” (why couldn’t that be a
Christmas song? It’s as much about the holidays as “Same Old Lang
Syne,” about which your editor has plenty to say later on), this is your book.
Neil Young’s “Waging Heavy
Peace,” which came out last year, is even better than “Americana,” however,
and more fun to keep picking up when the mood strikes: Neil’s recollections are
loopy, digressive, and admittedly unsure in some cases (at one point he
compares his memory of a drug bust with Stephen Stills’
recollection of the same drug bust—and given that Neil only stopped “smoking
weed” the year before writing the book, as he admits, it’s no wonder their
recollections are very different), but like all things Neil Young, he says what
he means and means what he says.
And if you’re wondering where
songs come from—great songs, eternal songs—Neil’s book is the place to begin.
Would that a holiday song may
one day spring from the fecund mind of Neil Young himself, for while he
professes more of a Native American religious spirit than a Judeo-Christian
one, either way, it would be so long Taylor Swift.
Merry Christmas, Happy
Hanukkah and a Good New Year to all!
—JM, December 7, 2013
2012 Editor’s Note: We
interrupt this holiday music review to bring you a potential stocking-stuffer
that ought to bring tidings of good cheer…
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2011 Editor’s Note: Back by
popular demand, we’ll again try to keep this year’s update brief…but past
performance would tell you not to hold your breath. Here goes.
Our annual holiday music survey—highly
biased, rankly unscientific and in no way comprehensive—covers new ground this
year, to wit: the SiriusXM all-holiday-music channel.
Actually, there are two such
channels courtesy of the satellite radio monopolists at SiriusXM. There’s
one for “traditional” music of the Bing Crosby kind, in which human beings sing
traditional Christmas songs while other human beings play musical instruments
to accompany those songs; and there’s another channel for everything else,
including the Auto-Tune-dependent sensation Michael Bublé, who has only
gotten more popular—unfortunately—this year, along with a new presence not
entirely unexpected but nonetheless frightening in its implications: Justin
Bieber.
Enough said about that,
for our main beef with SiriusXM is not the presence of yet another teen
idol on the holiday music scene.
Our beef lies with the soul-less
quality of the entire SiriusXM gestalt, which requires its three thousand channels
to carry songs strictly on the basis of whether they share either a common date
of issue (as on the “40’s at 4,” “50’s at 5,” “60’s at 6” et
al channels), or a common target audience demographic.
Among the later, for example is
the “Classic Vinyl” channel, which is essentially a “Classic Rock”
channel (“Classic Rock” being a Baby Boomer euphemism for what our parents
knew as “Oldies” radio) that plays the WNEW-FM playlist from around 1968
to 1978. And nothing else.
And there is the “Classic
Rewind” channel, which is another Oldies channel that plays the WPLR-FM
playlist from about 1979 to the late 1980s. And nothing else.
Then there’s “The Bridge,” a
Baby Boomer euphemism for “Easy Listening.” It plays Oldies of the James
Taylor/Carole King/Jackson Browne vein.
And nothing else.
Certainly there are one or
two such channels that manage to jump around between genres (The Spectrum is
worthwhile on that score). But, in the main, each SiriusXM channel is
tightly focused on a specific, narrowly defined demographic…sometimes scarily
so.
Here we’re thinking of
the “Metal” channel, which plays loosely defined “songs” that
consist of young men screaming their apocalyptic guts out above what appears to
be a single, head-banging, machine-gun-style guitar-and-drumming musical track
that never, ever changes.
You marvel at where these guys
came from, what portion of the domestic methamphetamine supply they consume,
and how many serial killers might be
listening to “Metal” channel at the very same moment as you.
If Beavis and Butt-Head could
afford a car, this would be their channel.
Unfortunately, no matter which
channel you pick and who the purported “DJ” may be (there are a lot
of old-time, smokey-voiced, recognizable DJs on the various Sirius Oldies
channels) you’ll hear a sequence of songs that all sound like a computerized
random-number-generator picked ‘em.
Listening to the “60’s at 6”
channel, for example, you may hear a great Beatles single like “Hello, Goodbye”
from 1967, followed by the wretchedly excessive “MacAurther Park” from 1968,
followed by an unrecognizable chart-topper from 1962 that nobody plays
anymore because it wasn’t any good even in 1962.
The listener ends up flipping
around from channel to channel and wondering why the bandwidth-happy SiriusXM
monopolists don’t just give each artist its own channel, as they in fact do
for Springsteen, Elvis and Sinatra. Those are channels you might
expect to find, but there is, oddly enough, no Bob Marley or Rolling Stones
channel—and, head-scratcher of all head-scratchers, no Beatles channel.
In fact, the absence of The
Beatles from the SiriusXM digital bandwidth relative to, say, the Eagles and
Fleetwood Mac, is one the great mysteries of our age.
After all, the Beatles
individually and collectively contributed 27of the Rolling Stone Top 500 Songs
of All-Time or 5.4% of those songs, yet they get nowhere near 5.4% of the
SiriusXM airplay, whether on “Classic Vinyl,” “Classic
Rewind,” “The Bridge,” “60’s on 6, ” “70’s on 7,” “The
Spectrum” or any of the other three thousand channels
here.
You quite literally have as much
chance of hearing “Snoopy and the Red Barron” on SiriusXM as “Revolution.”
So why then is there a Jimmy
Buffett channel (called “Margaritaville,” of course)?
Having gotten all that off our
chest, we can move on, since SiriusXM’s holiday channels add no new material to
our annual survey because most of the songs are widely played everywhere else.
Furthermore, we’ve been asked to
assemble a “Top Ten Worst” list of holiday songs for this review.
The problem is there are just so many, as we’ll be getting to shortly.
Rod Stewart’s somnambulant “My Favorite Things,” which sounds like
he’s reading the lyrics from a child’s book of verses, is right up there, while
Dan Fogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne” stands out in any crowd of non-favorites.
Easier, then, to simply
identify the All-Time, Number One, No-Question-About-It NotMakingThisUp Worst
Holiday Song of All Time, and let everyone else argue about the remaining 9.
It is “The 12 Pains of
Christmas.”
This so-called comedy song
takeoff on “The 12 Days of Christmas,” a pleasant English Christmas carol
discovered by a U.S. schoolteacher from Milwaukee and used by her in a
Christmas pageant in 1910, is an easily forgettable humorous novelty song
that is neither novel or humorous, in any way.
It isn’t even fun writing about,
so we won’t bother: we’ll simply move on to something pleasant, which
happens to be an entirely different sort of humorous novelty song that is
both novel and humorous, and, therefore, well worth a mention
here.
We’re talking about the
wonderfully bizarre, catchy, Klezmer-style cover of “Must Be
Santa,” from Bob Dylan’s 2009 Christmas album, “Christmas in the
Heart.” (Yes, Bob Dylan made a Christmas album.)
The music is fast and cheerful,
and Dylan’s low, growly voice is almost indistinguishable from Tom Waits.
(The truly bizarre music video is not to be missed, watch it here.)
After you get over the initial shock of hearing Bob Dylan singing what
most Baby Boomer parents will recall being a Raffi song, it becomes impossible
to not enjoy.
Another glaring absence from our
previous years’ commentary is neither novel or humorous, and inconceivably does
not appear to qualify for the SiriusXM random-song-generator holiday song playlist
despite being many-times more worthwhile than most of the SiriusXM catalogue,
whether holiday-themed or not.
The song is “2000 Miles” by the
Pretenders, and it belongs on anybody’s Holiday Top Ten.
If hearing Chrissie Hynde on
that original song (she’s also recorded some good Christmas covers, including
one with the Blind Boys of Alabama) doesn’t get you in a mellow holiday mood,
nothing will.
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Good New Year to all.
—JM, December 4, 2011
2010 Editor’s Note: Back for the
third consecutive year by popular demand, we’ll try to keep this year’s update
brief—but don’t count on it.
For starters, we’re going to
plug a book: Keith Richards’ autobiography, “Life,” which happens to be
one of the best books ever written—and we don’t just mean “Best in the Category
of ‘Memoirs by Nearly-Dead Rock Stars’.”
It is a great book, period.
The story of how ‘Keef’ (as he
signs sweet letters to his Mum while rampaging across America), Brian and Mick
developed the Rolling Stones’ sound, for example, is worth the price alone (in
short, they worked really hard; but the full story is much
better than that).
Yet there’s more—much more.
Guitarists can soak up how Keith created his own guitar sound; drummers will
learn—if they didn’t already know—Charlie Watts’ high-hat trick (and from whom
he stole it); while songwriters had better prepare themselves to be depressed
at how Mick wrote songs (‘As fast as his hand could write the words, he
wrote the lyrics,’ according to one session man who watched him write “Brown
Sugar”).
And that’s just the
rock-and-roll stuff.
The sex-and-drugs stuff is also
there, and the author lays it all out in his unfettered, matter-of-fact,
straightforward style, often with the first-person help of friends and
others-who-where-there (and presumably of sounder mind and body than
you-know-who: the drug and alcohol intake is truly staggering) who write of
their own experiences with the band.
Okay, you may say, but how
exactly is Keith Richards’ autobiography relevant to our
annual review of holiday songs?
Well, while furtively reading
snatches of ‘Life’ during a stop at the local Borders (we expect to
see the book under the Christmas tree sometime around the 25th of this month,
hint-hint), we happened to hear another musical legend perform one of our
favorite offbeat Christmas songs in the background, and it occurred to your
Editor that of all the bands out there that could have done that same kind of
interesting, worthwhile Christmas song, The Rolling Stones probably top the
list.
What with Keef’s bluesy
undertones and Mick’s commercial-but-sinister instincts on top, it would have
certainly made this review, for better or worse. (Along these lines, The Kinks’
cynical, working-class “Father Christmas” is one of the all-time greats,
and doesn’t get nearly enough air-time these days.)
Now, for the record, the offbeat
Christmas song that triggered this excursion was “’Zat You Santa Claus?”—the
Louis Armstrong and The Commanders version from the 1950’s. (The song was later
covered, like everything else but the Raffi catalogue, by Harry Connick, Jr.)
Starting out with jingle bells,
blowing winds and a slide-whistle, you might initially dismiss “’Zat You?”
as a sadly commercial attempt by Armstrong to get in on the Christmas song
thing, except that his familiar, Mack-the-Knife-style vocal comes over a
terrific backbeat that turns it into what we’d nominate for Funkiest Christmas
Song Ever Recorded.
It is a
delight to hear, and the fact that it is suddenly getting more air-time this
season is a step-up in quality for the entire category—or would be, if not for
the apparent installation of Wham!’s “Last Christmas” in the pantheon of
Christmas Classics.
A 1980’s electro-synth Brit-Pop
timepiece, “Last Christmas” combines a somewhat catchy tune with lyrics
that make a trapped listener attempt to open the car door even at high speeds
to get away:
Last Christmas, I gave you my heart
But the very next day you gave it away
This year
To save me from tears,
I gave it to someone special
Considering the fact that the
songwriter (Wham!’s gay front-man, George Michael) decided to repeat that
chorus six times, the full banality of the lyric eventually gives way to
incredulity: “Let me get this straight,” you begin to ask yourself. “This
year he’s giving his heart to ‘someone special’… so who’d he give it to last
year? The mailman?”
“Last Christmas” does
have the distinction of being the biggest selling single in UK history that
never made it to Number 1. Furthermore, all royalties from the single were
donated to Ethiopian famine relief, the same cause which led to creation of
what turned out to be the actual Number 1 UK single that year, “Do They Know
It’s Christmas?”
“Do They Know…” is a song
that has received some push from readers to receive an honorable mention in
these pages, and while it is certainly an interesting timepiece, with much
earnest participation from the likes of Sting, Bono and even Sir Paul, it is
not nearly as worthwhile as an album that seems just as prevalent these
days: A Charlie Brown Christmas by jazz pianist Vince
Guaraldi.
How a jazz pianist was hired to
create the music for a TV special with cartoon characters is this: the producer
heard Guaraldi’s classic instrumental “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” on
the radio while taking a cab across the Golden Gate Bridge.
One thing led to another, and
thanks to that odd bit of chance, future generations will have the immense
pleasure of hearing a timeless, unique work of art every year around this time.
(A second odd tidbit for our West Coast readers: Guaraldi died while staying at
the Red Cottage Inn, in Menlo Park—of a heart attack, however, and not the
usual, more gruesome fate of musicians who die in hotels.)
One second-to-last note before
we move on: we have been heavily lobbied by certain, er, close relations to
include Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas is You” as a worthwhile
holiday song—despite our previously expressed misgivings about her contribution
to the genre (see below).
And we have to admit, her “All
I Want…” leaves behind the incessant vocal pyrotechnics that made some of
her other Christmas covers (“Oh Holy Night,” for example) unbearable, at
least to our ears.
In this case she seems to trust
the song to take care of itself, which it does in fine, driving, upbeat style.
Now, as Your Editor previously hinted, all he wants for
Christmas is Keef’s book. And it had better be there, if, as previously noted,
you get our drift.
Finally, and speaking of
autobiographies, we happened to read Andy Williams’ own book this past year and
must report that our reference to Williams below was overly harsh. For one
thing, his book is as honest as Keef’s; for another, as a singer not
necessarily born with the vocal equipment of, say, Mariah Carey, the man worked
at his craft and succeeded mightily where many others failed.
Which, we might add, is, after
all, the hope of this season.
And so, we
wish for a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Good New Year to all.
—JM, December 13, 2010
2009 Editor’s Note: Back by popular demand, what follows
is our year-end sampling of the Christmas songs playing incessantly on a radio
station near you, and it demands from your editor only a few updates this
holiday season.
For starters, we have not heard
the dreaded duet of Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey singing “Baby, It’s Cold
Outside” thus far in 2009, and for this we are most grateful.
Indeed, if it turns out that
their recording has been confiscated by Government Authorities for use as an alternative
to lethal injections, we’ll consider ourselves a positive force for society.
On the other hand, we are sorry
to report an offset to that cheery development, in the form of a surge in
playing time for Barry Manilow’s chirpy imitation of the classic Bing
Crosby/Andrew Sisters version of “Jingle Bells.”
For the record, “Jingle Bells”
was written in 1857…for Thanksgiving, not for Christmas. And it’s hard to
imagine making a better version than that recorded by Bing and the three Andrew
Sisters 86 years later.
But Manilow, it seems, didn’t
bother to try. Instead, Barry and his back-up
group, called Expos, simply copied Bing’s recording, right down to that stutter
in the Andrews Sisters’ unique, roller-coaster vocals on the choruses, as well
as Bing’s breezy, improvised, “oh we’re gonna have a lotta fun” throwaway line
on the last chorus.
Sharp-eared readers might say,
“Well, so what else would you expect from a guy who sang ‘I Write the Songs’…which
was in fact written by somebody else?”
We can’t argue with that, but we
will point out another annoyance this year: the enlarged presence of Rod
Stewart in the Christmas play-lists.
Don’t get us wrong: we like Rod
Stewart—at least, the Rod Stewart who gave the world what Your Editor still
considers the best coming-of-age song ever written and recorded: “Every Picture
Tells a Story.”
It’s the Rod Stewart who gave us
“Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” we’re less crazy about. So too the Rod who chose
to cover “My Favorite Things” (for the definitive version of that classic, see:
‘Bennett, Tony’) and “Baby It’s Cold Outside” with Dolly Parton (for an only
slightly more offensive version of this one, see: ‘Simpson, Jessica’ and
‘Lachey, Nick’).
As an antidote to Rod, we
suggest several doses of Jack Johnson’s sly, understated “Rudolph the Red-Nosed
Reindeer,” which seems to be gaining recognition, and anything by James
Taylor—especially his darkly melancholic “Have Yourself a Merry Little
Christmas.”
Of all the singers who recorded
versions of this last—and Sinatra’s might be the best—it is Taylor, a former
junkie, who probably expresses more of the intended spirit of this disarmingly
titled song.
After all, the original lyric
ended not with the upbeat “Have yourself a merry little Christmas, let your
heart be light/Next year all our troubles will be out of sight,” but with this:
“Have yourself a merry little
Christmas, it may be your last/Next year we may all be living in the past.”
No, we are not making that up.
The good news is it should keep Barry Manilow from be covering it any
time soon.
JM—December 19, 2009
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Shazam! From the Boss to the King to
John & Paul (But Not George or Ringo), Not to Mention Jessica &
Nick
Like everyone else out there,
we’ve been hearing Christmas songs since the day our local radio station
switched to holiday music sometime around, oh, July 4th, it feels like.
And while it may just be a
symptom of our own aging, the 24/7 holiday music programming appears to have
stretched the song quality pool from what once seemed Olympic-deep to,
nowadays, more of a wading pool-depth.
What we recall in our youth to
be a handful of mostly good, listenable songs—Nat King Cole’s incomparable
cover of “The Christmas Song” (written by an insufferable bore: more on that
later); Bing’s mellow, smoky, “White Christmas”; and even Brenda Lee’s
country-tinged “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” (recorded when she was 13:
try to get your mind around that)—played over and over a few days a year…has
evolved into a thousand mediocre-at-best covers played non-stop for months on end.
Does anybody else out there
wonder why Elvis bothered mumbling his way through “Here Comes Santa Claus”? It actually sounds like Elvis doing a parody of
Elvis—as if he can’t wait to get the thing over with. Fortunately The King does
get it over with, in just 1 minute, 54 seconds.
Along with that and all the
other covers, there are, occasionally, the odd original Christmas songs—the
oddest of all surely being Dan Fogelburg’s “Same Old Lang Syne.”
You’ve heard it: the singer
meets his old lover in a grocery store, she drops her purse, they laugh, they
cry, they get drunk and realize their lives have been a waste…and, oh, the snow
turns to rain.
So how, exactly, did that become
a Christmas song?
Then there’s ex-Beatle Paul
McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime,” which combines an annoyingly catchy beat
with dreadful lyrics, something McCartney often did when John Lennon wasn’t
around. (After all, it was Lennon who
replaced McCartney’s banal, teeny-boppish opening line for “I Saw Her Standing
There”—“She was just seventeen/Never been a beauty queen” is what McCartney
originally wrote—with the more suggestive “She was just seventeen/You know what
I mean,” thereby turning a mediocre time-piece into a classic.)
But Lennon was not around to
save “Wonderful Christmastime” even though McCartney actually recorded this
relatively new Christmas standard nearly thirty years ago, before Lennon was
shot.
It rightfully lay dormant until
the advent of All-Christmas-All-The-Time programming a couple of years ago.
Fortunately, by way of offset, Lennon’s own downbeat but enormously catchy
“Happy Xmas (War is Over)” is played about as frequently as “Wonderful
Christmastime.”
Who but John Lennon would start
a Christmas song: “And so this is Christmas/And what have you done…”?
Of course, who but Paul McCartney would start a Christmas song, “The moon
is right/The spirit’s up?”
If anything explains the
Beatles’ breakup better than these two songs, we haven’t heard it.
Now, we don’t normally pay much
attention to Christmas songs. If it isn’t one of the aforementioned, or an old
standard sung by Nat, Bing, Frank, Tony, Ella and a few others, we’d be
clueless.
But thanks to a remarkable new
technology, we here at NotMakingThisUp suddenly found ourselves able to
distinguish, for example, which blandly indistinguishable female voice sings
which blandly indistinguishable version of “O Holy Night”—Kelly Clarkson,
Celine Dion, or Mariah Carey—without any effort at all.
The technology is Shazam—an
iPhone application that might possibly have received the greatest amount of
buzz for the least amount of apparent usefulness since cameras on cell phones
first came out.
For readers who haven’t seen the
ads or heard about Shazam’s wonders from a breathless sub-25 year old, Shazam
software lets you point your iPhone towards any source of recorded music, like
a car radio, the speaker in a Starbucks, or even the jukebox in a bar—and learn
what song is playing.
Shazam does this by recording a
selection of the music and analyzing the data. It then displays the name of the
song, the artist, the album, as well as lyrics, a band biography and other doodads
right there on the iPhone.
Now, you may well ask, what
possible use could there be for identifying a song playing in a bar?
And unless you’re a music critic
or a song-obsessed sub-25 year old, we’re still not sure.
But we can say that Shazam is pretty
cool. In the course of testing it on a batch of Christmas songs—playing on a
standard, nothing-special, low-fi kitchen radio—heard from across the room,
without making the least effort to get the iPhone close to the source of the
music, Shazam figured out every song but one (a nondescript version of a
nondescript song that it never could get) without a hitch.
And, as a result, we can now
report the following:
1) It is astounding how many
Christmas songs are out there nowadays, most of them not worth identifying,
Shazam or no Shazam;
2) All Christmas covers recorded
in the last 10 years sound pretty much alike, as if they all use the same
backing track, and thus require something like Shazam to distinguish one from
the other;
3) Nobody has yet done a cover
version of Dan Fogelburg’s “Same Old Lang Syne,” which may be the truest sign
of Hope in the holiday season;
4) None of this matters because
Mariah Carey screwed up the entire holiday song thing, anyway.
Now, why, you may ask, would we
pick on Mariah Carey, as opposed to, say, someone who can’t actually sing?
Well, her “O Holy Night”
happened to be the first song in our mini-marathon, and it really does seem to
have turned Christmas song interpretation into a kind of vocal competitive
gymnastics aimed strictly at showing off how much of the singer’s five-octave
vocal range can be used, not merely within this one particular song, but within
each measure of the song.
In fact Mariah’s voice jumps
around so much it sounds like somebody in the studio is tickling her while
she’s singing.
More sedate than Mariah, and
possibly less harmful to the general category, The Carpenters’ version of
“(There’s No Place Like) Home for the Holidays” comes on next, and it makes you
think you’re listening to an Amtrak commercial rather than a Christmas song
(“From Atlantic to Pacific/Gee, the traffic is terrific!”), so innocuous and
manufactured it sounds.
Johnny Mathis is similarly
harmless, although his oddly eunuch-like voice can give you the creeps, if you
really think about it. Mercifully, his version of “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot
Like Christmas” is short enough (2:16) that you don’t think about it for long.
Now, without Shazam we never
would have known the precise time duration of that song.
On the other hand, we would we
never have been able to identify the perpetrators of what may be the single
greatest travesty of the holiday season—Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey,
singing “Baby it’s Cold Outside.”
“Singing” is actually too strong
a word for what they do. Simpson’s voice barely rises above a whisper, and you
cringe when she reaches for a note, although she does manage to hit the last,
sustained “outside,” no doubt thanks to the magic of electronics.
Thus the major downside of
Shazam might be that it can promote distinctly anti-social behavior: having
correctly identified who was responsible for this blight on holiday radio
music, the listener might decide that if they ever ran across the pair in his
or her car while singing along with the radio too loudly to notice, they
wouldn’t stop to identify the bodies.
Fortunately, the bad taste left
by that so-called duet is washed away when Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song”
comes on next.
Thanks to Shazam, we learn that
this is actually the fourth version Nat recorded. The man
worked at his craft, and it shows. This is the best version of the song on
record, by anyone, and probably one of the two or three best Christmas songs
out there, period.
The second those strings sweetly
announce the tune, you relax, and by the time Cole’s smoky, gorgeous voice
begins to sing, you’re in a distinctly Christmas mood like no other recording
ever creates.
(Unfortunately, the song’s
actual writer, Mel Tormé, had the personality of a man perpetually seething for
not getting proper recognition for having written one of the most popular
Christmas songs of all time. We did not learn this from Shazam: we once saw
Tormé perform at a small lounge, during which he managed to mention that he,
not Nat King Cole, wrote “The Christmas Song”—as if this common misperception
was still on everybody’s mind 35 years later. When that news flash did not seem
to make the appropriate impression on the audience, he later broke off singing to
chew out a less-than-attentive audience member, completely destroying the mood
for the rest of the set.)
Like that long-ago performance
by the “Velvet Fog,” the pleasant sensation left behind by Cole’s
“Christmas Song” is quickly soured, this time by a male singer performing “Let
it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow” in the manner of Harry Connick, Jr. doing a
second-rate version of Sinatra.
Who is this guy, we wonder?
Shazam tells us it’s Michael
Bublé. We are pondering how such a vocal lightweight became such a sensation in
recent years—the answer must surely be electronics, because his voice, very
distinctly at times, sounds like it has been synthesized—when John Lennon’s
“Happy Xmas” comes on.
It’s a great song, demonstrating
as it does Lennon’s advice to David Bowie on how to write a song: “Say what you
mean, make it rhyme and give it a backbeat.” The fact that Lennon had the best
voice in rock and roll also helps.
Unfortunately, his wife had the
worst voice in rock and roll, and a brief downer it is when Yoko comes in on
the chorus like a banshee. (Fortunately she is quickly drowned out by the
children’s chorus from the Harlem Community Choir.)
The other songs in our Shazam
song-identification session are, we fear, too many to relate.
Sinatra, of course; Kelly Clarkson, an
American Idol winner who essentially does a pale Mariah Carey impersonation;
Blandy—er, Andy Williams; and one of the best: Tony Bennett.
Then there’s Willie Nelson, who
has a terrific, understated way of doing any song he wants—but sounds
completely out of place singing “Frosty the Snowman.” One wonders exactly what
kind of white powder Willie was thinking about while he was recording this, if
you get our drift.
Oh, and there’s Coldplay’s “Have
Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” which pairs the sweetest piano with the
worst voice in any single Christmas song we heard; Amy Grant, a kind of female
Andy Williams; the Ronettes, who are genuinely terrific—a great beat, no
nonsense, and Ronnie singing her heart out with that New York accent; and then
Mariah again, this time doing “Silent Night” with that same roller-coaster
vocal gargling.
Gene Autry’s all-too-popular
version of “Here Comes Santa Claus” would be bearable except that he pronounces
it “Santee Closs,” which is unfortunate in a song in which that word appears
like 274 times. ‘N Sync is likewise unbearable doing “O Holy Night” a cappella,
with harmonies the Brits would call cringe-making, and Mariah-type warbling to
boot.
Hall & Oates’s “Jingle
Bell Rock” is too easy to confuse with the other versions of “Jingle Bell
Rock”—thank you, Shazam, for clearing that up—while Martina McBride manages to
sound eerily like Barbra Streisand imitating Linda Ronstadt singing “Have
Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”
Winding things down is Dan
Fogelburg’s aforementioned “Same Old Lang Syne,” and here we need to vent a
little: something about the way he sings “liquor store”—he pronounces it
“leeker store”—never fails to provoke powerful radio-smashing adrenalin surges.
Fortunately, we suppress those
urges today, because the Shazam experiment concludes with one of the best
Christmas songs ever recorded. Better than Bing, and maybe even better than
Nat, depending on your mood.
It’s Bruce Springsteen. The
Boss. Doing “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town”… live.
Yes, this song was recorded
live, and despite its age (more than 25 years old), the thing still jumps out
of the radio and grabs you.
Now, as Shazam informs us, this
particular recording was actually the B-side of a single release called “My
Hometown.” (Back in the day, kids, “singles” came with two songs, one on each
side of a record: the “A” side was intended to be the hit song; the “B” side
was, until the Beatles came along, for throwaway stuff.)
Fortunately nobody threw this
one away.
Springsteen begins the familiar
song with some audience patter and actual jingle bells; then he starts to sing
and the band comes to life. Things move along smoothly through the verse and
chorus…until ace drummer Max Weinberg kicks it into high gear and the band
roars into a fast shuffle that takes the thing into a different realm
altogether.
Feeding off the audience, The
Boss sings so hard his voice slightly breaks at times. Then he quiets down
before roaring back into a tear-the-roof-off chorus, sometimes dropping words
and laughing as he goes.
This is real music—recorded in
1975 during a concert at the C.W. Post College—with no retakes, no production
effects, and no electronic vocal repairs, either.
Try doing that some time,
Jessica and Nick.
Actually, come to think of it,
please don’t.
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a
Good New Year to all.
Jeff Matthews
Author “Secrets in Plain Sight:
Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett”
(eBooks on Investing,
2014) Available now at Amazon.com
© 2017 NotMakingThisUp, LLC