"There's a time in life for Hoagy Carmichael. There's a time in life for Claude Debussy. There's a time in life for Jerry Lee Lewis. There's a time in life for Destiny's Child. All these things have their moment." ~Elvis Costello
A recent Metafilter post introduces us to Galeazzo Frudua, a musician from Bologna, Italy who, “possesses an uncannily good ear for harmony, and has produced a series of videos that painstakingly and expertly analyze and demonstrate for you the vocal harmonies employed in various Beatles songs.” These detailed tutorials, writes the Metafilter poster, are made all the more watchable by Frudua’s “perceptive commentary, capable singing voice, unassuming manner, impressive video editing skills and, hey, his charming Italian accent.”
In his first tutorial, for “Nowhere Man” (above), Frudua begins by introducing “Lennon voice”: “Lennon voice is very simple, and it goes like this.” And, handily, flawlessly, it does. Frudua, who seems to be recording in the back of a restaurant, matches the tone of Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison’s harmonies separately and together impressively. He particularly favors Rubber Soul. Hear his “In My Life” below. He calls it “one of the best performances ever of John Lennon in the Beatles” as well as “a fantastic campus on learning how to sing.”
Anecdotally, having worked with choir singers, opera singers, and a capella singers, I can say that Frudua’s ability is not particularly rare but is the effect of constant practice. One Metafilter poster puts it well: “It’s not hard if you have a bit of an ear, and some experience…. Harmonies are a kind of language. Spend some time learning the grammar and a few phrases and it can open up quickly.” Frudua’s not only a master of vocal harmony, he’s also an expert luthier and builds custom guitars for dozens of Italian artists. In his breakdown below of “You Never Give Me Your Money,” the intro to the Abbey Road medley, Frudua takes on a particularly difficult harmony, as he explains in great detail in his careful introduction to the song’s harmonic grammar. He tells us we can use this tutorial “as a guide for your Beatles’ tribute band or reproduce them in your home recording.” You may do those things if you wish. Or you could watch Frudua do them better. See his full series here.
Kurt Cobain discussed a variety of topics, ranging from condemning sexism to wondering if he was gay, in an interview with British journalist Jon Savage for a profile that ran in The Observer in 1993. Now, over two decades after that feature ran, PBS has hilariously animated a portion of that interview for its Blank on Blank series, which has given a similar treatment to artists like Beastie Boys, Janis Joplin and Ray Charles.
The clip begins with Cobain talking about how awkward he felt in high school and then moves into family life, as he admits that he didn’t know his family name was Irish until after he had already played in the city his surname hailed from. Quizzically, he said he’d even resorted to calling “Coburns” in phonebooks throughout America. The rest of the video finds Cobain discussing his stomach issues, his disappointment in the lyrics of Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin and how he found some spiritual solace after marrying and having a child with Courtney Love, among other subjects. Throughout the video, snippets of Nirvana songs play stitch together the narrative.
That Paul McCartney guy…not only was he part of the number two pop singles act of the rock and roll era (the Beatles trail only Elvis) but his solo work alone racked up enough singles success to rank him at the number sixteen position. He has so many hits that none of his Best-of collections have done even a decent job of collecting them all (and he’s probably the most significant artist not to have released a true career-spanning box set). Thus music buyers of more recent eras who haven’t collected the individual albums along the way will have some significant gaps in their collections.
Actually, many of his 1970’s hits weren’t even included on albums, making it infuriatingly difficult to find them until remastered import CDs appeared with these singles included as bonus tracks.
Let’s take a little tour of Mac’s dustier hits and see how many you remember…
1. “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” (#21 in 1972)
People tend to forget that Lennon wasn’t the only solo Beatle to get topical and court controversy.
Written in response to the events of Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland in 1972, this divisive ditty was banned from all UK media outlets. Despite the complete lack of airplay it still rose to number 16 in the British charts. It was a number one hit in the Republic of Ireland (go figure), while it got Wings guitarist Henry McCullough’s brother beaten up by thugs in Northern Ireland when they found out Henry was in the band.
2. “Mary Had a Little Lamb” (#28 in 1972)
Wings’ next single was the polar opposite of its predecessor–about as innocuous a pop song gets.
3. “Hi, Hi, Hi” (#10 in 1973)
Oops. Controversy again. Banned by the Beeb for its lyrical content. They not only assumed “we’re gonna get hi, hi, hi” was a drug reference (a safe bet knowing Paul’s habits at the time) but objected to the sexual content i.e. lines like “get you ready for my body gun”. Paul insisted the correct lyric was “get you ready for my polygon” and that he was going for an abstract image. Not convincing.
Again the BBC’s banning didn’t hurt and might have helped. The song charted at number 5 in the UK.
4. “Sally G” (#17 in 1975)
Paul goes country. This B-side to “Junior’s Farm” (neither song appeared on an album at the time) went top twenty in its own right. Recorded in Nashville with local backing musicians adding to the country vibe, this song actually charted at #51 on the country singles chart in addition to its top twenty pop placing.
5. “Letting Go” (#39 in 1975)
This one’s long forgotten.
Honestly I have no recollection of this rather heavy-sounding 1975 hit. But it did scrape the top forty. And its vibe is fairly unique among his single releases. If you don’t remember it, give it a few listens and it’ll creep under your skin.
6. “Venus and Mars/Rock Show” (#12 in 1975)
Despite leading off both his 1975 Venus and Mars album and the live Wings Over America LP of the next year, this one’s fairly forgotten in terms of latter-day radio airplay, thanks to the tendency of oldies formats to retain some of an artist’s hits (mainly the top tens) and shun others. I’ve complained about this syndrome ad nauseam in other posts.
7. “Girls’ School” (#33 in 1978)
Here’s a mind-blowing fact to help remind you that it’s a whole different world across the pond: This song was released as a double A-side in the UK along with “Mull of Kintyre” and was McCartney’s only number one single in that country in the entire decade of the 1970’s. During that time, America sent no fewer than six of his songs to the top spot (“Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey”, “My Love”, “Band on the Run”, “Listen to What the Man Said”, “Silly Love Songs” and “With a Little Luck”.)
Interestingly, “Mull of Kintyre”, despite its status as a radio staple, never actually made the pop charts in America, although it did hit #45 on the Easy Listening chart. In other words, a song that never made the top 40 is much more familiar to Americans than any of these songs that did.
8. “I’ve Had Enough” (#25 in 1978)
“With a Little Luck” was the number one smash from 1978’s London Town album, but the LP also spawned two less successful follow-up hits. The first is this rather feisty (for Paul) rant.
9. “London Town” (#39 in 1978)
The title track is a pleasant thing, and pretty much lost to history.
10. “Getting Closer” (#20 in 1979)
One of McCartney’s finest and most propulsive pop rock songs. It surprises me this one’s never been included on any of his greatest hits compilations. It almost has a “Live and Let Die” feel to its instrumental coda.
11. “Arrow Through Me” (#29 in 1979)
This one’s really gotten dusty. But it’s a great listen. The horn charts are Stevie Wonderesque.
12. “So Bad” (#23 in 1984)
Criminally overlooked, this one. I think it’s one of the true lost gems of McCartney’s catalogue. From 1983’s Pipes of Peace and re-recorded for 1984’s Give My Regards to Broad Street (also lovely). This was the follow-up single to “Say Say Say”, which was so bad.
13. “Spies Like Us” (#7 in 1986)
This uber-80’s sounding title song from the Chevy Chase/Dan Aykroyd film sounds like something Robert Palmer (wisely) left off one of this albums. I’m not a fan. And it’s too long. And it’s really stupid. I should have mentioned at the outset that there are a few here I don’t actually mind being forgotten.
14. “Press” (#21 in 1986)
Another not-so-stellar moment in a stellar career. Not awful. Just not representative of one of pop’s greatest living songwriters.
The guzheng was born in China over 2500 years ago. Originally made out of bamboo and silk strings, the instrument became very popular in the imperial court during the Qin period (221 to 206 BCE), and by the Tang Dynasty (618 CE to 907 CE), it was perhaps the most popular instrument in China. According to the San Francisco Guzheng Music Society, it remained popular through the late Qing dynasty (1644 A.D. – 1911 A.D.) and into the 20th century, when, in 1948, “the renowned musician Cao Zheng established the first university level guzheng program” in the country, and the “old silk strings were replaced with nylon strings, which are still being used today.”
In the estimation of most long-time Yes fans, Rick Wakeman would be considered part of the band’s “classic” lineup–the keyboard player they’d most like to see manning the Moog if they were to put money down to see the band live.
Wakeman’s contributions to pop also include the atmospheric Mellotron on David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and the sublime piano on Cat Stevens’ “Morning Has Broken”.
But in addition to his musical contributions, he’s pretty well-known for leaving bands too. He bolted from Strawbs in 1971 when Chris Squire invited him to join Yes. And he left Yes on several occasions for various reasons.
In 1973 ambitious rock acts like Yes were enjoying a boom in terms of popularity–and income. Prog magazine writer Mike Barnes picks up the story:
But although Wakeman might have been a young musician who was, in his own words ‘riding a wave’ with no idea when it might break, in 1973 the money started to pour in. “Suddenly the band was earning enough money for someone to collect your suitcase in the morning,” he reminisces. “I thought: ‘Bloody hell, what’s going on?'”
Wakeman feels that this new-found wealth had adverse effects on Yes and contributed to the disaffection he felt with Tales from Topographic Oceans, which resulted in him leaving the group for the first time in 1974.
“That was a difficult time. Because if a band is earning so much money that it can do anything it wants, that power is really dangerous,” Wakeman admits. “We had an interesting situation with Topographic Oceans. From pre-orders we already knew we had a
Number One album (In England. The record peaked at number 6 in America). We had enough material for an album and a bit, so we could either reduce it or add to it and the vote went in favour of adding to it. But most of the additional material was made up in the studio–and it was a lot of padding.
“That annoyed me because I said: ‘Listen guys, there are some great melodies and sounds, what’s all this crap that’s going on there–a percussion thing”?’ It was a mixture of everyone’s banging drums, which went on for an eternity. I was going: ‘What the fuck’s all that about”‘ They were going: ‘That’s another six minutes, lads!’ And I’m going: ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no’. I ended up really hating the album because of that and because the more I said I hated it, the more said they loved it.
“Jon (Anderson) and I have discussed this numerous times at length and we both agree that if the CD had been available back then we wouldn’t have had the problem, because the album would have been 60 minutes long.”
Tales from Topographic Oceans was the most ambitious (slash pompous) release of the band’s career–possibly the most ambitious of any band’s career: it was comprised of four album-side length songs, which Wakeman disliked performing live because of the time it took away from playing their more popular material. It was after this tour that Wakeman departed from Yes.
He’d return for the albums Going for the One and Tormato, which has the following amusing story attached to it (quoting Wikipedia):
The original album title was to be Yes Tor, referring to a geological formation in southern England. The photographs taken by Hipgnosis for the album cover were seen as so unimpressive that Rick Wakeman, in frustration, threw a tomato at the pictures. The cover and title were adjusted accordingly.
Wakeman is correct in his assessment that Tales from Topographic Oceans contains some beautiful bits of music, which perhaps remain undiscovered by the band’s more casual fans due to being buried within non-radio friendly 18-to-20-minute pieces. The edits below extract two such highlights:
“The Ancient: Giants Under the Sun” (2:22 edit)
“The Revealing Science of God: Dance of the Dawn” (8:17 edit)
No sane person disputes the fact that in the 1960’s the Beatles ruled supreme in the world of pop music. And in the decade that followed their break-up no single act really dominated the landscape in the same way–or has to this day, for that matter.
But a topic of some fascination to me is this: who came closest? Which 70’s artists’ work showed that type of originality, musical genius and popular appeal in the greatest measure? I’d love to hear your comments on this subject. I originally intended to list a top three, or even a top five. But I feel it’s a sharp drop off after these two.
Let the argument begin!
1. Stevie Wonder
If you write “Tik Tok”, “Gangnam Style”, “Rockin’ in the Free World” or “The Safety Dance”, you might have a hit. So much can depend on factors such as marketing, an artist’s charisma in the performance of the song, a viral video, the prevailing political climate, or…the inexplicable. (Hence every Dave Matthews hit song)
If, on the other hand, you write “My Cherie Amour”, it depends on no such ephemera, and there’s nowhere for it to hide.
To illustrate the point: this blog features a series of posts called “Songs You May Have Missed”. As part of the criteria for a song to be included here, it (generally) has to have missed the top 40. As much a point of pride as it is for me to seek out and give exposure to great, relatively unknown songs, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a “Song You May Have Missed” of the caliber of “You Are the Sunshine of my Life”. Classics don’t miss. And you don’t miss them.
Just as the Beatles wrote songs that were among their era’s closest thing to the Cole Porter/Jerome Kern/George and Ira Gershwin standards, Stevie Wonder wrote at least a handful that stand inarguably as classics. And like the Fab Four, Stevie created several albums (Fulfillingness’ First Finale, Innervisions, Songs in the Key of Life) that made relevant statements on topical social issues of the day, all while producing multiple hit singles and never sacrificing beautiful melody or the funk factor.
“My Cherie Amour”
“You Are the Sunshine of My Live”
Carole King deserves mention by this criteria and would perhaps merit inclusion on this list had she sustained the singular creative burst that was the incomparable Tapestry album. There’s no questioning the classic status of songs like “It’s Too Late” and “You’ve Got a Friend”.
2. Elton John
Read the following lyrics, which were presumably handed to Elton on a piece of paper by his lyricist Bernie Taupin:
When are you gonna come down? When are you going to land? I should have stayed on the farm I should have listened to my old man
You know you can’t hold me forever I didn’t sign up with you I’m not a present for your friends to open This boy’s too young to be singing the blues
Now, listen to them:
The magic of Elton John–at least in his heyday–was that he was the only man who could have coaxed that melody out of those eight fairly linear lyric lines, and sent it sailing into the stratosphere on the last word. Had any of the rest of us been given the job of setting those words to music, we could never have come up with something so gorgeous, imaginative and original.
Elton’s best songs didn’t feel like classic tin pan alley the way that Stevie Wonder’s (and Carole King’s) did. They felt like something fresh, modern and a little exotic, though by now most of us have heard them so many times it’s difficult to re-create the moment when they first blew our minds.
“Rocket Man”
3. Um, no one.
The rest of the top ten singles artists of the 70’s (Elton John is number one and Stevie Wonder number eight) include:
Paul McCartney
Bee Gees
Carpenters
Chicago
The Jackson 5
James Brown
Neil Diamond
Elvis Presley
It seems to me all can be disqualified for lacking one or more important trait the Beatles possessed–either “cultural” relevance, a diverse audience, or diversity of music. (And I disqualified Paul for being a former Beatle–seems like cheating).
My conclusion, obviously, is that no 70’s pop singer or band made nearly the impact–artistically, commercially or culturally–that the Beatles made in the 60’s. Even their seemingly short 8-year existence as recording artists (compared to the Beach Boys or the Rolling Stones’ run of 50 years or so) is actually much longer than the heyday of Elton John, whose years of true greatness extend, in my humble opinion, only from about 1971 through ’73. Stevie Wonder’s period of sustained excellence was about equal to the Beatles strictly in terms of years, though he can’t match them in terms of sheer number of songs that rate as “classic”, “beloved”, “influential” or whatever word you use to describe greatness.
Have I overlooked or snubbed anyone? What do you think?
Every Moment Has A Song 