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The Fugs - Nothing
I posted the other day about the 1966 film Georgy Girl and its classic title song. The film was also adapted into a notoriously unsuccessful Broadway musical called simply Georgy (it ran for a total of four performances in 1970). The brilliant yet terrifying iTunes shuffle just reminded me of the musical by playing a song from it covered by The Free Design, a great sunshine pop vocal group from the '60s and '70s who have seen a considerable revival of interest in the past ten years. It's the only song I've ever heard from the musical, but I love it!
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The Free Design - Howdjadoo (Fly Me Down) [from Georgy] [mp3]
The screening of Georgy Girl in my British New Wave series at Doc Films this quarter has been cursed with audio problems. The failure of an amp in the cinema forced us to cancel the initial screening. Last night, our make-up screening caused a moment of panic when we started playing the first reel and discovered that the soundtrack was physically missing from the print. We weren't sure if it was missing from just a portion of the reel, or if the whole first 20 minutes would have to be projected silently. Fortunately, as we let it run, we found that only the opening credits sequence (and later the closing credits) were silent.
This means, however, that we missed out on hearing the hit title song by The Seekers, a folk-pop group from Australia that were hugely popular for a while in the '60s. They coincided and were sometimes associated with the British Invasion, but sound more like an updated but less politically conscious version of The Weavers, along the lines of similar American groups like We Five and The Stone Poneys. "Georgy Girl" was their biggest hit in America, peaking at #2 on February 4, 1967, with "I'm a Believer" by The Monkees keeping it from the top. The music was written by Tom Springfield, brother of Dusty, and the lyrics were actually by the actor Jim Dale, best known for the Carry On films and for his really remarkable work on the Harry Potter audiobooks. Since it wasn't in the screening last night, here it is now:
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The Seekers - Georgy Girl [mp3]
One of my favorite subgenres of teen pop/teen movies of the '50s and '60s are the feeble attempts to force kids into adopting new crazes. In trying to mimic the success of "The Twist" and "The Loco-Motion," most of the pop songs had accompanying dances. The songs are always kind of pushy, because instead of simply introducing the new dance, they instead declare that the dances are already the next big thing that all the kids are doing. It's interesting also how much the songs must have depended on television appearances to ensure their popularity (though I guess I don't actually know what the "Loco-Motion" dance is). The teen films tended to exploit familiar fads (surfing, dragracing etc.), while also branching out to new ones. The Frankie & Annette Beach Party series was really good at this: Beach Blanket Bingo was all about skydiving, Muscle Beach Party had bodybuilding, and Pajama Party was about, uhh, pajamas.
There are countless examples of these, but I've been recently introduced to a couple really bizarre ones that I like a lot. One is the 1957 film Bop Girl Goes Calypso, which is about how a scientist with some fancy machine is "proving" that rock 'n' roll is on the way out, predicting that calypso will be the big new craze! There were a few films that came out at this time all with the same hypothesis, including Calypso Heat Wave which features Maya Angelou(!)
And in the music realm, how about this great song performed by Eddie Hodges, the child star best known as Huck Finn in the 1960 adaptation directed by Michael Curtiz? "Mugmates" suggests that what "everyone does" now to indicate they are going steady, instead of giving someone their pin, is simply have... matching coffee mugs.
Eddie Hodges - Mugmates [mp3]
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Brian Eno - Here Come the Warm Jets [mp3]
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Beulah - Emma Blowgun's Last Stand [mp3] (at 2:25)
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...the 21st night of September?
Buddy Holly - Everyday [mp3]
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Pavement - Silence Kit [mp3]
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Tears For Fears - Broken [mp3]
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The Clarissa Explains It All theme [mp3]
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The death of the era of the professional songwriters of Tin Pan Alley and the Brill Building also meant the death of something else: the standard. Particularly in the pre-rock period, songwriters explicitly wrote songs so that they would become ubiquitous, performed by everybody. Before the phonograph, the primary distribution method for pop music was sheet music, so that a home consumer in Middle-of-Nowhere, Ohio could pick up a song in the local store and perform it with their family and party guests in their parlor room. Even when the bulk of pop standards were written for specific characters to sing in musical theatre pieces, songwriters intentionally wrote them so that they would make sense out of context, hoping that as many singers as possible would pick them up and perform their own renditions.
The songs, then, did not "belong" to anyone. Though some artists may have arguably given definitive performances of certain songs, a song like "I Could Write a Book" or "Needles and Pins" was free to be interpreted by any number of performers. For example, within the span of three years, renditions of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" were released by major artists like Gladys Knight & the Pips, Marvin Gaye, the Temptations, the Miracles, Creedence Clearwater Revival, etc. Time may have been kindest to Marvin Gaye's interpretation, but all of those performances were considered separate and equally valid.
The idea of standards is still widely known in the jazz world, codified by things like the Real Book and Ella Fitzgerald's series of 'Songbook' records. But in the rock and pop world, the notion of "standards" has been entirely replaced by that of "covers." In the contemporary listener's mind, songs are linked intrinsically to their original studio recordings by their original performers, which, for rock music today, almost invariably means the song's composer. If released today, the blogs and the YouTube descriptions would all be referring to Marvin Gaye's hit not as one of many renditions of Barrett Strong and Norman Whitfield's pop standard, but as his "Gladys Knight cover."
This has benefits, of course, for the songwriter. Because the best songwriters are now writing for themselves and not for others, they're allowed to create more personal expressions through their music. It makes sense, for example, for us to consider "Lithium" in the context of Kurt Cobain's life, the Nevermind album, and Nirvana's overall artistic output.
But that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with still listening to these songs as songs either. Jon Brion often talks about how useful it is to strip "Lithium" down to its bare essentials: melody, chords, and lyrics; revealing that above all, it's simply a gorgeous, tuneful piece of songcraft, even if someone else were to perform it without Cobain's specific anxieties.
I'm starting this series of posts, then, to examine songs like "Lithium" that ought to belong in the Great American Songbook, if the book were still accepting submissions for new standards. Some of these will be songs released within the past thirty-odd years, too late to become canonical. Others will be songs from the standards era that for some reason or other failed to become one, or else has dropped out of today's public conscious.
Soon, I'll begin with a song from the tail end of the standards era that is, appropriately, about a musician reminiscing about a song he had recorded back in the good ol' days: Randy Newman's early composition "Vine Street."
In which Evan hums and talks about hums.