Tag: music

Trivial metadata surrounding music

I’ll bet some of them used to read the side panels of cereal boxes.

A friend of mine wrote this about his wife: “[She] likes music but isn’t obsessed with the trivial metadata surrounding it — you know, she knows a song when she hears it but might not know the title or artist, or underlying themes, or what studio it was recorded in, or if the band’s usual drummer was replaced by someone else for some reason on that particular song — that sort of thing doesn’t interest her.”

My wife is like that. And so are many folks who read my blog who DON’T know who Holland-Dozier-Holland are, or Barry and Greenwich, or Doc Pomus, or even George Martin when I mention them here, all of whom are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They do know Carole King from the album Tapestry, but Gerry Goffin, or Mann and Weil, not so much unless they happened to have seen Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.

What I realized is that my friend, and much of the crew who worked at FantaCo, and the director of my library, and Dustbury, and Chuck Miller, and I are the anomalies. We’re the geeky outliers who used to read the liner notes of albums to find out who wrote each song, who produced the tracks, even each song’s running time. We discovered that the person who wrote X also both wrote AND produced Y.

I’ll bet some of them used to read the side panels of cereal boxes. I know I did: thiamine, niacin…

I tended to surround myself with like-minded people and fooled myself into believing that almost everyone is like that. Then I post something on, say ABC Wednesday, and folks know the tunes but not the names.

I get the comeuppance I need. I’m the weirdo who knows Classical Gas by Mason Williams is exactly three minutes, designed to accompany some video on The Smothers Brothers TV show, without looking it up. But not everyone’s brain is filled with such musical trivia. And that, I suppose, is a good thing.

Music throwback: Baby, It’s Cold Outside

“The tension in the song comes from her own desire to stay and society’s expectations that she’ll go.”

Somehow I missed the controversy over the song Baby, It’s Cold Outside that was apparently raging on social media last Advent. It’s back in full force this year, having shown up in at least two Facebook threads, and I wasn’t even looking.

More than one person I’ve seen refer to it as the “Christmas rape song.” First off, it’s not about Christmas at all. The weather is obviously unpleasant, but it has no more to do with the holiday than “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!”

The song was written by Frank Loesser in 1944 and performed in the 1949 movie Neptune’s Daughter by Ricardo Montalbán and Esther Williams, with the guy in pursuit, two people who are IN LOVE, not contending for dominance. In the same film, Betty Garrett is wooing Red Skelton.

Some of the defenders of the song suggest considering the time period. Is it about sex? Possibly, but not necessarily. Perhaps he was being a gentleman by offering his place for her to stay warm into the morning. Her concerns may have been about what people would think about a single woman staying at his place.

But if the original is sweet and consenting, can the many cover versions be seen in the same light?

The specific lyric “what’s in this drink” is also a current concern, given the fact that there have been numerous cases of men (usually) lacing the drinks of women (most often), for the purposes of sex. Many women have reported that Bill Cosby was notorious for doing that sort of thing. But the phrase was, and arguably is, a common joke, justifying one’s goofy behavior, even when one is consuming nothing stronger than grape juice.

In the 2010 Listening While Feminist post, In Defense of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”, “The tension in the song comes from her own desire to stay and society’s expectations that she’ll go.”

As for the drink: “The phrase generally referred to someone saying or doing something they thought they wouldn’t in normal circumstances; it’s a nod to the idea that alcohol is ‘making’ them do something unusual. But the joke is almost always that there is nothing in the drink. The drink is the excuse. The drink is the shield someone gets to hold up in front of them to protect from criticism.”

See also the 2016 Vox article: Why “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” became an annual controversy about date rape and consent.

Listen to Baby, It’s Cold Outside, from Neptune’s Daughter.

Here today – “I am holding back the tears no more”

You’d probably laugh and say
That we were worlds apart
If you were here today

December 1963
The relationship among the Beatles is a very popular topic on the Quora website. Someone asked: If John Lennon were still alive, would he and Paul McCartney have patched up their differences?

It’s a reasonable question, given the number of post-breakup fight songs that were released by all four of the ex-Fabs, none quite as nasty as Lennon’s How Do You Sleep?, “an answer to Paul McCartney’s ‘Too Many People’ and a direct attack on his old friend.” It even features a slide guitar part played by George Harrison.

As all the respondents noted in one way or another, before he died, John had already resolved his relationship with Paul.

To a similar question, a writer notes: “It’s easy to see how Paul feels about John. Every time he sings “Here Today”, he wells up with tears. There was a lot of love between those two. Brothers always.”

Well, not every time; I’ve seen McCartney get through the song dry-eyed. But in this 2015 interview, around the time of what would have been John’s 75th birthday, Paul notes how he is surprised how affected he can sometimes become, singing the song he wrote back in 1981 about his late friend.

I remember that shortly after Lennon was murdered in 1980, someone put a microphone in front of McCartney’s face and asked him how he was feeling. Paul uttered something like, “It’s a real drag, man.” And he was criticized in some circles.

Stick a mic in front of any grieving person and one is like to find a lack of eloquence. That’s something I’ve been sharply aware of when reporters stalk out people after tragedy.

Listen to Here Today

Only tangentially related:

Coverville 1194: The 14th Annual All-Beatles Thanksgiving Cover Show

Ringo Starr does NOT support Roy Moore’s campaign – reference to “You’re Sixteen”

Labor woes: How it all began in America

Musicians: Cassidy, Hendricks, Reese, Tillis…

I knew Delloreese Patricia Early primarily as an actress

A lot of noteworthy musicians died in November 2017.

As the New York Times obit notes, Jon Hendricks brought a new dimension to jazz singing. I knew him best as part of the vocalise trio Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. “They recorded a version of Ross’s 1952 song ‘Twisted‘, featuring her lyrics set to a Wardell Gray melody”; it was later recorded by Joni Mitchell.

After Lambert died in 1966, Hendricks continued to be a genre pushing vocalist.
***
I’m pretty sure that my sister Leslie had a Partridge Family album. It may have been Sound Magazine with the hit I Woke Up in Love This Morning.

While I didn’t care much about the music, I was vaguely interested in David Cassidy, mostly because he was the son of actor Jack Cassidy, who was constantly on TV in the 1960s and early 1970s. Jack’s second wife, actress Shirley Jones, became David’s stepmom, and she played his mother on the Partridge Family.

I learned later that only David and Shirley actually sang on those records. The backing vocals were by The Ron Hicklin Singers.

When David was arrested in Columbia County, near Albany, this decade, and then had to make a subsequent appearance in court, it was cause for a lot of local buzz.

My favorite performance of his was on the theme song for the John Larroquette Show in the late 1990s. Dustbury pegged Bandala.

Check out Arthur’s recollections and Mark Evanier ghostwriting for David.

Like a lot of people, I knew Delloreese Patricia Early, a/k/a Della Reese, primarily as an actress, most notably on the TV show Touched by an Angel. But she had a stellar singing career before that. Her big hit was Don’t You Know.

Mel Tillis died, and I thought I’d read more about him. He was a Country Music Hall of Famer and Grand Ole Opry member. When I considered country music, he was among the first who came to mind.

He wrote, among many other songs, Ruby (Don’t Take Your Love To Town) that was a big hit for Kenny Rogers. I’d see him on Hollywood Squares. Here’s Coca Cola Cowboy, a #1 country hit in 1979, from the movie Every Which Way But Loose.

Pete Moore was the bass singer for Smokey Robinson and the Miracles and co-wrote some of the hits, such as Ooo Baby Baby and The Tracks of My Tears, and also Ain’t That Peculiar and I’ll Be Doggone, with Marvin Gaye.

Sha-ZAM! Jim Nabors died. He played Gomer Pyle on two TV series that I watched regularly. The Impossible Dream
***
I wasn’t a big AC/DC fan. but I appreciated their impact. In fact, the only related album I ever owned was an album of bluegrass covers of their hits. I’m sorry Malcolm Young passed away at 64. When you’re 64, you tend to hate almost ANYONE dying at that age.

Lydster/music throwback: Pastime Paradise

Verification
Of revelations
Acclamation
World salvation

As I have mentioned, the Daughter is really into the music of Weird Al Yankovic. She asks me questions about who did the originals of his parody songs. I’m pretty good with the pop/rock stuff, not so hot with the rap sourced items.

One exception is Amish Paradise, one of our favorite Weird Al songs, which I know came from the Coolio song Gangsta’s Paradise, featuring singer L.V. But truth is that I am only aware of that because it’s a reworking of Pastime Paradise, a song on the first side of the epic, Grammy-winning 1976 LP Songs in the Key of Life by Stevie Wonder.

A couple days later, the Daughter asked if Al gets permission to use other people’s songs, and I said that he did. But by this point, she knew of the Coolio/Weird Al feud. “Coolio claimed that he did not give permission for the parody… Yankovic claimed that he had been told Coolio had given the go-ahead through his record label and apologized.” Coolio too has since apologized for allowing his ego to get in the way.

For a while, the Daughter would play the three songs back-to-back. But eventually, she really glommed to the Stevie original, playing it a few times every day. I think it is the rhyme:

Dissipation
Race relations
Consolation
Segregation
Dispensation
Isolation
Exploitation
Mutilation
Mutations
Miscreation
Confirmation, to the evils of the world

Proclamation
Of race relations
Consolation
Integration
Verification
Of revelations
Acclamation
World salvation
Vibrations
Stimulation
Confirmation, to the peace of the world

I always liked it, but her affection for the song has enhanced my enjoyment of it.

Listen to:

Pastime Paradise – Stevie Wonder (1976) here or here
Pastime Paradise – Ray Barretto (1981) here or here
Gangsta’s Paradise – Coolio, featuring L.V., #1 for three weeks on the Billboard pop charts (1995) here or here
Amish Paradise -Weird Al Yankovic, #53 (1996) here or here
Pastime Paradise – Patti Smith (2007) here or here

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