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Song History: You’ll Lose A Good Thing

Barbara’s rendition appears on the Hairspray movie soundtrack, the original movie with Divine.

I’ll admit it; I’ve lost my energy for keeping up with the newest music. But this doesn’t mean I stop learning about music. There is apparently a wealth of older music I don’t know about.

This particular adventure started with the Coverville podcast (#756) about Aretha Franklin. As you may or may not know, Aretha was signed to Columbia Records in 1960, and recorded with the label with only moderate success; her entire output, plus extras, from her years on Columbia Records, is being released in a boxed set in 2011. Though raised in Detroit, Aretha Franklin never recorded with Motown; rather, her greatest success was with Atlantic.

One of the songs on Coverville, covered in this case by Madness, was You’ll Lose A Good Thing. But it wasn’t originally recorded by Aretha. It was written and recorded by Barbara Lynn; it went to #8 on the pop charts and #1 on the soul charts in 1962. Here’s the original recording and here’s a live version – check out Barbara’s nifty guitar playing! Aretha’s version came out in 1964. Incidentally, Barbara’s rendition appears on the Hairspray movie soundtrack, the original movie with Divine, which inspired the Broadway musical, which inspired the Travolta-starring movie.

Interestingly, the song was also covered by Freddy Fender. It went to #1 on the country charts and #32 on the pop charts in 1976. This showed me, once again, how universal music is – pop, soul, country: it’s pretty much all the same.

Not the Bob Dylan You Know

“Just as Schumann or Brahms or Wolf had re-interpreted in their own musical styles the same Goethe text, I intended to treat the Dylan lyrics as the poems I found them to be.”

On March 12, 2011, my wife and I got to see the great percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie perform, with the Albany Symphony Orchestra, a work by Pulitzer, Grammy, and Academy Award winner, composer John Corigliano, performing a piece commissioned by her, Conjurer. It was great.

During the intermission, there were several recordings by Glennie and Corilglano for sale. I thought to buy something by Glennie, but I was intrigued by something called Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan (for soprano and orchestra), and I bought that instead. In the program notes for the evening, he echoed what he wrote here:

When Sylvia McNair asked me to write her a major song cycle for Carnegie Hall, she had only one request; to choose an American text… I had no ideas. Except that I had always heard, by reputation, of the high regard accorded the folk-ballad singer/songwriter Bob Dylan. But I was so engaged in developing my orchestral technique during the years when Dylan was heard by the rest of the world that I had never heard his songs.

One reviewer of the recording found it highly suspect that the composer could never have heard “Blowin’ in the Wind”, but having spoken to him briefly after the concert, when he signed my copy, I find it totally plausible.

So I bought a collection of his texts and found many of them to be every bit as beautiful and as immediate as I had heard-and surprisingly well-suited to my own musical language. I then contacted Jeff Rosen, his manager, who approached Bob Dylan with the idea of re-setting his poetry to my music. I do not know of an instance in which this has been done before (which was part of what appealed to me), so I needed to explain that these would be in no way arrangements, or variations, or in any way derivations of the music of the original songs, which I decided to not hear before the cycle was complete. Just as Schumann or Brahms or Wolf had re-interpreted in their own musical styles the same Goethe text, I intended to treat the Dylan lyrics as the poems I found them to be. Nor would their settings make any attempt at pop or rock writing. I wanted to take poetry I knew to be strongly associated with popular art and readdress it in terms of concert art-crossover in the opposite direction, one might say. Dylan granted his permission, and I set to work.

And, musically, it’s not the Dylan you’ve heard before. On first listen, it is mighty jarring, but subsequent hearing, it begins to make its own sense. If you don’t like operatic sopranos, you won’t like this, but there is something about it that eventually appealed to me.

Possibly more immediately accessible is the other piece on the CD, Three Hallucinations (based on the film score to “Altered States”), a movie I saw in theaters three decades ago. The use of religious themes, specifically a variation on Rock of Ages, made this more gratifying on the initial listen.

Mozart -Dies irae

Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) is a famous thirteenth century Latin hymn, thought to be written by Thomas of Celano.

I’ve sung the Mozart Requiem in choirs at least twice, perhaps thrice, and I love it. The coolest piece is the Dies Irae. And it occurred to me that this is one of those pieces that gets used A LOT in commercials and movie trailers. I heard it most recently in a trailer for the VERY DARK – don’t say I didn’t warn you – Japanese movie called Battle Royale, along with the Verdi requiem that also appears in the film.

I wondered if anyone put together a list of the music’s appearances. Here’s a roster of Mozart in the movies which lists six appearances of Requiem, but only one, Incredible True Story of Two Girls in Love, which I’ve never seen, where the Dies Irae is specified. About.com notes three films, X-Men 2, Duplex, and The Incredibles DVD: Jack-Jack Attacks; I saw only the former.

My request: where have YOU heard this music before – I know you have – outside of a performance of the Requiem itself, besides in the movie Amadeus?

Incidentally, Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) is a famous thirteenth-century Latin hymn thought to be written by Thomas of Celano. The Mozart Requiem was completed by Franz Xaver Süssmayr; there is a controversy about “how much of the piece was completed by Mozart before his death. The autograph manuscript shows the finished and orchestrated introit in Mozart’s hand, as well as detailed sketches of the Kyrie and the sequence, Dies irae.”

Beatles Island Songs, 3-1

He’s utterly transfixed by the backwards tape, the chanting.

Before discussing my final three picks, I decided to rank the albums by adding up the ordinal values, then dividing by the number of tracks on the album; the lower the number, the better. I know this is particularly unfair to Abbey Road since those brief tracks didn’t make the cut, but the suite would have fared far better, and the album still did quite well. And comparing ordinals, with no other weights, is bad math. Whatever.

These are the British albums, so these are the British release dates:

# Title Release date

1 Please Please Me 1963, March 22 -137/125.86 (14)
2 With the Beatles 1963, November 22 – 126 (14)
3 A Hard Day’s Night 1964, July 10 – 62.54 (13)
4 Beatles for Sale 1964, December 4 – 136.29 (14)
5 Help! 1965, August 6 – 86.64 (14)
6 Rubber Soul 1965, December 3 – 87.64 (14)
7 Revolver 1966, August 5 – 59.57 (14)
9 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band 1967, June 1 – 92.54(13)
17 Magical Mystery Tour 1976, November 18 – 96.91 (11)
10 The Beatles 1968, November 22 – 123.5 (30)
11 Yellow Submarine 1969, January 17 – 141 (4)
12 Abbey Road 1969, September 26 – 118.47 (17)
13 Let It Be 170.33/155 (12)
28 The Beatles Past Masters, Volume One 1988, March 7 – 107.89 (18)
29 The Beatles Past Masters, Volume Two 1988, March 7 – 96.13/88.6 (15)

My affection for Revolver is well known to me, but A Hard Day’s Night did amazingly well. I prefer Rubber Soul to Help! as an album, but I was feeling burned out at the time over some of the better tracks on RS (In My Life, Norwegian Wood, Michelle). And unsurprisingly, Let It Be did poorly.

Notes: Magical Mystery Tour was released in the US in 1967, but it wasn’t considered as part of the canon in the UK until nine years later.
Wow: With the Beatles, the album that spawned many of the songs from the US Meet the Beatles was released on the day of the John F. Kennedy assassination. The sociological implications…
The albums with two numbers involved me substituting a different version of the same song; all the second versions ended up at end of the list.
Album #8 is A Collection of the Beatles Oldies (But Goldies), 1966, December 10, which essentially served the same function as Past Masters 1 did years later.
***

The rules of engagement

213-204
203-194
193-184
183-174
173-164
163-154
153-144
143-134
133-124
123-114
113-104
103-94
93-84
83-74
73-64
63-54
53-44
43-34
33-24
23-14
13-4

***
3 Help! from Help! A little after 09/09/09, my daughter and I watched the movie Help!, her for the first time, me for the first time since watching a quadruple feature of A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, Yellow Submarine and the ever depressing Let It Be in the early 1970s. Help!, which I also saw when it first came out in 1965, was less good than I remembered it. But I fell in love with the music all over again. This specific song my daughter knows all the lyrics to, without either encouragement or prompting from me. Moreover, I connect with the notion of Lennon actually making the song a cry for help, overwhelmed by making records and movies, touring, et al. Also, if one were on an island, needing help seems quite appropriate.
2 Got To Get You Into My Life from Revolver. Imagine, if you will, a teenage boy home alone in the late 1960s playing a great album. This McCartney song comes on, and he’s enjoying it well enough. But as it gets to the final chorus, he starts slowly increasing the volume, making the horn so resplendent in his ears and down his spinal column that he practically weeps for joy.
1 Tomorrow Never Knows from Revolver. So the stereo is pretty loud when the last song, by Lennon, comes on, and he’s utterly transfixed by the backward tape, the chanting. Totally mesmerizing. Ultimately, the bass/drum section could be applied to any number of Beatles songs. Try singing A Hard Day’s Night or any number of other songs to it; it works. I realized this when I heard the LOVE album, and the mashup of Within You Without You with Tomorrow Never Knows really elevated my appreciation of the former, and in doing so, stoked my appreciation for the latter. Heck, it even goes with Jingle Bells. Some background on one of the most audacious recordings the Beatles would ever attempt.

Well, that was fun. Or something.

M is for Musical Format

LP sales are only a fraction of CD or download sales.

When I was a teenager buying music, the LP, the long-playing album played at 33 revolutions per minute, was the dominant recording format in the United States and elsewhere. Then the CD, the shiny disc, was introduced in the 1980s, and by the end of that decade, the compact disc had supplanted the LP as the dominant musical form. CD sales peaked in 2000 with 942.5 million units sold in the US but have begun a steady decline in the 21st century, losing out to digital sales.

It has been predicted that digital music sales will surpass CDs in 2012, although even digital sales in the US were flat in 2010, possibly because of economic unease.

But here’s the odd phenomenon: since 2007, vinyl sales have been on the rise. It’s nowhere near the LP’s heyday, but in an era where physical manifestations of music are on the wane, it’s a peculiar trend.

Top Selling Vinyl Albums Of 2008
1 – Radiohead – In Rainbows – 25,800
2 – The Beatles – Abbey Road – 16,500
3 – Guns N Roses – Chinese Democracy – 13,600
4 – B-52s – Funplex – 12,800
5 – Portishead – Third – 12,300
6 – Neutral Milk Hotel – In the Aeroplane over the Sea – 10,200
7 – Pink Floyd – Dark Side of the Moon – 10,200
8 – Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes – 9,600
9 – Metallica – Death Magnetic – 9,400
10 – Radiohead – OK Computer – 9,300

Top Selling Vinyl Albums Of 2009
1 – The Beatles – Abbey Road – 34,800
2 – Michael Jackson – Thriller – 29,800
3 – Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion – 14,000
4 – Wilco – Wilco – 13,200
5 – Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes – 12,700
6 – Pearl Jam – Backspacer – 12,500
7 – Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest – 11,600
8 – Guns N’ Roses – Appetite for Destruction – 11,500
9 – Dave Matthews Band – Big Whiskey… – 11,500
10 -Radiohead – In Rainbows – 11,400

Top Selling Vinyl Albums Of 2010
1 – The Beatles, Abbey Road -35,000
2 – Arcade Fire, The Suburbs -18,800
3 – The Black Keys, Brothers -18,400
4 – Vampire Weekend, Contra -15,000
5 – Michael Jackson, Thriller -14,200
6 – The National, High Violet -13,600
7 – Beach House, Teen Dream -13,000
8 – Jimi Hendrix Experience, Valleys of Neptune -11,400
9 – Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon -10,600
10 – The xx, The xx -10,200

Again, LP sales are only a fraction of CD or download sales. Still it’s a growing trend when many believe the music industry is experiencing a slow painful death.

ABC Wednesday – Round 8