(#353: 17 October
1987, 1 week)
Track listing:
Ain’t Got You/Tougher Than The Rest/All That Heaven Will Allow/Spare
Parts/Cautious Man/Walk Like A Man/Tunnel Of Love/Two Faces/Brilliant
Disguise/One Step Up/When You’re Alone/Valentine’s Day
“I had a certain talent for friendship, but I never had
any friends, either because they simply didn’t turn up, or because the
friendship I had imagined was an error of my dreams. I’ve always lived alone,
and ever more alone as I’ve become more self-aware.”
(Fernando Pessoa, The Book Of Disquiet,
trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin, 2001, p 270, end of section 319)
“The laws that govern your private madness when applied
to the daily routine of living your life can coagulate into a collision.”
(Tom Waits, interview with Mark Rowland, Musician
magazine, October 1987: “Tom Waits Is Flying Upside Down (On Purpose)”)
Another Springsteen album, another Annie Leibovitz photo
shoot. But these photos are different from the ones on the album before. On the
cover he looks up at us, a little like a suspicious Columbo, in smart dark suit
and bootlace tie, hands in pockets, or looks across to us with what could be
interpreted as either weariness or contempt. He is leaning against a
capacious-looking, cream-coloured car, against an unidentified shoreline,
presumably somewhere on the New Jersey coast, maybe Atlantic City. Or the car,
beach and sea could be a two-dimensional advertising hoarding as per Heaven
17’s The Luxury Gap. On the back
cover he has taken his jacket off, rolled up his white shirtsleeves and looks
somewhere to his right, beyond the camera, markedly more relieved. On the inner
sleeve he is indoors and stares grimly at us, holding his guitar, in a
cramped-looking room, wearing dungarees and the working pants from the front of
Born In The U.S.A., perhaps the ones
where he swears he left his wallet in “All That Heaven Will Allow.”
On the cover itself, however, it looks to be evening, and
the sun appears to be setting. He could be anywhere, and from a personal perspective
it would be an interesting surprise if the camera moved round 180° to reveal
Blackpool Tower*. But he is with a car – or his idea of a car – and he is
alone, and possibly not enjoying it as much as you think he might.
Or perhaps he is too much in love with this
thirtysomething thing called rock ‘n’ roll and regretful that a music based on
youth and impetus has proven so poor an indicator of permanence. The music was
intended to be spontaneous, transient, not to be subject to lengthy studies of
meaning, purpose and function. But this man has just turned thirty-eight, and
there is nothing on this, his new record, which could possibly talk to
twenty-year-olds, never mind appeal to them. Whether this was a hindrance or a
reproach was not too clear in 1987, a year in which music did everything except
stand still.
What is known, what is palpable, is that he is still in love with this music he first
heard thirty years before, and still hopelessly entangled in its promised
fantasy of escape. So it is that the
opening of “Ain’t Got You” is performed with such fearful fearlessness that it
might be the first rock ‘n’ roll record following some unspecified apocalypse.
Such gusto does he have that he doesn’t even bother with instruments for the
first verse; it is as if he is at home, listening through loud headphones and
singing along.
And it’s the oldest story the capitalist wagon of rock
‘n’ roll knows; the man who has everything except what he wants. Got what he
wanted but lost what he had (“They gain a peace but they lose one too,” as
Samuel T Herring might put it). There is a discreet echo to the singer’s voice,
designed to arouse memories of “Heartbreak Hotel,” and even before the acoustic
guitar-and-castanets Bo Diddley shuffle waddles into aural view – this is not
the only 1987 number one album that will begin with such a gesture – the
unusual, almost tortured tension Springsteen (for it is he) puts on the first half of each line, tearing
up the words like unread telephone directories out of his reddening sky of
rage, suggests, ten years after he died, Elvis at the end of his rainbow, with
nothing left in his life but the thing that drove him to this life in the first
place (“But I’m still the biggest fool, honey, this world ever knew”).
Memories too of “I Can’t Get Next To You” – the fast
Temptations or the slow Al Green; either will do – in which the singer is
nothing so much as God, impatient that He can create everything except the one
thing that matters, despite all of His powers; and “I Can’t Get Started,” that
Gatsby of a song which became the unwitting anthem of a generation lost by war,
a war Bunny Berigan didn’t even live to see, having already destroyed himself
with drink (the Mingus/Schuller orchestration, as heard imperfectly on Epitaph, is a tortured jigsaw puzzle of
tonalities and anti-harmonies out of which Vernon Duke’s simple melody
eventually emerges like an intact butterfly. At the opposite extreme, the song
is effectively a beacon of light relief in the middle of No One Cares, the darkest record Sinatra ever made). “Ain’t Got
You” is both start and end to this record, or he finishes where he starts, or vice versa.
If the record starts in the manner of a tut-tutting,
surviving Buddy Holly, then “Tougher Than The Rest” might take place in the
same post-nuclear bar where the radioactive Blondie perform “Atomic” in their
video. The song lumbers along like a
big Orbison ballad, but the perspectives are all wrong; the bass synthesiser
looms across both its melody and rhythm like a disused, partially destroyed
bulldozer in a newly-created desert. Like Johnny Cash, Springsteen is ready to
walk the line; unlike either Cash or Orbison, he says to the girl that he knows
he’s not perfect, that he’s aware that they’ve both been around – probably been
hanging round and annoying each other for years – but Springsteen is sadly
pragmatic:
“Well, ‘round here baby,
I learned that you get what you can get.”
The song also includes the first appearance of the
recurring adjective “rough” (“If you’re rough enough for love,” “If you’re
rough and ready for love”), indicating that this is no blushing romance, this
is a cynical, or desperate, bidding, or plea, for love. Max Weinberg’s drums
boom unshowily like God’s alarm clock, while Danny Federici’s organ creeps into
the picture at the start of the second verse, holding sustained chords like
Webb on “Wichita Lineman.” Springsteen’s single-note, low-strung guitar solo is
reminiscent of Duane Eddy. Federici’s organ gradually moves to the front of the
mix, such that the song becomes more hymn than barroom pickup, and
Springsteen’s own harmonica takes the song out, more “Hey Baby” than Dylan, and
more “Groovin’ With Mr Bloe” than either (see also Bowie’s “A New Career In A
New Town”).
Still, the song holds out some hope, and in “All That
Heaven Will Allow,” the singer pleads with the bouncer, or Mister Trouble, or
God, to let him into the club where he knows his girl is waiting for him. There
is no indication whether he is working at all, let alone have working pants or
a wallet to leave in it, or maybe whether there is actually a woman inside
waiting for him to come through the door. The style is Ben E King-period
Drifters (as if Springsteen wants her to save every dance for him), fast and Latin-ish, but the title is sung and
addressed from a different angle every time it appears, and eventually it
appears that the song’s not about a dancehall at all, but about where the
dancehall might lead him and her, the life and future that they want. Buried
deep in its mesh are the following words:
“Now some may wanna die young, man,
Young and gloriously.
Get it straight now, Mister,
Hey buddy, that ain’t me.”
Oh no, rock ‘n’ roll was all supposed to be about “My
Generation” and hoping to die before one got old. So what happens when neither
dies? You have to see things through and find out how the story would have
progressed, or keep making the story up as you go along.
So far, so hopeful.
“How amazingly far normalcy extends; how you can keep it
in sight as if you were on a raft sliding out to sea, the stitch of land
growing smaller and smaller. Or in a balloon swept up on a column of prairie
air, the ground widening and flattening, growing less and less distinct below
you. You notice it, or you don’t notice it. But you’re already too far away,
and all is lost.”
(Richard Ford, Canada. London:
Bloomsbury, 2012, p 110, chapter 15)
Throughout “Spare Parts,” Springsteen’s guitar is speedy
and attacking, like an ill-treated motorcycle, before it descends into
baby-like cries. Something is wrong, and it is wrong from the song’s beginning,
with an opening line worthy of Ellroy:
“Bobby said he’d pull out. Bobby stayed in.”
So Janey gets pregnant and Bobby says they’ll marry but
Bobby gets scared and runs away. She has the child, never sees him again, and
hears of this woman in Calverton who drowns her child in the river. Bobby, now
in a “dirty oil patch” (which description sums him up) in South Texas, hears of
the birth but resolves never to return. Janey doesn’t know what to do; she
weeps, she prays. Finally she takes her child down to the river (“my baby and
I” as another song put it) and places him in it, but only up to waist level, as
though baptising him. Then both mother and child return home; she puts him back
to bed, takes out her engagement ring and wedding dress, takes them down to the
pawnshop and “walked out with some good, cold cash.” Life has been shit, but
she has no choice but to persist with it, to bury the old dreams and enable two
futures. Regaining “normalcy” is her only chance, just as the music is the most
straightforward and rock-like on the record. Canada outlines the dire consequences when two people make a
mistake, when they’re too young and too drunk to know better, and Bev Parsons
stays in. The narrator’s mother dies, in prison and by her own hand, because
she is unable to dissociate her reality from the dream which haunted her all
her life. “Spare Parts” suggests a way out.
Because what other way is there? “Cautious Man” gives us
a comparable story from the opposing viewpoint, though consists of just
Springsteen’s voice and acoustic guitar with discreet background synthesiser
drones – sometimes, as in the phrase “a thousand miles away,” his voice can
sound Vocoderised, as though the awake man is trying to put some distance
between himself and his sleeping lover. He has wandered carefully, if
aimlessly, through life, and then he falls in love and settles down. But he
remains restless; one midnight, while she is sleeping, he steals away,
half-intending to resume his life on the road, away from responsibility.
He reaches the outside – but sees “nothing but road” and
feels “a coldness rise up inside him that he couldn’t name.” Or, to put it
another way, the cold, cold ground (and a different type of coldness from
Janey’s “good, cold cash”). He finally realises that there is nothing left for
him out there, no future and no life. The fantasy has to be rejected because
his mind, his heart, his totality, is now with his wife. It may be that the
“God’s fallen light” that he witnesses and inhabits at the song’s end is a
signifier of Springsteen’s Catholic guilt (as the ending of “Spare Parts” may
also in part suggest), but it is a striking image (which Springsteen sings in
the voice of an exhausted wanderer), as well as a warning to anyone foolish
enough to reject reality for a wreckage of life based on rootless dreams, as
another record released six weeks ahead of Tunnel
Of Love made horrifically and comically clear**.
But the first side’s most profound meditation may be its
closer: “Walk Like A Man,” a song which would eventually show up the timid
likes of “The Living Years” for the flaccid failures that they were in terms of
father and son relationships. It is the son’s wedding day, and his father is in
attendance – there’s that roughness again as the singer recalls “how rough your
hand felt on mine.” He remembers how he had always tried to walk like his
father, right from the age of five on the beach, and how his mother would take
him and his sister to the church every time “she heard those wedding bells” –
those last two words are underscored by a hollow-sounding synthesised whine –
and show them the happiest or saddest of visions:
“Well, would they ever look so happy again,
The handsome groom and his bride,
As they stepped into that long black limousine
For their mystery ride?”
The “long black limousine” is a direct reference to one
of Elvis’ darkest songs and raises questions about the concept of “happy”; each
couple ventures into unknown darkness, as they find out what being together is
actually all about, what is involved in building and sustaining a marriage. Now
the singer himself is left by his father at the altar, waiting for his bride to
appear, praying and hoping that he can finally learn to walk like his father
did, all the while knowing that he almost certainly will not. This doubt is a
lifetime away from the masculine certainty of the Four Seasons’ 1963 hit of the
same name, where the singer’s father warns him away from love and commitment. “No woman’s worth/Crawling on the
earth” – no, that won’t wash anymore, and shouldn’t have washed even in 1963
(even if you capitalise that “earth”). What can he do? He can’t walk on. He walks
on. Because what other way is there?
The title song is the nearest thing the record gets to an
E Street Band – and this was no accident; many of the record’s songs had begun
as largely solo demos, and Springsteen had an urge to keep it that way. Co-producer
Jon Landau agreed; the other co-producer Chuck Plotkin listened to the songs,
worried about Springsteen and asked whether he wouldn’t mind having the band go
over them. Springsteen emphatically and angrily did mind, but suggested a plan where individual band members would
contribute to each song. This upset the band members more than if Springsteen
had kept them out of the process altogether, and although they were called in,
hardly any of their work was used in the final product. “Beat the Demo,” they
called it. Max Weinberg adds drums and sundry percussion to eight of the twelve
songs, but Federici appears on only four songs, Garry Tallent on one (“Spare
Parts”), and Clarence Clemons is heard only as a backing singer on “When You’re
Alone.” Keyboardist Roy Bittan appears on both the title song and “Brilliant
Disguise.” Otherwise it was Springsteen all the way, and many of the musicians
were furious about it.
But the band, such as they are on “Tunnel Of Love,” sound
like nothing less than Simple Minds, with the song’s jerky introduction, Nils
Lofgren’s very Charlie Burchill-esque guitar solo (his only other appearance
here, also as a backing singer, is on “When You’re Alone”) and the constant
four-chord synthesiser motif, not to mention Springsteen’s own, rather Jim
Kerr-ish vocals (his groan on the “fall” in the phrase “they fall in love”).
The song again focuses, via its fairground metaphor, on the unknown darkness of
commitment, and perhaps outlines a forensic self-examination on Springsteen’s
behalf of what really is meant by the word “love.” “But the house is haunted,
and the ride gets rough” – that “rough” again – “And you’ve got to learn to
live with what you can’t rise above,” which draws us back to the ambiguous
principle of “Tougher Than The Rest.” Towards the end of the song, it is
noticeable how backing singer Patty Scialfa’s voice gradually becomes louder
and more forthright and urgent. Weinberg rains down drum thunderbolts, and the
song screeches into a freeform pile-up which resolves into the delighted
screams of the riders of the rollercoaster at the Point Pleasant Amusement Park
(who, incidentally, were coached and directed by engineer Toby Scott and his
assistant).
Next comes “Two Faces,” a song worthy of a vengeful,
surviving Buddy Holly (“Two faces have I”) where the singer is at war with
himself, or his worse self; half of him wants love, the other half to destroy
it. The battle is numbing (the slow up-rolling of the word “baby” in the second
line of the second verse sounds like the singer is slitting his own throat with
a Swiss Army penknife) but the singer’s good half finally triumphs – for now
(“He swore he’d take your love away from me…/Well, go ahead and let him try,”
suggesting that the Orbison of “Running Scared” was both pursued and pursuer).
“Brilliant Disguise” is a sister song to “Two Faces” but
that isn’t the half of this remarkable piece of work. We immediately note how the line “Out on the
edge of time” relates back to the themes and emptiness of Darkness On The Edge Of Town – so it may not be too helpful to
label Tunnel Of Love as a break-up
album since this was not the first time Springsteen had presented us with such
forlorn songs (for what it’s worth, both Springsteen and Julianne Phillips
continue to speak of each other with what I think is heartfelt respect,
although both are naturally guarded about talking in great detail about their
time together).
Nonetheless, both song and performance beg the question:
what the hell do you, or I, want from pop music, from love, from life? The
song, like most of the songs on the album, proceeds like any immediate
pre-Beatles pop record might have proceeded, or perhaps a few and very select post-Beatles pop records – those
castanet triples which seem to resound throughout the entire history of pop,
Weinberg’s rhetorical Orbison/Spector timpani. “I hold you in my arms/As the
band plays,” Springsteen begins as though it were 1961 and he was Ben E King
and the debt of the future had yet to incur itself. The doubt takes no time to
make itself known: “What are those words whispered, baby/Just as you turn
away?”
And suddenly the performance is so far from certain.
There is paranoia – whoever is calling her name from underneath “our” willow,
the shameful secret tucked beneath her pillow – and in his evaluation of the
song, Dave Marsh is right to speak of “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” but
also of “Suspicion”, the Terry Stafford song covered by Presley in 1962, Pomus
and Shuman’s shame-filled sequel to “Save The Last Dance For Me.” He also
mentions Gene Pitney’s 1965 single “Last Chance To Turn Around” (a.k.a. “Last
Exit To Brooklyn”) as a specific precursor of “Disguise”’s “Is it meeee,
baby?,” but I can’t hear it, only one of Pitney’s fiercest and angriest vocals
as he surveys the extent of his lover’s deception before heading out of town
(accompanied by a bizarre Bubber Miley muted trumpet cry) with lyrics
foreshadowing both Scott Walker’s “Duchess” and Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back
Down.”
Bittan’s piano enters deep and dramatically after
Springsteen’s “Well, I’ve tried so hard.” When he reaches the middle eight’s
“struggling” he sounds at the end of his tether, and the stark imagery of that
same sequence points to another, less likely precedent – and the other end of
the “Lovin’ Feelin’” anti-rainbow – Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart”
(Federici’s high, held organ note at the song’s end, combined with Weinberg’s
timpani, removes all ambiguity)***. Finally, they marry, but Springsteen
already realises the danger lies within himself, as he slowly turns the song
around and asks his lover whom she sees:
“Is it meeee, baby?/Or just a brilliant disguise?” (Julianne Phillips is, of
course, an actress). Tired of everything, he wanders away from the song at its
end, again recalling “Apart” (“Tonight our bed is cold”), and finally
crucifies himself: “God have mercy on the man/Who doubts what he’s sure of.” In
1987, only Waits’ “I’ll Take New York” touched its self-destructive power.
On “One Step Up,” terminally disgusted with himself, the
singer breaks and quits. But everywhere he runs into a brick wall. His home is
unhappy, but his car won’t start and so he has no option but to go back to the
bar:
“When I look at myself I don’t see
The man I wanted to be.”
He is even reduced to trying a half-hearted pick-up at
the bar but, like the singer of “Tougher Than The Rest” and maybe even
“Brilliant Disguise,” he knows that she knows that it’s all bull and jive. Then
the dream reappears: “Last night I dreamed I held you in my arms/The music was
never-ending” – as if the beginning of “Brilliant Disguise” had happened only
in his mind, in his mind alone. But another voice joins in on the subsequent
“We danced…” and it is the voice of Patty Scialfa. The music then rises to a
crescendo of wordless chorals, as though
both dancers were rising out of that old world.
On “When You’re Alone,” she ups and leaves (“Times were tough, love was not enough”) and he
is all sneering and accusatory, but sounding so empty attempting either that
the conclusion has to be that he is singing to himself. She does come back in
the final verse, but the triumph sounds Pyrrhic; the intermediary second verse
sounds like the plot of Franks Wild Years
in précis. And then the backing
singers – Patty Scialfa, from New Jersey, being one of them – form a chorus
behind the singer, telling him that perhaps he’s not really alone. Or would
prefer not to be seen as such.
But on the closing “Valentine’s Day,” he is entirely on
his own. It is an attempt at deep soul with a steady, patient 6/8 tempo, and
Springsteen’s own bass prowls and arches beneath the singer as he realises that
fantasy and idealisations, like tears, are not enough. What is love, he
wonders; it’s the friend of his who became a father last night – he,
Springsteen, who on this album tries so hard to walk like his father – and the
singer has had enough of façades; he wants home, and her. He is driving down a
dark and “spooky” highway, but in the record’s most resonant and candid
couplet, he lays it open:
“That ain’t what scares me, baby;
What scares me is losin’ you.”
And again, those dreams, that light of God (dying in his
dreams reminding us of Joy Division/New Order’s “In A Lonely Place,” not to
mention “The Electrician”), come through with a hymnal organ to underscore
their importance. ”Don’t walk away. In silence” was how the song went. There
are closing, chiming bells, the bluest and loneliest of Valentines – but,
unlike Frank, he at least sounds as though he has a home still to reach and
reside. “Now that we’ve found love” asked the O’Jays some years earlier, “what
are we gonna do with it?” Recognising it, Springsteen recognises, is not the
same thing as living with it, nurturing it, allowing it to grow and flourish.
He has to get beyond the fun of the fair and get his hands dirty. It might even
be called growing up, that inconsiderate and un-rock ‘n’ roll-like phenomenon
that the most searching music of 1987 appeared to want and address more and
more. You’ve finally got to learn to live with what you know you can make rise
above. That is that thing called love.
*Appendix 1:
Blackpool
You may wonder why I should reminisce about Blackpool in
the context of an album set in one man’s heart in America, much of it
recognisably set along the New Jersey shoreline – if that “dirty oil patch” in
South Texas isn’t a roundabout reference to Roy Orbison’s background, and
remembering that Newark’s Four Seasons were as much the sound of New Jersey in
their day as Springsteen was, and perhaps still is, in his - and the only answer I can give is that I’ve
been thinking a lot lately about Blackpool, a place I knew very well in the
seventies and which I have not visited since the seventies, and something about
the sunset/end-of-the-road twilight gleaming of Tunnel Of Love set me thinking about the place.
Specifically I’ve been looking at Blackpool as it is now
via the marvel of Google Street View, tracing all the approaches to the town,
and the town itself, as far as fits my memory of them. The overwhelming feeling
that I have is one of melancholy. It doesn’t really matter which way you come
into town; however you do it, the familiar shape of the Tower will soon come
into progressively less distant view.
When my parents and I visited the resort regularly in
summer holidays past, we used to lodge somewhere in Egerton Road, part of the
elegant North Shore, by far my favourite district of the town (there is even a
Carlin Gate to mark the otherwise invisible boundary between Blackpool and
Bispham). As a very young boy I used to fantasise about living in the very
grand Imperial Hotel, but then I had similar fantasies about living in
Buckingham Palace and even in Tower Bridge. Tracing the path from there, I was
astonished at how swiftly and how well I recognised the streets, the houses
built in a brickwork of sandstone in a shade of red you don’t really find
anywhere else. The turning at the top of the road which turned into another
road, and you can glimpse the top of the Tower above one of the houses on the right (the same house used to boast an
advertising hoarding for Omega Watches which no longer exists). Dickson Road,
always an exciting walk in my younger days, eager to check out the latest
American Marvel Comics, which came to Blackpool a lot sooner than they did to
Glasgow. Then down to Talbot Road, with its terrific Marks and Spencer and
fantastic butcher’s shop which sold the best burgers I have yet tasted, past
Yates’ Wine Lodge to Talbot Square and there, facing you, was the North Pier,
stretching far out into the North Sea – on an especially clear day, you could
go right to its end and glimpse the coast of the Isle of Man.
Just to your left were Lewis’s department store – blue
and huge – then the Tower itself, and the Tower complex, and next to that was
the art deco Woolworth’s. If you glimpsed up the street that lay between
Lewis’s and the Tower then you would see the famous Winter Gardens, which
incorporated the comparatively swishy Opera House. Actually we hardly ever
ventured into the Winter Gardens itself, except accidentally one summer when we
opened a door and found ourselves in an auditorium, with distant acting on a
distant stage, and affable-looking fellows standing around at the back laughing
and conferring. It turned out to be the Are
You Being Served? stage show (of which cast only Nicholas Smith, a.k.a. Mr
Rumbold, now survives). There was a fairground of sorts and other such
distractions.
The Opera House we went to twice, to see Ken Dodd, once
in 1968 and again in 1971. I don’t really remember anything about the 1968 one,
but I still have the programme for 1971’s The
Ken Dodd Laughter Spectacular and it brings everything back. In truth it
probably presaged the truth about Blackpool in the seventies, that it was
already in slow decline from its twenties-to-fifties heyday, the cheap
airline/package tour market gradually eating into its numbers of visitors. Even
in the early part of the twentieth century, the likes of Sarah Bernhardt paid
the town more than one visit (except, on one occasion, when acting in a French
play with suboptimal sound quality, one gruff member of the audience regaled
Bernhardt with the upbraid: “Speak up, lass! Nobbut a soul can hear what th’art
sayin’! We haven’t paid our hard-earned money for that!”).
There was also the Grand Theatre, not too far away, where
we went twice; once to see Jimmy Jewel and Hylda Baker in the Nearest And Dearest stage show, and
again to see a farce starring Jack Douglas whose title I have long forgotten
(it might have been called The Love Nest).
But The Ken Dodd Laughter Spectacular
seemed like a last-ditch effort to stage the sort of grand variety show to
which Blackpool had been long accustomed.
I also recall it not being that funny. Dodd was only
onstage here and there; once near the beginning, and again near the middle for
some dreary song-and-dance business with the Diddymen which also involved some
admittedly spectacular waterfalls (and there was a full orchestra in the pit).
Otherwise the fare on offer could have come from 1911 or 1941; the Tiller
Girls, ventriloquism (Jack Beckitt, “supported by WILLIE DRINKALL”), juggling,
fire-eating, sleight-of-hand magic (the latter from the highly-respected Johnny
Hart, the only name on the bill apart from Dodd’s that I recognised) and lots
of stern, doughy songs sung by one Lyn Kennington with themes or titles like
“When Knights Were Bold” and “Derby Day.”
But at the end, more or less, Dodd came back onstage,
alone, and riffed, improvised or recalled gags from the air, reacted
immediately to his audience, for what must have been almost an hour and a half
and maybe even two hours. It was staggering. I’d never seen anything like it
before, and it was clear that this
was what everybody had paid to come and see, and that all the sub-Franz Lehar
rictus-grinning stuff that preceded it was merely a warm-up. It doesn’t really
matter that over forty years later I can hardly remember one joke that he told;
it was about the moment, the here and now, and the thrill and pleasure in
watching a master of his art at peak power and enjoying it so hugely.
Or maybe it was just one hour; I was very young and time
out of school was a matter of elasticity. What I do remember was that when we
eventually got out of the Opera House it was well past midnight and we had to
get a taxi back to our boarding house. Dodd’s then-current single “When Love
Comes Round Again” was sung on stage, played over the PA as we left the
auditorium, and indeed was on sale in the downstairs foyer. It didn’t become a
hit record until slightly later, and it remains perhaps Dodd’s strangest
single. It was an English version of a 1970 hit by Italian singer-songwriter
Sergio Endrigo, originally entitled “L’Arce Di Noé,” and followed Endrigo’s
original see-sawing between cheerful singalong choruses and melodramatic
verses. In Dodd’s recording, however, the pull-and-tug is almost schizophrenic;
now we have the honky tonk piano, the Mike Sammes Singers, the hand-waving
singsong (“Love –is-LIIIIIIIIKE an ever spinning wheel”), before these
musicians suddenly drop out, perhaps through a trapdoor, the key switches from
dominant major to subdominant minor, the guitar goes proto-Portishead on the
listener, and we are left with a regally cold string section – although the
song ‘s pulse is always constant, the verses pull off the illusion of sounding
out-of-tempo – against which Dodd’s voice descends a staircase of grief (“Down
the years, many tears have been cried
about love and devotion”) with a methodology
of phrasing and pause control almost identical in elegance to that of Scott
Walker. The strings swell up, the chords mourn like a lamenting Dido – but
before the wrecked soul can jump off the cliff, just as suddenly returns the
don’t-worry-be-happy-clappy chorus. The overriding arc of love dying and love
being reborn isn’t that distant from the overall theme of Tunnel Of Love. Towards the end of 1971, the song, retitled “Love
Is Like A Spinning Wheel,” became a hit for American country singer Jan Howard,
who in tandem with producer Owen Bradley did it as straight country without any
of the melodrama.
But back to the Woolworth’s tower – such as it was - and beyond that you left the North Shore
and entered the Central region, by far the most popular among the largely
Glaswegian Fair Fortnight holidaymakers. Far more colourful, and maybe tackier,
than the North, the smell of fish and chips combined with candy floss was
prevalent all the way down the Golden Mile.
Central Pier was also a far brasher pier than either the North or South ones,
with its extravagantly vulgar design and its Peter Webster talent contests.
There was a waxwork museum called Louis Tussaud’s, a cinema whose name I’ve
forgotten where we’d go to watch morning matinees of seemingly endless Warner
Brothers cartoon classics, and lots, but lots, of seafront hotels. Central
Blackpool was all about loudness, as opposed to the calming reserve of the
North Shore – there’s a great point on the North Promenade where the Metropole
Hotel rises up and suddenly, if briefly, there are huge buildings on either
side of the street.
Whereas the South Shore always seemed like something of
an afterthought, looking as it did rather down-at-heel, primary-coloured paint
scraping from the bright houses on the shore. The South Pier looked almost
embarrassed to call itself a pier, although it really wasn’t all that bad.
Nevertheless I clearly recall the pier’s theatre manager coming out onto the
pier deck to address the masses reclining in their deckchairs, imploring them
to come inside and see Freddie Garrity in The
Jolson Story. “Plenty of seats left!” he repeated, the implication being
that all seats were left (which, as I
understand things, wasn’t that far-fetched; nobody took up the offer). This was
very different from cheerful characters like Frank Carson and Little and Large
strolling up the North Pier, waving to deckchairs, beaming and always ready for
an autograph and a chat.
There was Pleasure Beach, Europe’s largest amusement
park, or so it was claimed in those pre-Alton Towers days, and yes, it had a
rollercoaster and a Tunnel of Love (not to mention a Ghost Train). It was
probably the only institution in Blackpool which could advertise itself as
separate and distinct from the Tower. After that, Blackpool slowly and
unspectacularly dwindled down to nothing, at least until you got to Lytham St
Annes, with its sand dunes on which you could actually sunbathe (at the
opposite end of the town were the infamously windy and often Irish
Sea-drenching Bispham Cliffs). And there were the trams, always the
indispensable trams, and in autumn, the Blackpool Illuminations which four
decades ago were pretty spectacular. Not to mention the local paper, the Evening Gazette, and the exotic novelty
of watching Granada rather than Scottish Television.
These memories are all intact, and really I don’t want to
spoil them by thinking about what Blackpool has turned into since then.
Traversing along Google Street View I saw on my right, on Church Street, a huge
and apparently disused club called The Syndicate. Now wait, I thought; don’t I
know this building from somewhere? And then it struck me – it wasn’t remotely
the same building, but was the building which had replaced the Blackpool ABC
Theatre, a constant in the seventies, and before then, where stars like
Morecambe and Wise trod its boards and guitarist Derek Bailey practised his
Webern in the orchestra pit.
Then, the all-too-familiar parade of chain stores, and a
feeling of slight desolation. Where Lewis’s once stood, there is now a Harry
Ramsden’s and a Poundland, amongst many others. Where once there was a
Woolworth’s, now stands Sports Direct. Many shops and hotels I had once known
and recognised along the shore were now closed, boarded up or turned into
other, less attractive things. I am aware that, for a multitude of reasons,
Blackpool is a far less pleasant place than it was when I knew it. If I went
there now, the thrill of instant familiarity would, I suspect, be swiftly
undercut by the same saddening, reddening sunset one sees on the album cover;
the time is gone, and I prefer to preserve the place as I remember it.
**Appendix 2: Franks Wild Years
I’m not very clear about Tom Waits’ religious upbringing
or beliefs – like Lanark’s Duncan
Thaw and myself, he may well have his “own conception of God,” although one of
his most apocalyptic songs has to be 2002’s “God’s Away On Business” (“The
ship’s sinking,” “it’s all over” etc.) and I note that his wife Kathleen
Brennan, who co-wrote that song along with much of Franks Wild Years, was, like Springsteen, raised as a Catholic –
but he seems able to raise his head from the mud more surely than Springsteen,
forever crucified by his Catholic guilt, manages on Tunnel, and maybe has a happier story to tell.
Franks Wild Years
– and this, incidentally, is not a typo; sleeve, spine and label are entirely
free of the pardoning apostrophe, implying that Waits is collecting and filing
wild years like others do stamps – was staged under the aegis of the
Steppenwolf Theatre Company, premiering at Chicago’s Briar St Theatre in June
1986. Planned as the third part of a trilogy of albums also encompassing Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs, it is perhaps more neglected
than either. The original, apostrophe-incorporating monologue appears on the
former, is over in a hundred and ten seconds, and is not much more than Waits
growling a tale over Ronnie Barron’s Hammond organ and Larry Taylor’s walking
bass, a story which doesn’t really have much bearing on what happens on this
record, other than the awful, spontaneous urge to abandon a life based on
reality and run away in pursuit of one based on fantasy.
Without wanting to waste my time and space and your
patience on what a thousand writers have already told you about Waits, I’ll cut
straight to the story that the record tells. It begins with excitement and
anticipation; “Hang On St Christopher” as Frank – Sinatra? Bascombe? Wheeler? –
sets out for Christ(opher) knows where, past The Grapevine, through Reno,
further and further away from what he knew. “Straight To The Top” continues
with the absurd optimism. But as he goes through “Blow Wind Blow” and
“Temptation,” his voice gets higher and more torn, the music less graspable.
The first “Innocent When You Dream” – the roughness of his dreams – is bawled
as though he is weeping at his own funeral.
As his travels broaden and narrow, and his resources run
out, the music becomes steadily more doleful as it becomes more dissonant; in
“I’ll Be Gone” he actively welcomes the prospect of suicide, and by “Yesterday
Is Here” and “Please Wake Me Up” he is dimly aware that there is no going or
coming back. “Franks Theme” teeters in and out of comprehensibility like Carla
Bley’s least forgettable nightmare. “More Than Rain” sees Waits pulling down
the shutters on the planet. “Way Down In The Hole” is deep soul marooned deeper
than Hades, Marc Ribot’s guitar tugging on the song’s perilous strands of
logic, a trio of backing singers – a signifier of “soul” music – entering the
song only a few seconds before it is terminated.
Side two is nightmare all the way. The Vegas “Straight To
The Top” is both pitiful and hilarious, while “I’ll Take New York” is Sinatra
refracted through Lynch**** – although Scorsese’s original New York, New York movie hardly said yes to life; Francine Evans
and Jimmy Doyle are fated to separate and go into their respective musical and
emotional dead ends . Then again, you could experience Waits/Franks’ torment,
as the lounge music disintegrates around him like the world, the future, his
life floating away from him (in his play “What Is The Right Thing And Am I
Doing It?,” BS Johnson has Ghent reiterate that the only way he can explain how
he coped what he made happen to him is “You had to…float”), as the devil who,
as Waits put it, knows the Bible like the back of his hands and flows through
the mind, wind and fingers of Jimmy Doyle as de Niro plays him. At the end of
the song, he is fluttering, bleary, incomprehensible and unlovable, in the gutter.
There is a grain of hope in the hopped-up “Telephone Call
From Istanbul,” as well as some of the album’s funniest lyrics (sample: “Never
drive a car when you’re dead” – well, Waits makes
it funny) – but “Cold Cold Ground” – the same cold, cold ground into which
Springsteen’s cautious man stares – with the aid of David Hidalgo’s accordion,
is the first of a pair of great vocal performances that showed D’Arby that he
had some way to go; slow, patient, deep, hurt, and genuinely “soulful.” The
second is the numbing “Train Song” where he realises that he has returned home,
but that it’s not “home” any more, that it is too late for redemption or
anything else. Springsteen never lets himself get anywhere near that trap. The
final “78” reading of “Innocent When You Dream” sounds played from beyond the
grave, as if Frank had expired. All that having been said, Waits is always
accompanied by a core of his repertory company of musical players – musically
he never sounds alone, as such – and given that the woman who became his wife
helped to write so many of these songs, you could argue that the ending here
was, paradoxically, happier than Springsteen’s lonely Valentine.
****Appendix 2b:
Climate of Sinatra
In 1986, Sinatra’s brassy, Don Costa-arranged “Theme From
New York, New York,” reissued by
Reprise to promote a routine best-of compilation album, became an unexpected
top five hit in Britain (his last such as a solo performer). I am not sure
whether this had the welcome effect of drawing curious listeners back to the
performance’s original home, 1980’s Trilogy:
Past Present Future, a self-explanatory triple album which, in its final
third, the Gordon Jenkins-masterminded “Future” suite, constitutes the most
exploratory and avant-garde music Sinatra ever recorded. Those who think that
Scott Walker was striking out a stubbornly lonely path are directed to “World
War None!,” “Song Without Words,” and “What Time Does The Next Miracle Leave?”;
the record is Sinatra’s Tilt, his Metal Machine Music, and as brilliant as
either.
***Appendix 3: A
Love Trilogy: Past Present Future
(a) “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’”
There were Springsteen-compatible precedents in Orbison,
Pitney and the Four Tops; what else is the knowingly failed barroom pick-up in
“One Step Up” but a cold rationalist update of “Twenty-Four Hours From Tulsa”?
But I doubt whether even the fifteen-year-old Springsteen was ready for “You’ve
Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.”
Like the opening of Citizen
Kane, “Lovin’ Feelin’” plays its cards upfront. There is no introduction or
prelude; without warning we are immediately lowered into the pit of the
sarcophagus of Bill Medley’s voice, clanging its own hellish chimes of doom. It
is like the Last Trump being blown directly into your ear.
No reassurance either: “You never close your eyes any
more” is how it begins; did we come in halfway through the story, or record?
Those first two words are uttered, as though they constituted the last words of
man, before any music begins, and when the music does begin it is distant, like the band are playing in the next
room, or on the next continent. The language of what the singer took to be love
appears to be no longer valid, and he is having difficulty accepting that.
As he reaches the first chorus a second, higher voice
joins him in harmony and their joint “gone, gone, gone” resounds like the
sailors crying for bread in Boris Godunov.
Then the song lands again, not quite where it was at the beginning – the sound
is fuller and there are next-door-neighbour backing vocals, one of which is
provided by Cher. A high string line – Nitzsche was indisposed and so Spector
grumpily hired Gene Page to do the arrangement – enters into our consciousness
like an oxygen tube. Then there’s another pained build-up – you may think these
are just little things but SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL’S DYING, the greatest offence
that humanity is incapable of bearing – and another chorus, before the rhythm
section suddenly drops out, perhaps through a trapdoor.
There is just a vibraphone, and a double bass, and then “Goodnight
Irene” harmonising, and then congas – but before even those Medley tries to
prove that even Homer (Simpson) can nod – “Baby, baby…I’d get down on my knees
for you” (then the wordless choir – is the subtext here “Take Me To Church”?).
But then there is another voice, a higher, more urgent
one, which we hear on its own for the first time – the voice of Bobby Hatfield.
Restraint versus anger, countenance against fear; two sides of the same man?
More percussion enters, then snarling muted trombones; the music just keeps
building and building – by the time the singers reach their quatrain of “Don’t,
don’t, DON’T, DON’T let it slip away-ay-ay!,” the song, the record, sounds as
though it is barely under control.
Then the two singers start to shout at each other –
“Baby!” “BABY!” “Baby…” “BAYYYYYYBAYYYYY!!” – why are they arguing? They
continue towards their peak of outward mourning: “I need your love,” says
Medley mildly. “I NEED YOUR LOVE!” hollers Hatfield, to remind us of how he
could stretch out and heighten that “I need your love” in “Unchained Melody,” a
song Spector gave him to do alone, as recompense for being absent from most of
“Lovin’ Feelin’.” Everything is about to boil over. It’s clear why they are screaming
at each other. It’s their version of getting laid.
But instead of a Penderecki-type eruption, we can only go
back to the chorus, the “Bring back that lovin’ feelin’,” roared more in
forlorn hope than assured certainty (for otherwise why would they hush up and
sing “I can’t go on” towards the end?). Another drop-out, and then an
intentionally anti-climactic fadeout. Burdon’s “House Of The Rising Sun” wasn’t
even in it.
Nor, for a moment, was British pop music. The big chart
battle here was between the original and Cilla Black’s George Martin-produced
cover. But Cilla and George got nowhere near it; the climactic bridge is cut
short (the singer said she didn’t want people to get bored, not too
convincingly) but after leading the original in the charts for three weeks, the
British public turned around and decided that they preferred “to get bored,” to
hear the whole, unabbreviated, unconfined story. It’s arguable that Black’s pop
career never regained its momentum after that episode; her follow-up, a far
more convincing and adventurous reading of “I’ve Been Wrong Before” – a record
which introduced Randy Newman to our charts – was perceived as an
audience-testing single and only just crept into the top twenty (a shame
because I think her version better than the contemporaneous Dusty Springfield
one; her cold harshness suits the song’s shopworn cynicism better, Martin’s
strings crouching in the bushes like unexploded grenades).
Perhaps the most convincing cover of the song appears on
the Human League’s 1979 debut album Reproduction;
coming out of an abstract instrumental called “Morale,” Oakey’s grave voice
resonates against giant tick-tocks, like God’s clock. He makes no attempt to
reproduce Medley and Hatfield’s original vocal pyrotechnics, but sings it in a
state of blank disbelief and premature resignation. The underlying “Morale”
motif does not move to accommodate the chorus’ chord changes. It is as if Oakey
is raising the question: what’s the look of love, and where did it go?
(b) Love Will Tear
Us Apart
It is said that Tony Wilson gave Ian Curtis a copy of the
1978 Frank Sinatra Twenty Golden Greats
compilation to give him tips for singing the song, which he sings more quietly
and slowly than any other uptempo Joy Division song, and most of the downtempo
ones. The music begins where most punk records ended, with a gigantic
guitar/drums climax, but this then unexpectedly gives way to Duane Eddy lead
bass and Hapless Child string
synthesiser. The song’s sentiments are the same as those of “You’ve Lost That
Lovin’ Feelin’,” but like Frank and Bruce the routine has now degenerated such
that there is no chance of reconciliation or even elementary contact with each
other. The music does not attempt another climax; instead Curtis simply muses
quietly and regretfully. Eventually the song gives way, and we are left with a
single high note of elegy flying above what is essentially “Then He Kissed Me.”
It’s not so much that the record closed down the recent past and permitted New
Pop to flourish, but that it is resigned to the possibility that there is no
future at all. Even the Pistols’ “God Save The Queen” hadn’t gone that far.
Beyond this only the posthumous ice forest of “Atmosphere” and something
awkward called the future.
(c) (I’ve Had) The
Time Of My Life
“I love myself (HE SAID I GOTTA GET UP, LIFE IS MORE THAN
SUICIDE)”
(“I” by Kendrick Lamar)
“If the future proves sweet, would it tell us to leap
before we move?”
(“The Future (Continued): I’ve Been There” by Frank
Sinatra)
Dirty Dancing
was released in August of 1987 and could in any other world have been an Elvis
movie (I wish that both Elvis and Marvin were still alive to give us their
readings of “Take Me To Church”); it is set in the summer of 1963, i.e. before
the Beatles changed everything, and the little plot it has hardly gets in the
way of the dancing, which is the movie’s point. You remember Patrick Swayze and
Baby and don’t recall the name of Swayze’s character or the name of the actress
who played “Baby” (Johnny Castle and Jennifer
Grey respectively). Maybe you bought the soundtrack, and even its
sequel/appendix, which is full of songs which would have been part of the
teenage Springsteen’s canon – “Hey Baby,” “Be My Baby,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “In The Still Of The
Night,” “Some Kind Of Wonderful,” “Love Is Strange,” “Will You Still Love Me
Tomorrow?”; all these songs of implied deliverance and paradoxical, if
retrospective, reassurance; those days before “we” were obliged to grow up.
“Time Of My Life” was written by John de Nicola, Don
Markowitz and Frankie Previte, which latter you may remember from early
eighties act Frankie and the Knockouts (the same team wrote “Hungry Eyes,”
recorded for the film by Eric Carmen). The original choice of duo was Donna
Summer and Joe Esposito, but they turned the song down, and so it came to the
attention of Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes. Although the Righteous Brothers
had a second number one in 1966 with the ostensibly self-produced (though Jack
Nitzsche was heavily involved) “(You’re My) Soul And Inspiration,” a record of
such desperate intensity as to outdo even “Lovin’ Feelin’,” they faded relatively
quickly, only really coming back in 1974 with the terrible “Rock ‘N’ Roll
Heaven.” So no doubt Medley was glad of the chance to reassert himself.
Meanwhile Warnes was busy enough, working with more dangerous characters like Leonard
Cohen and Arthur Russell – her Cohen covers album Famous Blue Raincoat was one of 1987’s most emotional records, as
indeed was Russell’s solo/multitracked voice-and-‘cello essay World Of Echo – but the film’s music
producer Jimmy Ienner prevailed upon her to repeat the “Up Where We Belong”
magic.
The song, as Medley and Warnes recorded it, was a lot
less ambiguous or ambitious than “Lovin’ Feelin’,” despite a deliberate
reference to the latter in the string chart, but it was undoubtedly happier,
and at the time of its initial release found an unlikely champion in Morrissey,
who reviewed the record on Radio 1’s Round
Table show and rated it very highly. It is corny and eighties-sounding, but
both singers sound heartfelt, and there is the feeling of closure being
attained. “I’ve searched through every
open door/’Til I’ve found the truth/And I owe it all to you” – are we really
that far away from a less melancholy Springsteen, out there on the highway in
the dead of night, heading home again?
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