(#572: 7 June 1997, 1 week)
Track listing: Love Won't Wait/So Help Me Girl/My Commitment/Hang On In There Baby/Are You Ready Now/Everything I Ever Wanted/I Fall So Deep/Lay Down For Love/Forever Love/Never Know/Open Road/Always
(Author's Note 1: The above represents the track listing of the UK edition of Open Road. The American edition altered the order of songs quite drastically, and replaced "Are You Ready Now" and "Always" with a Max Martin song called "Superhero" and a solo live version of "Back For Good."
Author's Note 2: This piece was written by Lena and edited by me. It is published under my name for reasons of administrative convenience only - M.C.)
THE GETTING OF WISDOM PART 2: SAVING THE BEST FOR, OH, THERE'S NO LAST
In case you need reminding, dear reader, this is a continuation of my hapless story of being courted, or not courted, or whatever was happening. I can’t relate all of it to you, but, well, yeah….
I can’t really remember Christmas of ’96, if anything happened. However my birthday is in the middle of January, and he took me to a place that was such a hit we went there again, both times having the goat's cheese pizza, so good I kept some of mine to take home to my mom, who of course liked it. Did I mention it was *his* birthday as well as mine? And that was about that.
Valentine’s Day was…oh dear…I am truly blanking out on what food, if any, was consumed. Afterwards we went into the depths of the Royal York Hotel to see the Glenn Miller Big Band/Orchestra whatever it was, which meant sitting down (no dancing) surrounded by people who were older, staring fixedly at the table with its red shiny confetti of hearts and cherubs. He just looked at me in a way that meant he was enjoying himself, wasn’t I enjoying myself?
No gifts, no cards or chocolate or stuffed animals, no pronouncements of any sorts. I still had nothing to go on about anything and felt like I was floating in a kind of limbo. Part of me was relieved, as getting anything from him would be even more awkward, because then I would be even more obliged than I already was. And I was beginning to realize I didn't want to be obliged at all. Maybe he would notice and end it. But no....
THERE'S ME, THERE'S ANOTHER ME AND A FUTURE ME TOO
Then spring came, and we went out to Oakville, so he could at least see where I grew up (and shop for records - he of course got a Bert Kaempfert one for himself and continued to be amused for my search for Lovelife by Lush* on tape, let alone Oomalama by Eugenius). We ended up at a British shop, full of food for expatriates, and I got some Penguin biscuits as their illustrations were so funny, including one with a penguin looking with some mild interest at a fizzing black bomb…
Then, it happened – one Wednesday in late May. Late May is, for whatever reason, a special time for me** and I stayed up to watch a movie, which I hardly ever do. My mom tried to watch it but was tired and fell asleep; I kept right on, sensing that something very important was happening and applied directly to me. The Double Life of Veronique is not an ordinary movie (I don’t want to sum it up in case you haven’t seen it) but the women at the heart of it I understood immediately. There is this famous scene, of course, but the scene where any semblance of distance between me and the main character collapsed comes later on, when Veronique looks through her photos and sees….
I cried and cried. Something was very wrong, and it had to be put right. I did not know the term "bad faith" at this time, but I knew there were two versions of me – one when I was by myself, and one with him. I had to stop things but had no idea how.
WHEN FOOD ISN' T THE FOOD OF LOVE, IT'S JUST...FOOD
The next day I woke up – or at least it feels as if it was the next day – to hear the news about Jeff Buckley. Next time I was with him – in his car I think, going up from my house to his parents’ house (he lived with them while working on his Ph.D. in History) I started going on about his death and met a wall of….not hostility…but indifference. He showed utterly no interest whatsoever in my distress, no curiosity about Buckley, his music, why I was so upset. I did something I rarely do. I apologized for going on about him. That I remember.
The end eventually came at his place. The TV was on, showing the old BBC '80s version of Northanger Abbey which always struck me as being somehow uncomfortable. It was warm, humid, the very beginning of summer. At some point he mentioned making food and then, well... It was how he did it; it was the lack of any sort of idea of ‘making nice food for someone in the hopes that they will like you more’.
Frozen ravioli, defrosted I guess; tomato sauce, ditto. A Pyrex glass measuring cup full of tomato sauce defrosted in the microwave. The cup then put on the table, no ceremony, bowl of ravioli in front of me.
It was baffling, but when you are at someone's place, you eat what you are given; there is no point in protesting 'why are you doing it that way, no one else is using the kitchen'. I said nothing. But it was like this, as Rebecca Harrington puts it in Penelope: "Oh, I didn't think it was really serious or anything,' said Penelope, who suddenly had a feeling in her stomach that occurs when you realize that your time enjoying composure is rapidly coming to a close."
Any equilibrium I had left was lost when, after this meal, he put a book of T.S. Eliot's poems on the table in front of me, requesting that I read from it. I don't know which one he wanted me to read aloud; I had a sudden feeling I was being set up. Once you read poetry out loud to a man, all bets are off. He had not mentioned before that he would like me to do this - it came out of nowhere. I felt reduced to some kind of object, and I reacted the only way I could. I said no, not just 'no' but also ended this 'relationship' or whatever it was. I was vehement and absolute.
He had to drive me home; awkward, sure, but as upset as he was, we did not argue. Once he was back home, he called to make sure that I hadn't suddenly changed my mind. Nope. What happened next was telling - in a few days he sent some notes that he had been making (yes, he had been making notes all this time, like I was a PROJECT or something) and they were all cryptic and ugly. Once in the summer I was with our social circle and he had to leave as he could not bear to be in the same room as me. I remember people clapping after he had left. Then I was politely asked not to attend the usual circle meetings, just the 'afterparties' and thus was liberated again. I finally felt more myself - more mayhem was to follow in the very late '90s, but for now I was happy.
My reward for this was to come later in the year, but first, Gary Barlow.
WHAT IF GABRIEL OAK HAD A YAMAHA KEYBOARD AND A DREAM
Now, I read Justin Lewis’ very fine biography of Gary Barlow in order to prepare for this: his modest beginnings, his urge to make music at an early age (neither of his parents were musical but they did at least own records), his incredibly industrious teenage years as a keyboardist/singer in the workingmen’s clubs in Northwest England…and his ambition to grow out of this to be a solo star. He wrote songs (learning from all the many songs he had to learn and then perform) and started to push himself in the music business, only to be told at 20 he was far too young and would you like to be in a boyband instead?
Well, it was a break from the workingmen’s club circuit, a chance to really push himself to perform and yes, write some songs for said band. Done and done, and so Take That were constructed around Gary Barlow. He was the squarest of the bunch, a bit stolid but this is not always a bad thing. He had to learn to dance (never as well Howard or Jason, alas) and maybe be a bit more frisky, though Robbie owned that, just as Mark owned a genial kind of oddness. Together they conquered the UK and did well elsewhere too and even had a hit in the U.S., “Back For Good.” It could well be when they broke up (inevitable, really, once Robbie quit to spend even more time with Oasis et al) the record companies looked and saw Gary Barlow as a free man, an easy sell, a star-in-the-making who could break America all by himself. Cough.
I have listened to Open Road and what I get most from it is the sound of money being spent. No expense was spared to make this a HIT ALBUM acceptable everywhere, with eight producers (including Trevor Horn, who suggested the cover of "Hang On In There Baby" which Barlow sings in a bland way as if the song isn't about anything) and more than a few songwriters of note being brought in, but….
…a few weeks ago I had a medical procedure (you well may be eating right now, dear reader, so I will spare you the details) and had to wait and wait in a big area with huge windows overlooking the Thames. On the wall was a flat-screen TV tuned into Smooth Radio (I am told this is NHS standard procedure). I was anxious, but here was music to soothe me, or attempt to put me into something of a passive trance. How I wish that this was the case. Too much ‘nice’ music makes me nervous, I guess. And Open Road is nothing if not ‘nice’. I grew increasingly anxious listening to it, willing something, anything, to happen.
But as a disciple of Elton John and Barry Manilow, Gary Barlow never strays past the middle, the absolute middle of the road. The safe place; the place of Goldilocks contentment and security; a place that can, in the right handling, be a springboard for surprising and moving things if the singer/songwriter/producer wants it to be. But there must be a genuine feeling put across, if not a leap into unfamiliar territory.*** Barlow knew very well this could be done, but unfortunately the album became a product of Clive Davis, executive producer, and all those he brought in, so the songs all seem to be ‘and guest starring Gary Barlow’ the whole way through. By the time his own song, the title track, comes by, I was exhausted and kept looking at the cover wondering, who approved of that? The photo is of a stolid, earnest man, determined to be…determined.
Because Barlow was the nice one all the mums liked, this of course was going to be a hit record; he makes all the sounds and noises he ever did in Take That, after all. To quote Lewis, "It felt a long way away from the original plan, for Gary to simply make an album with Chris Porter in a studio and then release it." However, once you declare that you want "to sell 10 million albums and I know that, to do it, I need to crack it in America." That simple plan is thrown by the wayside and The Industry will have you in New York City in no time, brought into an office with men in suits dancing to a remix of a song of yours you didn't write, which you have never even heard before. Barlow found himself as hapless as could be...
That this album was not at all a success in the US, where it was supposed to be one, shows how little regard The Industry has for what can work, and what can't. Open Road was worked on for almost a year, but as 1996 became 1997, it just became more dated and boringly beige and 'professional' whereas the good music around already was anticipating what was to come or perfecting a kind of modernism. This blog will be returning to Gary Barlow as a solo artist, though not any time soon. Barlow knows his niche, or groove, and resolutely stays in it, for better or for worse. Open Road, in other circumstances, could have been a good Take That album. But ambition took it elsewhere.
ALBUMS I WOULD RATHER HAVE LISTENED TO
WEAKERTHANS Fallow (John K. Samson, enough said)
THRUSH HERMIT – Sweet Homewrecker (“North Dakota” lives rent-free in my head)
AUTOUR DE LUCIE – Immobile (has the disquiet and lack of obedience that Barlow needed)
IVY – Apartment Life (a classic album, I feel)
DAFT PUNK – Homework (the future starts here)
THE JULIANA HATFIELD THREE – God's Foot (never released, though it is on YouTube)
MARY J BLIGE – Share My World (yeah, I actually do need to hear this)
RONI SIZE & REPRAZENT - New Forms (the actual UK sound of 1997)
And, while I’m at it, I’d also track down the unreleased songs recorded for John Cale’s Helen of Troy album because one of them is “God Only Knows” and my only response to that is ding-ding-DING come ON ALREADY ISLAND GET ON THIS (I just found out about this, hence its inclusion)
HAS ANYONE HERE HEARD OF STEREOLAB?
The summer of my freedom eventually led me to hearing something I hadn't known I was waiting for, which is always a joy.
If there was one thing I wasn't expecting, it was to be finally introduced to Stereolab via a car commercial, but this was the result of being at home more often - I saw these things. My reaction was as immediate as it was to The Double Life of Veronique, in that I was magnetized and somehow understood things better, it was practically telling me the future world I was living in was going to be a better place because Stereolab would be part of it, and include other people who knew who they were (When I showed up at an afterparty, a big one, and asked the room if anyone had ever heard of Stereolab, no one had. I felt suddenly cold, as if I didn’t really belong anymore. Which in a way, I didn’t).
Now, when I hear anything from Dots And Loops I fall into a kind of slightly painful how-did-I-not-know feeling then replaced by a happy kind of light melancholy. No one else knew about them, no one cared, I truly was on my own here, enjoying things by myself. I was what they said I was supposed to do - individuate - and if that meant listening to the rhumbas and bleeps and what sounded like lounge music but done right (I was not about to tell HIM about Stereolab; he had his own lounge music, after all). And for me, anyway, what I consider to be 'the late '90s' began when I saw that commercial. It was very much my thing, and after having endured over a year of not-really-my-thing-why-am-I-here on so many levels, I can only say Dots And Loops was and is the fabled happy ending. I am as uncritical of it as a cool breeze on a hot and humid day.
Next up: something, as they say, completely and utterly different.
*Yes the one with "Ladykiller" and "Single Girl" - not that he would have known about these songs, or cared.
**Two years earlier, not that I can really talk about it (for reasons, please see The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James) I had a mystical experience. I wasn’t really sure what was happening at the time, so I ascribed it to the saint for that day, Bede, and trusted he was looking after me. Then I found the James book and understood…
***You can still have passion, humor, signification and still be very MoR. “Could It Be Magic” by Barry Manilow is…typical at first, but by the end he is yelling COME, COME ON, COME and practically willing this magic to happen. He wrote the song, sure, but he is truly putting his full emotion into his singing. On the other hand, there is one of the most laidback MoR standards of all time, the Commodores’ “Easy.” It is a complex song that has Lionel Richie singing “Why in the world would anybody put chains on me, yeah?” in such an offhand way you have to remind yourself about where he’s from. Poor Gary Barlow doesn’t really have that passion or that ability to just casually drop in a reference to oppression, so he is dependent almost entirely on how good a song he has to sing.
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