QUEEN: A Day At The Races

(#178: 8 January 1977, 1 week)

Track listing: Tie Your Mother Down/You Take My Breath Away/Long Away/The Millionaire Waltz/You And I/Somebody To Love/White Man/Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy/Drowse/Teo Torriatte (Let Us Cling Together)

Listening to Queen’s individual studio albums, as opposed to simply their various Greatest Hits collections, I am more and more convinced that they are the Morecambe and Wise of rock. By that I do not mean that Freddie slapped Brian around the face and coughed “Arsenal!” or that Roger Taylor has short, fat, hairy legs, but that they are indubitably British, with a much-loved, audience-loving frontman who died too young, and that the people who claim they “love” them know only their “best bits.” Indeed I wonder what would happen if I stopped someone in the street and asked them if they knew any Queen beyond “Bohemian Rhapsody” or the other half-dozen or so of their songs regularly recycled on oldies radio; I suspect that most people would not, and that furthermore, if they delved beneath the hits, they might be rather surprised, and maybe not a little nonplussed, at what they find.

And just as watching any conventional episode of The Morecambe And Wise Show might in some cases lead to baffled viewers wondering what all the fuss was really about, then it’s equally possible that anyone listening to A Day At The Races might shrug their shoulders in bemused indifference. I know we have had things like Another Black And White Minstrel Show, The Rolling Stones No. 2 and The Best Of The Stylistics Vol II - not to mention Led Zeppelin II-IV - but this must be the first bona fide number one album that is the custom-built sequel to another number one album, and it is the regretful case that Races does not match the standard set by A Night At The Opera.

You certainly couldn’t fault the group for not trying; if anything, they try a little too hard here – although the cover insignia designs are different on each album, there is the Marx Brothers titular follow-on, the black album succeeding the white, and, over most of its ten songs, the mighty shadow of “Bohemian Rhapsody”; the whole album in fact starts with the gong that ended “Bo Rhap” and goes for a similar construction throughout. But, sadly, it doesn’t really come off. Mercury’s performances aside, there is little of the unforced humour that helped bring Opera its magic; the effortless, verging on insolent, stylistic genre-jumping prevalent on Opera now sounds forced and unnatural (there are no channel-hopping jump cuts, replaced as they are by ponderous ambient interludes). There is no “Bo Rhap”-style climax to sum the record up, no real sense of emotional deliverance. Instead the group’s eclecticism now begins to resemble a trap; the genre-hopping is superseded by what sounds like genuine confusion about what this group Queen should be, what they should sound like, what they ought to say.

Note that “ought”; A Day At The Races sounds like the album Queen felt they ought to make after Opera, rather than an album they wanted to make, and moreover the superb sequencing and editing on Opera show how important a part producer Roy Thomas Baker had to play; Races they opted to produce themselves (although a young Tim Friese-Greene helped engineer, and is thanked on the sleeve) and the result is rather how one would expect a Beatles album to sound like without George Martin there to curb their indulgences.

That all having been said, “Tie Your Mother Down” is one of the great album opening tracks; after a minute’s preamble of Oriental riffs and backwards harmonium, the song rips into being, Mercury’s “Oh!” exclaimed with the supreme confidence of someone springing out of bed, already wearing his jodhpurs, promising a great start to a hopefully great album. It’s clear from both the lyric and Mercury’s half-spoken snarl of a vocal that the song is a send-up of Jagger/Stewart-style jailbait cock rock (“Take your little brother swimmin’/With a brick (that’s all right)”) as he urges extreme violence against his would-be lover’s protectors before concluding “Why can’t they understand I’m just a peace lovin’ guy?” There is even a little Robert Plant takeoff towards the end and a complete assurance on the part of the whole group, a certainty which doesn’t really exist anywhere else on the record. It did only moderate business as a single, and so missed the Greatest Hits cut, but is one of their finest rockers and for years thereafter (although May had had the riff to hand since 1968) the staple opener to their stage act.

Then, disastrously, crucial momentum is lost. Following a meandering multitracked Mercury acappella Beach Boys vocal tribute, Mercury is largely alone with his piano to sing “You Take My Breath Away.” A clear attempt to reproduce the impact of Opera’s “Love Of My Life,” the song is not without its merits but its recitative nature – Mercury takes his time with it, doesn’t rush it and in part performs it out of tempo – clashes with the mood the opener set up, and the song isn’t strong enough to transcend that boundary. May briefly appears with a little guitar chorale, Taylor swishes his cymbal once, but the vocal and keyboard textures noticeably thicken when the song shows itself not to be a simple expression of idolatry: “Anywhere you go, I’ll be right behind you/Right until the ends of the earth” – does this remind you of another similarly-titled song? For something that depends on emotional power rather than brute volume, “Breath” is possibly misplaced here, and would have worked much better in a live or solo context (one of my regrets about Mercury is that he did not live long enough for Rick Rubin to get him and his piano into the studio for the solo album that surely would have happened).

All of a sudden, with the May-written and sung “Long Away,” we are in Big Star/power pop territory; a very confident mid-seventies soft rocker which, save for Mercury’s occasional massed harmonies and the characteristic long drone guitar pause in the centre, you would hardly recognise as a Queen track; May still looking for spiritual assurance (and his queries echo those of Mercury’s in “Somebody To Love”), the whole reminiscent of Teenage Fanclub playing what Lena terms “The Atheist’s Lament” (or possibly “The Astrophysicist’s Lament”).

“The Millionaire Waltz” encapsulates the problems at work on this album; within the group there are at least two forces wanting to pull their music in two different directions. It alternates between a cheerful camp piano-and-bass waltz and an all-out rocker, neither comfortable with the other – though I note, as with so many of these tracks, a tendency for the song to pause midsong for thought, or perhaps catching its breath. As Mercury is well on his way to inventing Rufus Wainwright, along comes a violent transition (“Come back to me!”), and via a quick Marlene Dietrich impression (“My fine friend”), forces its way back into – the third section of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” It is as though they cannot escape its shadow, and is jarring, rather than enjoyable, listening; yes, there is the quiet-loud-quiet alternating that would delineate so much of late eighties/early nineties American rock (and which, from the sound of it, I also suspect was a major influence on Earl Brutus; see, for instance, “On Me, Not In Me” from an album entitled Your Majesty, We Are Here), but not the point. Side one closes with John Deacon’s “You And I,” a competent slice of Elton-ish yacht rock which May repeatedly tries to engulf with his heavy riffing. It sounds like two records playing at once, although I note the House-anticipating piano riff at fadeout.

“Somebody To Love” was both the lead single and the album’s main setpiece; since it made number two as a single, I shall keep my comments here to a minimum. It’s enough to say, however, that Mercury delivers his most committed performance on this album, taking the love/God self-questioning of the first section of “Bo Rhap” into more psychologically tortuous waters; in the middle eight his vocal runs almost at riot, ignoring bar lines, tempo and so forth, as Lydon’s on “Holidays In The Sun” but he manages to pull himself together (with self-mocking “He’s all right, he’s all right” backing vocals). Thematically it’s “Another Saturday Night” gone to church, though Lena sensed a compatibility with “A Change Is Gonna Come” and pointed out the piano quotes from “Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring.” Inspired by Aretha Franklin’s gospel work, “Somebody To Love” finally reminds me of, of all people, Kevin Rowland; the same obsessive searching for “something” or “somebody” (“Where have you hidden it?” you can almost hear him asking), the same, near-religious commitment to escape and personal freedom. With “Tie Your Mother Down,” it is also the record’s best group performance.

May’s “White Man” tries to be Races’ “Prophet’s Song,” the record’s big rock epic, but unlike its predecessor never gets past first base; the lyrical theme is the same as “Indian Reservation,” complete with Cherokee tom-toms from Taylor, and despite (again) that quiet-loud-quiet trope, it is ponderous and proves that Queen at their most earnest were also Queen at their least entertaining. After that it is a relief to get into the familiar puddles of Mercury’s “Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy” (strange how the album’s two most immediately memorable songs were both written by Freddie) which confidently revisits and reshapes “Seaside Rendezvous” with a sudden dip into 10cc territory (“Hey boy where do you get it from?”) and the only convincing use of the noun “patter” in pop outside “Dick-A-Dum-Dum” (as well as a nice meditative interlude, distantly reminiscent of “Beautiful Dreamer”) which makes you wonder – May and Taylor may have been rockers wanting hard rock, but Mercury was happy with pop art, or art-pop.

Certainly there is little to be happy about with Taylor’s “Drowse,” a very long-sounding 6/8 trudge with atrocious lyrics (“Waves of alternatives wash at my sleepiness/Have my eggs poached for breakfast I guess” - See The Old Lady Decently this is not) and nothing of the spirit and enthusiasm of his previous “I’m In Love With My Car.” The album then limps to an unsatisfying close with “Teo Torriatte,” written by May as a tribute to the group’s Japanese fans. If anything, the track reminds me of the hits of Slik; doleful minor key piano verses bolted to an incongruous (and musically illogical) jaunty major key chorus. Pink Martini could probably make a decent fist of the song, but as it moves towards its inevitable stadium singalong finale (the backing chorus make it sound like an Official English World Cup anthem) and then meanders morosely to fade, succeeded by a reverse reprise of the album’s opening to bring the track’s final running time to 5:55 (the same length as “Bo Rhap”) one does not feel liberation, or euphoria, but rather a feeling that Queen on occasion were not tough enough with themselves, as self-producers; much of the record betrays a sense of tracks not good enough to make it onto Opera, a too-hasty attempt to reproduce Opera’s adventure and power. Though their popularity in Britain remained relatively undiminished, Queen do not reappear in this tale until 1980, and by the time News Of The World came out in the autumn of 1977 they found, possibly to their surprise, that they had to battle for their chart place along with everybody else. For 1977 may well be the toughest of Then Play Long years to negotiate; seventeen different albums, including Races, made it to number one – which means that it will take me about four months to get through it – and less than half of these are, at the time of writing, still in print. Indeed I note with some disquiet that this number includes no less than four 40-track double compilations. There will be many acts we have not seen on TPL for quite some while – and some we have not seen before. I do not know how recognisable this tale will still be once I get to 1977’s end. But, just as the 1976 Morecambe And Wise Christmas Show is, in its way, cognisant of the fact that something, somewhere, needs to change, and soon, it is also the case that hurried “sequel” albums may not be the “day” Brian May wants us to look for.

Then again, was it not Queen who cancelled at the last moment their appearance on Thames Television’s Today show in December 1976, thus allowing another EMI act to take their place?

Glen CAMPBELL: Glen Campbell's Twenty Golden Greats

(#177: 27 November 1976, 6 weeks)

Track listing: Rhinestone Cowboy/Both Sides Now/By The Time I Get To Phoenix/Gentle On My Mind/Too Many Mornings/Wichita Lineman/One Last Time/Don’t Pull Your Love-Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye/Reason To Believe/It’s Only Make Believe/Honey Come Back/Give Me Back That Old Familiar Feeling/Galveston/Dreams Of The Everyday Housewife/The Last Thing On My Mind/Where’s The Playground, Susie/Try A Little Kindness/Country Boy (You Got Your Feet In L.A.)/All I Have To Do Is Dream/Amazing Grace

“I really don’t know life at all.”
“Is this what I really am?”

After too long, the Worried Man found that he was satisfied. He had made it. Yes, he had made it, up to a point, before then, but he hadn’t found it very enjoyable. He knew his guitar like the back and front of his hands, he felt what songs we wanted to sing, but the people who had invested their interest in him were happy for him to go along as a sort of post-hippie Gene Autry, being a cartoon country and western avatar. He wasn’t happy with this, and then sometime in the mid-seventies, when even his friend Jimmy had become forgotten, he found a song which outlined and encapsulated what he felt about the whole, stinking scene. He was in L.A., but, like Neil Diamond, it wasn’t home to him. This song spelled out everything he couldn’t stand about the way his life had gone, complete with swipes at “On Broadway” and “The Hustle,” and his means of standing up for himself and shouting “No more!”

He thought he’d done a pretty good job on the song. Good, controlled but very heartfelt vocals; in places he sounded not very far away from Neil Young. “A Man Needs A Maid.” He thought: there’s a song I could have done.

Paradoxically – because that is the way things happen – the song made him more popular than ever, brought him back. Number one on the Hot 100; that hadn’t happened to him before. And so the song about getting out of this rat race made him even more susceptible to rats, the people he didn’t even know, calling him with offers – what offers? Hollywood Squares next Tuesday? – which meant that, when he thought about putting it all together, he looked back on the life that had brought him to this point. “Rhinestone Cowboy” as a framing device for an extended dream – for in his songs there had been so many dreams, so many “believe”s, too many contradictions.

He thought about Joni. She was all right. She’d been on his Goodtime Hour, those weird guitar tunings which produced piano jazz chords, that laughing openness. And he sang the song of hers many had sung before – hey, another song about rain and snow! – but stretched the melody so far over the bar lines that he sang it virtually out of tempo. Nobody was going to hurry him. But what, the song asks, has he learned of life? His regretful answer is: not very much at all, nothing of worth or value.

Back to Johnny Rivers. That was who the song was written for originally, and he got a copy of his album, heard the song and recognised something of himself in it. Somebody called Webb, from Elk City, Oklahoma, was the composer, and so he tried to get in touch with him. Oh yeah; good old Jim, his songs and singing always showed a marked difference, a heightening of intensity and commitment, when he sang and played them.

The record only did fair business on Billboard - peaking at #26 – but it got his name noticed, and he still chuckled at the thought of Jimmy, and of “Phoenix.” Man, the variations that guy got out of an F major seventh – that key, which you don’t come across every day, was the basis for most of his famous songs. He grinned remembering that Jamaican guy with his “No Woman, No Cry” that came out around the same time as “Rhinestone Cowboy” – that was in F major too. Should keep an eye on him.

But “Phoenix.” Why the chuckle? He thought of how many people had covered it, or rearranged it, or resculpted it, at how often the original got played on oldies radio (thereby giving the impression that it was a far bigger hit than in reality it was). He still warmed with inner admiration at the song’s economy, a story told in just three verses, terse, concise. He goes travelling, rather numbed, but breaks out into tearful emotionalism when the signifiers are flagged up – “So many times before,” “But time and time again,” that latter line sung as though yanking the goodbye letter out of his throat – and when he sings “Off the wall – that’s all,” it’s a bit like the Big O. He doesn’t erupt into sadness, though; just Webb’s genius as the song finally modulates down before unexpectedly settling (“I would really go”) on a reproachful D major. He travels on, and away from the listener. When were places like Albuquerque and Oklahoma referenced in pop songs anyway, outside of Chuck Berry or Rodgers and Hammerstein?

Yes, he ruminated, his was quite the performance. And that Isaac Hayes one – giving the whole thing a backstory, building it up and up until the drummer’s hand is on the verge of falling off, then bringing in full orchestra and chorus as though his “Phoenix” were the end, or summation, or something? Eighteen minutes to do it. Wow.

And still he chuckled, because he wondered how many people had noticed the simple trick “Phoenix” pulls off. Not Isaac Hayes, that’s for sure, not the legions of writers who seized on the song’s finite sadness, the slow glide of regretful departure, the shaking off of an old and unsatisfactory life. Because, well…”She’ll,” “the ‘phone will…,” “She’ll” over and over, all in the same conditional future tense. Has he actually left her?. The answer has to be no – “Phoenix” is a dissatisfied man fantasising about leaving his lover; he doesn’t go to Albuquerque or Oklahoma, except in his mind.

Mind? “Gentle On My Mind,” the John Hartford song with its “columbines” pun, its piling up of fuck you detritus, a song all about a man who doesn’t think twice about walking out on his lover(s); if he gets bored, why, he just makes for the nearest railroad, or junkyard, or highway, carries on unfettered. But it’s not even as simple as that, because this one woman, she keeps invading his head every time he pauses to think, on the back road by the river, and he in truth is tormenting himself because he knows deep down she might have been The One, and, furthermore, there might still be a chance that he can get back to her. But bear in mind; this is the truth behind the façade of “Phoenix” – the man really has no regrets about worrying others.

And it digs deeper into his mind, and heart; in “Too Many Mornings” he faces up to the emptiness of his transient existence – no more lonely nights, indeed – and wants to break out of it. To head back home – so many songs of this time, he felt, were about going home, or trying to find home.

Instead of which, he washes up in the vast middle of Kansas.

Imagine that he kept on through Oklahoma – yes, you have to do many unnecessary twists and turns to get from there to Wichita, but geography here is really a state of mind – and finds his loneness. He is surrounded by nobody and nothing, and simultaneously by the world. He is working high up on the telephone lines, fixing them, fiddling with them, changing them around, and he is as alone as any hapless Brontë heroine on the moors of West Yorkshire. He himself doesn’t change; from his story alone we could be in the twenties or thirties. In his mind he mingles workaday details of the pitfalls of his job and a piercingly sore yearning for the person he left behind. “I can hear you through the wires” – he is engulfed in quiet modernism, in a near-silent nowness, because he feels, he knows, that the world around him has changed, although he himself has not.

And then we get to the greatest lyric couplet in this tale. “What tale?” he asked. “This is my story.”

A couplet that has no need for the word “love” yet couldn’t exist without it.

A couplet in which “need” is given priority over “want” – the Carter Family marooned in a world full of Jetsons?

A couplet where that “for all time” could have been the corniest and laziest rhyme in all pop, but here, because of its emotional placement and delivery, stands for “eternity.”

The balance of old and new – the low-strung lead guitar paying tribute to Duane Eddy (“Because We Were Young”?), the RKO bleeps of Webb’s own organ, loaded onto a truck and taken to Western Recorders at the singer’s expressed wish.

High up, he knows the old world, and therefore his world, is fading, being superseded by a modernity he can’t quite understand. The camera of Al de Lory’s orchestration pulls away, to reveal an unending stream of green, of cars and trucks, of a dot in the middle horizon which if you look closely might still resemble a man.

Yes, he reflected, no matter what songs he sung, Jimmy always went above those.

That one where he did his Orbison thing, “One Last Time,” and you can tell, not just from the deliberately melodramatic drums and piano, that when he’s not dreaming about leaving her, when he is actually in a position to do it, he can’t quite do it. He begins solemn, reasonable, but the agony slowly builds up around him until he breaks down and confesses that he doesn’t want this to end. “Baby I WANT you!” he keeps screaming into the fade as though about to rip the song into pieces.

These Lambert and Potter guys, they brought him back by producing “Rhinestone Cowboy” and they suggested a little old-new medley. They’d already had a hit with “Don’t Pull Your Love” for Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds – yes, he remembered them too, nice, clean kids from L.A., and weren’t they back on the charts now? – but slowed it down so he could marry it up with the old Casinos ballad. In one song he asks not to be left to cry for a hundred years, in the other he pleas to be loved for a million years. A bravura performance, always goes down well in concert. But a plea for permanence nonetheless. “Reason To Believe,” well, he doesn’t turn it into a Rod Stewart train wreck, he does it with good reason, even though the lover here is laughing at the tears he cried in “Don’t Pull Your Love.” And then he reaches out for love, for someone, for anything. “It’s Only Make Believe,” an old hit for his buddy Conway Twitty, and he does it, again, like Orbison, vaulting through two chord changes, daring the listener to guess how high he’s prepared to go, how much self-inflicted pain he’s prepared to suffer; he loves her, he’d do anything for her, but – perhaps like Barry Ryan’s “Eloise” – she doesn’t actually exist, except in his dreams.

What was that line from Barrie again about how Peter Pan wants to fly out the window but finds it closed and barred?

“Honey Come Back,” Jimmy again – and if this is not the sequence in which he recorded these songs (so their underlying, unifying story is slightly opaque), then this is the song where he drops all the pretending. “Seems like a hundred years ago,” he muses, but he may have already lost her; she’s off with someone else, off to the bright lights and big time. Half the song he talks, or at any rate mutters, before suddenly breaking back into song. Who is this, leaving him for a better future – could he even be singing to himself, his old self, about to become a huge star with the biggest of lives? The thought is examined more deeply in “That Old Familiar Feeling” with its arching, echoing pedal steel.

Was he really singing about himself, he wondered? And what, if anything, had he left behind?

“Galveston” – from Kansas to Texas, and yet to a Vietnam pretending to be the Civil War (hence the splashing cannons); he is prepared to go and fight, and risk his life, all in favour of forgetting what he’s running away from, but he can’t; the girl on the beach (did somebody say “The Girls On The Beach”?) is the same one loitering in the vagabond’s back roads of memory in “Gentle On My Mind,” but now with the added dynamic of the question “and is she waiting there for me?” – if indeed she is waiting at all. “I’m so scared of dying” – how often do you hear a line like that in pop, even now? But the girl, the beach, the sea, the memory, the war – “Galveston” is pop’s equivalent to Chris Marker’s La Jetée, a series of stills all about memory, and love, and a horror barely touched upon.

But “Dreams Of The Everyday Housewife,” now that is a disturbing song. Written by one Chris Gantry, and a bigger hit for the singer in 1968 (in the USA) than “Gentle On My Mind” was, it is a delirious waltz which is more than a little reminiscent of Scott Walker’s very similar work, and lyrically just as double-edged; the housewife looks at her old photo albums, her old prom gown, wonders what the hell went wrong, from the time everybody wanted her. But – and here’s the mystifying rub – the housewife is clearly an Everywoman figure, but she “gave up the good life for me.” Every one of them. Musically the song looks forward to John Denver (especially “Calypso”) but this is worrisome. Again, that chuckle of his – all of these women giving up their lives for him? Or is he portraying himself as a kind of Everyman; is it a comment on the kind of people who buy and listen to his records – they think of the lives they used to have and the lives they live now, and his music is something of a succour, a balm, a form of pain relief?

“The Last Thing On My Mind,” Tom Paxton’s greatest song, and he thought he did it more than justice. Again his voice wanders down the corridors of Roy Orbison (though he wasn’t sure whether his 1971 version of “Dream Baby,” the missing link, would make the final cut; it didn’t, despite being Top 40 in both Britain and the States) but settles somewhere in the neighbourhood of Johnny Mathis. He is lying in his bed, like his friend Brian, consumed by fear and worry, and maybe the key point of his performance is when he exclaims “Lord, without you!,” putting an emphasis on the “Lord” as symbol of the thing which actually might be missing in his life…

…and did you catch, in that “Lord, without you!,” and the harmonic setting, the embryo of “Joan Of Arc” by Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark?

“Where’s The Playground, Susie” – Jimmy again, the most heartfelt thing of his he ever sung (though he wondered how many remembered his 1970 “Just Another Piece Of Paper” or “The Moon’s A Harsh Mistress” from ’74). “And here we stand/In a box of sand.” He thought again of his friend Brian, another sandbox dweller who never quite managed not to be a child. “And still you’re not content with something in me” – is this what we hoped for, grew up for, he asks, as he aims for the most absurd of high notes? Now he is in explicit pain.

And then there was “Try A Little Kindness,” a strange song for him to sing since it demanded the allowance of there being other people in the world. And yet “if you try a little kindness, you’ll overlook the blindness of narrow-minded people”…walking those streets of Broadway?

He snaps out of the reverie, or thinks he does. He’s in L.A., and it doesn’t matter that he was from Delight, Arkansas, rather than anywhere in Tennessee (America is his emotional shorthand); he takes another hard look at where he is, what he’s done with his life, and asks himself: “Is this who I really am?” and reminisces: “I can remember the time when I sang my songs for free.” Or the time a decade or so before, when he’d get up, do a round of golf, drive to the studios, read and play flyshit for a couple of hours, get paid, go back to the golf course, and then hang out with his family and friends drinking beer. Why couldn’t he have been satisfied with being L.A.’s best session guitarist? But Brian didn’t want to tour, so he went out on his behalf, and Brian even wrote and produced a song for him called “Guess I’m Dumb” which probably won’t be on this record and he guesses not too many people know about it; less than knew about “Turn Around, Look At Me” back in 1961.

The loneliness of the long-distance telephone repairman and that of the ageing surfer; move “Surf’s Up” inland, personalise it and you get “Wichita Lineman.”

And, finally, after a lifetime of walking out on girls or begging to be with girls, there is the voice of a girl, there in the studio with him. It is the voice of Bobbie Gentry, someone with a story of her own to tell, although there’ll be no real opportunity to tell it here, and they are remembering the Everlys (one side of a double-sided chart-topper, the other side of which was written by Roy Orbison). But it’s the same old story (that “gee whiz!” could stand for the sigh of Tantalus) of dreaming, imagining that love exists – and would you know Bobbie Gentry was on the record if you didn’t know it was her? Her voice is mixed so closely with his that you cannot clearly hear her; it could almost be him duetting with his overdubbed self. She is a ghost in his life’s camera.

No, this is not what he wants, or needs.

“Amazing Grace,” the last and most important song in this particular story

do you hear “Joan Of Arc” again? Same key and tempo and everything

and a song which keeps turning up when pop is in crisis – think “Never Ever,” think Calvin Harris’ “I’m Not Alone,” think even unto Kip Moore’s “Somethin’ ‘Bout A Truck”

Hey, I told you once, butt on out of MY story!

but “Amazing Grace,” a song he has known all his life, its dominant A major as reassuring a presence as the Statue of Liberty – and through performing this song he gains release, finds what he has been searching for. All of a sudden he leaves the world of heartaches and compromise behind, exceeds himself. His version pays tribute to both the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards – his own bagpipes – and Aretha Franklin (the gospel choir). He steadily and carefully ascends from sonorous baritone to Presley-like highness; it is a song of deliverance from the everyday, it is the song in which the singer finds his real self.

And he sings the song, the song he sang in church, when there was still hope, when possibilities still lay open for him, and realises that, like the song before it, he has wasted much too time dreaming his life away, travelling only in his head, for this Worried Man finds that he is not Glen Campbell, but living in the same house in Bedford Falls, Nebraska, while the world waited for him, and in part died for lack of him.

Is this record a map of the quietly tormented mind of George Bailey?

Where does he get these notions from? Alas, I know only too well; he gets them from me. I instilled them in him. He watches a film on television on Christmas Eve and he has all these crazy ideas.

I never say it to him, but I’m more than a little worried about what’s going to happen to him.

It is Christmas, 1976, and he has his presents; we give them to him straight now, rather than pretending that there is a Santa Claus. All because when he was seven, there was a stupid advertisement in a magazine he saw where the boy’s parents were laying out his presents beneath the tree. He stopped believing, and I believe something small but important died in him at that point.

But there is no question that he is racing ahead now; he’s only a month off thirteen, but he’s catching me out on stuff now, I who taught him half of everything he knows. But I can only lay the ground; he has to cultivate it. He has his music – so much music in here, even for a twelve-year-old, even for him - and his books and he knows exactly what’s happening, and why. He makes me feel a little ashamed of myself a lot of the time, which is why I get so angry sometimes. At least that’s one of the reasons.

In truth, though, I can only do so much. I am forty-five, I have diagnosed hypertension, my heart isn’t in the best state, I have the overpowering feeling that I ought to have made more of my life, and the lives of those around me, than I perhaps did. I am well aware that in life expectancy terms I am now on stoppage time. If I make fifty that will be a real achievement. But if he can make it to fifty I will feel, even beyond this life, that I have achieved something.

I have a feeling that he will end up too much like me. I can see it in his eyes. Heart problems are a given. But he will also have things that I never had, or never allowed myself to have. It will not be easy for him – I know this from looking at him now, even asleep. There is going to be trouble and the world will at times be astonishingly cruel towards him. But he still has that safety valve inside him – he’s made of stronger stuff than me, it’s beyond question.

All these records, though. 1976. He keeps his charts and I have to say I stopped keeping up a good while ago. Can’t abide Top of the Pops. Nor, I suspect, can he. But he listens to these records, says things about them, writes about them and I don’t know anyone else who does, certainly no one of his age.

I frequently worry about what’s going to happen to him after he leaves school, when he’ll have to deal directly with The World, when he doesn’t have journalists and teachers to protect him. But I have no doubt he’ll find a way. He’s persistent and a survivor, like his mother.

I’m hard on you sometimes because the world’s going to be much harder.

But go on you must. After all, you’re my only son.

(The above is based on remembered talk and genuine writing by my father, who would have been eighty-one years old today.)

Bert WEEDON: 22 Golden Guitar Greats

(#176: 20 November 1976, 1 week)

Track listing: Dance On/Wipe Out/Wheels/Diamonds/40 Miles Of Bad Road/Yakety Axe/Kon Tiki/Ginchy/Pepe/Sleepwalk/Guitar Boogie Shuffle/Walk Don’t Run/Scarlet (sic) O’Hara/F.B.I./Sorry Robbie/Marie (sic) Elena/Shazam/Perfidia/Man Of Mystery/Hava Nagila/Albatross/Apache

When Bert Weedon died earlier this year, a couple of weeks short of his 92nd birthday, I wonder how many people still remembered him or what he had done. Indeed, I cautiously posted something on the I Love Music message board about his passing, and many American readers were astonished to discover the extent and significance of his achievements, as he was little known outside Britain. Growing up in mid-seventies Britain, I had no real idea who Bert Weedon was either. He was often on television, turning up on variety shows or game shows, a genial, middle-aged fellow who always got a warm reception from the audience, and I mentally filed him alongside Henry Cooper or Lionel Blair, a celebrity well known for being a celebrity, an all-round sporting chap who regularly turned out and did much good work for the Variety Club of Great Britain, and so forth…but what had he actually done in the first place?

I knew from listening to the Double Top Ten show on Radio 1 and reading Tony Jasper’s 20 Years Of British Record Charts, 1955-1975 that he had had some success as a guitarist in the late fifties and early sixties. From the weekly magazine series The Story Of Pop I also realised that he was rather more significant than chart data alone might disclose, but didn’t really feel the need to delve deeper. And when he appeared on TV screens in the autumn of 1976, cheerfully advertising his 22 Golden Guitar Greats, I had him firmly pegged down as light entertainment.

Listening to this album now – which in its day sold over a million copies – the unwary might justifiably wonder what the fuss was about. Twenty-two easy listening renditions of instrumental oldies from what was already a rather distant past, performed by a fifty-six-year-old man in smart suit and moustache (apart from Perry Como, the oldest living individual performer to have a number one album up to this point?) – what did this have to do with something like The Song Remains The Same?

It could hardly be acknowledged at the time that without this self-effacing, courteous man from East Ham, The Song Remains The Same could arguably never have happened, and that not only was he the chief architect of British rock music, but he was also (so to speak) instrumental in getting the guitar recognised as a legitimate musical instrument in his country. Weedon spoke many times about how he felt, even as a teenager in the thirties, he was on something of a mission to push the guitar to centre stage; until he did something about it, the instrument was chiefly known in Britain from its appearance in singing cowboy films. He initially took lessons from a classical specialist, James Newell, who didn’t have much time for jazz or Western swing (Weedon’s two main musical passions at the time) but convinced Weedon of what the instrument could express; he also taught Weedon something of yoga, Buddhism and philosophy.

After war service he began to establish himself as a guitarist, principally on the dance band circuit, working with Ted Heath, Mantovani, the Squadronnaires and others; with his jazz hat on, he struck up a long working and personal relationship with Stéphane Grappelli. At one engagement he found he had contracted TB, and was out of action for some months and also told to avoid working in smoky nightclubs and dancehalls. Initially perturbed, he opted to become a studio player and quickly gained a reputation as a session musician.

It was while working with Cyril Stapleton’s band that the breakthrough happened. Stapleton gave him a copy of an obscure import record he had sourced from the States – “Rock Around The Clock” by Bill Haley – and rather than turning his nose up (as virtually every other British musician of his generation did) Weedon welcomed the new music and adapted his style accordingly. Through the fifties and early sixties he kept a foot in both camps; he worked with many young British rockers, including Tommy Steele and Adam Faith, but was also first call guitarist for visiting American superstars, called upon to back Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Tony Bennett and others.

Somewhere in the midst of all this activity, he carved out a career for himself as a named musician. His first and biggest hit was a cover of “Guitar Boogie Shuffle,” originally written and recorded by one Arthur Smith in 1945 but a big US hit (on reissue) for Philadelphia group The Virtues in the spring of 1959. Others followed (two of which, “Ginchy” and “Sorry Robbie” are also re-produced here); he was first off the block with “Apache,” arranging the song from the original sheet music, but unaccountably sat on his version for several months before releasing it, only for the Shadows’ cover to have conquered all in the interim.

It’s fair to say that as the Shadows rose, Weedon’s star dipped a little, but he remained a busy and popular musician. His greatest legacy, however, was his 1957 guitar tutorial book, Play In A Day, inexpensive and easy to follow. The equivalent of Sniffin’ Glue’s “three chords, now form a band” manifesto a generation later (significantly, taking effect at the same time as 22 Golden Guitar Greats), every British rock guitarist of note bought the book, learned from it, practised for many months and developed; it has been cited as an essential starting point by, amongst others, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Brian May, Mike Oldfield and, inevitably, Hank Marvin and Bruce Welch – while it might be a slight overstatement to suggest that British rock could not have happened without Play In A Day, Weedon’s book was the crucial catalyst, and if the mind baulks at so many Shadows covers on the present album, it might reasonably be argued that without Weedon these records might never have existed in the first place.

The lever behind the album was Warwick Records, a newish entrant to the budget TV-advertised compilation market, whose address – 120 King Street, London W6 – now houses the Hammersmith Holiday Inn. They tended to specialise in easily leasable (or re-recordable) compilations of hits by artists not quite in fashion; their roster included Vera Lynn, the Bachelors, Ken Dodd, Adam Faith and Frankie Laine, and their Various Artists albums incorporated things like David Hamilton’s Hot Shots. Quickly, however, Warwick realised that getting studio musicians in to re-record well-known hits of old was much faster and cheaper than obtaining leases for the originals, and so earlier in 1976 Instrumental Gold appeared, a collection of largely non-guitar dominant hits (although “Apache” again appears, as does Duane Eddy’s “Rebel Rouser”), largely from the pre-Beatles era, re-recorded by sundry stalwart British jazzers and sessioneers, Don Lusher, Stan Roderick, Jack Emblow and Gordon Langford among them, and spent five weeks at #3 over May and June. Clearly the “songs more important than the artists” market was still a goldmine waiting to be tapped (although the album’s version of “Telstar,” credited to “The Mellotronics,” is decidedly more bizarre than the original).

22 Golden Guitar Greats was designed as a sort of sequel to Instrumental Gold and Weedon was called upon to pick, choose and record the tracks (this we sort of gather from the anonymous sleevenote, written by someone for whom English was clearly a second language). Weedon went into the studio – not just any studio, but Konk Studios in Hornsey, owned by Ray Davies and the Kinks – with a band of rep reliables; Andy White, who played on “Love Me Do,” is the drummer, Rex Morris, whose provenance went back to Lord Rockingham’s XI and who played on “All You Need Is Love,” “Revolution 1” and “Honey Pie” (not to mention all of Weedon’s original hits), is on tenor saxophone, and Bill McGuffie, from the Radio 4 satire show Week Ending, is one of the keyboard players. The whole was co-produced (with Chris Harding) by none other than Brian Matthew, the venerable BBC broadcaster who now presides over Radio 2’s hugely popular show Sounds Of The ‘60s, a programme whose core audience is I feel not too far removed from the one that largely bought this album; in other words, elderly people who were always secretly rather disappointed with the Beatles, looking back to merry days of Craig Douglas, Jimmy Justice and the Fourmost, clinging onto their memories like oxygen masks. The recording engineer was Roger T Wake, an important figure in British jazz and improvised music of the period; among his other credits are Westbrook’s Citadel/Room 315 and Louis Moholo’s Spirits Rejoice!. The “Golden Guitar” may have been a tribute to Weedon’s golden Hofner, although it is not clear whether he used this on the record.

What about the record itself? Well, I don’t mean to render insult – quite the opposite – by comparing it with Italian café music, but that’s what it reminds me of (or perhaps French, in the M Hulot’s Holiday soundtrack way); “Dance On” and “Wheels” are exactly the sort of thing you’d hear while eating your tub of coppa whisky ice cream on a hot Wednesday afternoon in Venafro (listen to the work of the Marino Marini Quartet and you’ll see what I mean). Or, closer to home, Biggar in Lanarkshire, or Portobello, near Edinburgh, or maybe even Blackpool out of season, which latter might be the loneliest place in the world; distant echoes of British studios, polite, muted playing (Weedon’s guitar on “Wheels” made me think, for no good reason, of “Pink Frost” by the Chills) – and yet the slight reggae lilt to both of these tracks makes me wonder how good a reception this album might still get had it been recorded in Jamaica in 1964.

On the whole, the British covers work better than the American ones. There is no whooping or cackling on Weedon’s “Wipe Out,” although White’s drums here are outstanding – indeed, White stops just short of walking away with the record, as his work on “Diamonds,” “Scarlett O’Hara” and “Shazam” proves. Meanwhile, McGuffie treats the track as a jazz workout, daringly morphing McCoy Tyner block chords before the rest of the band come back in, just as it is about to turn into a Bill Evans Trio tribute. But the Duane Eddy tracks do not really work, since Weedon did not grow up in Tucson and Brian Matthew is not Lee Hazlewood, so they are proficient but no more, and the yelps and whoops on Weedon’s “Pepe” are, to put it mildly, forced. He does better with the Ventures (who indeed covered “Ginchy” in return), his “Walk Don’t Run” pitched noticeably higher than theirs. “Yakety Axe” is the Benny Hill theme.

Of the five Shadows covers (seven if you count the Jet Harris/Tony Meehan ones, and leaving “Apache” aside for the moment) it would be unhelpful for me to say much about them at the moment, since I don’t believe it’s a spoiler to say that I will be getting back to the Shadows themselves very soon; suffice it to say here that Weedon’s tone and intonation, as they are generally on the rest of the record, are very much classical in nature, very clean and precise (and so the nearest direct stylistic heir to Weedon in British rock is probably Brian May, who likewise tends to be very careful with the notes he picks and avoids ungainly smudging), and in terms of dealing with a group who were essentially half Weedon’s age, there is a definite teacher/pupil symbiosis going on here; how far ahead (if at all) the pupils jumped from their teacher remains to be seen.

This more or less leaves seven tracks worthy of closer attention. Of these, three are re-recordings of Weedon’s own hits, and the enthusiasm and commitment he and his band show when he is on his own territory are immediate. “Guitar Boogie Shuffle” is effectively Page One of British rock, let there be light, etc., and almost a literal textbook demonstration; Weedon starts out with the simplest of patterns and then gradually and methodically introduces other, slightly more complex variations on the theme. But in comparison to the polite 1959 original (produced by a very young Tony Hatch) this reading has far more vigour to it, and one can tell how and why he went down so well at the Roundhouse in 1970 (recorded on the splendid but hard to find Rockin’ At The Roundhouse); suddenly everyone is raising their game; there is real ebullience and teamwork, McGuffie at times veering off towards Taylorish elbow-on-keyboard abstractions. “Sorry Robbie” is a cha-cha which quickly cha-chas somewhere else; Morris’ grainy tenor is so impressive both here and on “Ginchy” that it intertwines with both tracks’ underlying proto-ska feel so effectively that you remember that we are just three years away from “One Step Beyond.” Likewise, his effortless take on “Hava Nagila,” the essential rite of passage for any tyro guitarist in those days – faster, faster! – is performed with absolute assurance; he even drops in a quote from Eddy’s “Peter Gunn” towards the end, as though trying to demonstrate a point (to which I will return).

“Ginchy,” though, is the revelation; with his introductory E minor/tremolo arm epilepsy “glide” chord, Weedon invents My Bloody Valentine, and the track then proceeds into what I can only term “klezmer ska”; there are also hints here of what will happen with Roxy Music and, indeed, Led Zeppelin. If the slightly menacing/out-of-synch tone of the track is familiar, it could be because Weedon co-wrote it with Jack Jordan, writer of the sinister “Little Red Monkey,” which, in its 1953 hit version by Frank Chacksfield, is probably the first British hit single to utilise an electronic keyboard.

Weedon also does well with the brace of American slowies. His “Sleepwalk” is tidier than the Shadows’ rather fumbling version (although Marvin’s fumbling is a great part of their version’s charm) which even McGuffie’s Tatum voicings cannot disrupt. But his “Maria Elena” is better still, and although Brazilian duo Los Indios Tabajaros had the big hit with the tune in late 1963, it should be remembered that Jimmy Dorsey took the song to number one on Billboard in 1941; given that Xavier Cugat also had the original hit version of “Perfidia” in 1943, it is worth noting that Weedon probably not only remembered the originals, but played them at the time, in the various dance bands in which he worked. So maybe he is reaching out to a longer and more distant memory here, but the deceptive delicacy of his rapid fire single notes – all cotton bud kisses – not only points the way to Mike Oldfield and, indeed, to the Jimmy Page of “The Song Remains The Same” and “The Rain Song” but also reminds us that in the late forties, with Julian Bream, he provided the music to a London stage production of Lorca’s Blood Wedding. Morris’ desolate Sven Klang sax joins in for a mournful abandoned dancehall scenario; all very impressive indeed.

But it is with the last two tracks that Weedon perhaps reveals the real subtext behind 22 Golden Guitar Greats. “Albatross” is the only song here to date from after 1963; the “pulsating sounds of the Guitar,” as the sleevenote has it, is otherwise strictly limited to that idyllic lotus of a time (to the record’s core audience) between Elvis going into the Army and the Beatles going up the charts. When things were good, and you could still make sense of them. Peter Green – another Play In A Day disciple – was inspired to write it by Santo and Johnny’s original “Sleep Walk” and by the inspiration of the Shadows in general. Its emergence at the end of 1968 suggested coming out a long sleep in a long, dark tunnel; what has changed, since we came out the other end and found ourselves still to be alive? So Weedon plays it, very faithfully (the high guitar call-and-response also suggesting the influence of “Indian Love Call”), but with a bit more twang than Green. Keep note of that “twang.”

For the entire record finishes with “Apache,” and not the Shadows’ “Apache” either, but “Apache” as Weedon himself originally envisaged and arranged it. And it is a markedly different affair from the Shadows; musically far busier, rhythmically much rougher; for the first time on the record, Weedon distorts his notes, plays faster, more jaggedly (there may even be some laughter in the background), and then we realise the record’s real mission. Pushing forty as the Shadows, and then the Beatles and everything else, took hold, one might be forgiven for thinking that the original John the Baptist of British rock had simply been left behind, that everyone else had caught up with him and long since overtaken him. But no, that’s not what he’s doing, or saying, or playing, here; what is happening is…

…he is playing “Albatross” like Hank Marvin and “Apache” like Peter Green…

…and so proving that the rock he helped invent was, and is, a circle, and everything comes around, and everything owes everything to everything else. “We could go on and on,” says the rather optimistic annotator…but really there is no need; at this moment we realise exactly who Bert Weedon was, and why he still matters. And, yes, when I was growing up, I also knew him from a line in a Bonzo Dog Band song: “We are normal and we dig Bert Weedon” (written by Neil Innes, and we’ll be getting back to him soon enough), but really most things in British rock were normal until it started to dig Bert Weedon.

LED ZEPPELIN: The Soundtrack From The Film The Song Remains The Same

(#175: 13 November 1976, 1 week)

Track listing: Rock And Roll/Celebration Day/The Song Remains The Same/The Rain Song/Dazed And Confused/No Quarter/Stairway To Heaven/Moby Dick/Whole Lotta Love

“I think this is a song of hope.”
(Robert Plant, introduction to live version of “Stairway To Heaven”)

First things first, so a caveat; the version I have of The Song Remains The Same is not quite the same record that went to number one in 1976. It is the 2007 Atlantic…well, “reissue” seems a paltry term here; this is more of a “total reconstruction,” re-sequenced, re-edited and remixed under the supervision of the surviving band members themselves, none of whom had any great enthusiasm for the original. Beautifully packaged, with two CDs and a two-hour-plus running time – featuring six previously unreleased performances – as well as an effusive new sleevenote from Cameron Crowe which is short on specifics but does feature useful comments from Page and Plant, the only thing that’s missing is a DVD of the film itself. But then again, I remember watching the film in my student days with its somnolent “fantasy sequences” so perhaps its absence is a bonus. Nonetheless, if you want to get The Song Remains The Same then the 2007 edition is beyond question the one to have; the sound quality is markedly improved and the songs now appear in a rough sequence which approximates what a full Zeppelin concert would have been like, and I think to the songs’ benefit. Some tracks have been discreetly trimmed down (“No Quarter,” “Stairway To Heaven,” “Moby Dick,” “Whole Lotta Love”) while a whole new three minutes have been found to extend “Dazed And Confused” to just short of half an hour.

But what relevance did the album have in an autumn which had already seen a live album by Dr. Feelgood at number one? No doubt there were many who took one listen to “Moby Dick,” cocked an eye to the film’s fan fiction segments and decided something had to give. Both album and film were put together, or sorted out to a successful issue, by a Zeppelin still unable to tour; so these were acts borne out of boredom. Taken from three nights of concerts at Madison Square Garden in mid-March 1973 – in other words, just after Houses Of The Holy had been released – there might also have been a reinvigorating or restorative element at work; if Presence suddenly saw the band thrust into a galactic trash disposal unit which they were compelled to escape, then it must have been refreshing for them to look back to the days, just three years previously, when they cocked the walk and didn’t need to think of such matters as impermanence.

As it is, side one (although I am not referencing the original issue, I have opted to retain its running order) is pretty much unassailable. In Crowe’s sleevenote, Plant speaks of “Rock And Roll” as the group’s “call to arms” and although he noticeably sings the song an octave lower than on the original record – as will become apparent, this is to preserve his voice for later forays – it is an endearingly sloppy beginning, Page digging in like Johnny Ramone’s encouraging uncle, and an underlying dynamic that really isn’t that far away from the Feelgoods. The song segues straight into “Celebration Day”; Plant’s voice warms up some more and Page pays explicit tribute to Hendrix in his solo.

The title track goes beyond what the band do with it on Houses Of The Holy; for its greater part we might be listening to Back Door, or Tony Williams’ Lifetime, or any such number of early seventies British-informed fusion power trios. An initial hecticity clears to make the way for Plant’s “crazy dream” and the singer inhabits a landscape somewhere between Jeff Buckley and Roger Daltrey, although, as previously noted, the overall mood is far closer to the former. Indeed, the meditative section is so thoughtfully wonderful that one almost regrets Page’s move back into power; yet he pushes the trio into choppier waters than he did in the studio, at one point reaching the harmolodic ambiguity of Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time. Even Plant is encouraged to join in, whipping himself up into dervish mood (“Do it! DO it!”)

The song segues suddenly, as if slamming up against a glass wall, into the pastoralism of “The Rain Song, with vocals and guitar only. John Paul Jones then adds in some mellotron textures which look forward to his work with R.E.M.; the whole is like a patient tug of war between Son House and Debussy. Finally Bonham makes his pronounced entry, and Page does a little essay on rock guitar history which takes in a good deal of Hank Marvin and again anticipates what is to come in the nineties (the song’s key, indeed, is the same as that of Buckley’s “Last Goodbye”). There is a climactic explosion, particularly with regard to the drumming, and a final wistful Shadows coda.

Then comes “Dazed And Confused.”

The other notable double rock live album of 1976 was Frampton Comes Alive, a record (or records) which did well enough here (peaking at #6) but was nowhere near as omnipresent as it was in bicentennial America’s summer. And perhaps there’s a reason why punk took so long to take off in the States and was far more readily successful in Britain; in the USA, the mood and climate didn’t take to bitter, grey isolationism. These were, as unbelievable as it may today read, optimistic times; Vietnam was done, Jimmy Carter was running for election, there was generally “a more positive attitude.” Swimming pools and freeways alike swam and bounced to the gently euphoric chimes of “Show Me The Way.” Even when Frampton seeks to unleash the detonator – his fourteen-and-a-quarter-minute “Do You Feel Like We Do?,” the performance which some say wrote the first page of the final history, an unexpectedly uncompromising (“hyperthyroid” is indeed the best way to describe it) octopus of an improvisation on a song which implies that this summer may not be endless – we still do not listen to it and think “apocalypse,” even if it took one arm of rock and pushed or pulled it as far as it could humanly go (including the talking box); instead we view it as an affirmation, a collective chant of as yet unchained power and freedom.

But this “Dazed And Confused” spells a different kind of end, and beginning, and ones which maybe could only be fully appreciated in 1976 Britain.

It begins just as it did in 1968, with Jones’ methodically stealthily crawling bass, and we are back in a leaky London basement with the blues. Except Page is already impatient to get out of that basement, lest it turn out to prove a dungeon. There is hardly any “conventional” guitar being played here; it is if the guitar is playing him, teasing him with wah-wahs, delay pedals, volume controls, as though sneaking around, not wishing to be unmasked. The collision of ancient and modernist in this sequence leads directly to the work of Portishead. Plant cautiously sidles into the picture but doesn’t take long to settle in; by verse two he already thinks he’s James Brown (and there is some similarity between his vocals here and Brown’s on “Stone To The Bone,” recorded later that same year; a non-encapsulated air of desolation, betrayal). Soon he and Page are ebbing in and out of each other’s whirlpool, Plant resorting to Cathy Berberian gabble to usher in the fast section, a section so furious and intent, and so unconventional melodically, that one is almost in the SoHo lofts (as documented on the Wildflowers set of albums recorded live in summer 1976, some tracks of which feature me as a member of the audience). This moves into a more pensive section. Plant paraphrases Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco” – casting around for memories, anything to remind him of how things once were – but soon the band swells up again and his voice is tossed around on board the stormy whaling ship. The group launch into a Fleetwood Mac-ish section which manages to invoke both Peter Green and Lindsey Buckingham, while Plant wails far in the distance.

And then, after some hard-set guitar, bass and drum unisons, Page is left on his own, with his effects pedals, the two necks of his guitar, and a violin bow.

How many pasts, presents and futures does Page’s solo echo? Here are a few observations:

1. When he applies the violin bow to one neck and somehow manages to keep playing on the other – however this was addressed in performance or post-production – it is reminiscent of Jerry Goodman jamming with John McLaughlin in the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

2. When he utilises his effects pedals to work on expanding his solo’s modal base, he somehow helps invent shoegazing.

3. The sequence of distended riffing broken up by long but gradually decreasing pauses, followed by what can only be described as free improvisation violin, is highly reminiscent of the title track of the Revolutionary Ensemble’s 1976 album People’s Republic.

4. The “violin” tones, initially conjuring up thoughts of Papa John Creach with a headache, are processed into areas so violently abstract that one thinks of Derek Bailey’s 1977 work with Tony Oxley (Soho Suites) and Evan Parker’s landmark solo 1976 recording Saxophone Solos. The same unending chirruping and abrupt howls, like blackbirds newly shorn of Eden.

5. Page’s work does not sound particularly close to that of Bailey, Fred Frith, Hans Reichel, or others who appear on the 1976 Caroline anthology Guitar Solos, but would also fit in perfectly there.

6. When Plant begins to yell wordlessly in the background behind Page’s abstractions, I think of the more jagged/euphoric moments of Ovary Lodge’s eponymous 1976 album. One member of Ovary Lodge, Julie Tippetts, was once Julie Driscoll, secretary of the Yardbirds Fan Club.

7. Page then launches into an ungainly Hendrix-type march before slamming back into the rock at an impossibly fast speed, then into a James Brown-style funk workout (Plant bellows “Uh!” and somewhere within this dense undergrowth the group are playing “Cold Sweat,” which very naturally mutates into “Crosstown Traffic.”

8. Page’s nearly ceaseless invoking of Hendrix echoes another live double album of this time, Miles Davis’ Agharta. Whether his own trumpet, or wah-wah organ, or via the two faces of Hendrix Miles projects onto Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas, you are left with no ambiguity towards whom the music is about. Page even nods at “Are You Experienced?”

9. Following some gargled vocal/guitar fanfares, then call and response, guitar locks in with bass and drums like an out of control sack race, the rhythm section snapping open and shut like a sadistic money box. Then Page calls up “Sabre Dance,” done by Dave Edmunds and Love Sculpture in the same year “Dazed And Confused” was first recorded.

10. The violin/guitar pseudo-interplay, and the genuine interplay with the rhythm section, make this track sound at times like an outtake from King Crimson’s Larks’ Tongues In Aspic.

11. Then Page starts playing the “Black Sabbath” riff, so fast as to be psychotic. The band speeds up and up, plateaus and starts playing…

12. …Punk rock! If “Dazed And Confused” is a statement of any intent, then far from being the reason for punk, it if anything is calling up all the punks – here we have witnessed the rhythmic attack of the Damned, the lyrical quietude of mid-period Siouxsie and the Banshees and the post-everything approach of Public Image Ltd., amongst many others. In its way it is spelling out the end of one chapter, or history, of rock, perhaps even sealing Zeppelin’s own doom. And we are still “only” in 1973.

There is not much else for Page and Plant to do here except go back to the song’s “head.” Page opts for his Albert King mode while bass and drums pick the song up behind him, and without anyone really noticing, moves into Hendrix. Meanwhile, Plant impersonates a police siren. “Ohhhhh, SUCK it!” he is reduced to exclaiming. He roars as though still in the Tottenham Royal, almost demanding Lydon and Strummer and all the rest of them to make themselves known. “Jimmy Page, electric guitar,” Plant announces at the end, as though the Light Programme were still in the present tense.

There is no sentient response to this half-hour, nor any other way in which it can satisfactorily be followed up. So, in the second album, instead of seizing this terrifying new music and taking it and their audience into the future, they fall back on the oldies and goodies; “OK,” they seem to say, “you’ve seen how far out we can go – now let’s get back to the classics you’ve paid to come and hear tonight.”

“No Quarter” is decent enough, with Plant’s phased vocals almost implanting AutoTune a generation too early. Page’s solo starts interestingly in Jeff Beck territory before again morphing into Hendrix; as Bonham’s drums buffer against his guitar, the whole begins to resemble Santana, although 1973-4 Traffic is a more accurate pointer (particularly with Jones’ very Winwood-ish organ lines). On the reconstituted 2007 edition it sits far more comfortably on CD1, as part of a long, meditative section that also takes in the abovementioned title track and “The Rain Song” before the latter’s climax leads, very naturally, into a thunderous reading of “The Ocean” (and, on the same CD1, as “Black Dog” comes charging out of “Celebration Day,” you can feel a euphoria and certainty which would most assuredly be at home in the realms of Stupidity).

Then it’s the “hits.” “Stairway” is done more or less straight, with a longer Page solo, a looser, more improvisatory feel to the performance as a whole, and some meaningful audience asides from Plant (“Does anybody remember laughter?”). “Moby Dick” is the band going backstage for some dandelion and burdock while Bonham does his party piece (look, no hands! Look, phasing! Look, is there a human being there?), clearly a child of Krupa (as opposed to Keith Moon, always an Elvin Jones – via Phil Seamen – kind of man) with his references to “Sing, Sing, Sing.” Impressive if you’re the type who’s impressed by it, but the football chant of “John Bonham!” at the end sums it up most succinctly. Finally it’s a flag-waving-bring-the-boys-home “Whole Lotta Love”; despite some very adventurous improvising here (Page at one point struggling to keep up with Bonham, and then vice versa) including Eno whoops and Sharrock-via-Sun-Ra free guitar swirls, one senses the multi-coloured lasers at work on the stage. Then suddenly it’s Plant and Page alone doing a bit of Elmore James business before the band launch into the otherwise (i.e. in the group’s lifetime) unrecorded “Boogie Mama” and suddenly become a rockabilly group (“Shake it down for Elvis, alright!”). Page plays a slightly pained solo against Jones and Bonham’s fifties swing, recalling everything he had learned from his Play In A Day book, before the band switch triumphantly back into “Whole Lotta Love,” Plant shrieking, invocating Wolf (“I won’t be your back door man”) and Cliff (“Move it!”). He says goodnight to New York, and New York remembers it, and him, and them, forever.

Me? I think the first album (as the original issue stands) is far better than the second, although probably needed the second album to justify its release. I also think that labelling Zeppelin as the root cause of Why Punk Had To Happen is extremely misleading; punk had many causes, musical and non-musical, and perhaps the sword-and-sorcery stuff in the film did have a part to play; but get beyond the façade and listen in particular to the extraordinary “Dazed And Confused,” the musical implications of which I do not believe have been fully followed through. There is one more Zeppelin album to come, at a time when it could have been reasonably (if erroneously) argued that Britain had forgotten about them, but like it or not, and regardless of what was or was not about to happen, they are, at this stage, and on this stage, still on top. On top of what, though? Now there’s the rub.

VARIOUS ARTISTS: Soul Motion

(#174: 30 October 1976, 2 weeks)

Track listing: You To Me Are Everything (The Real Thing)/You’re The First, The Last, My Everything (Barry White)/Lady Marmalade (LaBelle)/It’s In His Kiss (Linda Lewis)/T.S.O.P. (The Sound Of Philadelphia (MFSB)/Get Up And Boogie (Silver Convention)/Disco Lady (Johnnie Taylor)/Ms Grace (The Tymes)/This Is It (Melba Moore)/That’s The Way (I Like It) (KC and The Sunshine Band)/When Will I See You Again? (The Three Degrees)/More, More, More (Andrea True Connection)/Armed And Extremely Dangerous (First Choice)/Didn’t I Blow Your Mind (This Time) (The Delfonics)/Me And Mrs Jones (Billy Paul)/Lovin’ You (Minnie Riperton)/Wake Up Everybody (Harold Melvin and The Blue Notes)/Let’s Do The Latin Hustle (Eddie Drennon and BBS Unlimited)/(Are You Ready) Do The Bus Stop (The Fatback Band)/Love Train (The O’Jays)

(Author’s Note: The above track listing is based on the actual order in which the tracks appear, as opposed to the order incorrectly listed on the album’s rear cover. In addition I have preserved the actual song titles and artists, correcting the numerous errors and omissions on the sleeve, in an act more to do with exasperation than slavish fidelity to record covers.)

In the sixteen-and-a-half years I spent commuting daily between Oxford and London, I got quite used to seeing the low-rise K-Tel office building on Western Avenue, and even though K-Tel’s best days were firmly behind them by the time I had started commuting, it still baffled me a little as to how successful a multinational conglomerate could be satisfied with such pokey little offices, in the limbo of M40 motorway between Park Royal and Acton Town. In fact the building is set just before the crest of a hill, at the top of which only a slight twist in the road reveals the first sighting of London as it is known and recognised; the Post Office Tower (I know it is now called the BT Tower, but let love and life rule and call it the Post Office Tower) in the distance, and soon afterwards the recognisable west London skyline, dominated by the outline of Charing Cross Hospital (and, later, the Hammersmith Ark). I passed it twice every day, where the K-Tel sign remained until well into the nineties, following which it disappeared and the building degenerated into FOR SALE disuse.

Going back through some of those old K-Tel collections, it is perhaps easier to understand the appeal of such undemonstrative premises, for K-Tel, despite its Canadian origins, always struck me, in its British manifestation, as a cheerful cottage industry, clearly limited by budget constraints and whatever major labels were prepared to license out to them on a fixed-term basis, a business not too bothered how its end products looked as long as they were in some way useful, as well as inexpensive.

To sum the philosophy up, the sleeve of Soul Motion, designed by Peter Eaton & Partners Ltd, pays so little attention to classical formalities such as getting track orders, song titles and artists correct that it’s almost as if someone had thrown together a C90 (or, to be fair, a C120) tape and scribbled a rudimentary track listing on the front. Nor is there any room left for the stock monochrome artist photographs we find on the likes of 20 Dynamic Hits; instead we have a graffitied wall where people think to spray-can the likes of Linda Lewis and Eddie “Drennan.” It was the third in a series of grab-bag compilations of current and recent soul and disco hits produced by K-Tel, its two predecessors being Super Bad (1974) and Souled Out (1975 – there’s a title we’ll be coming across again), and all similarly designed. Was social deprivation really concomitant with the often highly sophisticated music to be found on the records themselves? How worse could the punning titles get?

Or did K-Tel have a better and more realistic idea of what albums meant to the people who bought and listened to them? Do glorified tape compilations satisfy what we want from an album? The history of the album, as this tale has in part tried to demonstrate, has frequently been a struggle between the respectable craving for long-form works of art (which were why albums were originally invented, so that those listening to a lengthy classical work didn’t need to get up and change the record every three minutes or so) and a corporate cynicism trying to make more short-term profits by taking a currently popular artist, shoving their one or two hits together with ten tracks of filler, and calling the end result an “album.” Art and cynicism are about the last two things I’d associate with K-Tel; they wanted to make money, not create a definitive, annotated retrospective, but they were also very clear in their motives – no filler (well, not much), some condensing of tracks to get twenty on one album, a cheaper and easier way to buy and own the hits you hear on the radio and maybe dance to. The cover of Soul Motion suggests a different demographic from the faux-sophistication of The Best Of The Stylistics Volume II; I’d be surprised if many over the age of about twenty bought it.

Yet bought it they did, enough to get the record to number one for a fortnight and therefore into this tale, and you hardly need, I think, to be reminded that multi-artist compilations had by now sneaked back, or been allowed to sneak back, into the album charts, and there they will stay until the end of 1988. Given the frequency with which “Various Artists” will assert themselves, it has to be concluded that a vast swathe of record buyers wanted all the hits, together in one neat bargain of a package, and weren’t too fussed about how the package was delivered or presented to them. Some might say that the blunt honesty of this kind of approach is more “truthful” than a thousand concept albums, but plenty of others would say the exact opposite.

As a coherent album, Soul Motion doesn’t really have anything to say about itself; its twenty tracks range from 1971 to 1976, just over half of them were number one hits in either the UK or the USA (none did the double), and its programming is fairly conventional – many immediately recognisable hits up front, followed by more hits and the occasional curveball, then a sequence of slow jams for the ladies, and then gradually revving the mood and tempo up again. I don’t believe there is any deeper subtext to the programme; these are hits ordered and siphoned by professionals. So examination of the album as a whole is pretty pointless, but that does not of course mean there’s nothing to say about the songs or artists themselves. That being the case, it is best to examine artist by artist and find out just why the record would have been such an attractive proposition to impressionable teenagers, from George Michael to Siouxsie Sioux.

The Real Thing
The only fully British track on this record; they came from Toxteth, Liverpool, and some of them were in an early sixties group called the Chants and knew Paul McCartney from the Cavern days. As The Real Thing they got by for six years until they managed to land a spot on New Faces (I always remembered them as being on Opportunity Knocks but see the comments section below); they won repeatedly and their “debut” single quickly went to number one. Even in the lamentable mid-1976 days of Top Of The Pops it’s not difficult to see how “You To Me Are Everything” would stand out so readily; a natural number one with Eddie Amoo’s lead vocal skilfully combining vulnerability with emotional generosity. The strings (or possibly string synthesiser?) towards the end quote “Love’s Theme” as a sort of acknowledgement of influence. They had further hits, with successive lower chart peaks, and by 1977 had delivered the concept album 4 From 8, including “Children Of The Ghetto,” to a deaf world. In 1979 they enjoyed something of a comeback with “Can You Feel The Force?,” their best record; yet some still recall above all else the jingles they recorded for the Godfrey Davis car hire firm.

Barry White
Born in Galveston and raised in South Central LA, a first-hand witness to the Watts riots, it’s not surprising that White wanted to put something of the past far behind him. Hence the sighing flutes and echoing harpsichords characteristic of his early work as a performer; a lushly romantic counterpart to Isaac Hayes’ sternly classical approach. Were you to depend on British oldies radio stations as a reliable barometer of anything, you’d think “You’re The First…,” his only British number one, was the only record he ever made. Unlike the version routinely trotted out on radio, this retains the crucial spoken intro (or at least some of it) but manages to omit the entire second verse and chorus and is quick to fade the song out before the spoken coda (hence we have an incomplete understanding of the pain and struggle which lie behind the fact that White and his Other have “made it”). Best to find the original albums, particularly 1974’s Stone Gon’, which Paul Lester once urged me to listen to, saying that side two was practically the Cocteau Twins. And he was right.

LaBelle
One of many perspectives on Philadelphia to be found on this record, they were once Patti LaBelle and the Bluebells before jazzing themselves up for the seventies. Again, radio here appears to think that “Lady Marmalade” was their only record – thus omitting, amongst many other achievements, “Morning Much Better,” their remarkable nine-minute-plus take on Cat Stevens’ “Moonshadow” and, from the same album as “Marmalade” (Nightbirds), “You Turn Me On” and “What Can I Do For You?” In fairness, one can understand the record’s continuing appeal; the opening chants of “Go, Sister Soul” sound like pre-emptive Girl Power war cries and Allen Toussaint’s cowbell-heavy production doesn’t put a foot wrong; the performance sounds live, the organ both light and provocative, the singers give deep collective breaths which resonate like a gong, the horn-dominated middle-eight provides an entirely unexpected Picardy third, and Patti LaBelle’s French soul coaxing tutorials are delivered with as much dynamic urgency as her phenomenal 1978 reading of “Teach Me Tonight” (last seen in its full version on the Soul Jazz compilation Barrio Nuevo which unfortunately is currently out of print; please petition the label for a reissue). Given the involvement of Philadelphia, New Orleans and (via co-author Bob Crewe) New Jersey, this is one of the junctions in seventies soul music where everything seems to meet. And given its chart-topping, million-selling status in the USA, its continuing popularity and the fact that two subsequent cover versions made number one in Britain, how could the original have stopped at #17 in our charts in the spring of 1975, prevented from climbing higher by such heavyweights as Mike Reid, Peter Shelley, the Rubettes and Kenny?

Linda Lewis
From West Ham, but with a record made in America, Linda Lewis’ early work belies the misleading picture of her given by her short list of hits. Possibly the first British black female singer-songwriter to attain critical and commercial success – folk-tinged albums like Lark (1972), Fathoms Deep (1973) and Heart Strings (1974) paved the way for everybody from Joan Armatrading to Corinne Bailey Rae – this volatile Betty Everett cover from 1975 was her biggest British hit, though the arrangement and production were by Tony Silvester and Bert deCoteaux. She certainly attacks the song with great gusto; her five-octave vocal range put her in the same class as Minnie Riperton although the extreme highness and glee with which she delivers the song is near-childlike. An enthusiastic Michael Jackson is certainly near the mark, a predicative Clare Grogan even more so as Lewis scarcely sounds older than twelve – her sopranino shoots up like a rocket to shower the instrumental break with colour and verve.

Philadelphia
The Philadelphia story goes almost back to the beginning of post-war popular music, to the days of Dick Clark and American Bandstand. If one of the unspoken purposes of Soul Train was to show that which Bandstand would never dare – in terms of styles of music, that is; Clark was instrumental in demolishing the colour bar on his own show, and many soul and R&B stars benefited from his and the show’s patronage – then its theme tune, “T.S.O.P.,” was a calling card of action. Gamble and Huff had experimented for some time with the next logical step from Motown – marrying easy listening strings with blues rhythm sections and singers somewhere in between, thereby creating an opulent earthiness – but “T.S.O.P.,” a US #1 in 1974, was a largely instrumental gesture of radicalism. Here, the carefully balanced males and females – strings and brass for the first major key theme, answered by saxes for the second minor key riff – are artfully held together by the purposeful rhythm section; guitars, bass and drums echo off each other in a manner that anticipates Simple Minds. Tension is carefully built up until the Three Degrees finally enter; their entry is later than Bowie’s on “Sound And Vision” but then this record partially persuaded Bowie to go to Philadelphia and find himself a way out. “People all over the world,” they call out when words are formulated (see also the final entry in this section), “let’s get it on.” Disco is born, and although in terms of its timescale this isn’t quite America getting over, or rid of, Watergate, it does say, “Don’t worry, America – there is a future, and here is where it starts.” Oh, and the MFSB Sigma Sound studio orchestra acronym stands for exactly what you think it stands for.

Silver Convention
Originally called Silverbird, until an American band objected, and once nearly having Donna Summer in their line-up, Silver Convention were the creation of Munich-based writers and producers Sylvester Levay and Michael Kunze. The modus operandi was simple chants alternating with long instrumental workouts. “Save Me” attracted many ears in the spring of 1975; “Fly Robin Fly” was their breakthrough, reaching number one on Billboard later the same year; and 1976’s “Get Up And Boogie” was a US #2 and their biggest British hit. As ever, they don’t have much to do except sing the title over and over with vague rock chick accentuations, with abrupt “That’s right!” exclamations from the producers and plenty of funky clavinet and a strange string chart which sounds like von Karajan’s Berlin Philharmonic auditioning at the Grand Ole Opry. So on one side of mid-seventies Germany you had Kraftwerk and Autobahn, and on the other side this. Slow it down a little and you practically have “Autobahn” here; it’s the same beat, more or less, and the same clear lyrical minimalism.

Johnnie Taylor
The only real dud on this album; “The Philosopher Of Soul” sounding a very long way from the pioneering soul/country/urban fusion of “Who’s Making Love?” and the startling anti-balladry of 1973’s “I Believe In You (You Believe In Me)” but then by 1976 he needed a hit, and this one went all the way on Billboard whereas his previous works of distinction had not. It sounds like Warren Beatty’s Shampoo idea of disco; interminable and ponderous, I doubt whether anyone would dance to it now. Taylor does his best but is clearly slumming it – his “Shove it in, round about”s are one step short of humiliating – and his committed delivery and the gospel-derived antiphonal handclapping do not lift the record out of its mud. “Girl you oughta be on TV – on Soul Train,” he bellows at one point, and the word “discotheque” makes its always unwelcome appearance. Still, hear how the bored bassist decides to start improvising towards the end, the free wah-wah guitar squelches punctuating the middle eight, and Taylor at one point lamenting “Lord, I miss you so.” One can understand his dilemma.

The Tymes
Part of the original Philly sound, their big American moment was 1963’s “So Much In Love,” followed by nothing much except, in Britain, a bizarre deep soul reading of the show tune “People” in 1969, a comeback of sorts in 1974 with “You Little Trustmaker” (the “doobie-doobie-doobie” vocal bassline sounds like Kevin Ayers) and finally a UK number one with “Ms Grace.” A deliberate old-school doo-wop finger-snapper decorated by florid seventies orchestrations, the song is rare amongst hits of its period in that it actually swings, and the passing of the lead vocal line between all of the group’s frontline is refreshing.

Melba Moore
Like so many others, she got her break in the Broadway production of Hair, proceeding to several well-received albums in the early seventies. But then her career temporarily ran out of steam, and so Van McCoy was prevailed upon to bring her back. “This Is It” has an ebullience entirely lacking in the later work of the Stylistics, and what is most remarkable about the record is that Moore phrases the entire thing like a jazz song; her vocal mumbles between each line, the way she makes lines like “I’m lost for words” become a one-breath melange of abstract vowels. A blast of optimistic freshness to a British chart which badly needed it.

KC and The Sunshine Band
Miami, of course, and although George McCrae got the breakthrough hit with “Rock Your Baby,” it was the backing band who got the career. Like “Lady Marmalade,” “That’s The Way” works as an intersection of world music – here there are Latin features, African influences, Brill Building insolence, horns that seem to breathe in and out (like Gil Evans once did for Claude Thornhill) and disco, as an epicentre of Utopia, brings them all together into an unmistakeably American blend. In addition, Harry Wayne Casey’s vocal answers questions I have asked myself for many years; where does that voice come from? And, listening to this anew, it dawned on me; listen especially to his two “babe, oh babe”s about halfway through the song – it’s Neil Young! The Sunshine Band to cut Tonight’s The Night and “Like A Hurricane”? Would that really be the strangest thing that has ever happened (have you heard Americana yet?)?

The Three Degrees
They were, quite consciously, Gamble and Huff’s Supremes, and there are moments on their eponymous debut album – released in 1974, fully eleven years after the group had formed – which will make you shrivel up with tears (“If And When”) and others which will make your blood course with renewed fury (“Dirty Ol’ Man”). But this was their big hit, the only Philadelphia International single to make #1 in the UK (and in doing so held off “You Make Me Feel Brand New”). Fourteen years down the line, the record only makes sense as a sequel to “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” If in the earlier song the girl was perhaps fearing sex, or its aftermath, more than welcoming it, “When…?” is the resigned sigh of the same girl, now a grown woman, who has done it but is still wondering whether there is anything more to life, including love. Bobby Parker’s electric piano boils like a smouldering kettle underneath the arches of strings and brass and the Degrees’ coos. As was the custom with Philly records, emotion only leaks into the closing moments, when rhetorical questions turn to pleas and cajoles. If only their most famous fan, Prince Charles, had listened to the song more attentively.

Andrea True
Straight out of Nashville, a porn star who got her one musical break in Jamaica; finding that she could not take the money she had earned from working in Jamaica out of the country, she instead set to recording “More, More, More.” Producer/arranger Gregg Diamond had the song ready and waiting, and it is noticeable how True’s need amplifies and spreads with each set of verse and chorus. The trumpet solo set against percussion – including, again, that cowbell – perhaps anticipates Herb Alpert’s “Rise.” And then there is that eight-bar break in the middle, the sample heard around the world, which a generation later Toronto record store owner and DJ Marc Costanzo would use for a song he was making for his band Len, entitled “Steal My Sunshine” – a record which could stand as the bridge that connects one century and millennium to another. Also involved in the record was Toronto musician Brendan Canning, and he used the money he made from its international success to kick-start the Broken Social Scene collective into being – a group which, it seems to me, have addressed and answered all the questions which beset musicians in our time and forged a path towards the future, a group whose implications go far beyond Canada, and music, and perhaps even society. And so a one-off dance record – made when Canning was barely nine – helped make now possible. These connections are apt to happen.

First Choice
Also from Philadelphia, the corny Dragnet intro to “Armed” is almost enough to deflate the most enterprising listener, but the percussion track has been sampled many times, and despite a rather forlorn echo being placed on her voice, lead singer Annette Gaunt depicts a convincing picture of the dangerous streets of America, if not quite Womack’s “Across 110th Street.” On which subject…

The Delfonics
…it is perhaps the most moving sequence Tarantino has ever directed; despite the restrained humanity of the acting in Jackie Brown, it is still a highly silly film with a sillier story. Pam Grier’s Jackie is in the apartment of Robert Forster’s bondsman, Max Cherry. Neither is young, and they mutually admit that, but they are growing closer together. Forster asks if he can put a record on; Grier says yes. The song is “Didn’t I Blow Your Mind (This Time)” and Forster, who admits he is not much good at small talk, attempts to explain exactly what this song means to him. Grier doesn’t need to hear it, of course, but likes the fact that he tries, and also that he is clearly a vulnerable man in need of love. So they bond. And, going past the tally-ho French horn intro, it is also the work of Thom Bell. The song’s procession is stately and elegant, performed with great beauty and control – but that is not what the song is about. The bridge is menacing – “Get this thing through your head, there’ll be no more” – and it gradually becomes clear that the singer is leaving her, and that the title is a disappointed rhetorical question. Didn’t I do it? Why didn’t I? Towards the end, a cry of “I got to leave you baby!” makes the intention entirely clear, but Dave Marsh reckons the guitar on this record predicates grunge, and indeed this is in many ways an archetypal Nirvana song. There was always a disturbing undercurrent in Bell’s work with the Delfonics that is either not present, or very carefully suppressed, in the Stylistics.

Billy Paul
Consider the setting. Tinkling piano, alto sax, cocktail guitar. It could almost be 1942, not 1972. It could be a response to “When Will I See You Again?” if that singer shouldn’t really be with him. But they meet every day, at the same time in the same café, “holding hands, making all kinds of plans.” They know this is so disastrously wrong, but as Paul stutters, it’s much too strong “to…let, it, go, now.” He holds that last “now” after the song’s harmonies modulate so that a feeling of dissonant poignancy is revealed. Then he can’t hold in his emotions any longer. He pronounces the title as an anguished acappella. “It! Hurts! So! Much!” he exclaims. The orchestra seem to be pummelling against the singer, but not in the same way they did with Humperdinck on “The Way It Used To Be” – what if she did pass by one day, this Mrs Jones, hear the song and remember something she’s spent half a lifetime trying to forget? The singer keeps repeating her name and appellation, rolling it around his throat as if he cannot quite credit it, or the situation. They know it’s dangerous – the same place, the same time; surely they must be found out sooner or later? As the song wanders towards its end, he breaks out and improvises – and here is where things become really disturbing. “We’re gonna hold hands like we used to,” he sings – implying that he may have known Mrs Jones for rather longer a time than, say, Mr Jones. If he himself has a wife, he never mentions it. And, finally, and scariest of all: “We know…THEY know…it’s wrong…” Who are “they”? In one way the song is a follow-up to “Running Scared” except now both parties are afraid that Mr Jones “might show.” But think about the wider implications; this was America’s number one over Christmas of 1972, a time when the nation had just re-elected Nixon without really knowing what it was doing, or letting itself in for – cannot the metaphor be extended and amplified, the notion of having to spend half one’s life creeping around, under cover, being “extra-careful,” while all the time doing something one knows is fundamentally wrong – isn’t this song really about Watergate? Listen to the same singer’s “East,” recorded nearly at the same time, and watch those doubts fly like scattered recording wires fleeing a bullet.

Minnie Riperton
A number two hit in 1975 Britain, and therefore not my remit to review it; furthermore, any personal thoughts I do have about the record – and there are many – fall, I regret to say, into the None Of Your Flipping Business category. So the synthesised birdsong, the “Black Bull” production credit (Stevie Wonder, for Taurean and contractual reasons), the minimalist but empathetic musical setting, the unavoidable poignancy of the “while we grow old” section sung by somebody who never got the chance to grow old, the song’s origins as a lullaby for the infant Maya Rudolph, the Rotary Connection history – you’re going to have to wait for Lena’s thoughts on all of these, and I am sure more.

For God’s Sake, America – WAKE UP!
Written in 1975 by McFadden and Whitehead, and used as the Democratic anthem for Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign the following year, this is an optimistic warning of a song; Teddy Pendergrass sings the words with great restraint and emotional profundity, even the bitterly sardonic references to “Let It Be,” although this edit loses out on the crucial verse about the doctors and the elderly. Note how both strings and bass are stung into action by the words “war and poverty” and how, again, Pendergrass emotionally takes off into Levi Stubbs country once the song proper is done. “WAKE UP!” he barks frantically towards fadeout. You mean we are dreaming this record?

Eddie Drennon
I don’t think I’ve heard it since it was in the charts, over thirty-six years ago, but Drennon, from Newark, is a far more substantial character than the record in itself suggests; a violinist, composer and arranger – as a musician, Stuff Smith was among his early tutors – Drennon is also an important figure in Latin, salsa and charanga music; at the time of “Latin Hustle,” he was part of the group Orquestra (Tipica) Novel. And yet something about the record is strangely familiar, namely the main two-flute riff. Strings and brass thicken the sound in individual layers; a wordless chorus materialises and eventually sings the title over a flurry of flamenco handclaps. Air? An Associates instrumental (it could so easily be)? And then the “A”s travelled to the Avalanches, who I remember sampled the track for Since I Left You. Everything leads to its own poignancy.

The Fatback Band
From New York, and harder than most of the rest of the music under consideration here – both saxophonist George Adams and keyboardist Don Pullen were members at one time or another – “Bus Stop” crept into the overall terrible UK charts at the end of 1975, and even in this truncated form it is startling. Nothing about the record seems to fit with anything else on it, and that’s a big part of its magic; the bass and organ suggest a midway leyline between Booker T and Derek Forbes. There is what Lena calls “the wonderful bossiness of dance records” (thanks as always to Lena for many of the ideas and terminologies used in this piece) – a sergeant major type appears: “Don’t stop! Keep the groove!” His barks of “Don’t stop!” steadily become more demented (“I’ll tell you when!”). There is a fake fadeout. There is a decided resemblance to “Family Affair” – it is as if the sun of Sly Stone, in imploding, has afforded all those satellites to drift into orbit. It is a salutary reminder that such radical music was still capable of getting into our Top 20 at a time when radicalism seemed to be the last thing on the menu.

All Join Hands
For it is about Philadelphia, and the cowbell – why not call this album Cowbell Motion? – and the O’Jays, getting their time, and their US number one, at last with this affable update of “Peace Train.” But of course this is a peace and a happy ending hard won – this joy is also capable of radiating to things like “992 Arguments” and “For The Love Of Money” – and we can close by noting that this is the last song on the soundtrack of Stillman’s The Last Days Of Disco; it is the song danced to by the couple in the subway train, and as everyone else joins in, the meaning of that term “people all over the world” is instantly and intimately understood. If only we had the nerve to see that vision through in the Oxford Tube coach, somewhere in the vicinity of 620 Western Avenue.