Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Smells like ... new year
Dear reader(s): I am out of the country and the blogosphere for the rest of 2006. Back around Twelfth Night, 2007. Enjoy your sugar plums.// posted by KC45s @ 3:50 PM 
Monday, December 18, 2006
45s: Alternate dimension
”One Less Bell to Answer”
by The Fifth Dimension
Written by Hal David and Burt Bacharach
Blogger has eaten two versions of this post. But you know what? I’m so determined to write about the 5D that I’m defying all signs to desist and trying again. I feel that, as Time magazine’s person of the year, I have to dig deep.
When I was a kid I loved the Fifth Dimension.
Their music was all around. Everyone I knew, or a direct relative of everyone I knew, owned a 5D album. “Up Up and Away” was a staple in elementary school music class and whenever one of the neighborhood groovydudes brought out his guitar to mellow out the block party.
I also dug “Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In." From the faux-mystic tinkle on the intro to the unending singalong on the fade, the song gets the hands clapping and insists the listener take off his/her clothes to dance about in the glorious sunshine. I react that way every time I luck across it, even if I’m driving.
The Fifth Dimension may be the only African-American group to steal the white man’s music, rather than suffering the reverse. They hit on a winning formula. Harmonies. High energy. Borrowing from Motown’s business plan to smooth out all the rough soul edges and appeal—relentlessly appeal—to white people. As I was a white kid, I fell for it. Do you blame me?
I like to think the 5D went this route not just to prosper—though I have nothing against that—but also because of an impulse to create harmony between the races. Was this true? I have no idea. What I do know is that the group had big success championing young white songwriters.†
They feared not the complex melodies of Jimmy Webb, author of “Up Up and Away.”
Nor did they shy away from the nigh-unclassifiable Laura Nyro, a stage presence disaster who only David Geffen believed in. They had a big hit with Nyro's "Wedding Bell Blues" and sold a million copies of her “Stoned Soul Picnic.” To give you an idea of the Fifth Dimension’s career arc, they received an award for the latter going gold while playing… Caesar’s Palace. Handing it out? Frank Sinatra.
Playing casinos at the height of your career? A certain kind of entertainer made that decision in the late 1960s. The kind that recorded a super-slick surefire like “Last Night (I Didn’t Get to Sleep At All),” one of the hits from the period when Marilyn McCoo began to step out from the rest of the group, and an uncommonly hokey use of the 5D’s harmonies, until that time notable for clever interplay with whatever singer took the lead.
Put all of the aspects mentioned above together. Mix it up. Turn the crank. What kind of marbled Play-Doh comes out?
Exactly. Hal David and Burt Bacharach, songsmiths extraordinaire, the kings of supper-club pop forever and ever amen, the whitest of white sounds, whiter than white noise, whiter than “Whiter Shade of Pale.”
David and Bacharach provided one of the group’s late hits, the ballad “One Less Bell to Answer.” A traditional love song, to say the least. A three-minute mini-tragedy, to say the truth. It’s not a song that reflects their sound. The harmonies play less of a role that in the usual Fifth Dimension hit, in fact you can hear a solo artist like Dionne Warwick* doing "One Less Bell," and it lacks the group's popular singalong element.
That it’s atypical doesn’t detract from its power. The emotional highlight is the bridge—McCoo’s platform to sell heartbreak:
Though I try to forget, it just can't be done
Each time the doorbell rings I still run
I don't know how in the world to stop thinking of him
’Cause I still love him so
I end each day the way I start out
Cryin’ my heart out
There is no hearing those last two lines without a chill. As for Bacharach, is that E-major to C-major to E-minor to… A? Probably not—I’m rusty. Let’s just say it's all right to raise your eyebrows at the series of chord changes in there.
McCoo does them credit. She hits “Cryin’ my heart out” dead on. Emotional, but free of tricks. I would never say McCoo was a great singer. But a total pro? Listenable with no problem? Definitely and definitely. Let me sing this half as well—
I end each day the way I start out
Cryin’ my heart out
—and I’d be a happy man.
† Allow me to contradict my point. The Fifth Dimension also worked with the African-American songwriting team of Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson. Though known best for their 1980s hit “Solid,” Ashford and Simpson contributed a lot of songs to Motown in the 1960s, including the transcendent Marvin Gaye-Tammi Terrell duets “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough" and “You’re All I Need to Get By.”
* Cosmic connection alert: McCoo later replaced Warwick as co-host of Solid Gold.
by The Fifth Dimension
Written by Hal David and Burt Bacharach
Blogger has eaten two versions of this post. But you know what? I’m so determined to write about the 5D that I’m defying all signs to desist and trying again. I feel that, as Time magazine’s person of the year, I have to dig deep.
When I was a kid I loved the Fifth Dimension.
Their music was all around. Everyone I knew, or a direct relative of everyone I knew, owned a 5D album. “Up Up and Away” was a staple in elementary school music class and whenever one of the neighborhood groovydudes brought out his guitar to mellow out the block party.
I also dug “Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In." From the faux-mystic tinkle on the intro to the unending singalong on the fade, the song gets the hands clapping and insists the listener take off his/her clothes to dance about in the glorious sunshine. I react that way every time I luck across it, even if I’m driving.
The Fifth Dimension may be the only African-American group to steal the white man’s music, rather than suffering the reverse. They hit on a winning formula. Harmonies. High energy. Borrowing from Motown’s business plan to smooth out all the rough soul edges and appeal—relentlessly appeal—to white people. As I was a white kid, I fell for it. Do you blame me?
I like to think the 5D went this route not just to prosper—though I have nothing against that—but also because of an impulse to create harmony between the races. Was this true? I have no idea. What I do know is that the group had big success championing young white songwriters.†
They feared not the complex melodies of Jimmy Webb, author of “Up Up and Away.”
Nor did they shy away from the nigh-unclassifiable Laura Nyro, a stage presence disaster who only David Geffen believed in. They had a big hit with Nyro's "Wedding Bell Blues" and sold a million copies of her “Stoned Soul Picnic.” To give you an idea of the Fifth Dimension’s career arc, they received an award for the latter going gold while playing… Caesar’s Palace. Handing it out? Frank Sinatra.
Playing casinos at the height of your career? A certain kind of entertainer made that decision in the late 1960s. The kind that recorded a super-slick surefire like “Last Night (I Didn’t Get to Sleep At All),” one of the hits from the period when Marilyn McCoo began to step out from the rest of the group, and an uncommonly hokey use of the 5D’s harmonies, until that time notable for clever interplay with whatever singer took the lead.
Put all of the aspects mentioned above together. Mix it up. Turn the crank. What kind of marbled Play-Doh comes out?
Exactly. Hal David and Burt Bacharach, songsmiths extraordinaire, the kings of supper-club pop forever and ever amen, the whitest of white sounds, whiter than white noise, whiter than “Whiter Shade of Pale.”
David and Bacharach provided one of the group’s late hits, the ballad “One Less Bell to Answer.” A traditional love song, to say the least. A three-minute mini-tragedy, to say the truth. It’s not a song that reflects their sound. The harmonies play less of a role that in the usual Fifth Dimension hit, in fact you can hear a solo artist like Dionne Warwick* doing "One Less Bell," and it lacks the group's popular singalong element.
That it’s atypical doesn’t detract from its power. The emotional highlight is the bridge—McCoo’s platform to sell heartbreak:
Though I try to forget, it just can't be done
Each time the doorbell rings I still run
I don't know how in the world to stop thinking of him
’Cause I still love him so
I end each day the way I start out
Cryin’ my heart out
There is no hearing those last two lines without a chill. As for Bacharach, is that E-major to C-major to E-minor to… A? Probably not—I’m rusty. Let’s just say it's all right to raise your eyebrows at the series of chord changes in there.
McCoo does them credit. She hits “Cryin’ my heart out” dead on. Emotional, but free of tricks. I would never say McCoo was a great singer. But a total pro? Listenable with no problem? Definitely and definitely. Let me sing this half as well—
I end each day the way I start out
Cryin’ my heart out
—and I’d be a happy man.
† Allow me to contradict my point. The Fifth Dimension also worked with the African-American songwriting team of Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson. Though known best for their 1980s hit “Solid,” Ashford and Simpson contributed a lot of songs to Motown in the 1960s, including the transcendent Marvin Gaye-Tammi Terrell duets “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough" and “You’re All I Need to Get By.”
* Cosmic connection alert: McCoo later replaced Warwick as co-host of Solid Gold.
// posted by KC45s @ 4:00 AM
Thursday, December 14, 2006
The One Mortal Sin
Yesterday's Salon offers us a short interview with rock legend David Crosby. He takes down today's pop stars, he justifies that $200 per head ticket price, he's making the best music he's ever made. Boy, I believe that!God, what a load. Is there any rock figure less deserving of having sustained attention into 2006?
David Crosby has contributed about as much to rock history as Jimmy Buffett. That is, not much. He got into the pantheon by being a good harmony singer and lucking into two bands that asked little else of him. That he's in the pantheon at all says a lot about who the Baby Boomers chose as icons, and almost as much about how one can sustain celebrity almost indefinitely as long as you remind a significant portion of the American population about its youth.
There are a lot of contemptable things about Crosby. For instance, his obvious belief in his own significance. I recall seeing a TV "history of rock" series where Dave, camped out on his yacht, got in a nudge against the Byrds for booting his ass. Yeah, bad move. All it did was free them up to make interesting music not written by Bob Dylan!
Here's the worse thing about the guy: David Crosby had the fucking world fall at his feet. Against all odds, the second-rate shards of three bands coalesced into a singer-songwriter collective at just the right moment, recorded 1 1/2 albums of listenable harmonizing that rewarded a listener stoned on good Hawaiian with one of the top mellows available in 1970, and then...
It was all in place to launch that really meaty career he still believes he had.
And he pissed the whole thing away.
By consuming grotesque amounts of every substance in his orbit. And I mean orbit. By 1985, he was so enormous he generated his own gravitational field.
I understand addiction. Dig, I have some sympathy for it, and I don't romanticize it, except in the case of Keith Richards, and then only to awe at his survival, and to laugh at the unending drug-induced dumb-assery he indulged for twenty years.
But when the gods give you not one but two situations... when you have the opportunity to contribute, an opportunity millions of musicians more gifted than you would kill for, let alone the poets and dancers and sculptors... when it's there for you to be the goddamn Beatles of the 1970s (as unjust as that was, as lame as it would've been)... it is unfuckingforgivable that you cannot get your shit into the merely semi-together condition that is necessary to make rock music.
He doesn't deserve to be a tabloid figure, the Walrusman lookalike with organs not his own and the source of Melissa Etheridge's man-spawn. He certainly doesn't deserve status as an elder statesman of anything. No, in a just world, David Crosby goes away. Period.
// posted by KC45s @ 7:00 AM
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Lukewarm 100
Time magazine has released its list of the Top 100 Albums of All Time. Did you feel civilization become complete?
What do you say to a list like this? Time is to popular music what the Vatican was to the heliocentric universe. The least-hip publication this side of Reader’s Digest, an institution that only recently gave up on the idea of rock n’ roll as a communist plot, Time asks you to believe that anyone on its staff outside of the mail room has listened to NWA enough times to form an opinion on its place in the canon of popular music.
Let me use a phrase Time just caught up with: As if.
I’m not going to complain about what got left off. A Top 100, by definition, leaves off dozens, probably hundreds, of worthy albums. Rock alone is a vast enough universe to command a hundred choices. Add in hip-hop, soul, country, straight pop, jazz, and reggae—as the Time list does—and even five hundred selections would fall short.
Here’s my beef. If you’re going to put out a best list, why just copy the canon?
The answer is easy, of course. It’s Time magazine, the hymnal of Conventional Wisdom. No doubt the editors hoped to stir up controversy with it’s hip, daring foray into pop culture, maybe enough to get a mention on cable television and connect with that elusive “reader under sixty” that the magazine hasn’t reached lately.
Unfortunately, they didn't really know what to do. When in doubt, do "research." That is, find out what everyone else says.
I have a book with a critics and artists poll from 1975. Just the top twenty-five albums, straight up. Little on the list is surprising, except possibly Born To Run (at the time a new disc, so a more daring choice than it seems now), and Love’s Forever Changes, a selection displaced in subsequent decades as melodic hippydippyism faded from respectability.
Let me say, I accept that some discs are immortal—that there is a canon, as antithetical an idea as that is to music genres conceived in anarchy against the canons of their day. Revolver will always belong in the Top 100. Ditto Never Mind the Bullocks, for historical reasons, if nothing else. And so on.
But I have to call bullshit on some of the selections. Not because I disagree on artistic grounds. Let me stress that point. More than a few heinous selections made the list, but that’s the bid for controversy, the stuff that’s supposed to get people talking. I understand. And I’m not taking the bait.
What I want to know is this: did the committee members really listen to Astral Weeks, the Van Morrison album everyone buys for prestige, rather to listen to? How many voters dug out the soundtrack to The Harder They Come? Did they judge it against the three decades of music that have happened since? Or did they see it on a bunch of other polls and figure, if Rolling Stone listed it, it must be good? (Talk about a horribly misguided presumption.)
I’ve heard the soundtrack to The Harder They Come. Ten years ago, the last time it crossed my bow, I thought it was pretty good. But is it a beneficiary of the Ulysses effect—the great book on every list of great books that no one actually reads?
Dig, I want diversity. I just don’t know how many people are music fans to the extent they can weigh Sinatra against NWA against PJ Harvey against Willie Nelson against Radiohead. That’s an enormous sonic universe because not only do you have to measure each album against the rest of popular music, you have to measure it against the artist’s other albums to determine if it’s the best of them.
Not so hard with slow workers like Radiohead. Can be done with Springsteen. But Sinatra?
Finally, you cannot compare studio albums with boxed sets. This sin even exceeds that of trying to fit in every genre.
No album, no matter how transcendent, can approach a box like Star Time—four sweat-drenched discs of James Brown’s career output. James Brown! There are musicians as significant as James Brown in this country, but none are more significant. None.
Including Star Time, or the Hank Williams box also on the list, skews the other selections right into absurdity. One little R.E.M. disc, no matter how great, can compare.
Ridiculous. Minor, compared to the magazine’s seventy years’ worth of crimes and absurdities, but ridiculous nonetheless.
Because I am the elf who can love, though, let me close with praise. The list recognizes Little Richard and Chuck Berry, and if that only underlines the absence of Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers, well, again, there are always omissions. The fuck-you inclusion of Hotel California is hilarious, as is the self-conscious decision to blackball Pink Floyd. Anointing two consecutive Aretha Franklin albums shows boldness. Listing Dr. Dre and NWA, among others, admits that even Conventional Wisdom believes hip-hop is here to stay.
It’s a stupid list. But it’s not an unusually stupid list. Considering the source, that’s something.
What do you say to a list like this? Time is to popular music what the Vatican was to the heliocentric universe. The least-hip publication this side of Reader’s Digest, an institution that only recently gave up on the idea of rock n’ roll as a communist plot, Time asks you to believe that anyone on its staff outside of the mail room has listened to NWA enough times to form an opinion on its place in the canon of popular music.
Let me use a phrase Time just caught up with: As if.
I’m not going to complain about what got left off. A Top 100, by definition, leaves off dozens, probably hundreds, of worthy albums. Rock alone is a vast enough universe to command a hundred choices. Add in hip-hop, soul, country, straight pop, jazz, and reggae—as the Time list does—and even five hundred selections would fall short.
Here’s my beef. If you’re going to put out a best list, why just copy the canon?
The answer is easy, of course. It’s Time magazine, the hymnal of Conventional Wisdom. No doubt the editors hoped to stir up controversy with it’s hip, daring foray into pop culture, maybe enough to get a mention on cable television and connect with that elusive “reader under sixty” that the magazine hasn’t reached lately.
Unfortunately, they didn't really know what to do. When in doubt, do "research." That is, find out what everyone else says.
I have a book with a critics and artists poll from 1975. Just the top twenty-five albums, straight up. Little on the list is surprising, except possibly Born To Run (at the time a new disc, so a more daring choice than it seems now), and Love’s Forever Changes, a selection displaced in subsequent decades as melodic hippydippyism faded from respectability.
Let me say, I accept that some discs are immortal—that there is a canon, as antithetical an idea as that is to music genres conceived in anarchy against the canons of their day. Revolver will always belong in the Top 100. Ditto Never Mind the Bullocks, for historical reasons, if nothing else. And so on.
But I have to call bullshit on some of the selections. Not because I disagree on artistic grounds. Let me stress that point. More than a few heinous selections made the list, but that’s the bid for controversy, the stuff that’s supposed to get people talking. I understand. And I’m not taking the bait.
What I want to know is this: did the committee members really listen to Astral Weeks, the Van Morrison album everyone buys for prestige, rather to listen to? How many voters dug out the soundtrack to The Harder They Come? Did they judge it against the three decades of music that have happened since? Or did they see it on a bunch of other polls and figure, if Rolling Stone listed it, it must be good? (Talk about a horribly misguided presumption.)
I’ve heard the soundtrack to The Harder They Come. Ten years ago, the last time it crossed my bow, I thought it was pretty good. But is it a beneficiary of the Ulysses effect—the great book on every list of great books that no one actually reads?
Dig, I want diversity. I just don’t know how many people are music fans to the extent they can weigh Sinatra against NWA against PJ Harvey against Willie Nelson against Radiohead. That’s an enormous sonic universe because not only do you have to measure each album against the rest of popular music, you have to measure it against the artist’s other albums to determine if it’s the best of them.
Not so hard with slow workers like Radiohead. Can be done with Springsteen. But Sinatra?
Finally, you cannot compare studio albums with boxed sets. This sin even exceeds that of trying to fit in every genre.
No album, no matter how transcendent, can approach a box like Star Time—four sweat-drenched discs of James Brown’s career output. James Brown! There are musicians as significant as James Brown in this country, but none are more significant. None.
Including Star Time, or the Hank Williams box also on the list, skews the other selections right into absurdity. One little R.E.M. disc, no matter how great, can compare.
Ridiculous. Minor, compared to the magazine’s seventy years’ worth of crimes and absurdities, but ridiculous nonetheless.
Because I am the elf who can love, though, let me close with praise. The list recognizes Little Richard and Chuck Berry, and if that only underlines the absence of Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers, well, again, there are always omissions. The fuck-you inclusion of Hotel California is hilarious, as is the self-conscious decision to blackball Pink Floyd. Anointing two consecutive Aretha Franklin albums shows boldness. Listing Dr. Dre and NWA, among others, admits that even Conventional Wisdom believes hip-hop is here to stay.
It’s a stupid list. But it’s not an unusually stupid list. Considering the source, that’s something.
// posted by KC45s @ 7:00 AM
