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Column: Origin of Song
Origin of Song: I Can’t Stand the Rain
With drought conditions officially declared severe in California, even after January’s downpour, you won’t ever hear this Californian say she literally can’t stand the rain. Growing up in the Golden State, we learn all about the century’s old water wars, and though I don’t fully understand the conflict (beyond that the South is dry and the water comes from the North), I know it’s partly why upstate has zero tolerance for weather complaints from the folks down below. And yet, “I Can’t Stand the Rain”, the 1973 hit single by Ann Peebles, is the song that haunted me during January’s deluge. Meteorological report aside, it wasn’t so much all the wet that got me going on my “I Can’t Stand the Rain” trip as it was the plink-plink-plunk-plunk of the rain against my window, bringing thoughts of days gone by—days when it used to rain more often.
Hey window pane,
Do you remember
How sweet it used to be?
I’ve always loved records—the single kind—but my Hi Records 45 of Peebles Top 40/Top 10 R&B hit is one that I especially cherish and it shows: Its condition is still what collectors would classify as vg (very good), which is amazing since it was one I dropped the needle to over and over again. And in the moments I wasn’t actually playing the record, I was waiting for it to come on the radio—The Big 6-10, KFRC. Of course, at the time, there was no way I could relate to the song’s scenario between a man who’s gone and a woman alone, left only with sense memories of the end of an affair, touched off by pouring rain against the window.
Went to See the Gypsy
Way back last decade, at the end of 2008 to be exact, I predicted a column on the gypsy as portrayed in rock ‘n’ soul. Well, let’s just say it took me a while to distinguish voodoo from hoodoo, and a true-blooded gypsy from a down-home fortune teller or conjurer. This literally colorful archetype has faded from popularity in song since her blues roots and ’60s and ’70s rock peak as a theme, a time when her style became rock iconic thanks to Cher, Linda Ronstadt, and Stevie Nicks, to name a few. But I predict she’ll make a comeback, in that kind of everything old is new again way. Not that I believe in future predictions or anything, but simply for entertainment purposes, I’ve prepared this first column of the first month of the first year of the new decade as a token of health, happiness, and prosperity, in tribute to gypsies young and old (without actually consulting one).
Let it be a given by now that when we talk of the origins of rock we’re talking largely about the blues, an idiom in which the gypsy is a well-known character, her ways and means a favored subject. But we’d never leave the settlement if we dwell here too long, so like the gypsies, we’re just going to pass through: “Gypsy Glass Blues” by Ida Cox, in which the blueswoman learns that someone’s put a hoodoo (or a curse) on her, according to what she sees in the crystal ball, dates back to 1927. Furry Lewis was talking gypsies in “Black Gypsy Blues” in the ’20s as well, though it wasn’t the kindest portrayal: “My woman must be a black gypsy / She knows every place I go.” Robert Johnson’s songs are famously filled with references to the magic of the conjurers and to local hoodoo practice. In the ’30s, Memphis Minnie admonished, “Don’t put that thing on me,” in her “Hoodoo Lady.” Then along came Muddy Waters: “You know the gypsy woman told me that you your mother’s bad luck child.” “Gypsy Woman” from 1947 began a long catalog of songs by him that often told of the tools of the conjurer and hoodoo practitioner—the mojo hands and John the Conqueroo of African-American/Creole folk magic. “Hoochie Coochie Man” from 1954 refers to the gypsy woman’s prediction of a lucky seventh son and his later signature number, “I’ve Got My Mojo Working”, declares, “I got a gypsy woman giving me advice.”
And So This Is Stewball
And so it was that a centuries-old folk song about a race horse launched a rock ‘n’ roll Christmas standard 38 years ago this week. Oh, I know this will not be news to the most scholarly of you folk and rock types, however, for this folk and rock type, I hadn’t made the link ’ til it was pointed out to me last week that the melody to “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” was borrowed from “Stewball”, so I thought I’d investigate.
Do I hear groaning? That’s what I did, too. Not another chorus of “Stewball”, I thought; the people will revolt. Or perhaps you’re groaning because you’re wondering why someone who didn’t have the “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” is “Stewball” rap down pat has a job writing a column called The Origin of Song. Well, you and me both, bub, but as the singers say, I don’t find the songs, they find me—which is cool this time around, as I get to learn for the first time about the lives of horses and the people who own them. These aren’t subjects with which I was previously acquainted, and if you think I’m just trying to fill space before getting to the story of “Stewball,” well, you’d be right about that: I needed to get myself psyched for this whole equine thing.
“Stewball” was a race horse, which, of course, is the part of the song you, like I, can quote, as it’s the opening line. Now I don’t know about you, but I can only call out two other race horse names: Seabiscuit and Secretariat. Both have songs written in their names, though Stewball has a leg up on them as the first song about him was written in the late 1700s. At that time, Stewball went by the name Skewball, though you might also see versions that tell of Sku-ball and Squball. The name was likely because his coat was of the skewbald variety, or what we call “pinto,” a horse with patches of color, usually on a chestnut or reddish base (funny that at some point he wasn’t dubbed Screwball). I sure hope you found this clarification on the coloration of horses as helpful as I did; now, for a micro-interpretation of the song…
“Don’t Bring Me Down”
You’ve heard the song and may’ve even used the expression the title was based upon, but despite the many recordings of different songs with the same title, there are just three that are fit to undergo examination of the origin of “Don’t Bring Me Down”, a stand-up song that has endured confusion, the passage of time, and a multitude of complaints and criticisms no matter who sings them. Consider them exhibits A, B, and C.
The basic definition of the bring down might seem obvious and unnecessary to outline, but since over-explaining is a bit of a specialty of mine, I’m going to do it anyway. If it’s too much of a bring down for you, you can skip this part. But the general idea is that a negative person or event come to destroy an otherwise perfectly good situation—an instant depressor and a real bad vibe—is a bring down. Born from ’50s jazz and hipster lingo (look, I’m no William Safire, but it’s my best guess), whether it’s a party, an idea, a person’s lifetime hopes and dreams, or even their delusions—to be told, ‘That’s not gonna fly, Jim,” is a definite bring down. Ruining someone’s high or coming down from one? A bring down. Get off my cloud, and don’t be a downer, a bummer, or a drag—these are all other ways of saying, “Don’t Bring Me Down.” As jazz lingo had a way of finding its way into R&B and rock ‘n’ roll, and into the vocabs of the people who listen to the stuff, the bring down found its way into hundreds of songs, some more memorable than others. Dig?
What’s a Surrealistic Pillow?
On Halloween of 1966, San Francisco’s Jefferson Airplane entered a Los Angeles studio with a new lead singer to begin recording their second album. The collection of songs—a curious blend of acid-dipped folk, harmony, and hard rock that came to define the San Francisco Sound—was completed in enough time for the band to make it home for Thanksgiving dinner. Upon hearing the tracks, their friend and mentor Jerry Garcia suggested that it “sounds like a surrealistic pillow,” and a classic psychedelic album was titled.
So what is a surrealistic pillow anyway? What does it sound like? And why, if you’re not familiar with it, should you care? I’m banking on the idea that any album whose 11 cuts keep comin’ back to me, 43 years after it was made, is worth having a look into and passing on, so for just this month, it’s the Origin of an Album rather than the customary song.
Following its release in February, four months before Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and a month before the Grateful Dead’s debut, throughout the Spring and Summer of Love, Surrealistic Pillow contributed toward turning the Airplane into Life magazine-styled pop stars. The Marty Balin-founded group and the steel voice of Grace Slick clicked with a growing international audience of West Coast hippie watchers and rock lovers ready to take a walk on the Technicolor side. As a child, I adopted them as my new family; like bigger siblings and fellow travelers (though at least two of them were older than my own dad and mom), I could’ve been their littlest flower child mascot. As the years passed, I grew increasingly fascinated by the story of the five young men and the young woman who put my hometown on the musical map, though despite attempting to divine through listening, reading everything I could get my hands on, speaking informally to its former members and crossing paths with their friends and at least two of their children, I’m only slightly closer to solving the mysteries of Surrealistic Pillow or “the Pink Album,” and its allure for me. Had the record been tinted blue, as Balin had intended it, as an old-world girl, I may not have even gravitated to it in the record racks at all. Decades later, its songs are still alive and green for me, though rarely do I listen to the album in parts; rather, it is as a comfortable whole that I find the greatest satisfaction in the Pillow. Perhaps it is fate that has bound me to the songs. Among the things my love and I share, beyond a mutual attraction, is a mutual affection for the Airplane: They were his first concert and Surrealistic Pillow was my first album. We also share his paperback copy of The Jefferson Airplane and the San Francisco Sound by one of rock journalism’s fathers, Ralph J. Gleason, from which I’ve gleaned many fine details on the band contained herein.
Hey Lead Belly, Bam Ba Lam
“I’m obsessed with him. He’s my favorite performer,” said Kurt Cobain. “No Lead Belly, no Beatles,” claimed George Harrison, and the same may as well be said for Led Zeppelin, as Jimmy Page was rocking “Cotton Fields” back in 1957. According to Van Morrison, “If it wasn’t for Lead Belly, I may never have been here.” And yet, Lead Belly—born Huddie Ledbetter near Mooringsport, Louisiana in 1888—is rarely the first traditional American musician historians credit with the creation of rock ‘n’ roll or the bands of the British Invasion. His contribution to rock is as fundamental and profound as those of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, so why is it we don’t hear that much anymore about his legend? Perhaps it can be blamed on the boll weevil he sung about—and it indeed may have something to do with cotton—though the diminishment of Lead Belly’s influence on rock is likely just another case of the forgotten origins of song.
The Louisianan’s sound first came to impact the young lads who would go on to form the classic rock bands of the ’60s via the British Isle’s mid-’50s skiffle craze. Rooted in the jug band style of the 1920s, skiffle’s homemade and improvised style relied on the wacky sounds of household items like washboard, comb, and homemade instruments—the stuff that makes for its irresistible, ecstatic sound. Glaswegian Lonnie Donegan’s frantic version of “Rock Island Line”, first popularized by Lead Belly, swept across the land like skiffle-mania, boosting guitar sales and launching a thousand bands, like young Jim Page’s combo as well as the Quarrymen (who we all know by now birthed the Beatles). For Morrison—who’d already developed a taste for the blues voices of the American South—skiffle provided confirmation of the potential for what an Irishman could do with a black American folk sound. The Lead Belly repertoire meeting English skiffle marked the beginning of his long association with rock ‘n’ roll; though stateside he was more of a singular phenomenon, as well as a folker.
Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale”
Matthew Fisher had his final day in an English court last month, following a battle for songwriting credit that waged for four—if not 42—years: From here on, he will receive a share of all future royalties from “A Whiter Shade of Pale”, the 1967 Procol Harum hit for which he composed the famous organ theme. Perhaps he skipped the light fandango, turned cartwheels ’cross the floor when the whole ordeal was through.
But here’s where I leave the words of the song and lyricist Keith Reid’s allusions to Milton, Shakespeare, and Chaucer for the experts and go in pursuit of the origin of its music, previously credited solely to Procol Harum’s singer and pianist Gary Brooker. Without access to expert witness testimony in the Fisher case, we don’t know how it was exactly decided that he came to be awarded a 40 percent split of the song’s royalties. What we do know for the record is that “A Whiter Shade of Pale” was recorded at Olympic Sound Studios with producer Denny Cordell and engineer Keith Grant and released May 1967. In an interview with the BBC in the ’90s, Fisher explained he based his melody on Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Air on a G String” and “Sleepers Awake”, “… plus, there’s an awful lot of it that isn’t really based on anything, it’s just me. It’s a bit of a hodge-podge.” Specifically, the song’s long note at the beginning, companioned with a descending bass, is borrowed from “Air”, while the baroque figure (the “deedle dee”) that follows took its inspiration from “Sleepers Awake”, though Fisher added his own variation to accommodate the bass part.
Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough of Michael Jackson
Even though I work at home and can wear my pajamas if I like—not that I do (very often)—under no circumstances do I watch daytime television. It’s just not a distraction that I can fiscally or mentally get away with; believe it or not, I need all of my faculties to write this stuff. However, I chose to lift the self-imposed ban on daytime viewing for three hours of Michael Jackson funeral coverage, a curious decision given I haven’t much been interested in his music since Thriller came out in 1982. So why did I tune in? In memory of the music of the old Michael Jackson, I guess.
“If you’ve come looking for a vinyl copy of Thriller, they’re all gone,” said my friendly neighborhood record seller as we walked into his shop a couple of days after Jackson died. I was able to assure him that I still had my original vinyl promo copy of it, as well as Off the Wall. Surly record store banter is something I’ve felt comfortable with ever since I was a teenaged Tower Records clerk; attitude was a job qualification there. It’s also why I love the book and kinda like the movie High Fidelity: The psychotic clerk Barry, played by Jack Black in the film, in my experience is true to type.
“People actually called us to talk about it when it happened,” said the real, live record man, incredulous that customers might want to talk about anything other than Tuesday’s new releases or whether the latest copy of MOJO had arrived. But I feel those people. They were naturally seeking community—within their community of record geeks. It was a particular, confusing mix of grief and other uncomfortable emotions that we felt, we who hadn’t actually purchased a Jackson record in more than 25 years, but who were among the members of the Michael Generation. He was like a big brother—a hella freaky big brother, but a brother nonetheless. Though perhaps I should speak for myself: Jackson ceased to tingle me since the thrill of Thriller was wearing off, sometime during its close to two-year stay on the charts, somewhere after it hit the 50 million sold mark, but before it hit the 100 million plus it ultimately sold. Maybe for you it was before, or maybe it was after. I’ll cop to liking “Man in the Mirror” and “Black or White” too, but the actual line of demarcation for me came in the mid-’80s, somewhere around the time of the Pepsi commercial burn incident and before “We Are the World.”
That Summer Feeling
They say that where there is light there is dark, and so, it is with the brightness of summer that there’s a kind of spookiness to it that looms at the dusky part of the day. It’s in these weeks approaching this time of year, when the days get just a bit longer before they start their slow and steady return to shorter, that I suggest a listen to the sound of the high summer blues.
Now, when I say summertime blues, I don’t mean the 1958 song by Eddie Cochran; I’m also ruling out square ditties like “Those Lazy-Hazy-Crazy Days of Summer” and “Summertime, Summertime.” Nor am I thinking of the cockamamie songs sparked by the Summer of Love in San Francisco, like how “out there it’s summertime, milk, and honey days” (from “San Francisco Girls (Return of the Native)” by Fever Tree) or the “warm San Franciscan nights” described by Eric Burdon and the Animals, which is, of course, an oxymoron. I’m talking about “Summertime”, and the livin’ is easy “Summertime”, the touchstone of dark night summertime songs, its emphasis on the minor-key. The song’s inspired cover after cover of rock ‘n’ soul versions, some of which achieve the desired high-level mastery of unity between words and music of the original work—but we’ll get to those in a minute.
Origin of Song: Money (That’s What I Want)
by: Denise Sullivan
Born February 5, 1941 in Hard Times, Mississippi, you know him as the songwriting partner of Norman Whitfield and all those right-on Motown hits: “War” (“Good God! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing”); “Smiling Faces Sometimes” (“They don’t tell the truth”); “Psychedelic Shack” (“That’s where it’s at”), “Cloud Nine,” (“I’m doing fine up here”); “Ball of Confusion (That’s What the World Is today)” and “Heard it Through the Grapevine.” The guys were geniuses, Songwriting Hall of Famers and all rest, but, before all the writing, Strong was a singer. The Beatles knew him as the dude who sang “Money (That’s What I Want).” He was the one to score the first hit record for a then-brand new little label called Tamla, and chances are you’ve heard the rest. If not, check this:
Tired of earning pennies on the dollar for writing songs for Detroit’s R&B pride, Jackie Wilson, songwriter Berry Gordy switched over to music’s business side. In competition with his sister Anna and the record label that was her namesake, he formed his own label, Tamla, his roster consisting almost entirely of kids from around the way, with a few notes from his own songbook. Distributed by Anna, by June of 1960, “Money (That’s What I Want”—written by Gordy and Janie Bradford and performed by Barrett Strong—was his company’s first national hit, reaching number two on the R&B charts and crossing over to the Top 40. It turned out to be as prophetic as it was strong: “Well now give me money (that’s what I want)… I wanna be free.” Not long after that, Gordy’s friend and label VP, Smokey Robinson, sold a million copies of “Shop Around” with his group the Miracles. The self-contained, family-like, black-owned business from the Motor City delivered “The Sound of Young America” to the world with its especially designed blend of pop and R&B, intended to steer the singers away from the sounds of the stratified R&B chart ghetto and into the spotlight, where American Dreams were made.
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by: Denise Sullivan
published: March 3, 2010
in column: Origin of Song
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