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Origin of Song: Money (That’s What I Want)
These unprecedented times of bail-outs and world economic crisis have me thinking a lot on money: Who’s got it, who doesn’t, how they got it, and how I can get my hands on some of it. Money. That’s what I want. Which is how I’ve come to consider the case of Barrett Strong.
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.
Ex Post Facto: Patti Smith, Twelve
Patti Smith
Twelve
(Columbia, 2007)
As the last CD to be loaded into my library before the disc player broke, you might say I’m overly familiar with Twelve, its songs frequently shuffling their way into the mix. The album’s so-called obvious covers repertoire went wildly under appreciated by critics at the time of its release, some going as far as to call it predictable. Yet when I revisited the album, inspired by a surge of Patti activity this past December, I found it to be anything but that. I found the songs on Twelve to be tenacious buggers, snaking their way around my playlist in a not-so-random order. “Twelve truly had a mind of its own…” wrote Smith. I’ll say. These songs could get up, walk out of a room, and set up housekeeping on their own if they wanted. They are that commanding.
Her faithful version of the Jimi Hendrix psychedelic standard, “Are You Experienced?” has popped up on my iTunes sandwiched between “Which Side Are You On” (a striker’s chant updated for the civil rights movement by Len Chandler) and “Border Song” (a gospel-styled piano number by Elton John as sung by Aretha Franklin). Smith’s seriously to-be-reckoned-with cover of the Rolling Stones‘ screamer “Gimme Shelter” was been preceded by Public Enemy’s anti-racist tract, “By the Time I Get to Arizona.” Her version of the Beatles‘ “Within You Without You” revealed itself, surrounded by “There Was a Time”, by James Brown, “Paper Planes” by M.I.A, and “Winter in America” by Gil Scott Heron. And just in case it appears my collection’s top-loaded with music for your mind, it’s not, yet, Patti’s hits have never been dealt to segue with Aerosmith. Rather, they stream nicely aside heavyweights like Yoko Ono, Sly Stone, Max Roach, and Ornette Coleman. read more
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.
Patti Smith Reads and Rocks in LA
While the rest of LA kicked off Grammy weekend in all their finery, Patti Smith put on her reading glasses, told stories, and sang songs over a three-night series of free-to-the-public performances. Night one at the Hammer Museum was a tribute to New York avant-garde figure Harry Smith, an old pal of Smith’s from her days living at the Chelsea Hotel. Smith, who compiled the Anthology of American Folk Music makes a cameo in Just Kids, Patti’s memoir about life as a young artist in New York in the late ’60s and early ’70s, alongside her then-boyfriend photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
Reading from the book at Skylight in trendy Silverlake and at Book Soup on the Sunset Strip (both stores are among the last of LA’s independent booksellers), during Friday’s Q&A, Smith was asked, what was the most surprising thing to happen in the course of her 30-plus-year career? “This book,” she said, noting its positive reception among critics and readers alike. As for her current thoughts on Mapplethorpe who died in 1989: “I feel closer to him now than I ever did, and he’s been gone for 20 years.” Watch a clip of Smith perform an impromptu version of “In My Blakeian Year” with a borrowed guitar after the jump. read more
Janis Ian: Tech Savvy Society’s Child at 58
“I predict that within the next two to three years everyone is going to go back to telephones,” says Janis Ian. Sound unlikely? That’s what people said when she launched a website and message board in 1992 and bet on music’s future at the dawn of the world wide web, too. Proving the skeptics wrong, Ian took more heat in 2003 when she came out in favor of file sharing, a view not generally shared by her contemporaries. And yet, as the decade closes, Ian, a self-managed artist, has found the totally wired life to be less than satisfying; though it’s great for her business, it’s not necessarily good for her art.
“This is my year of I Can’t Cope Anymore,” she says. “I don’t Twitter; I have a MySpace page that hasn’t been updated since 2008. I have a Facebook page, and I get a gazillion friend requests everyday. Why would I want to be friends with you? I don’t even know you!” Though Ian’s exasperation may sound like every boomer’s reaction to the interweb, she’s clearly no techno-phobe or old fogey; she’s simply a techie with a desire to unplug and, as an early adapter to online music and one of its biggest advocates, she’s allowed to vent. “I’ve always been interested in technology. I had a home IBM machine when they first came out. When I was 16, I did binary programming to earn extra money for awhile,” she explains. “I had been online really early—early enough that my AOL name is janisian. It was just obvious that this is where it was going. I mean, it was really obvious. It wasn’t obvious to me that we’d have iPods. I would never have dreamed about that. But it was obvious that this might be an amazing means of transportation and connection.”
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…
Yoko Ono: Between Her Head and the Sky
“I’ve passed the time when I used to think I’m going to surprise people with this, break the sound barrier, I’m going to put in some chords that nobody has ever put in or whatever. That day is over. I just want to be myself,” says Yoko Ono.
Pioneer of the avant-garde, godmother of the new wave, conceptual art maker and peace advocator: Ono has been called all these things, and others, some of them not quite as nice, during her 40 years in the public eye and 50 years as a working artist. These days, she’s back to fronting the Plastic Ono Band, the group she and her husband John Lennon founded in 1969 as an outlet for his post-Beatles expression and the couple’s most political and experimental work. It was also the beginning of a period of intense collaboration for them, inside and outside the studio, which lasted ’til Lennon was assassinated in 1980. Beatles fans and critics were notoriously unkind about the partnership, particularly regarding Ono’s musical participation in it. “I’ve been attacked so much, I thought, ‘Oh, being attacked… this is a normal thing,’” she says.
Next year marks 30 years since Lennon was murdered and 40 years since the break-up of the band he founded in Liverpool over 50 years ago. Had he lived, he would be turning 70, while his and Ono’s son, Sean, who shares a birthday with his father, will turn 35. Though I neglected to ask the reported numerology and astrology buff Ono about the significance to all those round numbers, I don’t have to consult any oracles to know that her next birthday in February will be an auspicious 77. After all these years, it is amazing that she even bothers with fielding the inevitable Lennon questions and Beatles queries, and she does it with admirable enthusiasm and personal dignity, too. Certainly, in the face of a tragedy that could’ve defined the last 30 years of her life, she couldn’t have been blamed if she had chosen to retreat. But Yoko’s too much of a life-lover to go down that way. “Why is this life so beautiful, so interesting?” she exhales on the new Plastic Ono Band album, Between My Head and the Sky. Remaining a kind steward of her husband’s legacy—overseeing the release of The Beatles: Rock Band, their remasters, and curating a New York exhibit of Lennon artifacts currently on display—it’s no wonder she demurs when asked if she’ll ever sit down to write her own story.
Green Day: American Idiot
Green Day
American Idiot
(Reprise, 2004)
I can think of no better musical companion in 2004—my year of feeling teenage—than Green Day’s quasi-rock opera about a bad boy gone good. Of course, that phase of life is a long time gone for me, but there are still days when I feel like I’m on the same wavelength as the average adolescent waiting in vain for life to begin. Both of us are out of our heads, slam-bang in the middle of life-changing passages, based on the premise that “this is the dawning of the rest of our lives.” No wonder we aren’t thinking clearly—that’s a whole lotta platitudinous junk to be throwing at people who are high on hormones, supposedly having the times of their lives.
It was during one of my bouts with mid-life disorientation that great and merciful rock ‘n’ roll in the form of American Idiot gave voice to my existential confusion, much in the same way similarly undecipherable rock operas like Quadrophenia and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway did when I was a pre-tween: If there had been proper librettos to accompany those pieces they’d make as little or no sense as American Idiot does, but I suppose that is partly the point in trying to capture existential angst in a teenage rock opera. Certainly it’s the point of opera, which is meant to be felt.
The Day Van Dyke Parks Went Calypso
When 80,000 barrels of oil spilled into the waters of the Santa Barbara Channel in January of 1969, the crude-splattered water, beaches, and birds along the California coast in its aftermath became the symbols of modern eco-disaster. While the ensuing public outcry helped hasten the formalization of the environmental movement as we now know it, for musician Van Dyke Parks, the spill and “the revelation of ecology,” as he calls it, was a very personal, life-altering occasion. “It changed my M.O. and changed my very reason for being,” he says. The Union Oil rig rupture in Santa Barbara made Parks go calypso.
“When I saw the Esso Trinidad Steel band, I saw myself in a Trojan Horse,” he says. “We were going to expose the oil industry. That’s what my agenda was. I felt it was absolutely essential.” From 1970 to 1975, Parks waged awareness of environmental and race matters through the music and culture of the West Indies, though in the end, “You don’t know whether to laugh or cry. That’s what makes Van Gogh go,” he says, “That’s what great art does.” Though Parks is referring directly to Esso Trinidad’s happy/sad steel drum sounds, he could just as easily be talking about his own experience during what we’ll dub the Calypso Years. read more
Ex Post Facto: Tiny Tim, I’ve Never Seen a Straight Banana – Rare Moments: Vol. 1
by: Denise Sullivan
I’ve Never Seen A Straight Banana – Rare Moments: Vol. 1
(Collector’s Choice Music, 2009)
Once upon a time, 16-year-old fanboy Richard Barone persuaded Tiny Tim—the unusual falsetto/vibrato singer, ukulele player, and a 1960s musical phenomenon—to make a record. Now that I’ve Never Seen A Straight Banana has finally surfaced after 33 years on the shelf, it sounds as strangely beautiful, naïve, and sophisticated as the combination of its two musical forces would suggest.
In the ’60s and early ’70s, the long-haired, flower-peddling Tiny Tim was ubiquitous. Guest shots on the popular comedy series Laugh-In, a hit single with “Tiptoe Through the Tulips”, and a marriage to a woman mysteriously named Miss Vicki performed on live television to a record number of Tonight Show viewers are the highlights as I recall them. A long-haired, slightly gender bent peace-freak with a thing for old time music didn’t seem an anomaly in the culture, though his appearances occasionally lead to giggling and eye-rolling among the straights. And yet, children especially loved Tiny, and he even released some songs, For All My Little Friends, just for us kids. Prior to his 15 minutes in the late ‘60s, Tiny had enjoyed a Greenwich Village moment on the scene with Bob Dylan and recorded with the Band, all appreciators of his knowledge and devotion to music from the early part of the 20th Century—Al Jolson, Rudy Vallee, Eddie Cantor, and singers with names more obscure. But when Barone, a budding musician in his own right, caught up with Tiny Tim, he found him on the dreaded lounge circuit, home to many skilled musicians in their 40s and 50s trying to stay alive in the mid-’70s. Performing at a Travelodge outside of Tampa, the underage Barone couldn’t actually see the show, but following the set, Tim invited the young man and his friends up to his room for a private audience. By the end of the evening, the teen had talked Tim into recording an album with him.
read more
by: Denise Sullivan
published: March 10, 2010
in column: Ex Post Facto
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