Saturday, September 29, 2007 Mitch Miller, "The Yellow Rose of Texas" (September 3, 1955) And what should follow up the first rock & roll #1 but some of the squarest music in the annals of history? I've never read any of the books on Sinatra, Clooney, or Bennett, and he never wrote his memoirs (Kind of weird, no? I'd read 'em!), so I have to confess I don't really know what kind of person Mitch Miller was in real life. Tasteless? Oh sure, sure. But that's not what I mean. Was he overall a nice guy? Or was he heavy-handed about imposing his vision on others? A control freak? A jerk? Well...who knows? I don't. But surely this record does not reflect well on him. He steps out from behind the curtain and forges in the smithy of his soul an unalloyed reflection of his musical vision, and it is completely anonymous. The star is a chorus of men, manly drinking-buddy men's men -- and a few ladies in the chorus, perhaps to prevent them from sounding too camp -- whose lockstep uniformity smothers all singing quirks, all individual star-power, all dissenting opinion to degrees that even megalomaniac hardasses like Phil Spector would not bear. (I mean, even on a Ronettes record, you can sort of tell which one's Ronnie Spector most of the time.) Even if Miller's version drops the hallmarks of minstrelsy from the original (written from the point of view of a "darky"; also, Wikipedia says "yellow" used to refer to light-skinned blacks), the record also doesn't reflect well on our country at the time, either. It is not at all difficult to treat the mandatory fun of this singalong as emblematic of the stifling cultural atmosphere the fifties are absolutely famous for. This is oppressively straight; without the drum fills, it'd be completely charmless. 2 (link)

Sunday, July 22, 2007 Bill Haley and the Comets, "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock" (July 9, 1955) Even though Billboard's "Hot 100" wouldn't become its definitive ranking of hits until 1958, and even though it had been publishing other reasonably authoritative charts for pop hits since 1940, Fred Bronson's The Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits starts with this song and numbers all subsequent chart-toppers accordingly: "Rock Around the Clock" is #1, "Harper Valley P.T.A." is #246, "Funkytown" is #525, and "Gettin' Jiggy Wit It" is #865. The pop hits that preceded "Rock Around the Clock" are at best a mere hobbyist concern. (The Bronson book is nearly a thousand pages and goes for thirty bucks. The official Billboard publication covering the pre-Haley charts, Joel Whitburn's Billboard Pop Hits Singles & Albums 1940-1954, is about 600 pages under hardcover binding, and on my copy is a price tag for almost seventy bucks, a situation that this seems to be par for the course in the publishing world for books --like many academic works -- with only vanishingly small specialty audience.) "It's only from our perspective several decades later that we can see the impact this song had on our culture," Bronson writes. "It was the beginning of the rock era." Bronson, in his account of the song (the book devotes exactly one page to each #1), doesn't bother detailing what shape this "impact" had, why it happened, how it lingered, and what in the song gave it impact -- he just notes that it was huge. It is just assumed that this fact is patently obvious to anybody who might pick up the book. Which is to say that this song has become something like a purely decorative chair in a house, set in an upstairs hallway or any place where nobody tends to need a sit. One could pass by it every day for decades, but heaven knows, nobody expects you to actually think about the thing, look at it, or even sit in it (though you could if you had to). It yields no surprise, and anyway, one is never receptive to possibility it might contain surprise. It is a completely inert artifact. And it lends itself well to inertia. Had this song not been given the burden of historic rupture, had I not been aware of this song almost since birth, I wouldn't feel the guilt I do about not having much to say about it. It's a pleasant lil' bouncer based on a clock conceit, and not much more than that. I admire the way the opening lyrical salvo rushes through the numbers one through twelve, increasing in speed as Haley has to negotiate singing numbers as they increase in syllables: three, sev-en, e-lev-en. I like how it embodies an archetypical youth idea: round-the-clock dancing stretches from raves to marathon dances (possibly even before, I don't know), and it's strictly the domain of youth as responsible adults have neither the time nor stamina for such frivols. But it's very hard to hear what was so revolutionary about this record. This isn't even entirely a function of all the time that's gone by, how we've become so inured to outrage thanks to all that gansta rap and the Marilyn Mansons and the doodle doodle dee wubba wubba wubba. It's not especially different from the number ones that preceded it, nor that remarkable in terms of velocity, ranch, noise, or loudness compared to other uptempo number ones like "Rag Mop" or "The Thing," although, yes, it is somewhat sparer than those. So...I don't fucking know, man, I just wish this landmark was landmarkier. Insert audible shrug here. 5 (link)

Saturday, July 07, 2007 Perez Prado, "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White" (April 30, 1955) Lovable because when you get right down to it, it's about pussy. YES REALLY. Both the fruit and the colors evoked in the title are (ahem) "gendered" as the theory-mavens would say, and the lyrics (yes, this was a song song before it was instrumental) compare the embrace of the fruit trees in the wind with the embrace of lovers in a passionate moment, but the clincher is that trumpet sound that comes round about four or five times or so, a blast, dipping then lingering lingering lingering then coming up for breath again in perfect mimesis of the progression of an especially fine (male) orgasm. Don't let Prado's overly polite cha-cha-cha fool you, no; its unrestrained horniness is perfectly deserving of Prado's many grunts of ĄDilo!. 6 (link)

Bill Hayes, "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" (March 26, 1955) I never daydreamed about the frontier as a kid. The frontier was the burnt orange territories on maps of the fifty states. The frontier was empty of content. A small detail of my intellectual development worth relating: most archetypes of radical autonomy that've fascinated generations of young American boys -- pirates, knights, cowboys & indians -- meant nothing to me growing up. I was something of a loner as a child, and thus am left with no definitive experience on the matter, but I don't believe any of my peers cared much, either. It was all dinosaurs at first, Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, then a little later video games and comic books and cars. Even with the Bicentennial in recent memory, the cast of characters in The Story of Young America all seemed like quaint concerns. Davy Crockett was the archetypical fad of sometimelongago before I knew anything of his legend, or the facts behind the legend, and the sum total of everything I've ever known of the facts or the legend has been close to nil. No, at best he's the Disney character that sold a million coonskin caps. So I approach this song with no romance at all. You could argue that my approach to the songs I've been reviewing has been romance-free, but you would think a song about a legend -- however mediated by the marketplace -- might tickle the same parts of my brain that respond to Volume 1 of the Anthology of American Folk Music. But no. Its roots aren't deep into the American mystic but the pure product of "the fifties." All its cornpone, the cute contractions and the tale tales about Crockett killin' him a BAHR when he was only three and patchin' up the crack in the Liberty Bell is capped with: His land is biggest, and his land is best From grassy plains to the mountain crest He's ahead of us all in meeting the test Followin' his legend right into the West His land is my land, his land is your land, our land can totally kick the other guy's land's ass because ALL AMERICANS ARE DAVY CROCKETTS, except that he's also AHEAD OF US ALL in meeting THE TEST, which is the THREAT OF International COMMINISM. Clearly. OK, OK, it's liminally sung from the POV of the settlers trailing behind Crockett, "test" was probably put there just to serve as a second-rate rhyme for "West," but it surely beyond serendipity that we can read these lines as saying that Crockett's a figure of virtue for all good Americans of the 20C can emulate. The top 40 strikes me as a weirdly inappropriate place for patriotism: when it's there, it brings pop into the realm of social control (or at least in ways more obvious than usual), and anchors music too firmly into the realm of moral duty when a play of values usually reigns. Yeah, I believe America is the greatest country in the world and all, but I don't reach for the radio to affirm this. 2. (link)

Monday, June 25, 2007 The McGuire Sisters, "Sincerely" (February 12, 1954) Another slick white-on-black cover, but judging from this, doo-wop and mainstream pop contradicted each other the least when the romance was dripped molasses-slow. Not a revelation, but no embarrassment, either: by the time the final key change rolls around, it even sounds like they're trying to make a point. Of what, who knows? 5 (link)

The Fontane Sisters, "Hearts of Stone" (February 5, 1955) Rock & roll! Sort of! Like the Crew-Cuts' "Sh-Boom," this is a smoothed-out cover of an R&B; tune. Unlike "Sh-Boom," or most of the pop covers of country hits from a few years prior, the arrangement here doesn't obliterate its origins, perhaps in consideration of the kids who were propelling R&B; originals to places on the charts alongside their pop counterparts. (The year before, the Chords' original version "Sh-Boom" went to #9.) In another win for pop minimalism, there's the Fontane 3, there's drums, upright bass, a sax, a few male background singers who might actually be African-Americans murmuring doo-doo-wa doo-doo-wa-dah-doo -- and that's it. Speed? Oh, it's got speed alright; it's even markedly faster than the original. And yet it's pop's superficial solution to the R&B; question, tight-assed in a way neither R&B; or pop never rarely was. Is it unfair that I'm viewing this record through the prism of rock history? Possibly. I can see why the record companies found a lot to like in R&B.; One of the key tenets of mainstream advertising in the fifties is the repetition, repetition, repetition of key selling points; with a bare minimum of effort, a producer or group could take the hooks of an R&B; tune and make them so repetitious the song becomes an advertisement for itself. In the folds of this song the sax repeats a series of notes squeaked so perfectly it could be a loop, and the rhymes here are so obvious (break/take/break/take) they might as well be saying the same words, over and over again, as they actually do with a string of thirteen "no"s followed by a "everybody knows." So, the song's sure catchy -- but as the history of rock (and pop) tells us, this is never enough. 3 (link)

Sunday, June 24, 2007 Joan Weber, "Let Me Go Lover" (January 22, 1955) You have to hear this: Weber oversings in ways Whitney, Mariah, and Celine never dreamed. There's explosive consonants and vibrato OH GOD is there ever vibrato, applied to lyrics with weep/deep/sleep and loose/use rhymes that belong in the kiddie pool. But where Weber really lays it on thick is when she cascades from the top of her register, so sweet and girlish, to a bellowing bottom that turns "lover" into a gasp of "luuuhffher." It calls up so many unsexy aural referents -- asthma, drowning victims, Carol Burnett doing one of her funny grunting sounds -- you have to wonder (once again) what people saw in it. Were they bowled over by Weber's incaution? Did they think that it's only when you sound crazy that you really mean it? That true singing, like true love, is a trial? Did they treat her as a wonder of nature? Was her eccentricity the attraction? The online biographies cite Mitch Miller as having a heavy helping hand in her career, so it's plausible her oversing was as much a "novelty" as his other tracks Miller had a hand in, like Rosemary Clooney's "ethnic" hits or Johnnie Ray's alluring wheeze. (Why hasn't Miller written his memoirs yet?) That said, it's pretty much an Elvis ballad. Elvis' gasps and growls are far more suave than Weber's, but they're more like than unlike, and the record even features a solo electric guitar and Jordanaires analogues to boot. Indeed, it's not hard to believe Elvis ballads like "That's When Your Heartaches Begin" or "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You" are as much attempt to recreate the sensibility of a record like this as much as any gospel or R&B; track you'd care to name. So this an oddity in an era of oddities, and yet an appropriate bit of accidental prescience in that pop chart interzone of the pre-rock era. 4 This was her only charting song, by the way. She had the nasty luck of giving birth right when this song hit, killing all the momentum in her career. She died of heart failure in a mental institution at 45. Christ. (link)

Saturday, June 23, 2007 The Chordettes, "Mr. Sandman" (December 4, 1954) As a kid, I was a spirited singer in music class, and there were a few pop songs that I could stand to admit I adored (like Anne Murray's "You Needed Me") but in general, I didn't seek music out. It came to me instead, usually through the radio in my parents' cars or through television, especially ads for cheap-o oldies compilations. Any song that I heard in my childhood must've had a fairly significant amount of cultural capital in order to break through this wall of uninterest. I remember "The Doggie in the Window" and the Nat 'King' Cole hits, and the Christmas songs, of course, were played every December. I think I knew "Music! Music! Music! from Teresa Brewer's appearance on The Muppet Show, and "If I Knew You Were Comin'" because it was reffed in Same Time, Next Year. And then there's this one. WCBS-FM, though it was a pioneering rock & roll oldies station, would still play this and a few other non-rock hits from the smudgy border of the Presley-and-beyond era. While it has the gooey girlish pleading common to Patti Page, it also shares a musical sensibility with doo-wop in that it's the harmonic acrobatics of the Chordettes themselves that act as the primary hook. The song has a barrage of instruments and effects -- hand claps, vibraphone, upright bass, drums, a few horns, a male vocal, and a piano -- but they serve only to supplement rhythms and establish counter-rhythms, and they don't get in the way of those prim and precise bum-bum-bums. The effect is minimalist compared to the blaring mush of something of the number #1s from only a few years back: the novelty ethos, but on a diet. That said, it's surprisingly less pristine than I remember, and like a lot of amateurish doo-wop singing, suffers for it. The tenor of the group (a thankless job for a girl group, I guess) goes awfully flat once the middle eight starts. When she hits the line "give him the word that I'm not a rover" it leaves the unfortunate impression that she's not pleading she's monogamous but that's she's not a dog. 6 (link)

Friday, June 22, 2007 Eddie Fisher, "I Need You Now" (November 13, 1954) He's a little too plummy for this jaunty bit of nothing (it's like he's physically incapable of sounding casual), but finally, something by Eddie Fisher that doesn't asymptotically approach total dogshit. 5 (link)

Rosemary Clooney, "This Ole House" (November 6, 1954) This one kinda hits home in an amusing way. Lately I've spending my spare time going on the tours in the AIA Guide to New York City, working my way through Manhattan, methodically visiting site after site, taking pictures, getting myself real real gone for a change in the shifting landscapes. So I've been doing a lot of thinking about buildings and how they pass through time and accrete the residue of human history. This song pays homage to that idea, with its titular house described as having known its owner's wife and kids and their travails. I like the way this lyrical detail evokes the past (which I guess might be reflective of an older record-buying audience -- as well as an audience of home-owners) but doesn't luxuriate in a sentimental reflection of things past. The song never stops to detail what happened to the owner's wife and kids, doesn't try to feel sorry for guy. The song's relentlessly uptempo old-timey rickey-tickey backing won't allow any time for that kind of reflection. Sadly, the only weak link here is Rosie. Where she infused uptempo fluff like "Come On-a My House" with curls of suggestion in every syllable, here she rushes through this one and comes off strident as a result, especially towards the end. 6 (link)