The Beat Goes On, Part XIV.

Holy shit, he’s doing it again. Now that I’ve completely lost any audience I may have had for this thing (what a talent for self-sabatoge!), I’m finishing it up as quick as possible.

And . . . go.



070. Ray Price “Night Life”
(Walt Breeland/Paul Buskirk/Willie Nelson)
1963
Available on Good Old Country

The whole “urban cowboy” movement didn’t really come about until the mid-70s with Mickey Gilley (and big urban centers like New York wouldn’t embrace country until the 90s), so this can’t really be put down in that column. Even though Price — originally a hardcore country singer, but one who played the Nashville game — sounds classy as a nightclub singer here, working supper-club blues changes like he’s B. B. King or someone, making it acceptable for people who wear ties and cuff links to listen to country. The album this came from, Night Life, is one of the few country concept albums of the 60s that wasn’t either Johnny Cash or a novelty record; a country version of Sinatra albums like In the Wee Small Hours. And the piano is jazz-blues, not honky-tonk. And the surging ending is even rock & roll.



069. The Tornados “Telstar”
(Joe Meek)
1962
Available on The Alchemist of Pop: Home Made Hits and Rarities

So this is just early Muzak, right? Except of course for the explicit urgency that marks a Meek recording. (Joe Meek, that is: the British producer who was much stranger and more eccentric than Phil Spector; also much less successful.) The Tornados were just another instrumental rock band who kind of wanted to be the Shadows (who kind of wanted to be the Ventures) until Meek got hold of them, and his tape-manipulated sound, featuring a trade-off between early synthesized organ and crisp electric guitar on the semi-classical melodic line, mades for a unique experience; and then Meek's own voice hits, doing the same thing, and the song becomes possibly the strangest, and therefore the best, of all the early instrumental rock hits.



068. The Marvelettes “I’ll Keep Holding On”
(Ivy Hunter/William “Mickey” Stevenson)
1965
Available on One Kiss Can Lead to Another: Girl Group Sounds Lost and Found

The ugly stepsisters of the Supremes in terms of chart success, the Marvelettes had given Motown its first #1 (“Please Mr. Postman”) and then been neglected while Diana and the girls went toe-to-toe with the Beatles for chart dominance. This song came well after their brief moment in the sun (and a few years before their comeback with “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game”) — they were so off of Gordy’s radar that the song was recorded in New York while they were on tour. So it was an approximation of the Detroit sound, not the Funk Brothers themselves, but that means we get some lovely piano runs, and horns that provide texture rather than melody. The “watching, waiting” refrain is one of the most thrilling builds in 60s pop anyway, especially when it ends on the harmonically advanced “mine.” Ooh baby baby.



067. Buffalo Springfield “Mr. Soul”
(Neil Young)
1967
Available on Buffalo Springfield Again

It’s a pop song, first of all. It’s also Neil Young’s first great song, even if it is indebted to Dylan for the rhyme scheme and the Beatles for the guitar lines; it still introduces the world to one of the most distinctive voices and guitar styles in rock & roll. It doesn’t seem to be about anything in particular, unless it’s about groupies, which is pretty much the same thing for a rock & roll outfit. Buffalo Springfield was one of the strangest, most adventurous rock groups in the 60s; maybe it’s just as well that this, one of their their least strange or adventurous songs (well, until you listen to the wiry, fragmented guitar solos), came from the member of the group who turned out to be one of the strangest and most adventurous guys in rock & roll.



066. Lee Perry “The Upsetter”
(Lee Perry)
1968
Available on The Upsetter: Essential Madness from the Scratch Files

Slowed-down ska, or maybe banging rocksteady. Reggae, I mean. You know, one-drop, the slow skank shuffle, stripped to the bone here, no production, no dub, nothing that makes Perry Perry except of course it’s just him. Boasting and bragging like a rapper, threatening in a silky tone. I imagine him half-smiling to himself as he promises someone vague (a lover? a rival? the earth and sky?) that “you’ll never get away from me.” Eventually more instruments come in, and somehow the song ends up being not all that far away from wistful California folk-rock (well, except for the rhythm and the Jamaican patois, duh).



065. Margo Guryan “Sunday Morning”
(Margo Guryan)
1968
Available on Take a Picture

Margo Guryan was a songwriter in the days just before “singer-” became the inevitable prefix to the job description. Like Randy Newman and Laura Nyro, she was classically trained but yearned to do pop. This song was a kiddie-pop hit for Spanky & Our Gang (think a less-edgy Mamas & the Papas; and yes, their name was taken from the Little Rascals), but Guryan does it better here. Partly this is because she’s not as “good” a singer as Elaine “Spanky” McFarland, who’s got a strong Broadway voice, but the song’s too delicate and ethereal for that. Partly it’s because of the jazz-pop instrumentation (it would be California sunshine pop if it wasn’t so overcast) which Guryan arranged herself. Her thin, airy voice, piled up several times with overdubs, makes me think of Kirsty MacColl, who is one of my great pop heroes. Finally, I can’t give a higher compliment to the song than to say that in a face-off between this and the Velvet Underground song of the same name, it’s hard to tell which would win.



064. Dion “Runaround Sue”
(Dion DiMucci/Ernie Maresca)
1961
Available on King of the New York Streets

“He was the one that boys liked — perhaps even more than girls did. He was especially popular with white boys who imagined themselves tougher, darker, Italian (a way of being black while still being white). ‘Here’s the moral of the story from the guy who knows,’ Dion sang in ‘Runaround Sue,’ and the moral of the story was essentially the same in all of his songs: ‘This chick’s a tease, this chick’s a bitch.’ Runaround Sue, what was her big crime? She goes out with other guys. In my neighborhood, we used to sing ‘goes down’ on other guys and assume that’s what Dion meant.” — Francis Davis, Like Young: Jazz, Pop, Youth, and Middle Age



063. Petula Clark “Downtown”
(Tony Hatch)
1964
Available on Anthology: Downtown to Sunset Boulevard

It’s not very often that you find a singer, much less a single song, which stands at the precise point in a Venn diagram that four distinct genres overlap. It’s equally at home as a Broadway showstopper, as a go-go British Invasion song, as pop-soul of the Dusty Springfield variety, and as grown-up pop of the sort that, say, Dean Martin or someone would sing. Even though it became kind of an anthem for Swinging London, the music itself sounds like it could be about New York, or maybe Chicago, in a Lerner/Loewe musical. That was why it was an enormous hit, of course, because every city’s got a downtown that people would like to feel that way about, even if they don’t. Another reason it sounds like it’s from a musical, or perhaps is an entire musical packed tightly under three minutes: the dramatic music tells a story all on its own, one in which your worst (or most glorious) suspicions are confirmed by the muted-trumpet freakout at the fadeout.



062. The Rolling Stones “Ruby Tuesday”
(Mick Jagger/Keith Richards)
1967
Available on Between the Buttons [US version]

Really? This is the Stones? With a Romantic piano line, vibrant cello texturing, and a watery recorder solo? The song might be Brian Jones’s apex as a kooky instrumentalist, or the Stones’ apex as a pop group that could go toe-to-toe with the Beatles or the Kinks with inventive, raiding-the-centuries musical productions. But it’s more than that: it’s heart-stoppingly beautiful. And if you've never associated this song with a specific girl you knew, then I feel sorry for you. Also: it makes a definitive case for Keef as one of the greatest harmony singers of all time, just below Don Everly and Art Garfunkel.



061. Shocking Blue “Venus”
(Robbie VanLeeuwen)
1969
Available on Have a Nice Day: The 70s Pop Culture Box

I was going to say something about how this was the first transatlantic Scandinavian hit, paving the way for ABBA, Roxette, Ace of Base, Max Martin, and the flood of great Scandinavo-rock of the ’00s. But then I found out they were Dutch, not Danish, so I’ve wasted the entire previous sentence. We’ll call it Euro-rock, then, and while certainly the opening riff is a blatant steal from “Pinball Wizard,” there’s enough energy and pop smarts here for it not to matter. It’s pyschedelic rock (the laid-back San Francisco version) at its most friendly, and even so it sounds slightly threatening; what does it mean exactly to cure desire? The quickest way to apreciate this song is to play the Bananarama remake right afterwards; suddenly the original sounds immortal.


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