“Yesterday,” the fantasy movie that imagines a world in which only one person remembers the Beatles music, goes into wide release today and I can’t wait. No matter how lame the film itself turns out to be, any movie with a lot of Beatles songs can’t be half-bad. The Beatles themselves only made four or five movies (depending on how you count “Yellow Submarine”) and two of them — “Help” and “Magical Mystery Tour” are just not good. Still the boys from Liverpool have inspired a whole sub-genre of films, of which the following ten are my favorites:
1. A Hard Day’s Night
The first and still the best. I saw it when it first came out in 1964 thought it was a romp but as I’ve rewatched it over the years I’ve come to believe it’s the best rock and roll movie ever made; which is remarkable because this was just supposed to be a cheap exploitation movie. The Beatles themselves are witty and exuberant, still enjoying their monstrous fame. But you begin to see how closed-in and claustrophobic their lives have become, crammed onto trains, cars, dressing rooms, and narrow halls. Then suddenly, when they’ve had enough, they burst out, race down a fire escape, and run wild to “Can’t Buy Me Love.” An exhilarating scene.
It’s a mystery that George, the third-ranking Beatle, should have been the one with the best post-Beatle career and turned out by far to have been the “deepest” one of the whole group. He explored the harder questions of life with eyes wide open and had a remarkable capacity for friendship. When he died too early at age 58, his friends (and what a group of friends: Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, Billy Preston, Ravi Shankar, and Monty Python) celebrated his life with a concert that still moves me every time I watch it, especially any number in which his look-alike son Dhani participates.
3. Across the Universe
This is a movie that shouldn’t work, but somehow does solely through the power of the Beatles music. The film purports to depict the culture’s transformation of the Sixties, including the flower power movement, the Vietnam War, urban riots, elite campus privilege, Weathermen-style violence. The main characters all take their names from Beatles songs — Jude, Prudence, Jo-Jo, Max, Sadie and Lucy — and the full Beatles catalog gets a good work-out. It’s all a little mind-blowing.
4. How the Beatles Changed the World
The world broke in two in 1964 — there were people who came to maturity before the Beatles and those who came after them, and their sensibilities could not have been more different. This is a fairly recent documentary about how the Beatles influenced youth culture and created the way we look, talk, dress, think, and act today.
5. George Harrison: Living in the Material World
A Martin Scorcese documentary that is a good companion piece to “The Concert for George.” Given George’s wide range of artistic and spiritual interests it’s not surprising that he inspires the most thoughtful commentary.
6. Backbeat
The teenage Beatles transformed themselves into an electrifying rock and roll band when they went off to play the seedy clubs in Hamburg. This is that story, framed through the lens of a love triage among John Lennon, the fifth Beatle Stu Sutcliffe, and Stu’s German girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr. No classic Beatles songs, just the rock and roll covers they performed during this time.
7. Yellow Submarine
A trippy cartoon feature once experienced most fully by stoned teens is now marketed as a multi-generational family movie. This is best seen in the theaters or on a big-screen TV because the animation is dazzling.
8. Nowhere Boy
A dramatization of John Lennon’s teen years, particularly his fraught relationship with the mother who abandoned him and the aunt who raised him. The sub-plot is the creation of the Beatles themselves, including the famous meeting with Paul and the recruiting of George.
9. John and Yoko: Above Us Only Sky
When John and Yoko sat down to record the “Imagine” album they brought along a camera crew to document their every move. This narcissistic strategy resulted in a surprisingly compelling window into early Seventies life. There they are, smoking constantly, lying around their pig-sty bedroom, or eating greasy food at the communal breakfast table. But it’s undeniably fascinating to watch the songs on this album evolve over the course of the recording session.
This documentary about the making of the “Let It Be” album is a little hard to follow given the lack of a narrator. It’s also painful to watch how far apart these four former mates have grown. They barely speak to each other except when they can’t avoid it. And the constant presence of Yoko in the recording study casts a giant pall over the whole enterprise. But the movie is redeemed by the great ending, when they play together live for one last time on the roof of their recording studio in the middle of London.
(This blog post originally appeared on another now-defunct blogging platform on August 11, 2011, and has been reposted here for posterity.)
When I was in the 11th grade, the Russian Club, of which I was a member in good standing, went to see James Taylor at the old Boston Garden. This was my first rock concert and the crowd was even bigger and more enthusiastic than anything I’d previously experienced when I’d gone there to see the Celtics or Ice Capades. But before James Taylor took the stage, he introduced a woman named Carole King. None of us in the Brockton High School Russian Club had ever heard of her, but when she started to sing “I Feel the Earth Move,” I couldn’t believe we were seeing such a great opening act. Were all rock concerts like this?
She went on to sing several other great but previously unheard of (by us) songs, including “You’ve Got a Friend” and “It’s Too Late.” She also did some nice renditions of “(You Make me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” and “Will You Love me Tomorrow,” songs that we thought belonged to Aretha Franklin and The Shirelles. To this day, that was one of the best concerts I ever attended.
It wasn’t until several months later that we understood the significance of what we’d seen – that concert tour was essentially the launch of the singer-songwriter era. There had been singer-songwriters before – Bob Dylan and such – but this new confessional genre didn’t really coalesce as a vehicle until the release of “Tapestry,” a monster hit that was Billboard’s number one album for 15 weeks and went on to sell 25 million copies.
I hadn’t really thought about Carole King until she and James Taylor went on their wildly nostalgic “Troubadour” reunion tour last year. And then when I was on vacation last month I heard “It’s Too Late” on the car radio – always an evocative experience when you’re driving to the beach with the windows open and smelling of Coppertone.
When I returned from vacation I pulled out the CD. (No, I never had it in vinyl. As much as a liked the individual songs, buying “Tapestry” itself didn’t seem like a Y-chromosome thing to do.) I wanted to see if such a consequential album still held up after all these years.
The first thing I noticed is that the album cover is one of the greatest rebranding jobs in music history. The cover photo is a long shot of a woman of indeterminate age and ethnicity sitting in the cozy window seat of a vaguely rural house. She’s bathed in sunlight, barefoot, wearing jeans and holding what appears to be a tapestry in her lap. Oh, and there’s a cat in the foreground. This is the picture of a mellowed-out former hippy and quasi-Earth Mother, someone with whom you would have a nice cup of chamomile tea.
In fact, until the album came out, Carole King was no one’s idea of a back-to-the-earth hippy. She was born in Brooklyn (where her college boyfriend was Neil Sedaka!) and together with her husband Gerry Goffin she had become a phenomenally successful Manhattan-based songwriter. Working out of the Brill Building in the 1960’s she churned out hits for artists as diverse as Aretha Franklin, The Monkees, The Chiffones, The Drifters, Herman’s Hermits and Blood Sweat and Tears. She was among the last practitioners of that old-fashioned tradition going back to Tin Pan Alley in which a songwriter wrote a song on spec, hoping to sell it to someone who would make it hit. She was in show business, with an emphasis on the business.
The young Carole King and Gerry Goffin
But after splitting from Goffin, she and her kids moved to L.A., and settled into Laurel Canyon, a haven for artists like Joni Mitchell and Crosby Stills and Nash, who were developing a new style of music. It was out of this amazingly creative milieu that the new Carole King emerged.
If there was ever an album that captured the Zeitgeist of its age, it was “Tapestry.” The Carole King celebrated therein is a natural women, lovelorn but independent. She’s strong but vulnerable. She’s a friend and a lover (but definitely not a mother – kids are neither seen nor heard of in this album). She was what every thinking woman wanted to be as the sixties morphed into the seventies.
Hearing “Tapestry” afresh, the songs that were great then remain great today. “I Feel the Earth Move” is still one of rock’s great anthems to passion, and has there ever been a more rueful break-up song than “It’s Too Late”? And in “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” her slower, more mature approach seems profounder than the Shirelle’s pop version.
Not every song is a gem. Although the “Tapestry” versions are OK, I do prefer the more soulful renditions of “Natural Woman” and “You’ve got a Friend” by Aretha Franklin and James Taylor, respectively. I actively dislike Smackwater Jack, with its clichéd attack on small town sheriffs; and “Beautiful” (“You’ve got to get up every morning, with a smile on your face and show the world all the love in your heart”), is a little too self-helpy for my taste.
Then there’s the title song, which is one of the weirdest, most out-of-place songs on any gigantically popular album. The opening line does a perfect job in setting the tone for the whole album: “My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue.” But then the song describes “a man of fortune” with “a coat of many colors” who eventually turns into a frog. He is replaced by a gray and ghostly figure, previously seen in black, who unravels the tapestry, because he has “come to take me back.” This sounds like the grim reaper coming to get her at the end of her life. If so, this is such a downer of a song, I can’t believe it’s on this otherwise generally optimistic empowering album. My guess is that most listeners grew confused with the heavy-handed symbolism and just pretended the song wasn’t even there.
What strikes me about the album now is that except for the aforementioned title song, everything in “Tapestry” is very simple, with few complicated images or multisyllabic words. Nothing wrong with that. Great poetry often relies on short basic words, but after a lifetime of listening to the sophisticated melodies, lyrics and meanings of Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon or the Beatles, it’s a surprise to see that that this album is a work of such sparseness.
Although most of the classic songs on Tapestry remain terrific, I can’t say I love Carole King’s overall delivery. Her voice is neither rich nor deep, and she falls into the trap of over e-nun-ci-a-ting every syllable. It’s almost as if, after a career or seeing her lyrics smothered by mushy vocals, she wanted to make sure that every word came through clearly. This makes the singing a little choppy and very duh-duh-da-duh.
Finally, what strikes me about this album after so many years is that she made it when she was only 29 years old. Today, that seems remarkably young (particularly for someone who had already had an astoundingly successful first career as a song-writer) and she seems wise beyond her years. But at the time, her corporate overlords must have thought she was a little over-the-hill. How else can you explain that soft-focus cover photo, where she’s wearing long pants and a long-sleeve sweater? Not only is the camera pulled back far enough to obscure her face, but there is not an inch of skin showing. She is definitely not selling sexuality. No Gaga-esque outfits for her.
So, to the question at hand; after listening to “Tapestry” fresh for the first time in years, I would say, yes, it remains terrific, mostly. I’ve downloaded it into my iPod and will be once again playing my favorite songs and deleting the rest. I might even play the CD itself on a cool autumn night when we’ve made a fire and are mellowing out with some Port. Now if I could just find my “Sweet Baby James” album, we’d be all set.
There are Christmas movies that I love, there are some I find crude and unfunny, and others that are boring or sickly sweet. But there’s only one that I actually hate: “Love Actually.”
I hated this movie the moment I saw it in the theater 15 years ago and have nurtured that disregard ever since. But since I’m an open-minded person I recently gave it another shot to see if I had been wrong all these years. Nope.
“Love, Actually” is an ensemble piece featuring the cream of the English acting establishment (minus Maggie Smith for some reason. How she escaped is beyond me.) Set in upper-middle-class London the movie purports to illuminate the various aspects of love through nine case studies. Most of the characters are interrelated in some unexplained way that seems to revolve around an elementary school attended by everyone’s kids or the kids of their friends.
The movie is bracketed at the beginning and end with genuinely affecting scenes of people joyously reuniting at the airport: grandparents and grandchildren, friends, lovers, parents and children, spouses. Fair enough. That’s very touching. And because the movie is set during the four weeks leading up to Christmas, the movie tries to examine love through the prism of Christmas.
And yes, love is all around us at Christmas. Love for your fellow man. Love for your family. Love for your community. But “Love Actually” has the narrowest definition of love, emphasizing romantic love at the expense of all else. Of the nine stories, seven are about love between one male and one female and only two depict all the other kinds of love in the world (one is about love between old friends and the other depicts a sister lovingly caring for her brother.)
OK, sure. Romantic love sells tickets, but what the movie calls love is frequently just infatuation between people who barely know each other, including:
Two strangers (Colin Firth and his Portuguese housekeeper) who don’t even speak a word of the same language
An 11-year-old boy with a crush on a girl he’s never spoken to
A bloke who’s so infatuated with his best friend’s new wife that he’s barely spoken to her
The prime Minister of the UK, who is enamored by the woman who brings him tea and crumpets despite never having had a serious conversation in the two weeks she was waiting on him
A guy who goes to America to pick up women in bars and apparently manages to snag one, although we are not shown how he accomplishes it
This bizarre definition of love is bad enough but here are six other things to which I object:
1. The elevation of puppy love to the highest echelons of human feeling
One of the main stories involves a school boy, Sam (now more famous as Jojen Reed in Game of Thrones!), who we meet at his mother’s funeral. His stepfather, Liam Neeson, is concerned that the boy is distraught, but in a surprise twist it turns out that the reason for Sam’s despondency is his crush on a classmate who is moving to America.
This is the moment when I actively began to despise this movie above all others. Losing your mother is about the worst tragedy that can befall a child and yet the movie completely blows off that loss. And Sam’s situation is definitely not a case where the kid is compensating for losing Mom by channeling his grief into another love object because he declares that he’s felt this way since “before Mom died.”
Throughout the movie Sam talks like a sophisticated, hyper-self-aware 45-year-old. About three weeks after the funeral, he asks Liam Neeson when he’s going to start dating again, which Neeson actually does after meeting another single mom (who happens to be Claudia Schiffer!) at the school’s Christmas pageant. I don’t know who this Mom/wife was but she must have been a cipher if she is so easily forgotten.
2. The insult to the United States
To the extent there’s a main story it revolves around the the new prime minister, the dorkishly cute Hugh Grant. Almost immediately after taking office he meets with the American president Billy Bob Thornton, a bully and a womanizer who hits on Natalie, the assistant that Hugh Grant himself covets. In his first cabinet meeting the PM tells his advisers he’s going to go along with whatever the president wants because the US is so powerful. But after catching Billy Bob making a pass at Natalie he grows a spine and dresses down President Predator in a press conference that causes everyone in the UK to beam with pride.
This episode is clearly wish fulfillment by the post-9/11 filmmakers. At the time the movie came out George W. Bush and Tony Blair were staunchly allied in fighting terrorism and there were some in the UK who just hated the alliance. The “Love, Actually” Hugh Grant is a PM that British leftists could only dream of, but rather than make a substantive political argument, the filmmakers load the deck by making the U.S. president personally repulsive. Thanks a lot Britain. You’re welcome for D-Day.
(And speaking of the film’s strange view of America, there’s also the story about Colin the Incel, who goes to America to get lucky. He walks into a bar and flashes his English accent and three gorgeous girls — including January Jones! — immediately fall for him. So that’s America for you — boorish men and loose women.)
3. Situations that would never happen in real life
The movie seems to take place in an alternative universe where people do things that would never happen in any world resembling reality.
There is, for example, the story involving a couple who meet as stand-ins during the filming of a porn movie. I’m not an expert but I don’t think pornos bother with the niceties of gaffers, best boys, and stand-ins. We’re supposed to believe that these otherwise completely normal lovebirds are unaffected by spending half their time together in nude simulated sex and can go on to have a completely average courtship despite having been naked together for hours on end.
Also unworldly is the example of the groovy Prime Minister dancing by himself in his first night in 10 Downing Street. The scene is funny, of course, but preposterous (and stolen from Ricky Business too.)
Or what are we to make of Colin Firth’s ability to learn Portuguese in two weeks? Coincidentally, this is also the same amount of time it takes 11-year-old Sam to become a great drummer.
And then there are the big dramatic scenes that would never happen in any sane world — like Sam breaching airport security and getting chased all the way to the gate where his plan is about to take off.
Or Colin Firth proposing to a woman he’s known for two weeks in front of an entire restaurant. Or an aging rock star telling his long-time manager, “You are the f***ing love of my life.” Or the prime minister sneaking backstage in a elementary school auditorium to lay a lip lock on one of his assistants?
And probably the most unbelievable development of all is that Alan Rickman’s slutty secretary manages to plan a great holiday office party in less that two weeks! What fantasyland is that?
4. The crudity
This is supposed to be a Christmas movie but it’s not something to which you could take your kids or mother. The script is littered with unnecessary F-bombs and nude scenes. We also have the moment when Sam high-fives Liam Neeson and exclaims “Let’s get the shit kicked out of us by love.” First of all, that is a sentence that no person, much less a child, has ever uttered, and secondly, I am uncomfortable knowing that some stage mother let her little boy say those words in a movie. I am also uncomfortable that a climatic scene revolves around a little girl suggestively singing and dancing to Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas.”
What’s surprising about this is that none of the storylines culminate in anyone having actual sexual relations. Even the porn stand-ins make a point of telling people they haven’t had sex yet. So the movie is chastely crude, or crudely chaste. One or the other.
5. The overuse and abuse of the soundtrack
It’s hard to think of a movie that makes the soundtrack work harder at evoking the emotions that should evolve out of the character, plot, acting and directing. In many ordinary cheesy movies there’s a climax during the concluding moments that comes larded larded with orchestral swells and other uplifting music. The problem with “Love, Actually,” is that it is promiscuous with climaxes, all of which have suitable triumphant scores.
Consider this garbage scene, where Hugh Grant tells off the U.S. president in the first fifteen minutes of the movie. The background music is more appropriate for a “winning the 100-meter-dash in the Olympics” moment. (And while we’re at it, what kind of statesman makes an agreement in face-to-face meetings and then denounces it once he gets in front of the cameras.)
But it’s not only the score that is over-used. The movie also relies heavily on popular music to piggyback on our emotional connection to these songs. Who doesn’t viscerally respond to the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows,” Norah Jones’ “Turn Me On,” The Pointer Sisters’ “Jump,” or The Calling’s “Wherever You Will Go”? This is just cheap manipulation.
6. The movie’s bizarre understanding of employer/employee relationships
I know this movie was made before the #MeToo movement, but some of the employer/employee dynamics are weird even by 2003 standards. Many of the love relationships involve men and their employees: Prime Minister Hugh Grant and his lowly tea-bringer; the rock star Bill Nighy and his manager; Colin Firth and his non-English-speaking housekeeper. These power dynamics are bad.
Then there’s Alan Rickman, the head of some kind of agency, who, in addition to giving his secretary an expensive gift, actively encourages Laura Linney to make a pass at a co-worker. Aren’t companies supposed to discourage dating between co-workers? This sounds like an HR fiasco waiting to happen.
On the other hand, a few things do work
To give the movie its due, two storylines actually do have the ring of truth: the Alan Rickman/Emma Thompson marriage and Laura Linney’s relationship with her brother. These are heartbreaking and realistic depictions of the effort that needs to go into making mature love work.
The Laura Linney story is particularly poignant because her situation is so intractable and something that many people can relate to. Hardly anyone who has met a significant other as a stand-in on a pornographic movie but there are millions who feel stuck as the main caretaker for a disabled relative. I’m a little frustrated, however, that Laura and the object of her desire cannot have a serious conversation about her brother to see see if they can work something out, but this is far from the most objectionable part of the movie.
As for Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson, let’s skip over the fact that despite being the the Prime Minister’s sister and very posh, she sends her kids to the local public school, which has a distinctly lower-middle-class vibe. Putting that ridiculousness aside, their story is as old as the hills — the husband is beguiled by the young new secretary who’s coming on to him. As sexy as this Mia person is, why anyone would consider cheating on Emma Thompson is beyond me! Idiot!!
In any event, the moment when the wife discovers her husband is straying is genuinely sad. This is one time the filmmakers use background music appropriately to advance a legitimately earned emotion. When she plays “Both Sides Now,” as sung by a much older and world-wearier Joni Mitchell than the one who first recorded it in the 1960s, you feel the hurt and pain of an adult woman who’s really lived life and, frankly, deserves a lot better. This is a world-class scene trapped in a pile of dreck. So watch this clip alone for a shock of honesty and throw out the rest of the movie. That would be the best Christmas present you could give yourself.
The Fourth of July is the day we celebrate America and what better way than through a celebration of America-themed music? I’m not talking about overtly patriotic songs. I doubt the Marine Band will ever play any of these songs on the White House lawn, but still, they do offer a glimpse of the vast tapestry that is America:
There’s a Facebook challenge going around where people post photos of their ten favorite albums “without explanation.” No one challenged me to do this, which is just as well because I definitely need to explain. Because instead of selecting “favorite” albums, I’m more interested in the most meaningful — the ones that remind me of who I was. These all create aural Proustian moments — except that it’s not the taste of a madeleine that sends me back in time, it’s a song.
Considering how rare it’s been to buy a CD, never mind an LP, for the last 15 year, it’s not surprising that these albums are front-loaded toward decades past. But if truth be told, the real reason this music is weighted toward the old days is that music is more important and meaningful to you when you’re younger. With that as an apologia, here are the ten albums that I just can’t forget.
1. Oklahoma!
I was about five years old when our family moved into our little ranch house in Brockton, Mass. My parents were young and didn’t have a lot of money but they did buy a hi-fi and a handful of albums — almost all Broadway musicals or movie soundtracks. I still love all those old albums (in fact my wife thinks I have an unnatural interest in show tunes) but the one that really brings me back is the first one they bought — Oklahoma.
Even now I know the lyrics to most of the songs — but now I actually understand them (I’m thinking of you, “I Cain’t Say No”). But the most evocative song for me remains “People Will Say We’re In Love,” which is the best flirting song ever written.
2. Please Please Me
Other generations must get tired of hearing Boomers talk about the Beatles, but they loomed so large for so long that we just can’t get over it. The Beatles burst upon the scene when I was ten years old and my mother took me down to the old Coats Field department store in Brockton to buy what would become my first record album.
The Capitol Records version of this is officially titled The Early Beatles, but the version I have was released by JayVee Records (multiple companies had rights to these songs because no major American label wanted to sign them and they originally ended up signing with the fly-by-night JayVee. For more detail on the tangled history of this album click here.)
This is my battered LP, VeeJay version
This is hardly the best best Beatles album. There’s even a cover of a song from the Broadway musical “The Music Man” (“Til There Was You”). Most of the original Beatles songs aren’t really top notch either, but “I Saw Her Standing There,” “There’s a Place,” and especially, “Please Please Me” still exemplify the energy and fun of being a young Beatles fan.
3. Jesus Christ Superstar
When I was in the 11th grade, Jesus Christ Superstar hit our school like a bomb. Tommy might have been the first “rock opera,” but this was the second and no one had ever heard anything like it. What I never expected then was that Andrew Lloyd Weber would abandon rock and go on to transform musical theater, but for at this moment he seemed like a very cutting edge composer.
Some kids in my English class wrote a short play based on the album called “J.C.” (the 20-minute performance involved us acting out some scenes with the music playing in the background). Throughout the day, over multiple periods, we performed this little one-act to packed crowds in our “Little Theater.” And then later that summer, a dozen of us drove into Boston to see a concert version of album performed in Boston Garden (yes, those were the days when parents would let six 17-year-olds cram into the family car and drive on the Southeast Expressway without seat belts.) King Herod’s song brought down the house as it always does.
I’d like to think I imbued some religious feeling from the album but I can see now that very little Christianity is expressed in the album. And when it was turned into a movie a couple of years later, it all seemed vaguely ridiculous. That movie actually turned me against the album. A couple of years ago I played the LP for the first time in decades and actively disliked it. The songs themselves are fine but the way they’re performed, with screeching strings, vibrated differently with me as an adult than as a teen. Worse, several of the songs became ear worms and I couldn’t get them out of my head for weeks, so not only did I not like them, but I couldn’t forget them. I didn’t even watch the John Legend version when it was on TV last Easter. Sigh — it’s tough to get old.
One song I still do like, though, is “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.”
4. All Things Must Pass
In contrast with “Jesus Christ Superstar,” I love George Harrison’s first solo album even more now than I did when it came out. I received it as a gift from my high school girlfriend on Christmas 1970 and whenever I play it, I can smell her patchouli oil perfume, taste the food in our high school cafeteria, and remember what it was like to drive around in that old junker of mine.
More important, the songs are still fantastic. What I can’t understand is how George wrote such deeply spiritual music at age 27 — the age my son is now! I not only still have my original boxed set LP but also the CD, and whenever I drive by myself on a long trip, this is always in the mix of CDs I play.
5. No Secrets
To the extent I have a guilty pleasure it’s Carly Simon. I know the music is not top quality, with simplistic lyrics and pretty cliched tunes, and yet I bought her first ten albums and still love them all. No Secrets is the album that came out the year I was a freshman in college. “You’re so Vain” was the biggest hit but the title song is the one that most recaptures the feeling of being away at school, even though I had barely any secrets to keep.
6. Court and Spark
My college-era girlfriend had been a serious Joni Mitchell fan and I thought she was as pretentious as they came (Joni, not the girlfriend). My friend Jim was also a Joni fan, which I scoffed at, until he brought me into his dorm room and made me listen to her newest album Court and Spark, which was more musically accessible than the earlier work. I still remember sitting there hearing “People’s Parties” and changing my mind on the spot. But my favorite song from the album is “Help Me,” a plea from a woman who is sinking into love and can’t escape. Man I still love that song.
This album turned me into a huge Joni Mitchell devotee. I even went back and reconsidered her earlier albums, all of which I now love. But Court and Spark was the turning point.
7. Stop Making Sense
I saw the Jonathan Demme movie “Stop Making Sense” before I even heard the album and couldn’t figure out what exactly was going on, with The Talking Heads’ David Byrne singing a series of increasingly frantic and despairing songs as his suit got bigger and bigger. Eventually I bought the album and learned to love the existential dread of “Psycho Killer,” “Burning Down the House” and, especially, “Once in a Lifetime.” What did I have to despair about? I was 30, living an exciting life in Washington DC, and reasonably happy. It wasn’t exactly in despair I felt but the question at the core of the album did resonate: “And you may ask yourself/well, how did I get here?” That’s a question that never goes away. Twenty years ago I wouldn’t have put this album on the list but it’s been haunting me to long enough to warrant being rated one of albums I can’t forget.
8. Born in the USA
When I was working on Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign in 1984, there was a guy in the research department who was a Bruce Springsteen fanatic. Born in the USA had just come out and he was such a proselytizer that he recorded it for me on a cassette tape. I never actually listened to that tape but eventually bought my own LP — my real introduction to Springsteen. And of course the song “Born in the USA” eventually became the unofficial anthem of the Reagan/Bush 84 campaign until Springsteen himself told us to stop playing it at rallies.
This album is a good example of how an artist can lose control of the narrative for his own art. Most of the songs are supposed to be about the dissolution of the American dream, what with working class guys losing their jobs etc., and yet the album largely comes off as a celebration of America. The song “Dancing in the Dark” has bleak, lonely, depressing lyrics but the tune is so upbeat that the effect is actually positive. And the title tune, which is supposed to be a devastating indictment of American society ended up sounded patriotic because of that strong, repetitive chorus. “Born in the USA, I was Born in the USA.”
9. Graceland
Aside from being a great album with innovative music, Graceland is on this list for two reasons: 1) Soon after my wife and I were married and living in a thin-walled New York apartment, the tenant next door to us broke up with his boyfriend and played it until about 2:00 a.m. one night. Consequently this album always reminds me of those early days in NYC when we were trying to figure out married life.
2) About four years later, when my son was a year and a half old, we moved to Connecticut. Until we filled the living and dining rooms with furniture, I used to pick him up and dance with him from one end of the house to another to the tune of “You Can Call Me Al.”
And of course the music was unlike anything I’d ever heard before — all those South African musicians being introduced to American audiences.
10. Running With Scissors
My wife and I always agreed that humor provides you with emotional resilience, exercises your brain and helps you make sense of an increasingly absurd world. To that end we exposed our son to a variety of comedians and comedy shows, including “The Simpsons,” “Seinfeld” “The Office”, “Letterman,” etc. Eventually he started to introduce us to comedians he’d found on his own, including Weird Al Yankovic. Soon the house was full of Weird Al CDs, the best of which, by far, was “Running With Scissors.” In addition to the the usual parodies of hit songs, this album has two masterpieces.
The first is “The Saga Begins,” a spoof of the second round of Star Wars movies to the tune of “Bye Bye Miss American Pie.” The lyrics summarize the intricate and, frankly, ridiculous plot of “A Phantom Menace.” Sample: “We took a bongo from the scene/ And we went to Theed to see the Queen/ We all wound up on Tatooine/ That’s where we found this boy…” The juxtaposition of the nerdy “Star Wars” detail with the great “American Pie” tune is what makes this song achieve greatness.
The second masterpiece on this album is “Albuquerque.” Unlike most other Weird Al songs, this is not a song parody but a absurdist story about a guy whose wildest dream is to visit the city of Albuquerque. This is a long meandering story — what is know in literature as a picaresque, in the manner of “Candide” or “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” It’s just one damn thing after another for the narrator.
In any event, my wife, son and I all found the song both hilarious and a bonding experience. I tried to share it with some people outside the family and they just didn’t get it. Didn’t think it was funny and gave me a strange look after I played it. Well, at least there’s three of us who appreciate it.
Special bonus song
I’ve leave you with one more meaningful song, as long as we’re discussing the idiosyncrasies of humor. This one isn’t even on an album. When my son was on the college tour, one place we looked was Middlebury, my own alma mater. We learned that some students had just produced a music video parodying the students body. The video spoofs the various “Midd Kidds” at the college: the Library Queen, the Lax Bro, the Quidditch nerds, the flannel-shirted granola guy. The video is full of inside jokes, but even an outsider can enjoy the humor because the college stereotypes are universal.
The video itself is hardly an advertisement for Middlebury or any liberal arts college, but it actually achieves a level of art as it illustrates how college is about taking on new identities, posing with them for a while, and then trying on something else. Colleges would have you think that the education revolves around the classroom but in reality, college is about figuring out who you are — even if that takes means appropriating some obnoxious personalities for a while.
My son ended up going to Middlebury but avoiding all the stereotypes in the video (thank God). Still, of all the songs that came out when he was in college, this is the one that most reminds me of those four very emotional transitional years.
Here comes summer. And here comes the debate about the “song of the summer.” As in, what song will everyone be singing when they’re driving around in the car, googling the location of the nearest Dairy Queen? Every year there are predictions and this year I’ll go out on a limb and place my money on Drake’s “Passionfruit.”
A great summer song needs one of two things: either exuberance and a zest for life, especially if it’s even tangentially connected to sun or water, or an overt nostalgia for summers past.
Except for Christmas, no season generates the kind of nostalgia that summer does, and it’s all based on the same principle — a yearning for a simpler more innocent time of life, where everything seemed new with limitless possibility. And I have to admit, there is nothing like that last day of school when the entire summer stretches on indefinitely. I’d like to say I spent my summers at the swimmin’ hole, riding on Ferris Wheels, or writing poems to my first love, but I was more likely to be inside watching game shows on TV (on a perfectly good day!!!) or moping about being bored.
Nevertheless, like everyone else I have an idealized view of summer and here are the songs that remind me of the summers I may or may not have actually experienced.
15. Saturday in the Park
The band Chicago is more or less disdained now by rock aficionados because of their heavy reliance on horns. Nevertheless I was a big fan and actually went to see them in concert at the old Boston Garden. “Saturday in the Park” was inspired by a visit to Central Park by the band’s lead vocalist Robert Lamm on July 4, 1971 (actually a Sunday, btw), who saw steel drum players, singers, dancers, and jugglers all having a great time, which translated into: “People dancing, people laughing/A man selling ice cream/Singing Italian songs.” Yep, that sounds like summer.
14. The Age of Aquarius/Let The Sun Shine
The Fifth Dimension’s “The Age of Aquarius/Let The Sun Shine” is by no means a classic summer song but I am using the blogger’s privilege to include it in this list. In 1969, when I was 15 (!!) I spent the summer building swimming pools for my father’s company, which meant a lot of physical labor outside with the radio on. We listened to WRKO, Boston’s Top-40 radio station so I heard the same songs day after day. Looking at the Billboard list for that summer is like stepping into a time capsule. The apocalyptic “In the Year 2525” was a huge hit, as was Henry Mancini’s “Love Theme for Romeo and Juliet.” But in between those two extremes is “The Age of Aquarius,” a commercialized version of the anthem from “Hair.” Whenever I hear this song I remember wielding a shovel all summer and am grateful I went to college.
13. Summer Nights
I’m not really a fan of “Grease,” which makes “West Side Story” look like a serious anthropological study of 50’s teen alienation. The song “Summer Nights,” though, cleverly combines insights on the differences between men and women while articulating the yearning for hot-weather romantic passion. Olivia Newton John and John Travolta narrate their version of their summer romance, and in her story he was sweet and caring, while in his version she was hot and randy. One thing they agree on, however, is “Summer fling don’t mean a thing/But, uh oh, those summer nights.”
12. Schools Out
If you ever wondered whether “This is Spinal Tap” was a parody or actual documentary all you need to do is watch Alice Cooper videos to see that “Spinal Tap” actually didn’t go far enough. “School’s Out” seemingly celebrates the last day of school, but is actually a profoundly anti-social song (“School’s out forever/My school’s been blown to pieces”). Aww, who takes that seriously? Of course now Alice Cooper portrays himself as your basic bourgeois grampa, telling Terri Gross on “Fresh Air” that it was all an act. Whatever, the song is fun and joyous as long as you don’t think too hard about it.
11. Party in the USA
Clarification Warning: The inclusion of this song does not constitute an endorsement of Miley Cyrus, twerking, celebrity rehab or anything else connected with Miley-drama. The song isn’t really even about summer — it’s about hearing a song and partying, two essential elements of summer. Plus in the video she’s wearing a tank-top and short-shorts and dancing in a pick-up truck. What could be more summery than that?
10. 4th of July Asbury Park (Sandy)
About half the songs in the Springsteen oeuvre are summer songs at heart, even when they’re ostensibly about closing factories and ruined futures. That’s because they are drenched in nostalgia and yearning. “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” which is about as nostalgic as it gets, paints a vivid word picture of an amusement park, with boardwalks, arcades, fireworks, tilt-a-whirls — the whole nine yards. The main attraction, though, is Sandy, the boss’s daughter, and the narrator’s throat-tightening, teen longing is palpable.
9. Summer of 69
Another classic nostalgia song, reminiscing about young love, drive-ins, porches, etc, etc. during that great summer of 1969. Or as it makes clear in no-nonsense terms, “Those were the best days of my life.” The song turns me off a bit because it commercializes nostalgia so explicitly — and yet, it definitely pushes enough buttons to make it on the list.
8. Summertime (Kenny Chesney)
Summer songs constitute a whole sub-genre of country music, which makes sense because people always imagine they spend their summers out in the country instead of in the air-conditioned offices where they really are. Kenny Chesney is the king of giving the people what they want — as his sold-out mega-concerts attest — and in “Summertime” what he offers is perpetual late-teenagery at the waterhole where the boys’ hearts “skip a beat” as the girls “shimmy out of their old cut-offs.” Kind of makes me wish, sometimes, that I’d grown up a yokel.
7. Walking on Sunshine
For sheer exuberance nothing quite matches “Walking on Sunshine.” And since it’s got sunshine in the title we’ll classify it as a summer song, although the official video, which shows the band walking along the Thames on a winter day, makes clear this was about the last thing on their minds.
6. Hot Fun in the Summertime
Sly and the Family Stone performed at Woodstock in 1969 and released “Hot Fun In the Summertime” soon thereafter. The slow, soulful melody takes the banal lyrics (“I cloud nine when I want to/Out of school, yeah/County fair in the country sun/And everything, it’s true, ooh, yeah”) and turns them into one of the coolest songs ever. A lot of summer songs are frantic in their pursuit of fun but “Hot Fun in the Summertime” is a good reminder that a good deal of summer is about conserving your energy in the heat.
5. California Gurls
Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” is a clear take-off of the Beach Boys song, except that tells the story from the female perspective, as in, “damn right we’re hot.” It’s a song that invites the male gaze and finds power in overt female sexuality. Why, the girls have sex on the beach and don’t mind getting sand in their stilettos. And this was Hillary Clinton’s ambassador to the girls of America! Yet there’s no denying that the beat is infectious and joyful and a lot of fun to sing in the car.
4. California Girls
It’s hard to think of a Beach Boys song that doesn’t bring to mind summer (except for, perversely, “Surf’s Up,” a weird psychedelic song). California Girls is not my favorite Beach Boys record but it’s the one that’s most overtly about summer. I doubt that in 2017 they could get away with referring to bikini-clad women as “Dolls by a palm tree in the sand,” although Katy Perry might consider it a compliment. In any event, it’s about being happy at the beach, in the sun, and contemplating female beauty. Now that’s summer!
3. Summer Breeze
What I love about this song is its ordinariness. It’s not straining after hackneyed images of manufactured fun; instead it’s rejoicing in the quiet day-to-day existence of summer. The windows are open and the kitchen curtains are blowing and you can hear music from the neighbor next door. And that great climax: “And I come home/from a hard day’s work/and you’re waiting there/not a care in the world.” As a kid I always thought that is what a perfect marriage would be, and you know what? It is.
2. Dancing in the Streets
Written by Marvin Gaye and released in 1964, “Dancing in the Streets,” has an optimism that wouldn’t be seen again in pop music for decades. The song calls for all the people of the world to come together and dance, and before the Sixties went completely haywire with war, riots and multiple assassinations, that seemed possible. This song is also a good reminder that summer also happens in the cities and is not just a rural phenomenon.
1. Call Me Maybe
When you talk about songs of the summer, this has got to be number one of all time. The song is not explicitly about summer except that the participants are scantily clad and have sex on their minds. No, what makes it a summer song is that it played all summer long, worming its way into the deepest part of our cortex. Released in 2012 just when social media was coming into its own, it became a huge ubiquitous hit, pouring out the radio all summer, and then, through YouTube parodies, out of Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. Those video parodies took on a life of their own, starting with the Harvard baseball team (see below). This soon became a strange form of homoerotic male bonding (see more below). That wouldn’t have happened in the halcyon summer of 1969 but it was still a lot of fun.
I recently argued that 1968 was the greatest year in pop music; you can make the case that maybe it was 1967 or 1969, but there’s no debate that the late sixties were pretty terrific.
So it’s shocking to consider that just eight years later we had what is probably the worst year in pop music. I had completely forgotten how bad it was until I listened to Chris Molanphy reviewing the number one hits of 1976 on Slate’s “The Gist” podcast. I listened to the podcast with growing incredulity as one terrible song followed another. The year was full of novelty songs, easy listening hits and disco-influenced garbage.
How did this happen? First of all, it’s important to mention that every year — even 1968 (remember “Honey“?) — has its share of schlock. But 1976 was impressive for being dominated by schlock. (Here are the top 100 songs of the year.)
It’s easy to point to contemporary events to explain the artistic output of an era, and in 1976 the U.S. was coming out of a bad time, with Watergate, the Vietnam War, gas shortages, inflation and a lousy economy still fresh in people’s mind. Arguably, the consequence could have been a turn to mindless music.
Then too, there was a rise in Album Oriented Radio, with many of the more serious music fans focusing on albums instead of singles. Indeed, 1976 had some great albums, including Stevie Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life”, the Ramones eponymous album, David Bowie’s “Station to Station,” The Eagles’ “Hotel California,” and Bob Dylan’s “Desire.” None of these artists had major hits on the singles charts in 1976.
My own explanation is simpler: cultural trends go in cycles and the tremendous tidal wave of great music from the 1960s had exhausted itself with nothing left to replace it except disco.
In any event, on to the actual music. Here are some highlights (lowlights?) from Molanphy’s podcast.
50 Ways to Leave Your Lover
We’ll start with the one acceptable number one song of the year. Believe it or not, this was Paul Simon’s only number one hit as a solo artist (he had three others with Simon and Garfunkel). It’s not a bad song but is inferior to “Kodachrome,” “Graceland” and “You Can Call Me Al.” It’s hard to remember what a major musical force Simon was in the 1970s, but he had a string of hits and was a frequent guest on Saturday Night Live (including the famed second episode, which put SNL on the map when he sang “Still Crazy After All Those Years” wearing a chicken suit.)
Disco Duck
From the best number one song of the year we now move to the worst. The problem with 1976 wasn’t disco per se, it was the way disco infected so many acts and spawned so many novelty songs. Give Rick Dees credit. He knew that the song was a joke, and maybe fun for about five minutes. He even named his act “Rick Dees and His Cast of Idiots,” suggesting that maybe this was a Mad Magazine spin-off.
A Fifth of Beethoven
Disco strikes again in a semi-novelty record. Walter Murphy takes the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, some of the most famous musical phrases in music history and gives it a disco beat. Is nothing sacred for crying out loud? The song, if you can call it that, is not exactly terrible, and how could it be with all that Beethoven? It’s just deeply weird. How weird? The writing credit goes to “Ludwig von Beethoven and Walter Murphy.” Talk about cultural appropriation!!! The song eventually appeared on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, making Murphy a very rich man.
You Should be Dancing
The only pure disco song to top the charts in 1976, “You Should be Dancing,” is not bad a far as disco songs go. It became even more famous the next year when John Travolta danced to it in Saturday Night Fever. Oh, and The Brothers Gibb set a fashion style by flaunting their hairy chests, another trend that would not last.
Tonight’s The Night
Welcome to the 1970s, when Roman Polanski thought it was ok to seduce a 13-year-old and Woody Allen made a highly regarded movie about an older man’s affair with a 17-year-old. “Tonight’s the Night” fits right in there — a song about taking a young woman’s virginity that includes the line “spread your wings and let me come inside.” This is the only number one hit that Rod Stewart wrote on his own, so it’s his full id on display. Nice.
Afternoon Delight
People were obsessed about sex in the 1970s. The sexual revolution of the 1960s went mainstream, as did porn (“Deep Throat”), “key parties,” the Playboy Mansion and divorce. And here we have a number one song about having sex mid-day (“skyrockets in flight”). The Starland Vocal Band won a Grammy for “Best New Artist” and then never had another hit single. They did have a variety show for six weeks in 1977; one of the show’s writers was David Letterman, so there’s that.
Convoy
Another huge fad in the mid-1970s was the CB Radio. For about 20 years blue collar workers had used the citizen band frequency to communicate with each other. It became a mainstream fascination during the energy crisis when truck drivers started using the CB to evade the 55 mile-an-hour speed limit that the government had imposed to save gas. The C.W. McCall song “Convoy” exploited that fad and eventually spawned a movie of the same name starring Kris Kristofferson and Ali McGraw. Needles to say, like many other popular artists in 1976, C.W. McCall never had another pop hit.
Silly Love Songs
Now we come to the most popular song of 1976. “Silly Love Songs,” was Paul McCartney’s answer to John Lennon, who claimed that McCartney wrote insipid love songs. So Paul’s response was to write an insipid song with an underlying disco beat that asked the burning question, “Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs, and what’s wrong with that, I’d like to know?” As Chris Molanphy points out, when “Silly Love Songs” became a massive hit, both Paul and John could point to the other and say “see, this proves my point.” But really, Paul McCarney’s greatest songs, “Hey Jude,” “Let It Be,” “Penny Lane,” “Fool on the Hill”, “Back in the USSR,” and “Eleanor Rigby” were not even love songs so he had no reason to apologize.
So, what a year. And yet out of the ash heap of 1976 arose new and exciting forms of music. Stevie Wonder would reinvent R&B for a mainstream audience; Bruce Springsteen would breathe new life into rock; we’d see the birth of Punk and the emergence of New Wave rock stars like Blondie, Elvis Costello, the Talking Heads. When Disco finally died whole new genres of exciting music were left standing.
Lest you think 1976 was a total loss, there was one terrific song in the year’s top 100. Sitting way down there at number 72 was “I’m Easy,” the Keith Carradine song from the movie “Nashville.” In the movie, which takes a sardonic look at American society through the lens of the Country music industry, Carradine plays a manipulative, womanizing folk singer. It says something about 70’s taste that a gaunt, grungy, hollowed-eye guy like that would be considered such a sex symbol. In the movie he sings this song to attract the middle class Lily Tomlin character, although three other women that he’s already slept with think he’s singing to THEM. It’s a soulful sensitive song that actually does manage to seduce Tomlin, although she quickly sees through him. It’s still on my all-time top 20 after all these years and somehow it came out in 1976.
Was 1968 the greatest year in popular music? To me that seems self-evident, unless you want to claim 1967. Or maybe 1969.
OK, so I was 14 years old at the time and it is well-known that the most meaningful music in your life is the music that was popular when you were in adolescence and beginning to have a sexual awakening. But it wasn’t my hormones that made 1968 such a great year – it was the music itself.
At least that’s what I thought until I listened to a Slate.com podcast featuring music historian Chris Molanphy, who pointed out that many of the top songs from 1968 were little more than schlock or elevator music. In other words, for every fantastic Number One like Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” there was a dog like Bobby Goldsboro’s “Honey.”
Molaphy’s theory is that music served as a refuge because 1968 was such a horrible year politically (assassinations, riots, war, etc.). Therefore some of the year’s most popular songs were mindless diversions from the evening news. Maybe that’s the reason, or maybe the truth is that every year is full of schlock and it takes a couple decades to realize it. Looking at the full list of top hits in 1968, though, it seems that about half the songs aimed to change society through social commentary that you’d never find in pop music today so I’m not sure how escapist it was.
In any event, here are ten interesting nuggets I learned from Molanphy or my own observations about the top hits of 1968.
1. “Hey Jude,” one of the all-time great songs, is still the longest single ever to top Billboard’s pop charts. It was also the Beatles song that stayed longest at Number One (nine weeks). At seven minutes and 11 seconds, it was twice as long as most pop hits, and every radio station played the whole thing. Even more unprecedented, the Beatles ended the song with a four-minute chant, giving pop music a rare sense of mysticism. I will never forget watching the “Hey Jude” clip (below) that appeared on The Smothers Brothers in October 1968. In retrospect, that moment, even more than Woodstock, was the high point of the feel-good “flower power” movement.
2. Another really great hit from 1968 was Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson,” a fragment of which had appeared in Mike Nichols’ “The Graduate” the year before. Paul Simon hadn’t finished the song when the movie premiered and it wasn’t released until the next summer. The song was initially titled “Mrs. Roosevelt,” but when Simon showed it to Nichols the director convinced him to change it the name of the seductress in the movie. The famous line if the song, “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?” was originally intended to refer to Simon’s boyhood hero Mickey Mantle but the syllables didn’t match up. In a song so deeply contemptuous of 1960’s America it was probably better anyway to refer back longingly to DiMaggio’s generation.
3. There were two instrumental Number One hits in 1968, both by international artists. First we had “Love Is Blue” by the French composer Paul Mauriat, who remains to this day the only French artist to have a chart-topping Billboard hit. The song was composed – with lyrics – for the Eurovision contest (as Luxemburg’s entry.) It didn’t win at Eurovision but became a huge hit in the U.S. Molanphy dismisses this song as the greatest piece of elevator music ever composed, but I have to admit that I owned this record and played it constantly.
4. The other major instrumental hit of 1968 was “Grazing in the Grass” by the South African musician “Hugh Masekela.” Of course I’ve heard this song a million times; it arguably invented the smooth jazz genre. But I never knew the music was from South Africa. Partly that’s because The Friends of Distinction added words and released their own hit single, which is now better known than the original. (And “Love is Blue” and “Grazing in the Grass” weren’t the only instrumental hits that year – only the two number one hits. Other notable instrumental songs from 1968 include “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” and my favorite, “Classical Gas” by Mason Williams. I can’t remember any instrumental hits in the 21st Century.)
5. Another Number One hit that might as well have been an instrumental recording was “Tighten Up” by Archie Bell and the Drells. This is a proto-Funk record in which Bell directs the band and the dancers on how to perform a dance called The Tighten Up. The remarkable thing about this song is that Drell had been drafted into the army and was recuperating in a German hospital from wounds suffered in Vietnam when the song hit Number One.
7. And then there’s Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass, a hugely popular instrumental band that had 17 Top 100 hits before they finally charted a Number One song with “This Guy’s in Love With You.” To demonstrate the oddity of 1968, this song was NOT an instrumental record. Nope, the band’s first Number One hit was vocalized by Herb Albert himself. Originally inserted as a knock-off number in a CBS TV special, the song so charmed viewers that it was rushed out as a single. And not only was this the first Number One hit for Herb Albert, it was the first Number One song by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Go figure.
8. Molanphy reserves his greatest scorn for Bobby Goldsboro’s weeper “Honey,” about a husband mourning his dead wife. He claims that it is considered by many to be the worst Number One song ever, although I’m sure the competition for that title is very steep. I have to admit that it’s pretty bad: consider these immortal lyrics: “She was always young at heart/Kinda dumb and kinda smart/And I loved her so”
9. If “Honey” was notable for anything other than its schlock, it was for exemplifying the trend toward country music crossing over into pop. A worthier country/pop entry in 1968 was Jeannie C. Reilly’s “Harper Valley P.T.A.” which scathingly attacked the hypocrisy of small town life.
10. Then there are Number One songs from 1968 that seem downright dangerous. The Doors’ “Hello I Love You” is ostensibly about Jim Morrison’s yearning for a girl walking down Venice Beach but the aggressiveness of the lyrics and the pulsing way in which they’re delivered seems scary even today. In any event it was the first 45 rpm stereo record.
So is 1968 the greatest year in music? I consistently liked more top songs from 1967 (Aretha’s “Respect,” The Monkees’ “I’m A Believer,” The Turtles’ “Happy Together,” The Doors’ “Light My Fire,” Bobby Gentry’s “Ode to Billy Joe,” The Association’s “Windy,” The Supremes’ “The Happening,” even Lulu’s “To Sir With Love.”) But any year in which “Hey Jude” could be heard on the radio for month after month has to rank high.
Suffice it to say that the Sixties really were the Golden Age of pop music. Almost every week another great new song appeared on the top 40 and since we all listened to the same Top 40 format we all had the same frame of reference. Those were the days, my friends. In fact, there was a big hit with that very title in 1968.
To those of us old enough to remember Joni Mitchell as the blonde sex-bomb of the folk music scene, the TMZ report that she was in a coma — whether true or not — is an alarming reminder of our own mortality. More than any other artist, she was a chronicler of the flower children of the 1960s. Indeed as the creator of the song “Woodstock” she essentially dictated how we should think about that era. It’s disquieting to be reminded of how old those “forever young” artists have actually become. And it’s even sadder to think that she has no family or loved ones to serve as her conservator.
As a performer, Joni never achieved massive success. She was on the verge of it after the popularity of her 1974 album “Court and Spark” but instead of creating more pop songs, she doubled down on the introspection, experimented with jazz and then ultimately (and unsuccessfully) tried her hand at political commentary
She will always be known as a songwriters’ songwriter. The list of artists who claim to be influenced by her is long, but she was also an outstanding performer in her own right. She burst onto the scene with one of the most beautiful voices in the industry (a voice that has deepened over the years thanks to her affinity for tobacco products). And she was beautiful, with chiseled cheekbones and long flowing hair. But more important than all of that was the emotion she put into her songs — the stories about love and loss that helped generations of young sensitive souls understand the feelings the couldn’t quite articulate themselves.
The writing itself is phenomenal. No one — not Dylan, not the Beatles — ever did a better job of phraseology, rhyming, or creating images. Listen to the words in the following songs and try to deny she wasn’t the best lyricist of her generation.
10. A Free Man in Paris
Supposedly written for her friend David Geffen, this has great sentimental value for me because when I heard the album “Court and Spark” I realized I could like Joni Mitchell on her own and not because of what she stood for as a sensitive songwriter. Even now, 40 years later, I love how her voice slides up and down the lyrics, expressing exuberance, vitality and freedom.
9. Chelsea Morning
Hillary Clinton claimed that she named her daughter after this song, and who knows, this might actually be one of those truthful Clinton claims. A cheery song, for a change. The sun poured in like butterscotch — I’m sure it did.
8. Song for Sharon
This is an unappreciated classic — one long story of a women walking around New York City ruminating on her failed relationships. Her friends tell her to find find herself a charity or “put some time into ecology” but all she wants to do is find another lover. There are no refrains and choruses, just one beautiful observation after another.
7. Blue
This is a song that makes you want to open a vein. Song are like tattoos? Love never really went right for Joni Mitchell, and the pain just pours out through these lyrics. Yet I do like to listen to it when I’m feeling self indulgently in a blue mood myself.
6. In France They Kiss on Main Street
One of her few joyful songs, this is an expression of free-love and a rejection of middle-class staidness, as the video images makes clear.
5. Carey
This song came out when I was in high school and from the very first lyric (“The wind is in from Africa”) it represented for me a glimpse into an exotic, free-spirited world that seemed to exist only in Fitzgerald and Hemingway novels. I’ve always wanted to go down to the mermaid bar and have someone buy me a bottle of wine. But alas, I went to college and got a job.
4 Both Sides Now
Ever since Judy Collins made this a massive hit, “Both Sides Now” has been Joni Mitchell’s most well-known and most frequently covered song. I’m not a big fan of the 1960’s versions, which are peppy and flower-childreny. But this rendition from 2000 by an older and wiser Joni is haunting. As she sings them now, the lyrics assume the melancholic meaning that was always intrinsically there. Somehow, when a 57 year old woman sings “I really don’t know life at all,” it has an entirely different meaning than when a 25 year-old tries it.
3. All I Want
The ultimate expression of what you can get out of love. It piles up concrete images of what she wants to do for her lover: knit him a sweater, write a love letter, culminating with the ultimate offer of “Do you want to take a chance on finding some fine romance with me.” This song always epitomized how a love affair — and even a marriage — can be fun, romantic, and mutually supportive, something that Joni herself was never able to accomplish for very long in her own life.
2. Help Me
Boy do I love this song. It was her biggest hit, but never even cracked the Billboard top ten. This is from the “Court and Spark” album, which was her most explicitly pop effort. I love the way her voice conveys the knowledge that love is once again going to cause pain, but she can’t help herself.
1. Coyote
From the “Hejira” album, when she was turning away from pop music. A great articulation of the contradictory desire to be loved and to be free at the same time. Here she is performing it during the Band’s “Last Waltz” movie. “No regrets coyote” might as well have been Joni’s own personal motto. Lord knows she lived life on her own terms.
The “Best Original Song” category – usually an Oscar snoozer – has been the subject this year of more controversy than usual.
First, the Academy inexplicably snubbed all the songs from “Inside Llewyn Davis,” the Coen Brothers depiction of a folk singer in pre-Dylan Greenwich Village. I can only assume the problem is that there were SO MANY good songs in the movie they canceled each other out. Because the soundtrack produced by T-Bone Burnett is crammed with great music, including my favorite“Fare Thee Well,” sung by Oscar Isaac and Marcus Mumford. (By the way, this song is credited as being a traditional folk ballad but Mumford rewrote it so significantly that I think it could have qualified as an original song. Here’s thetraditional version for the sake of comparison. )
Then there’s the controversy over the title song from the Christian-based movie “Alone Yet Not Alone,” which was first nominated and then declared ineligible on the grounds of inappropriate campaigning. Charges of anti-Christian bias flew. Obviously I’m not in a position to judge any rule violations that but I do note that it is a lovely song.
With the two best songs out of contention, it looks like the path is clear for “Frozen” to deliver Disney its tenth Best Song Oscar for “Let it Go”. This is not a type of song I usually like, coming out of the modern Broadway tradition of big big big big quavering singing and I don’t like this one either. It’s fitting that the song is performed by Idina Menzel, who plays Rachel’s birth mother on “Glee” because a lot of the Glee songs are belted out like anthems: “Here I am, look at me, I can SIIIIIINNNGGG!!!”
Back in the day, the “Best Original Song” category was almost as competitive as the best actor and actress races. Some of the losers from the 1930s and 1940s include some of the most beautiful songs ever written (e.g., “They Can’t Take that Away From Me,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “I’ve got You Under My Skin.”) Modern filmmakers are less likely to use original songs to advance a plot or set a mood, but the occasional great song does slip through. With that in mind, here are my choices for the ten best Oscar-winning songs of the past 50 years. (I don’t want to go back further because if I included films from the early days of Hollywood, this list would be made up of solely of songs from before I was born.)
10. Jai Ho (Slumdog Millionaire – 2008)
This is VERY original for an “original song.” It’s both exotic and westernized, providing an emotional release at the end of a generally depressing movie. The lyrics are a combination of Hindi, Urdu and Punjab (i.e., unintelligible for a Western audience) which makes it all the more remarkable that it won. Clearly the impulse to get up and dance transcends cultures and languages. By the way, this particular video is from a 2009 concert in Argentina, which among everything available on YouTube, best seemed to capture the dynamism of the song.
9. “Flashdance” (Flashdance – 1983)
Sometimes I have trouble keeping the dance-themed movies the 1980s straight. There was “Fame,” “Dirty Dancing,” Footloose” and of course “Flashdance.” What a feeling, indeed! Hewing closely to a post-Disco vibe, the song seems a little corny now, and of course the movie itself is terribly corny – working class girl just wants to dance!! This was “Billy Elliott “before “Billy Elliott.” In any event, I have to confess that I love the soundtracks to all the aforementioned 80’s dance movies, but “Flashdance” is my favorite song from all of them.
8. “Falling Slowly” (Once – 2007)
“Falling Slowly” is a very simple love song from “Once,” a movie about a street singer who connects with a Czech flower girl (Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová wrote and performed the songs). They make beautiful music together, but that’s all they do together because she has a husband and he has an ex-girlfriend with whom he is reconciling. Alas, their love remains unconsummated. Well, at least they have the Oscar and now a hit Broadway show.
7. Last Dance (Thank God It’s Friday – 1978)
I make no apologies in being a Donna Summer fan. I even saw her perform this song at a corporate event the year before she died and she was fantastic. Until I assembled, this list, though, I didn’t realize “Last Dance” came from a movie. I can’t imagine how I missed Thank God It’s Friday.
6. “The Streets of Philadelphia” (Philadelphia – 1993)
You have to say this for the Academy, they do occasionally reflect the musical tastes of popular culture. Disco in the 1970s, Rap in the 2000’s and eventually even Rock with this award to Bruce Springsteen. It’s hard to believe it’s been 20 years since the movie “Philadelphia” came out; and even harder to believe there was a time when Springsteen deigned to appear at the Academy Awards. But then, this is the greatest AIDS awareness song of all time and I’m sure he wanted to use the Oscar platform to further raise awareness.
5. “The Windmills of Your Mind” (The Thomas Crown Affair – 1968)
“The Windmills of Your Mind” is one of the great sultry pop songs of the last 1960s, especially as performed by the always soulful Dusty Springfield. Yet it’s actually Noel Harrison who performs the song in the movie “The Thomas Crown Affair.” Hearing his rushed and careless rendition makes you wonder how this song was even nominated, much less a winner. I’m including both versions below to demonstrate how two singers can achieve dramatically different effects with the same song.
4. “Skyfall” (Skyfall – 2012)
It’s really amazing that no song from a James Bond movie had ever won an Academy Award until last year when “Skyfall” finally delivered one. Not “Goldfinger,” which is the best of them all, nor “Live and Let Die,” “Nobody Does it Better” or even “You Only Live Twice.” It would have pretty hard to deny Adele anything in 2013 and she certainly deserved it.
3. “I’m Easy” (Nashville – 1975)
Of all the movies mentioned in this list, Robert Altman’s masterpiece “Nashville” is unquestionably the greatest. A story of ambition, corruption and backstabbing in the Country music industry, the film delivered several great songs, including this Oscar winner by Keith Carradine, who plays a selfish womanizer who somehow manages to make every woman in the audience think he’s singing directly to her.
2. “I just called to Say I Love You” (The Woman in Red – 1984)
Huh, this classic Stevie Wonder song comes from a pretty mediocre movie called “The Woman in Red?” Who knew?
1 “Shaft” (Shaft 1971)
The most electric moment in the history of the Academy Awards arguably occurred in 1971 when a bare-chested, heavily chained Isaac Hayes and his synthesizer were rolled onto the stage during a wild performance of the theme from Shaft. (The only video I could find was in this Oscar wrap-up for the year. Scroll down to find it.) This was the era when Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis and Dean Martin were considered the cool cats. Not after this.
So what’s missing from the list? Well, for starters, I really can’t stand any song by Barbra Streisand, including “The Way We Were” and “Evergreen” (the theme from “A Star is Born” so they’re off the list. I also don’t like big loud anthems with a lot of booming vocalism, such as “You Light Up My Life” and “My Heart Will Go On.” Never been a fan of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” which was inexplicably a huge hit. Having said that, have my perverse music tastes caused me to overlook anything that really should be included on the “best of” list? Let me know.
Really!!? 