Paul's Incomplete Guide To Classic Pop 1975-79 Part 5

'Sultans Of Swing' by Dire Straits (1978)

It's like this: A friend relays a story from the previous weekend about a desperate pair of small time jazzers. He gives the protagonists names like Harry and George. But you know it's actually about him. He peppers the conversation with quasi-hip references to 'the jazz goin' down' and the like. His delivery is cool, detached, inexpressive even. Paradoxically perhaps, this draws you in. All the while he's fiddling around with an old Fender Stratocaster. And he punctuates the story with crisp chords, fills and lines, picks and scrapes, the likes of which you've never really heard before. In fact, after a while you realize that the real star of this little anecdote is the guitar. Whilst telling you the story he's managed to come up with the single purest distillation of the 'Strat' sound that there's ever been. And as the story ends you think, why doesn't this guy quit his teaching job and become a star?

Paul's Incomplete Guide To Classic Pop 1975-79 Part 4

'Surrender' by Cheap Trick (1978)

"Surrender, surrender, but don't give yourself away." Now there's a credo to live by.

      I’ll get straight to it: Cheap Trick should have been the biggest band in the world. Photogenic front man who was as gifted a vocalist as any in rock. Check. Even more photogenic bass player. Check. ‘Quirky looking’ guitarist who could churn out brilliant power pop at will. Check. An even more quirky looking drummer who played ‘songs’ rather than ‘beats’. Checkmate. Ah, that it were a perfect world…

      One of the main reasons Cheap Trick never achieved the world-straddling success (and, no ‘The Flame’ doesn’t count) they deserved was their lyrics, even though those very same lyrics were among the group's strongest virtues. The words were just too darkly comic, too snidely cynical, too brilliantly subversive for mass consumption.   

      ‘Surrender’ is Cheap Trick’s best song; and a good encapsulation of what made them great, as well as what made them a difficult sell too.

      Here’s the first verse:

Mother told me, yes she told me, I'd meet girls like you
She also told me, "Stay away you'll never know what you'll catch
Just the other day I heard of a soldier's falling off
Some Indonesian junk that's going round…”

Suffice to say we’re a long way from McCartney’s mull in Kintyre with its comforting mists rolling in from the sea.

      “I heard of a soldier’s falling off, some Indonesian junk that’s going round” can be read (at least) three ways: the most literal interpretation is off an army man falling off an Indonesian boat (boats are known as ‘junks’ around parts of SE Asia); a deeper reading involves some poor soul on the nod (or ‘falling off’) due to a lethal dose of heroin; the third interpretation concerns a lethal dose of a different kind – a case of venereal disease so extreme that it’s caused some astonishingly unlucky soldier’s penis to fall off (hence the placement of the possessive apostrophe in the lyric above).

      And it’s a hell-ride from there.

      In the second verse the father enters the picture; and he’s quick to assure the kid that Mom knows of what she speaks; that, in fact, she was once in the Women’s Army Corps:

Father says, "Your mother's right, she's really up on things
Before we married, Mommy served in the WACs in the Philippines"
Now, I had heard the WACs recruited old maids for the war
But mommy isn't one of those I've known her all these years…

Here the kid seems to be reticent to believe what he knows deep down to be true: his parents are cooler than he is. He completely overreaches in his attempt to discredit Dad by making himself out to be more worldly than he is; the nonsense about 'old maids' only serves to discredit himself. (An earlier version of the song leaves no doubt as to kid's insecurities in the worldliness stakes, with the preposterous false-bravado of “Now, I had heard that WACs were dykes, either that, old maids or whores.”)

      Any doubts the preceding verses throw up as to who's cooler are removed once and for all in the Freudian nightmare that is the final verse:

Whatever happened to all this season's losers of the year?
Every time I got to thinking, where'd they disappear?
But when I woke up, Mom and Dad are rolling on the couch
Rolling numbers, rock and rollin', got my KISS records out...

That's one hell of a role reversal. The kid walks in to find that his parents are not only having sex (and are, by extension, debunking the whole 'no sex after marriage' myth), they're also smoking dope and listening to loud stupid rock music. 

Now, those choruses:

Mommy's alright, Daddy's alright, they just seem a little weird

Surrender, surrender, but don't give yourself away...

The moral of the parents' 'weird' behaviour (as outlined above) is, I think, this: When you become an adult you are joining a world often marked by pain and compromise; but it is possible to retain your youthful exuberance, your childlike wonder, the things that make you you; and never mistake innocence for naiveté (the parents here are demonstrably not naive with their talk of death and disease, but they are, I would argue, innocents).

      This is possibly the best, and most honest, song about growing up that I've heard. The parents have 'surrendered' to adulthood; they've had a kid. But they haven't given themselves away.

Paul's Incomplete Guide To Classic Pop 1975-79 Part 3

Meat Loaf - You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth (Hot Summer Night) & Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad (1978)

Bat Out Of Hell. A Dickensian dichotomy of a record. The best of times: 'You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth' and 'Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad'. The worst of times: The bloated title track, and the never-ending and ever-dreadful 'Paradise By The Dashboard Lights'.
      The Springsteen connection: Much of the Bat Out Of Hell plays like Bruce Springsteen's Born To Run album beamed in from a parallel universe. And Born To Run's key ingredient (apart from Bruce himself) was Roy Bittan's piano. It is his romantically wide-screen playing that helps elevate the relatively well-worn 'teenage wasteland' concerns of Born To Run songs like 'Thunder Road' and 'Jungleland' to almost mythical status. In these songs, as in all great rock 'n' roll, the musical backdrop implies a profundity that simply isn't there on paper.
      Take this line from Thunder Road: "Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays..."
      Okay, as rock lyrics go, it's not bad; in fact, it's really good. But when combined with Bittan's lyrical arpeggios it is transformed into a thing of almost unbearable beauty (and is there anything more profound than real beauty?).
      What has Bruce Springsteen's piano player got to do with Bat Out Of Hell? Well, a lot as it happens. Meat Loaf and his songwriter Jim Steinman were so keen to make a record that sounded like Born To Run that they hired, you guessed it, Roy Bittan to play piano on every track. And they got Bruce's drummer Max Weinberg to play drums.
      A theory: There is an inverse relationship between the quality of Bat Out Of Hell's songs and their similarities to Bruce. So, the more Meat Loaf tries to play Springsteen at his own game, the worse the result. For instance, the title track 'Bat Out Of Hell' is, in its lyrical concerns, arrangement, and even melody, a thinly veiled 'Thunder Road' re-write; and it's horrible. Whereas, perhaps the album's high point, 'Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad', is the least Springsteen sounding track on the record (as 'Bat' producer Todd Rundgren once pointed out, it could almost have been an Eagles song with its smooth harmonies and vaguely country lilt).
      And another thing: There's a bit in 'You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth' when Meat Loaf sings "You know there's not another moment, not another moment, not another moment to waste" over an ascending chord progression. It's probably my favourite moment in all of music.

Paul's Incomplete Guide To Classic Pop 1975-79 Part 2

'That's Rock 'n' Roll' - Shaun Cassidy (1977)

In 1977 I was still a year away from being a regular (or even semi-regular) radio listener; and the main way I got to hear pop music was through after-school turntable play at friends' places; and of all the songs I got introduced to in this way 'That's Rock 'n' Roll' was easily my favourite. And I still like it a great deal...

      ...but, I’m prepared to admit that despite the fact that it was written by power pop wunderkind and sometimes genuine rocker Eric Carmen (yes it’s true, the guy who sang the exquisitely awful ‘Hungry Eyes’ from Dirty Dancing used to be good, very good; check out the first Raspberries album for proof), ‘That's Rock ‘n’ Roll’ fits nicely into sub-category of songs about rock ‘n’ roll that contain very little actual rock ’n’ roll (other prime examples being Billy Joel’s 1980 hit ‘It’s Still Rock ‘n’ Roll To Me’ and Starship’s massively over-produced ‘We Built This City’ from 1985); with the most glaringly un-rock ‘n’ roll aspects being the virtually non-existent drums, Cassidy’s overly breathy rendering of the lyric, and the sax fills and solo that no one would ever confuse with Clarence Clemons (or The Stones’ Bobby Keys).

      The Joe Hardy connection: At the time Shaun Cassidy was starring in a television series called The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries in which he played Joe Hardy, an ameuter sleuth, who together with his brother Frank (played by Parker Stevenson), maintained impeccable hairstyles (whilst solving the odd 'mystery'). 
      (The Hardy Boys story lines were interspersed with largely separate Nancy Drew mysteries with Pamela Sue Martin playing the feisty girl detective; and I managed to develop a bit of a pre-adolescent crush on Pamela Sue, which is probably not of any real interest to anybody, and is certainly not germane to the topic…)
      Anyway, the ninth episode in the first series ('The Mystery of the Flying Courier') opens with Joe Hardy giving a fully arranged rendition of  'That's Rock 'n' Roll'. The fact that Joe had no solid background in singing, let alone performing dead-on Shaun Cassidy covers, seems to have been conveniently overlooked in the name of stunningly cynical cross-promotion. I would say that it's worth seeking out the episode and/or the series on DVD, but that would be being untruthful...

Paul's Incomplete Guide To Classic Pop 1975-79 Part 1

'January' by Pilot (1975)

"January, sick and tired, you've been hanging on me." Heard that everywhere in 1975. Never knew what it meant. Never realised that January was a girl's name like May, April or June. Never realised that the song was, like a lot of vital art, probably alluding to a faltering relationship. I actually thought the lyric was "January, second time you've been hanging on me" and that the singer was lamenting the fact that he'd had a disastrous start to the last couple of years - damn that month of January.
      To latter-day ears it sounds a lot like what a mid-'70s McCartney-led Beatles single would have been like had they stayed together (one can easily imagine 'January' joining 'Michelle', 'Eleanor', 'Prudence' and the rest of an illustrious group of girls feted by the Beatles in song).


'Single Bed' by Noosha Fox (1976)

S-s-s-single bed. Clap. Clap. S-s-s-single bed. Clap. Clap. If the anemic, forty-something, Noosha Fox took a demo of this song to a record company today she'd be summarily escorted from the premises by security guards under strict instructions never to let her darken their door again - her mere presence having the potential to 'harm the brand' or some such. 

      In 1976, however, things were different. You could have very little going for you image-wise – she also had lank, lifeless hair and sang like a Frenchwoman impersonating an Englishwoman – but if your song had a hook that was catchy enough to get a run in the schoolyard, then you had a hit on your hands.

      Maybe the hint of permissiveness in the lyric also helped its chances. After all, Noosha spends much of the song affirming that her bed isn’t big enough for two. Is she happy about this state of affairs? No, we – the playground jury – assumed not. 

      There was still some ambiguity though: was the fact that “all (she) got is a single bed” an admittance of defeat, that she’d be sleeping alone, perhaps, to take it to its extreme, in perpetuity?; or would these would-be lovers run the risk of being cramped and make-do with the titular single bed?

      I personally think its success was all down to those handclaps…

'The Way That You Do It' by Pussyfoot

More Beatles influence (it sounds almost exactly like Ob La Di ob La Da). And more Gallic flavour (this time courtesy of a ludicrous, and stridently meaningless faux-French refrain that can best be 'translated' as "ooh nunna hiyah, ooh nunna hiyah, hiyah). 
      Again, the Beatles influence went unnoticed by me at the time: although other acts were having huge success releasing tracks highly derivatibe of the Fab Four (ELO and 10cc being the most obvious, but by no means only, examples), the Beatles themselves were not particularly in vogue either as a group (Beatles nostalgia as we know it today only truely kicked in with the advent of the CD and the re-release of their albums on that format), or as individuals (John had 'retired' and become the world's most musically gifted house husband; George was releasing hitless albums that you've never heard of like Extra Texture (1975) and Thirty-Three & 1/3 (1976); McCartney had hit a mid-career slump (Wings At The Speed Of Sound anyone? Didn't think so.); and Ringo, I'm not sure what Ringo was doing.


'Glass Of Champagne' by Sailor 

Hello Sailor...goodbye.