Song Nebula

“Bish Bash Bosh” (1974) – The Jook * Written by Ralf Kimmet * 45: “Bish Bash Bosh” / “Crazy Kids” * Produced by John Burgess * Label: RCA Victor

“Bish Bash Bosh” was the final A-side by the Jook, a glam-era singles band that branched off of John’s Children (who included Marc Bolan) and broke up when two members left to join Sparks. The Jook apparently inspired the Bay City Rollers, who mastered the fashion, if not their models’ manner of bedroom-eyes musical assurance. Here’s Jook drummer Chris Townson, quoted in Wired Up: Glam, Proto Punk and Bubblegum: “We were playing in Scotland and this rather scruffy long-haired bunch, who looked like we did a year previously, came in after the gig and said what a fantastic show it was and how impressed they were with the image. Not two months later, even less, we saw these same guys and they’d patched it up with lots of tartan and everything. It was essentially the Jook image…. [and] bloody irritating when you go somewhere and they say, ‘You look like the Bay City Rollers.’ I think I came close to punching many people.”

“Manifiesto” (1973) – Victor Jara * Written and produced by Victor Jara * LP (Mexico): Manifiesto * Label: Discos Pueblo

“Manifiesto” by Chile’s Victor Jara became the title track to an album assembled after military thugs from the Pinochet dictatorship arrested, tortured and murdered him in September 1973. Jara had intended the song to appear, along with six other tracks he’d already recorded and others yet to be recorded, on an album called Tiempos que cambian (times that change). Listening to this with the knowledge that we’d lose him so soon after its creation still makes one’s skin tingle. It would have the same effect without that knowledge, though. “I don’t sing just to sing,” go the lyrics. “I sing because the guitar makes sense and has a reason… The song that is brave will always remain a new song.” Only in summer 2016 did Pedro Barrientos, the army officer who murdered Jara and who had escaped to Florida in the late 1980s, face a trial. The jury found him guilty, moving his eventual extradition to Chile a few steps closer.

“Buzeqesh Goca” (1994) – Lavier Bariu * Trad. * Produced by Ben Mandelson and Kim Burton * CD: Songs from the City of Roses (1998) * Label: Globe Style

The late Albanian clarinetist Laver Bariu got first class treatment on this 1998 CD (recorded live to digital in 1994) called Songs from the City of Roses by Globestyle, back when that label actively bird-dogged music from all corners. UK musician and scholar Ben Mandelson, along with ethnomusicologist Kim Burton, recorded Bariu in Përmet, near the Greek border, capturing a bandleader with decades of hard work and discipline under his belt, rallying his men forward with his cascading melody lines. “Buzeqesh Goca” means “smile, Goca” (the name of a girl – rhymes with ‘boats-ah’), and will make you want to pick up any instrument nearby to try and play along. In 1978 Bariu appeared in a black and white Albanian film called Gjeneral Gramofoni, which is set in the 1930s.

Born in New York City to Armenian immigrant parents, oud master John Berberian introduced the fascinating sounds of his heritage to many an American ear during the 1960s. His music’s immediate danceability, too, didn’t compromise any of its authority. What ever happened to the once-prolific Berberian, whose prodigious output appeared on labels like MGM, Roulette, and Verve? Nothing dramatic. He still makes music, but he simply allowed his life to diversify in other directions.

“One Bad Apple” (1971) – The Osmonds * Written by George Jackson * 45: “One Bad Apple” / “He Ain’t Heavy…He’s My Brother” * LP The Osmonds * Produced by Rick Hall * Label: MGM

In his Soul Country: Making Music and Making Race in the American South (pp. 118-124), Charles L. Hughes writes that the Osmonds’ “One Bad Apple” was as “controversial as any piece of U.S. popular culture.” This was because its successful mimicry of the Jackson 5 sound came off to some as participation “in the white rip-off of black cultural resources.” Its inclusion in soul station playlists, too, seemed to fly in the face of “soul’s extramusical meaning.” Hughes points out that the single can also be seen as a model specimen for the “racial and stylistic crisscrossing” going on at the FAME studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. The record was, after all, the product of a white producer (Rick Hall) and a black songwriter (George Jackson) who had been recommended to Hall by another white producer (Billy Sherrill). The record’s multiracial Fame Gang studio musicians backed five white young men singing in a black idiom for a label run by a conservative white man (Mike Curb). In spite of any controversy, the song would launch ongoing successes for everyone involved, and lives on as a cheerful signifier of seventies youth. An Osmonds cartoon created in 1972 used the song for its opening sequence.

“Should I Stay or Should I Go” (1982) – The Clash * Written and produced by the Clash * 45: “Should I Stay or Should I Go” / “Cool Confusion” (b-sides varied after first issue) * LP: Combat Rock * Label: CBS (UK)/Epic (US)

Heavy rotation inconsequence (falling short of the Top 40 in its day) that nonetheless became consequential, managing to maintain, in the present, the don’t-give-a-f*ck attitude that first hooked teenage boys in the early eighties. The song became an instant staple among non-metal garage band kids who never looked as serious as the Ayn Rand characters on the single’s European picture sleeve. Oddly enough, the Big Boy restaurant franchise resisted using the song during its 1984 “Should He Stay or Should He Go” mascot campaign, although TV-stink finally did get all over it when a 1992 Levi’s commercial propelled it to #1 in the UK. The song remains a lawsuit candidate for its reliance on John’s Children’s “Let Me Know,” which probably lifted from the Spencer Davis Group’s “High Time Baby,” which probably lifted from the Righteous Brothers’ “Little Latin Lupe Lu.”

Named after the Greek mythological figure who challenged Apollo to a flute contest, the Czech folk-rock group Marsyas’s debut LP appeared in 1978 and they’ve recorded a few live reunion albums in recent years. Their second album (Kousek Přízně from 1982), contains a soothing, organic cover version of Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s “From the Beginning” that sounds as though Crosby, Stills, and Nash could have consulted on the vocal arrangement. From what I gather, the words’ meanings are quite different from the original, with the title translating to “cold bath.”

“After the Rain” (1979) – Bruce Cockburn * Written by Bruce Cockburn * LP: Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws * Produced by Gene Martynec * Label: True North

“After the Rain” is a wordy expression of pantheistic ecstasy in which a frolicking piano hook settles into a bemused minor 7th chord. The song’s bliss-amid-blight theme recurs all throughout Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws, perhaps the most poetic and musically sophisticated of all Christian pop albums. The following year of 1980 would find the inventive Canadian singer-singwriter Cockburn newly divorced and taking a much harder look at his world.

Antonio Giron – “Corrido a Honduras” (1955) * Written by Antonio Giron * LP: Songs and Dances of Honduras * Label: Folkways

Tucked away on this 1955 Folkways release, which otherwise has a coarse field-recording sound, is a quite polished “ballad for Honduras.” The song’s main thrust is loyalty to the beautiful Central American country, but it also name-checks both the national hero Morazán (a freedom fighter and eventual president of the Federation of Central American States who fell to an assassin in 1842) and the Virgin of Suyapa, patroness of Honduras.  Why do the liner notes, written by Doris Stone, go out of their way to keep the suave-sounding performer of “Corrido a Honduras” a mystery? This is a mystery in itself. Is it to preserve an aura of authenticity for Peter K. Smith’s field recordings? Performing credits go to “Instrument: Guitar,” and a footnote cranes its head in to point out that the contracted usage of “que ellos” is typical of songs “not sung by a professional singer.” Writing credit, though, is given to a man named Antonio Giron, so I’ll assume that the performance, worthy of much better recognition and respect, is also by him.

“Don’t Make Promises” (1967) – Gary Puckett and the Union Gap * Written by Tim Hardin * 45: * “Woman, Woman” / “Don’t Make Promises” * LP: The Union Gap Featuring Gary Puckett * Produced by Jerry Fuller * Label: Columbia

The costume gimmick didn’t match the sound of Gary Puckett’s group at all: his big casino voice and the records’ bloated arrangements (mostly by Al Capps) catered, with financial savvy, to the other side of the generational divide. Then as now, kids were likely to change the station on parent-friendly hit songs like “Woman, Woman,” “Lady Willpower,” and “Young Girl.” But in the Union Gap’s hands, Tim Hardin’s “Don’t Make Promises,” a song admittedly hard to go wrong with, gets an ideal commercial treatment.