Song Nebula

“No New Tale to Tell” (1987) – Love and Rockets * Written by David J (words) and Love and Rockets (music) * Produced by Love and Rockets * 45: “No New Tale to Tell” / “Earth Sun Moon” * LP: Earth Sun Moon * Label: Beggar’s Banquet * Billboard charts: #18 (Rock Tracks)

Although they were offshoots of Bauhaus, who were goth rock royalty, Love and Rockets (named after the Hernandez Brothers cult comic) offset their alt aura with a certain bloke-iness. The sounds and personae leaned toward hooks, power chords and male camaraderie, but then leaned further still toward socially trangressive, “going against nature” subject matter.

The lean was the thing. Their 1987 “No New Tale to Tell” is exhibit A: an acoustic chord sequence strums its way through a paradoxical harmonic minor neighborhood (like the Flirtations’ “Nothing But a Heartache”) with a halt-then-skitter cadence like we hear in Manfred Mann’s (not Sweet’s) “Fox on the Run.” If you draw dot-to-dot lines on its notes as played on the bass guitar (D-F-C-A on the fifth and third frets), you get a leaning column, an italicized lower case L, as in “leaning” (not straight) and “love and rockets.”

The title refrain nods toward Ecclesiastes’ “nothing new under the sun” motif and the lyrics equate the complications of human nature with the complexities of a flower. Natural but hardly black-and-white. This was a favorite theme of theirs, cf. “Yin and Yang (The Flowerpot Man)” and also “Holiday on the Moon,” wherein the lyrical theme of “having a wonderful time” pairs up with with pop music’s traditionally mopiest sequence (Im – VI – VIIb – Im). Love and Rockets’ formula, surprisingly, seemed more palatable to American radio, who gave them the attention that the stations in their native UK did not.

P.S. That’s British flautist Mel Thorpe taking the solo, not Ian Anderson, as you might have suspected.

“I Hate My School” (1981) * Written by Jeff McDonald * EP: Red Cross * Label: Posh Boy

It’s quite a story: The two McDonald brothers, Jeff and Steve from Hawthorne, California, released their debut EP full of unserious pop culture punk in 1981. Shortly after, the serious legal team for the International Committee of the Red Cross informed them that they would have to rebrand. The moral, possibly, is that every band starting out should choose a problematic copyright name just to see if they can at least get arrested. “Annette’s Got the Hits,” a goof on Muscle Beach Party and its ilk, would be the one that got the attention of KROQ up the road in L.A., but the key track was “I Hate My School,” in which the McDonalds flip a minute-plus-seventeen bird at the “rah rahs,” surfers, jocks and bookworms at Hawthorne High. This happens to be the very institute the Beach Boys had drawn inspiration from in 1963 (the year Jeff was born) for “Be True to Your School.” Things change, or maybe not. In The Lost Beach Boy (2007), Jon Stebbins reports how David Marks and Dennis Wilson would have to deal with the ongoing sneers and assaults of the surfers and jocks back then. Red Cross would become Redd Kross and would work for decades in boiling down pop-rock to its essence in their mass kitsch kitchen.

“The Torture Never Stopped” (1976) – Frank Zappa * Written and produced by Frank Zappa * LP: Zoot Allures * Label: Warner Bros.

“The Torture Never Stopped” reaches you like an exercise in willful discomfort. Zappa bombilates right in your ear about a ghastly dungeon scenario which seems like the ideal plot device for a man with a Ph.D. in scatalogy. Here’s another possible raison for its etre you may have come up with: he’s counteracting San Francisco’s Grateful Dead, an ensemble that the Los Angeles king Mother likely didn’t like. Their 1975 Blues for Allah album brought forth “The Music Never Stopped,” which had this for an opening line: “There’s mosquitoes on the river, fish are rising up like birds.” Here’s the opening line on Frank’s: “Flies all green ‘n buzzin’ in this dungeon of despair.” But it turns out Zappa was already performing this live with Captain Beefheart before the Dead album came out. (You can hear on The Muffin Goes to College how morbidly gleeful Van Vliet sounded in contrast to Zappa’s official version.) Biographer Barry Miles tells us that “The Torture Never Stopped” is actually a direct response to Zappa’s 10-day sentence, in the spring of ’65, in the San Bernardino County Jail. He wound up there for an alleged pornographic recording he’d made, and the experience quite possibly unleashed the outraged and outrageous libertine persona that held forth for the rest of his prodigious career.

“In My Little Corner of the World” (1960) – Anita Bryant * Written by Bob Hilliard and Lee Pockriss * Produced by Lew Douglas * 45: “In My Little Corner of the World” / “Anyone Would Love You” * LP: In My Little Corner of the World (1961) * Label: Carlton * Charts: Billboard (Hot 100, #10)

Anita Bryant’s top ten recording of “In My Little Corner of the World,” produced by Lew Douglas and arranged by 101 Strings stalwart Monte Kelly, transcended its humble lyrical implications. All participants aimed for the cosmos. We forget how big and commanding Bryant’s voice was and how well-matched it sounded alongside the lavish pop orchestrations of the day. (A follow-up album went for a “songs about the world” theme.) But our thoughts inevitably drift toward her late ’70s anti-gay activism, her fearful “human garbage” utterances, and then satires begin writing themselves: “In My Little Corner of My Brain,” “My Little Corner of the World is the Only Corner of Any Value,” etc.  The song title also morphs into a self-indicting syndromic label for the Oklahoma native Bryant’s human rights-challenged corner of the U.S. We struggle not to stroke the brush broadly in this way. Many cover versions of this song have sprouted elsewhere, most of them truer in lyrical sentiment, and therefore less spectacular.  Marie Osmond (who had also updated Bryant’s “Paper Roses”) recorded a cuddly country version in 1974, while Yo La Tengo sang it from a proper corner in 1997.

“Los Oprimidos” (1978) – José-Luis Orozco * Trad. * LP: Canta 160 Años Del Corrido Mexicano y Chicano * Label: Bilingual Media Productions

Before he recorded this 1978 album, and especially after, Mexico City’s José-Luis Orozco established himself as a gathering force of Mexican folk song. A one-time member of his home city’s boys choir, the musically-inclined Orozco emigrated in the late 1960s to California, where he evidently realized he couldn’t separate his tendencies toward musical and social consciousness. He began teaching, collecting songs, and recording while working on degrees at Berkeley and the University of San Francisco, where he earned a Master’s Degree in Multicultural Education.

We know Orozco now as the simpatico, kid-friendly Smithsonian Folkways resource for Mexican-American folk song, so the shadowed and serious young man on the cover of his first record, José-Luis Orozco Sings 160 Years of Mexican and Chicano Corridos, is an eye-catching contrast. The back cover introduces him aptly as being attentive to how “social contrasts and social struggles are universal realities which transcend borders and nationalities.”

The album’s opening corrido, “Los Oprimidos (The Oppressed),” dates back to 1821, immediately after the Mexican War of Independence. It’s a song that acknowledges that conflict’s overall collective effort, and also the galvanizing spirit of Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the “priest of Guanajuato” and spiritual father of Mexico, but concludes that the suffering of the “sad Indians,” the Native Americans and Mestizos who had already lost so much, is not likely to ebb.

“Los Guisados de la Berenjena” (2006) – Aman Aman * Trad. * Album: Música i Cants Sefardis D’Orient i Occident * Label: Galileo MC

Aman Aman are a side project by Mara Aranda and Efrén López, whose Catalonian group L’Ham de Foc (“the fire hook” in Catalan) got their names in circulation among Spanish and world music listeners. The offshoot enabled the two to explore the music of the Sephardic Jews, who had spread out into Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa after their expulsion from Spain in the 15th Century. It’s a musical trail that’s rich with distinct traditions and enchanting sounds. Their opulent version of the old song “Los Guisados de la Berenjena” describes seven ways to prepare eggplant, a Sephardic suppertime staple. Other versions of the song, from days of yore, are known to give as many as thirty-five different recipes. A repeating phrase between each verse gives a nod to “Uncle Cerasí,” who enjoys “wine, wine, and wine.”

“I Believe in Sunshine” (1967) – A Passing Fancy * Written and produced by Greg Hambleton * 45: “I Believe in Sunshine” / “She Phoned” (Columbia) * LP: A Passing Fancy (1968) * Label: Columbia, Boo (LP)

The only album by this Toronto quintet, who chose a name that implied a short life, had a striking, delicate butterfly on the cover, radiating a sense of hand-crafted independence. The back cover’s song titles and credits appeared in stencil-free characters full of character. Art direction credits go to “Rainbow Ink, incorporating Cannabis Rex and the Pig,” and typography to the Tolkien-inspired pseudonym Fatty Bolger. Its label—unsurprisingly—is a small entity called Boo, but four singles (all on the album) preceded it—surprisingly—on Columbia, the major-est of labels. Still, the music preserves a garage-bound crudity. The opener, “I’m Losing Tonight,” is a keeper for its uptempo libido, while the other standout, “I Believe in Sunshine,” grabs you for its more complex, melancholic layers. It’s written, with undoubtedly cheerful and commercial intentions, by Tuesday Records founder Greg Hambleton (the brother of Ferguson, who also appears on the album and will later replace band leader Greg Price). When Jay Tefler sings, though, you know his winter breath vapors are visible, and you imagine the Canadian sun sinking dark orange behind him at something like 4:30 in the afternoon. It’s teenage music from a realm where sunshine is precious, where not much of it’s left after the school dismissal bell rings. See their band publicity photo on the too-cold playground. Hear how the piano + organ interlude seem to be emanating from an ice cave. The album sequence follows this track up with another Hambleton composition called “Island,” which merges “In My Room” with “I Am a Rock.” “I Believe in Sunshine” gets a further dose of wistfulness from this subsequent banishment to the basement.

“Wanted” (1975) – The Osmonds * Written by Alan, Wayne and Merrill Osmond * Produced by Mike Curb * 45: “Havin’ a Party” / “Wanted” (UK only) * Label: MGM/Kolob

“Wanted” is a hidden Osmonds goodie, released only as the B-side for the 1975 UK single “Havin’ a Party.” The A-side, moderately successful over there, had appeared on Love Me for a Reason, which was their panicky answer to the poor sales of their ambitious The Plan. “Wanted,” which had a 1975 copyright, happened to be one of their best recordings. It’s a song sung by Wayne that moves back and forth between chugging “Crazy Horses” rock and mid-seventies soul-in-the-Milky-Way dreaminess and features a sublime-sounding guitar solo. Considering songs like this, and others that Wayne had more prominence in (and also his underutilized lead guitar chops), it seems that he took quite a few, maybe more than we realize, for the team. The difference between this strong track and the weak 1975 Proud One album is staggering. The “Crazy Wayne” joke-teller stage role he filled for the rest of their years possibly masked a frustrated penchant for interesting musical expression. The scene in the bio drama Inside the Osmonds (2001), where the otherwise quiet soldier Wayne— dressed as a crab for the Donny and Marie show—tells Merrill that his chances for a legitimate recording career had officially been dashed, might be one of its truest moments. If the family’s perception of commercial expediency buried additional tracks like this, that’s a very sad thing. (Adapted from my Osmonds mega-post at Early 70s Radio.) 

“Plastic Fantastic Lover” (live) (1969) – Jefferson Airplane * Written by Marty Balin * Produced by Al Schmitt * LP: Bless Its Pointed Little Head * Label: RCA Victor

Not one of rock’s classic live albums, Bless Its Pointed Little Head is still memorable for the following: that hangar-esque ambience you also heard on the Jefferson Airplane’s first two studio albums; the introductory King Kong clip of Carl Denham saying “It was beauty killed the beast” to an audibly gratified Fillmore West crowd; the trippy cover and title; and the very end, when Grace Slick says, “I guess you can move your rear ends now.” But as Lucretius, the Roman philosopher, would point out, there’s atomistic, shape-forming activity going on beneath it all. They’ve named the album, in fact, after the final line in beat poet Philip Whalen’s “Homage to Lucretius,” where he writes of peeing on a snowbank and seeing it transmogrify into a yellow crystal cone, thus prompting the words “Bless your little pointed head!” In his Nature of Things, Lucretius does, indeed, refer to cones with pointed heads, and also to “trapezoids, rhombs, and so on” that atoms capriciously compose. In the album’s best track, Marty Balin sings of a lover’s “trapezoid thermometer taste,” and praises her pliable plasticity. So there you go.

“Las Cuatro Milpas” (1927) – Sexteto Habanero * Written by Eduardo Vigil Y Robles * 78: “Las Cuatro Milpas” / “Mujeres Que Gozan” * Label: Victor

This, the most hypnotic of the earliest recordings of “Las Cuatro Milpas,” raises origin questions. The lyrics to a verse of it (the title of which translates to “the four cornfields”) appears as a “revolutionary song” in Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust (1939), sung by Earle the Mexican in the guise of a romantic song aimed at Faye Greener. It’s a song of longing for simpler, more abundant times, and it fits alongside that Hollywood novel’s themes of deception and upheaval. The three earliest recordings date to 1927: One by Cantantes de la Orquesta Tipica Mexicana (Victor), with only B. De Jesus Garcia credited as arranger; one by Magarita Cueto Y Juan Palido con The Castilians (Columbia), with only Eduardo Vigil y Robles credited as composer; and this one by the Cuban Son ensemble Sexteto Habaneros (Victor), with no one credited as composer. An online bio of Eduardo Vigil y Robles in Spanish identifies him as the music director of Latin American recordings at Victor between 1924 and 1929. Why, then, did the two Victor recordings not credit him as composer? And why are the lyrics to this Sexteto Habanero version different from the others?