Author: Kim Simpson

“All-American Alien Boy” (1976) – Ian Hunter * Written and produced by Ian Hunter * 45: “All-American Alien Boy” / “Rape” *  Album: All-American Alien Boy * Label: CBS

In the mid-seventies rock-record lexicon of musical symbols, “New York City” and “America” translate to “saxophone.” Quick cross-references include proud LA via NYC transplant John Lennon’s “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” (1974, Bobby Keys on tenor), David Bowie’s “Young Americans” (1975, David Sanborn on alto), and Ian Hunter’s “All-American Alien Boy” (1976, Sanborn again).

The Hunter track, the title entry for his second LP, memorializes the UK glam rocker’s move to “tube [subway] city” and packs in plenty more lyrical quirks and neologisms typical of a fresh expatriate, bubbling with the same fascination for big-city USA that we had read about in his 1974 book Diary of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star. “Don’t wanna vote for the left wing, don’t wanna vote for the right,” he sings, in symbolic solidarity with the apolitical party rockers of Cleveland and Detroit that had always embraced him and his group Mott the Hoople. Let’s note, though, that he’s packed a “bulletproof vest” with unpleasant prescience in a song that also name checks Lennon as a fellow alien.

The overlong album version of “All-American Alien Boy” is the one you want, not the shortened UK single, because it includes the unusual sound of Jaco Pastorius delivering one of his trademark curlicue bass solos over a workhorse rock beat. Hunter would later say, in Bill Milkowski’s 1995 bio of the bassist, that Pastorius’s Weather Report fame made him inaccessible after this. It’s OK, because as good as it sounds here, Hunter’s brand of street balladry never called for such virtuosity.

 

“Arthur McBride and the Sergeant” (1976) – Andy Irvine and Paul Brady * Traditional Arrangement with Additional Lyrics by Paul Brady * Produced by Donal Lunny * LP: Andy Irvine/Paul Brady * Label: Mulligan

“Arthur McBride and the Sergeant,” which goes back to 1840s Ireland, falls into the category of anti-war songs espousing violent catharsis, a la Bruce Cockburn’s “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” (1984). Here’s a synopsis of the tale it tells: The singer and his cousin Arthur McBride go out for a Christmas morning constitutional only to get aggressively recruited for enlistment by a sergeant, a corporal, and a “wee little drummer.” (You can get a visualization of such a recruitment scene, complete with drum, in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.) The meeting simmers into words, boils into rapiers and shillelaghs, then goes kaboom with Arthur and the singer delivering the final “hard clouts.” The soldiers’ rapiers get thrown in the sea, the drum gets kicked like a football, and the war mongers get left like “wet sacks” in return for spoiling an otherwise lovely outing.

The song goes back to 1840s Ireland, but came to Brady’s attention through a 1973 reprint of A Heritage of Songs, a book by a Maine collector named Carrie Grover. Although the track appeared on a now-classic duo album with Andy Irvine, it’s all Brady on voice and guitar. Many covers using his reworked version of the lyrics happened in its wake, including one by Bob Dylan in the early ’90s. 

“Adventures in Success” (1983) – Will Powers * Written by Lynn Goldstein and Sting * Produced by Lynn Goldstein * 12″ single: “Adventures in Success” / “Adventures in Success (Dub Copy)” * Album: Dancing for Mental Health * Label: Drag City/Palace

Pseudonymous and hypnotic, “Adventures in Success” cleared some space in alternative radio playlists with its New Thought messages of self-affirmation and slinky, stealthy beats. Although most listeners probably recognized it as a spoof, positive mind exercises have a way of prevailing over problematic origins and changing lives anyway.

It was rock photographer Lynn Goldstein who hatched the idea of Will Powers, whose full album Dancing for Mental Health didn’t quite mesmerize the way the leadoff single did (and who had no connection to the late ’80s Will to Power duo). She sent her voice through a down-pitched vocoder and got famous friends such as Sting and Robert Palmer (who helped with side B’s dub version) to give it musical palatability. Video director Rebecca Allen devised the 3D talking faces video that upped the track’s trance factors even further.

Certain questions undermined the record’s premise: Can an ultra-mechanized piece of mass culture really help to enhance a human being’s uniqueness? If one’s singular existence is the first law of success, why should the endeavor to become something different from that serve as laws two and three? But there again… all roads do lead to Rome. 

 

“There Must Be Someone” (2021) – Matt Sweeney and Bonnie “Prince” Billy * Written by Vern, Rex, and Cathy Gosdin * Album: Superwolves * Label: Drag City/Palace

You, too, would adopt a stage name with the carefree connotation of Bonnie “Prince” Billy if you enjoyed such longtime critical attention and TLC as Will Oldham. Here are two standouts on his Superwolves album with producer/guitarist Matt Sweeney: 1) “Hall of Death, one of three songs to feature guitarist Mdou Moctar, but going even further by including an additional three Moctar bandmates, thereby vaccinating it with Nigerien Tuareg musical immunity; and 2) “There Must Be a Someone,” covering a 1968 Gosdin Brothers track wherein 4/4 is changed to an Otis Redding 6/8.

Another key tweak in this version, though, explodes the surface-level pathos in the song’s yearnings for love, acceptance, and friendship: Oldham sings, “Why can’t a man be accepted for what she has to be.” (The Gosdins, of course, went straight “he.”) It comes off, on one hand, as a gag, leading you to think that you now “get” the gender-confused singer’s self pity.

Could Oldham be poking fun, along the way, at gender dysphoria icons Antony and the Johnstons and their “Hope There’s Someone” (2004)? Or is he being sincerely PC, on the other hand, and presenting the pronoun switch as fair play and/or food for thought? That the motivation is so unclear is probably what made it worth doing.

 

“My Baby Wants a Baby” (2021) – St. Vincent * Written by Annie Clark * Album: Daddy’s Home * Label: Loma Vista

The “look at me” messages in St. Vincent’s cover art follow a fame arc. Album one (Marry Me, 2007) is the introductory entreaty, where she needs us to look her in the eyes. On album two (Actor, 2009), she needs us to keep looking, but she’s no longer obliged to meet our gaze. Albums three (Strange Mercy, 2011) and five (Masseducation, 2017) make do with St. Vincent body parts, while on album four (St. Vincent, 2014) she surveys us from a throne. Album six (Daddy’s Home, 2021) shows an altered, I-never-knew-ye Achtung Baby St. Vincent. She’s looking us in the eyes again but we don’t recognize her.

On this 2021 album she sings a song called “My Baby Wants a Baby” in which she wrestles with and rejects the notion of familial dependency and responsibility. (Her audience may perhaps feel a Freudian inclination to read themselves into this.) Has anyone noticed that she sings it to the chorus melody of Sheena Easton’s 1981 hit “9 to 5 (Morning Train)”? That hit single was an ode to the straight world, and a songwriting credit to Florrie Palmer might have given St. Vincent’s distaste for such subject matter even more winking clarity.

 

“My Lovely Elizabeth” (c. 1962) – S.E. Rogie and His Guitar* Written by S.E. Rogers * 45: “My Lovely Elizabeth” / “Advice to Schoolgirls” * Label: Rogie

Here’s an ideal representation of the West African “palm-wine” genre, so named for its suitability for having a nice tropical drink while you listen. Sierra Leone’s S.E. Rogie (Sooliman Ernest Rogers, d. 1994), in spite of the laid back impression his music conjures, was rather industrious, launching his own label in the early sixties and working its distribution. “My Lovely Elizabeth” was his first big seller – the label image above contains the frustrating note that it was “first published in 1965,” although other sources claim that the record had been floating around as early as 1962 and that his sound had changed quite a bit by 1965.

Here’s what Gary Stewart says in his Breakout: Profiles in African Rhythm (1992, p. 48): “Rogie’s biggest record of the early days was the 1962 hit ‘My Lovely Elizabeth’ … [it] sold an estimated thirteen thousand copies in Sierra Leone (an astonishing figure for the time given that record players were, for the most part, the property of more affluent city dwellers in a country whose population was largely rural) and thousands more when EMI picked it up for international distribution … Suspicious of EMI’s sales figures and disappointed in their royalty payments, he reverted to doing his own distribution.”

Side B contains Rogie’s “Advice to Schoolgirls,” in which he recommends, along with the virtues of honesty and staying true to one’s dreams, the avoidance of prostitution.

 

“Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” (1978) – Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson * Written by Ed Bruce and Patsy Bruce * Produced by Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson * LP: Waylon and Willie * Label: RCA Victor * Charts: Billboard Hot 100 (#42); Billboard Country (#1); Billboard AC (#33)

By 1978, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson had turned their reputations as country music outsiders into marketable assets. Although the “outlaw” tag arose out of their (and others’) unwillingness to comply with the wishes of Nashville record industry sheriffs, they also played up a grizzled, maverick persona that found a theme song in Ed Bruce’s “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” Released around the time the Dallas Cowboys beat the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XII, a cultural association that certainly helped fuel it (think about the problematic relationships between moms and football), the record also invited other fantasies and projections among audiences. Many a doctor and lawyer surely listened with wistful escapism, while the word “cowboys,” for others, served as a code word for any occupation lacking in societal respect. Most crucial among these, for the sake of Jennings and Nelson, were the ones who heard it as “mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be DJs.”

“Backlash Blues” (live) (1968) – Nina Simone * Written by Langston Hughes and Nina Simone * Produced by Joe René * LP: ‘Nuff Said! * Label: RCA Victor

The Summer of Soul (2021) concert film unearths footage of the Harlem Cultural Festival, the forgotten “Black Woodstock” that ran for six separate nights during the summer of ’69. It’s a concert film rarity that has the power to take viewers through a full range of emotions, from giddy joy to sanctified tears and then to anger. Nina Simone, at her uncompromising peak, handles that last bit, serving it up with an equal portion of awe. “Backlash Blues” is here at full boil, with words by Langston Hughes, bearing the same vocal edge, spoken statement of purpose, and boom-crash piano it had on her ‘Nuff Said! album. This was a live recording done three days after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Her first version of the song, a studio take on her 1967 Nina Simone Sings the Blues album, captured it at a mere simmer.)

In the film, “Backlash Blues” launches Simone’s set, and by the end of it she is working the crowd with lines such as  “Black people…Are you ready to smash white things, to burn buildings, are you ready?…Are you ready to kill, if necessary?” She’s actually reading verses by the Last Poets’ David Nelson, but you wouldn’t know it.

“Gone” (1971) – Alan Parker and Alan Hawkshaw * Written and produced by Alan Parker and Alan Hawkshaw * LP: Alternatives * Label: Music De Wolfe

If you can afford a slot on your classic album list for library music, consider Alternatives by the British composers Alan Parker (guitarist) and Alan Hawkshaw (keyboardist). They loaded up the master shelves at KPM with recordings done together, individually, and with others, and did much in the way of shaping that genre’s curiously evocative sound.  Alternatives was one of the few projects Parker and Hawkshaw did for De Wolfe instead of for KPM, but it seemed to overachieve in media placements during the seventies. “Jolly Thomas” is possibly the record’s most recognizable one, classified for prospective sync-ers as “bouncy” and “childlike,” but “Woodworm” (“heavy, comic…”) also made the rounds.

The track called “Gone” appeared as a “desolate, lonely” needle-drop in a well-circulated educational short produced by Brigham Young University called Cipher in the Snow (1974). Its flute and guitar blew chilly winds as Cliff, a neglected grade schooler, used his lunch money to craft a melancholy snowman’s face. For its closer, the film made use of the album’s “The Difference” (“dark, moody, mellow”), wherein the flute, raven-like, reappears. The film’s uninformative music credits have likely frustrated viewers who couldn’t shake the distinctive music from their minds.

Where did Cipher in the Snow‘s joyous frog sequence music, though, reminiscent of Sagittarius’s “Song to the Magic Frog” (1968), come from?