Author: Kim Simpson

“Rail On” (1995) – Papa Wemba * Written by Papa Wemba and Lokua Kanza * Produced by Stephen Hague * CD: Emotion * Label: Real World Records

The Congolese singer Papa Wemba adopted his stage name from his real-life situation as the oldest child of a family who had lost both parents by the time he was 24. Although the over-achiever had become a pan-African star by the early seventies, his 1995 Emotion album, with its slick production by Stephen Hague, found him making a deliberate play for the international market (including a cover of Otis Redding’s “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa”). Oddly enough for the high energy rumba/soukous king, the album’s standout track and future fan-favorite was a low-key acoustic guitar number called “Rail On,” a collaboration with fellow Congolese singer-songwriter Lokua Kanza. Papa Wemba had normally sung in his native Lingala, but this song featured lyrics in Kiswahili with an English refrain. On April 23, 2016, he died on stage in Cote D’Ivoire, and since then the song has “railed on” further into even more of an African pop standard than it already was.

“Sorry You Asked?” (1995) – Dwight Yoakam * Written by Dwight Yoakam * Produced by Pete Anderson * CD: Gone * Label: Reprise * Billboard charts: #59 (Country)

Never a proper establishment country artist, Dwight Yoakam caught the US country airwaves via the west coast a la Buck and Merle. He was a honky tonk dance floor top ten regular during the first eight years of his discography (1986-1993), which included a bad-press fling with Basic Instinct-era Sharon Stone. His 1995 Gone album, though, would be the first one in the cult-country, low-to-no charting realm where he still abides. The leadoff track had big fun with his new rep as a crappy romantic partner, and stands as the world’s funniest breakup song. No other country radio offering before (or elsewhere, even Bob Dylan’s “Ballad in Plain D,” which also featured a meddling sister) contained such diagnostic lyrics as “well, we started having problems…” The mariachi trumpet comes off more as vindictive “Understand Your Man” Yoakam hokum than as “Ring of Fire” nostalgia. The trashed-up relationship scenario would become a comfortable go-to theme for Dwight in later songs like “Santa Can’t Stay” (1997) and “Intentional Heartache” (2005) (and his role as a full blown antagonist in the 1996 Sling Blade film monkeys with the persona), but “Sorry You Asked?” was the masterpiece.

“Swan’s Splashdown” (1966) – Perrey-Kingsley * Written by Jean-Jaques Perrey and Gershon Kinsley (Tchaikovsky uncredited) * LP: The In Sound from Way Out! * Label: Vanguard

On the back cover of this first album by Moog synthesizer trailblazers Jean-Jacques Perrey and Gershon Kingsley, the two men appear as studious music scientists dressed in lab coats. The dual meaning of the teen lingo LP title implies that they are also turning music inside out, exposing its inner essence to uncharted modes of interpretation. As Perrey made clear in an Incredibly Strange Music interview, though, he was primarily concerned with giving instrumental music the ability to express humor, something he considered to be a lost art. Partnered with Kingsley (who wrote the original version of “Popcorn”), his work on this album and the follow-up, Kaleidoscopic Vibrations, demonstrates hard work at the laugh lab, sending up genres and familiar melodies with electronic squitches and squiggles. On “Swan’s Splashdown,” the Allegro Moderato section of “Danses des Cygnes” in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake gets a honked-up dressing down. You will possibly think about that ballet’s duality-themed story of the good swan and evil swan and compare it to the musicians’ story of serious music and unserious music. Or you may think about Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, where the character Swann, in the fourth volume (“Sodom and Gomorrah”) thinks about the “binary rhythm which love adopts… bearing no close and necessary relation to the woman they love, but pass to one side of her, splash her, encircle her.” You may also wonder if SmashMouth were listening to this before concocting “Walkin’ on the Sun.”

“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 him 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.