“Rymoka String Band” (1985) – Rymoka String Band * Produced by Gef Lucena * Recorded by David Fanshawe * LP: Spirit of Melanesia* Label: Saydisc
The late British composer and ethnomusicologist David Fanshawe captured this group of Papua New Guinea students as part of his enormous archive of worldwide field recordings. The liner notes for SayDisc’s Spirit of Melanesia compilation explains that the song was recorded at the 6th anniversary celebrations (July 28, 1985) for Passam National High School.
Fanshawe’s liner notes say the following:
“This most attractive song, recorded on BigDay at Passam National High School’s 6th Anniversary Celebrations, was led by Trudi Egi and Vincent Raka from Tubusereia. Their group Rymoka won the string band competition and this number, one of my favourites, was especially recorded in the cool of the evening in the chapel.”
What’s not made clear by these notes, though, is that the song included on the CD—with its rich 13th chords and sung in Tok Pisin, a mixture of Pidgin and English—is actually a different song, not the school contest winner. That one, sung in English, appears on ARC Music’s Music of the South Pacific. A proper title and translation for the one I’m posting here, then, is a mystery at present.
Passam National High School, by the way, is still operational but was shut down between 2010-2014 over a land dispute.
“Ain’t No Woman Gonna Make a George Jones Outta Me” (1985) – Daniel Johnston * Written by Daniel Johnston and Bill Anderson * Produced by Pam Peltz * Cassette: Continued Story
The suspicion is that when heartache happens to a Texas male, the mental George Jones jukebox lights up. That’s why the title of Austin savant Daniel Johnston’s “Ain’t No Woman Gonna Make a George Jones Outta Me” looks like something defiant. But a listen reveals that it’s already too late. No, he hasn’t begun singing in the manner of the East Texas icon, nor is he necessarily drinking too much or missing important engagements. He’s just a woman-sick subject who’s trying to wrap the blues around his head, and he’s chanting those words as an incantation that might chase the existing affliction away.
Johnston, whose level of cult notoriety had upticked after appearing on IRS Presents The Cutting Edge on MTV in August 1985 (in a ragtag episode focusing on Austin), wrote the song with Bill Anderson of the band Texas Instruments, who also plays lead guitar on it. Musician Pam Peltz plays the role of the unattainable, inscrutable female. Stubbornly crude as it is, the track sounded to Johnston regulars like a beefy upgrade.
“Conspiracy (You’ll Be All Right)” (1986) – The Jazz Butcher * Written and produced by the Jazz Butcher * Label: Glass Records
There’s a type of British ’80s indie rock that’s appealing to American listeners precisely because of its fuzzy and exotic phrasing, wit, and eccentricity. This track by Oxford’s Jazz Butcher is a good example. The attach-a-rap at the beginning, the sort we heard too much of in those days, distinguishes itself by talking about egg-to-potato ratios (sorry, can’t help), while later in the song we hear about the BBC’s Channel 4 and feeling as “sappy as the late George Brown,” a Labour party politician who’d died in 1985 and who bore the Monty Python-esque full title of George Alfred George-Brown, Baron George-Brown.
After the opening rap, though, this song has the power to sink deep into your psyche and do actual healing duties. The main gist is that, in spite of “big questions,” you will inevitably, whenever [choose a doomsday scenario] happens, be all right. You can play ethical ping pong with this – are you receiving this message from a standpoint of privilege, or are they delivering it from one? Do they minimize the potential for misery from any given doomsday scenario? Perhaps, but the healthiest philosophical or religious outlooks will assure that, regardless of what may happen, you will be all right.
“Conspiracy (You’ll Be All Right),” with an emphasis on the “big questions” section, served as the opening theme for Rich Hall’s Onion World, a talk show that ran on the Comedy Channel from 1990-91. The E.P. that it appeared on was billed weirdly to the Jazz Butcher v. Max Eider, alluding to an apparent rivalry between band leader Pat Fish and band member Eider, who would depart after the two came to blows at the end of 1986. But it was all right – they later reunited. After this release, the band would sometimes bill itself as the Jazz Butcher Conspiracy.
“Blaze of Glory” (1989) – Joe Jackson * Written and produced by Joe Jackson * Single: “Blaze of Glory” / “Rant and Rave” * LP: Blaze of Glory * Label: A&M Records
Joe Jackson, the British singer-songwriter known for stylistic shifts and melodic pastiche, submitted a new articulation of the Johnny story in 1989. It was reminiscent enough of Bad Company’s “Shooting Star,” reshuffling its acoustic guitar-driven Is, Vs, and VIIbs, to seem like a slightly irritated attempt to fill some of that song’s psychological holes. What Bad Company didn’t tell us, according to Jackson, was that Johnny’s skill didn’t matter so much as a “look in his eye” and an ability to make “young girls cry.” Johnny was exploited, he misled legions of imitators, and someone should possibly pay. His ghost also haunts Memphis, which means that Jackson is singing about Elvis and his lesser ilk, and that Jackson is therefore canceling out all elements of natural musical prowess so important to Chuck Berry’s version of the story. Maybe that’s his way of saying Berry misunderstood the true mechanics of Johnny’s world. But then this happens: the horns near the end start quoting “On Broadway,” the 1963 Drifters song where an African American declares determination to get his name in lights because he can “play this here guitar.” And we end up right back in Berry’s original dream.
“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: a strummed acoustic chord sequence works in 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.
“Oh the Warm Feeling” (1986) – Van Morrison * Written and produced by Van Morrison * LP: No Guru, No Method, No Teacher * Label: Mercury
Van Morrison took the title for his No Guru, No Method, No Teacher album from a passage in the 1964 book Think on These Things by Jiddu Krishnamurti, and the songs reflect that anti-guru guru’s focus on self-knowledge as true religion. Inner peace and societal change, he teaches, both come through self-directed meditation, and you can hear Morrison express this, especially, on the album’s “Got to Go Back,” “Oh the Warm Feeling,” and “In the Garden.” Recorded in Sausalito, it was New Agey in sentiment and sound, sharing the Marin County textures of late-eighties Windham Hill releases. But even if you’ve been programmed to reject such characteristics, you’d have to be truly hard-hearted not to feel the genuine spirituality in those three songs, at least. “Oh the Warm Feeling” gets the spotlight here for espousing peaceful seaside pondering, filling Morrison with “devotion” and “religion” and, presumably, peace, while Richie Buckley’s soprano sax handles aforementioned aural textures. But the first four notes of the song seem to mimic the first four notes in the main riff of the Damned’s “Noise Noise Noise” (1979) which, if intentional, is quite the emphasis-through-counterpoint exercise.
“Pheremones and Incense” (1986) – Andy Bole * Written by Andy Bole * LP: Ramshackle Pier * Label: Left Leg
The British acoustic guitarist Andy Bole released his debut LP Ramshackle Pier in 1986. Listening to it sends you back to what feels like an era of more sprightly fingerstyle sounds, before the Fahey-revival steam engine started making its rounds. Bole is an internationally-minded multi-instrumentalist who would go on to study hansa veena (a type of Indian slide guitar), and he’s also an experimentalist, with certain tracks sounding like his fingers have turned into pencils, or his guitar has been somehow strung up non-linearly. He’s participated in numerous projects past and present, including Bonfire Radicals, Fret and Fiddle, Shankara, and Daevid Allen’s Glissando Guitar Orchestra. This bouzouki track, called “Pheromones and Incense,” appeared as one of three bonus tracks on the 2004 CD reissue of the Ramshackle Pier LP, although the notes don’t indicate whether it’s an outtake or recorded later.
“Go Lil’ Camaro Go” (1987) – Ramones * Written by Dee Dee Ramone * Produced by Daniel Rey and Dee Dee Ramone * LP: Halfway to Sanity * Label: Beggars Banquet The Ramones and car songs are among America’s greatest exports. “Go Lil’ Camaro Go,” from 1987 — one of the Ramones’ less celebrated eras — is a merger of those two products. Debbie Harry’s vocal contribution reminds us of how the high female voice in the car crash records of the early sixties signified angels warning of impending tragedy. Songwriter Dee Dee (not to be confused with the Dee Dee of Dick and Dee Dee) also installs a set of healthy “papa oom mow mows,” knowing that all songs with such machinery turn into classics.
“The Race” (1988) – Yello * Written by Boris Blank and Dieter Meier * UK 45: “The Race (video mix)” / “The Race (sporting mix)” / “Another Race” * Produced by Yello * Label: Mercury * Charts: UK singles (#7), US dance (#33) When you attach the description of “dance duo” to images of the two severe-looking Swiss men who formed Yello, you laugh. The music’s funny, too, but the humor never diluted any of their muscular club-clout. When “The Race” revved up in 1988, with its myriad remixes, clock-in times, and a video showcasing their distinctive visages, they’d already become global discotheque vets with such tracks as “I Love You” (1983) and “Oh Yeah” (1985). Its instrumental hook came directly from Gino Soccio’s “The Dancer,” a disco smash from 1979, which either accounted for Yello’s dance chart success or confirmed Soccio’s absence from recent memory.
“Everything Is Broken” (1989) – Bob Dylan * Written by Bob Dylan * 45: “Everything Is Broken” / “Death Is Not the End” * LP: Oh Mercy * Produced by Daniel Lanois * Label: Columbia
“Everything Is Broken,” with its lyrical index of damage, is the single most resonant song in Bob Dylan’s oceanic oeuvre. At once lamenting, lashing out, and healing, it can get its work done on any listener approaching it from any angle. Learn these words and move through your life with wisdom and compassion. The song’s zen quality shines even brighter when you consider how “Death Is Not the End” appears as the single’s B-side. (No YouTube link – everything is broken, remember?)
