“As It Was in Ancient Times” (2007) – Village People Folk Band * Traditional * LP: As It Was from Ancient Times
Now more familiar in Ukraine as a carol, “As It Was in Ancient Times,” true to the title, goes back to early pre-Christian days. It’s a solemn cosmogony song, speculating on how things got started. It frames the singers observing the blue waters and nearby fires, and deciding that the only way they are to create anything is to send someone down to the ocean floor, to gather the yellow sand, and to sprinkle it outward to bring us flowers and stars. In the Christian era, St. Peter is given the assignment, and that’s the version we hear on this recent, ancient-sounding recording. The refrain “Oj Daj Bo’ ” is an entreaty to God, which likely appeared in the earliest versions. A word about locality to enhance these perspective-bound thoughts on deity, distance and time: The album cover specifies the music as coming from the right bank of Kiev which, on a map, is the West side.
“Lookin’ In” (1971) – Bobbie Gentry * Written and produced by Bobbie Gentry * LP: Patchwork * Label: Columbia
“Mystique” became a key word for Bobbie Gentry when her very first (and biggest) single, the Southern-Gothic “Ode to Billy Joe” (1967), darkened the Love Summer sky with its moody account of an unclear event. Then, after a handful of distinctive albums, a popular run in Vegas, and a final public-eye appearance at the Academy of Country Music Awards in 1982, she vanished and became impossible to contact.
Her last proper album, 1971’s Patchwork, featured orchestral interludes and closed with a track called “Lookin’ In.” This turned out to be a suitable swan song of sorts. “I’m packin’ up and I’m checkin’ out,” she sings, claiming full ownership for the state she was in and eschewing the notion of “sacrifice” as the “ugliest word” that keeps people from being who they’re meant to be.
Maybe one of the best clues for explaining her eventual disappearance comes from former Capitol Records executive Ken Mansfield. He writes in his memoir Between Wyomings (2009) about traveling with Gentry and seeing how intensively she’d study Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. The novel was Rand’s 1957 thousand-plus page opus about her “objectivist” philosophy, which boiled down to a belief in the complete, unregulated rights of the individual to pursue wealth and prosperity. There’s a key character in the book named John Galt, a genius innovator, engineer and philosopher who goes on strike, due to the inability of his world to allow him to work with no regulations and restraint. He also talks other innovators into joining him in his act of defiance. Makes you wonder, then, if Gentry simply pulled a John Galt.
“The One on the Right Is on the Left” (1966) – Johnny Cash * Written by Jack Clement * Produced by Don Law and Frank Jones * 45: “The One on the Right Is on the Left” / “Cotton Pickin’ Hands” * LP: Everybody Loves a Nut * Label: Columbia * Billboard Charts: Country (#2); Hot 100 (#46)
Johnny Cash’s “The One on the Right Is on the Left” depicts a folk group whose incompatible politics bring them to an onstage brawl. Written by Jack Clement, the 1966 country hit appeared on an album called Everybody Loves a Nut with artwork by Mad magazine’s Jack Davis, and it rose up in the wake of two massive pop hits with folk panache and opposing viewpoints: Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” (#1, 1965) and S Sgt Barry Saddler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets” (#1, 1966). “Keep your politics to yourself” is the moral, which is usually the type of thing people with strong political views say about outspoken people with contradictory ones. Country audiences, after all, later adored brazen political songs by Merle Haggard, Guy Drake, and others.
But Cash was a rare bird who managed to straddle the middle ground in a polarized era. He showed deference for elected leaders in word and deed (for the most part—at a 1972 White House concert, he brushed off Nixon’s request to play Drake’s “Welfare Cadilac” (sic)). He also maintained a hardcore country audience even while voicing stances sympathetic to the American left (“What Is Truth?,” “Singin’ in Vietnam Talkin’ Blues,” the Bitter Tears album).
What’s interesting about “The One on the Right Is on the Left” is that the consequences he depicts for this band with messy politics go inward. It’s the band who pays the price. Cash’s own willingness to take on political topics in later years indicates that his heart was in this interpretation, that a band divided cannot stand. If a band is in agreement, on the other hand, let the topicality commence. This makes sense and applies especially to the hyper-polarized current era, where the middle ground is ever-elusive, where band members are liable to go rogue and maintain alternate political personas through social media, and struggle, on the road or between sets, to have stress-free conversations.
When did the flatted seventh resolving to natural (heard later in the song during the “land” parts of “folk songs of our land”) become a “great frontier” signifier and why? I think about it as being a transition that goes deeper than we expect, so it gives us a feeling of poignancy. It sounds like a near-loss of footing that finds recovery, symbolizing the countless recoveries that eventually tamed the frontier. Follow me? It shows up in Western themes all throughout the ’60s and ’70s and can likely just be chalked up as an Elmer Bernstein innovation. He used it in his theme for The Big Country (1958), and again in The Magnificent Seven (1960). That’s probably all it took to catch on.
“Do You Wanna Hold Me” (1983) – Bow Wow Wow * Written by Matthew Ashman, Dave Barbarosa, Leigh Gorman, and Anabella Lwin * Produced by Mike Chapman * 45: “Do You Wanna Hold Me” / “What’s the Time (Hey Buddy)” * Label: RCA * Charts: UK (#47); Billboard Hot 100 (#77)
Bow Wow Wow started out as an agitpop project for Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, who oversaw releases rife with record biz flouts, provocative album covers, and lurid lyrics. By 1982 the four young Londoners had coalesced into a more self-contained musical prospect. Teenage singer Annabella Lwin, with her soaring voice and pow wow dance moves, possessed a “too old to be so young” (and vice versa) persona that was as crucial as it was troubling; guitarist Matthew Ashman had a flair for whammy statement riffs on his big Gretsch guitars; Leigh Gorman summoned thunderstorms on bass; and heartthrob drummer Dave Barbarosa, with his red melting kit, was rock’s high chief of Burundi drums.
With “I Want Candy” (their hit Strangeloves cover), Bow Wow Wow found American audiences in the summer of ’82, via alternative radio formats and MTV. The video showed them surfside and looking convincingly So Cal, a half-clad conflux of mohawks, sandy hair, and brown skin. The following year they delivered an album called When the Going Gets Tough the Tough Get Going, produced by the customarily band-sensitive Mike Chapman, and it couldn’t have been any better of a showcase for the four members’ strengths. The leadoff single “Do You Wanna Hold Me” joshed around with Californiana and Sergio Mendes vocals, finding a spot of eternal exotic sunshine in the pop ether with nothing but the essentials of hooks, voices, guitar, bass and drums.
We’re dealing with pop music, though, where full-realizations so often wreak full dissolutions, and that happened with Bow Wow Wow. They didn’t make it past the big tour, with its ritualized tests of a band’s mutual commitment. The three males tried a short-lived hiphop rock vehicle called Chiefs of Relief, while Lwin dabbled in the dance market. Ashman died young, reunion configurations came to pass, and “Do You Wanna Hold Me” sounds ever more poignant in retrospect. Who else was more qualified to deliver the opening line of “children I wanna warn ya,” than Annabella Lwin, a seventeen-year-old who, by then, knew a thing or two about exploitation and “illusions” and whose big moment was moments from fading?
“Once You Understand” (1972) – Lily Fields and the Family * Written by Lou Stallman and Bobby Susser * Produced by John Bennings * 45: “Once You Understand” / “Help Me Make It Through the Night” * Label: Spectrum
If the original “Once You Understand”—a #23 hit for a studio project called Think—told a tragic tale, with its generation gap unrest and drug-overdose ending, the soul cover version by Lily Fields and the Family managed to lighten things up a bit. Produced by Spectrum label head John Bennings, this one featured a chugging, danceable backing track with the kind of kitchen table family banter that became more of a familiar sound a few years later when black family sitcoms such as Good Times had a regular TV presence. For the climax of this new version of “Once You Understand,” the father merely finds out his son is at the police station, and it feels like more of a punch line than a tragic turn of events. The record never charted, but samples of it turned up on Biz Markie’s “Things Get a Little Easier” (1989). Lily Fields put out a number of recordings in the late sixties and early seventies, but the strongest of these, called “Changes,” sat unissued and unappreciated until Northern Soul excavators brought it to light in 2019.
“Kissin’ Time” (1974) – Kiss * Written by Bernie Lowe and Kal Mann * Produced by Kenny Kerner and Richie Wise * 45: “Kissin’ Time” / “Nothin’ to Lose” * LP: Kiss * Label: Casablanca * Charts: Billboard (Hot 100 – #83)
It’s too bad that no single Kiss song featured alternate lead vocals by all four members. They were all so distinctive. The closest they got was “Kissin’ Time,” the Bobby Rydell cover that Casablanca Records head Neil Bogart insisted they do in April ’74 to spark radio action. (Rydell’s record had reached #11 in 1959.) Loaded up with large market city references and kissing contest promotional possibilities (which indeed happened), Bogart mailed out 45s and then made certain the track would show up on July reprints of the debut album they had already released in February. The track sported vocal turns by Gene, Paul and Peter and embarrassed the group, but it shouldn’t have. It preserved the huckstery chutzpah of the original, and Peter’s bum-bum-diddit drums in the verses suggested both Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” and even cheeky Gene Krupa (“Disc Jockey Jump,” say). It also seems a tad appropriate that the introductory chart entry for the future lunchbox icons would have the sticky bubblegum residue of Neil Bogart—who’d brought the world “Yummy Yummy Yummy” and “Goody Goody Gumdrops”—all over it.
“New York’s Alright If You Like Saxophones” (1981) – Fear * Written by Lee Ving * Produced by Fear and Gary Lubow * LP: The Record * Label: Slash
As mentioned in the previous post, saxophone sounds had a seventies heyday as signifiers of slick New York urbanity, and the Saturday Night Live theme song, with its riffing tenor, reinforced this. Because punk rock’s mission was to overturn all apple carts (and apples, for that matter, big and little), the antagonistic LA group Fear made fun of both New York and saxophones right there on SNL, smack in the middle of the sketch comedy institution’s living room. (“It’s great to be here in New Jersey,” said singer Lee Ving.)
This was on the 1981 Halloween night episode, a slot the band secured with the help of John Belushi, who had swooned over their anarchic shtick when he saw them in the Decline of Western Civilization movie documentary the same year. Their performance reeled with chaos and danger and transfixed American viewers. Appropriately enough, the guest host was Donald Pleasence, who had played the hapless US President who oversaw the devastation in Escape from New York that same year.
Fear’s notorious appearance was likely the direct catalyst for the reassuring 1982 CHIPS episode where Erik Estrada beats a menacing punk band not with a billy club but with vocals and dance moves in a talent show. The album version of “New York’s Alright if You Like Saxophones” is below, but you might as well just watch the SNL clip, which includes it as song #2 and features some surprisingly servicable skronk from band member Derf Scratch.
“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.
“Once You Understand” (1972) – Lily Fields and the Family * Written by Lou Stallman and Bobby Susser * Produced by John Bennings * 45: “Once You Understand” / “Help Me Make It Through the Night” * Label: Spectrum
