Make Believe DJ: “I’ll Stand by You”

Today, I’m taking a (hopefully) very short break from the “This Day in History” feature, for a few reasons:

1) the post I planned to write contained a date that could not be positively identified, and I wanted nothing less than total accuracy for you, faithful reader;

2) researching and writing even one of these posts every day is so intensive that I had little time to come up with an alternative idea—not if I wanted to take care of some much-needed business I (like many 0ther people) normally attend to this time of year; and

3) it’s good to have some variety on a blog—including this one. And, since I’m the chief writer/editor, etc., these are my rules, so I get to make them.

But don’t think you’re getting off that easily! Because, as it turns out, I’ve always had, probably like many of you, a desire to play Make-Believe DJ. The advent of the iPod allows even the likes of myself to create and program compilations.

Moreover, I’ve shared with at least a couple of my friends not just CDs of songs I’ve burned for them, but also liner notes I’ve created for the occasion. Here’s one example – one that, I think, has universal application, for anyone who’s felt they need a friend or someone to love to get them through everything life throws at them. I’m naming it for the first song in the list, which is representative of this entire collection:

1. “I’ll Stand by You” – The Pretenders (from Last of the Independents). Written by Chrissie Hynde, Tom Kelly and Billy Steinberg.
Kelly and Steinberg describe the process of writing songs with Hynde as a bit intimidating. She keeps a notebook with stray lyrics written boldly across the page, never fitting neatly into lines, and she invariably crossed out lyrics by Kelly and Steinberg that struck her as too tender and sensitive. Even so, she reportedly thought even the version of the song here was a little too mushy.

Over the years, however, seeing fans’ strong reaction, she came to embrace the song. I first came across this affirmation of friendship and love while I was channel-surfing. As the theme song of the closing scene of a “Homicide” episode, set at the gravesite of a slain officer, it moved me instantly, and I sought it for years until I finally found the album recently.

2. “Don’t Forget About Me” – Nanci Griffith (from Flyer). Written by Nanci Griffith and James Hooker.
Griffith is a highly regarded folk-country singer, as much at home as an interpretive singer as a songwriter in her own right. This song continues the theme of friendship from “I’ll Stand by You.” Mark Knopfler’s guitar is featured here.

3. “Don’t I Know You” – Susan Werner (from I Can’t Be New). Written by Susan Werner.
Susan Werner is, she would admit, musically schizophrenic. Part of her is a jeans-wearing folkie, oriented toward acoustic guitar; the other performs cabaret compositions for the piano and is dressed, she jokes, like “a Republican consultant,” in dresses and pearls. This song, from a recent album, incorporates the second personality.

You can hear echoes of Cole Porter, the Gershwins, and Rodgers and Hart in the lyrics and melody – a kind of cool Manhattan sophistication that keeps the promise and peril of love at bay. One of the most spontaneous performers I’ve ever seen, she could play two shows back to back, and half the songs would be different.

4. “Up on the Roof” – James Taylor (from Flag). Written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King.
Originally performed by Ben E. King and the Drifters and reaching #5 on the pop charts in February 1963, this song remains as timeless as ever, much like the work that inspired it: the musical West Side Story. King thought "My Secret Place" might be a good title for it, but hsuband Goffin's preference hints more strongly at the source of it all.

In any case, it is one of Carole King’s best compositions, played, with simple but distinctive guitar chords and impassioned singing, by Taylor (who performed the same yeoman service on King’s “You’ve Got a Friend”).

More than 20 years ago, while working for the publishing house Prentice-Hall, I attended a Taylor concert in New Jersey with a number of colleagues– the second time I’d seen JT. (His was the first concert I ever attended, back in ’75.) I remember saying to my P-H friends that the song I most wanted to hear was “Up on the Roof.” Sure enough, he concluded the first half of the show with this. “I thought it was really nice of him to play that for me for my birthday,” I told them.

5. “Boats Against the Current” – Eric Carmen (from Boats Against the Current). Written by Eric Carmen.
An allusion to the famous closing lines of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and the first of at least two times that Eric Carmen alluded to a Fitzgerald work in song. (The other, later instance was “Winter Dreams.”)

Carmen’s album was a less commercially successfully follow-up to his first solo album, which produced “All by Myself” and “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again.” However, the album, and especially this song, became Carmen’s favorite work. (And, given the title of this blog, how do you expect me to leave this off my list?)

Many people have interpreted this as a love song—not hard to do, given the soaring production—but Carmen has recalled that he wrote it in the wake of his decision to break with producer Jimmy Ienner, the creative force behind the Raspberries and Carmen’s own successful eponymously titled album.

6. “Come Rain or Come Shine” – Don Henley (from The Unplugged Collection, Vol. 1). Written by Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen.
Composed for the 1940s all-black musical St. Louis Woman, this song was almost derailed on its way to Broadway: its creators (who at one time included Arlen’s collaborator on “Over the Rainbow,” E.Y. Harburg) were accused of demeaning blacks. The show didn’t last long, but several tunes became standards, especially this one.

The song began with Arlen’s melody. Mercer, hearing it, said it was marvelous, and came up on the spot with the opening line: “I’m going to love you like nobody’s loved you…” “…come hell or high water!” Arlen filled in jokingly. “Why didn’t I think of that?” Mercer answered, changing the line to the less jocular, “come rain or come shine.”

It seems appropriate to include this fondly recalled song here. Henley’s version shows that a standard need not be the first refuge of an aging rocker (a la Rod Stewart), but can be done in one’s unique voice.

7. “In Your Eyes” – Jeffrey Gaines (from Fresh New Music—WFUV Compilation). Written and originally performed by Peter Gabriel.
Rosanna Arquette may be the only film star I know who’s inspired not one, but two rock hits. The first was “Rosanna,” performed by Toto. (At this time, in the early 1980s, she was dating keyboard player Steve Porcaro, and even took to bringing the band munchies in the wee hours of the morning.) Later in the decade, she broke up her marriage at the time by taking up with Peter Gabriel, who wrote this song about her.

One of my favorite films, Say Anything, features the Gabriel original of this song prominently, as John Cusack holds up his boom box outside the window of his lover, Ione Skye, in the hope of winning her back. (The story goes that Gabriel would not allow the song to be used until he saw a rough cut of the film. After seeing it, Gabriel replied that it was a good film, though he had reservations about the hero’s drug overdose at the end. The confused director Cameron Crowe finally figured out what had happened: he had mistakenly sent Gabriel the video of WIRED, with a scene of a strung-out John Belushi.)

Gaines’ stripped-down but still moving version appeared in a compilation for one of my favorite local radio stations, WFUV-FM.

8. “Better Things” – Dar Williams (from Out There Live). Written by Ray Davies.
A lovely version by folk musician Williams of the Kinks classic. Davies wrote this following a personal and creative malaise in the mid-‘70s, and it revived his group’s fortunes early in the next decade.

The song was also featured in the Kinks tribute album This Is Where I Belong, performed by a group whose title I find especially felicitous: Fountains of Wayne (named after a town in Northern New Jersey).

9. “Closer to Fine” – Indigo Girls (from 1200 Curfews). Written by Emily Saliers.
The Indigo Girls’ breakthrough hit in 1989, performed live four years later. My favorite lyrics in the song might be these:

The best thing you've ever done for me
Is to help me take my life less seriously, it's only life after all

10. “Romantico” – Arturo Sandoval (from My Love Affair With the Piano). Written by Arturo Sandoval.
Heavily influenced by Dizzy Gillespie and bebop, jazz trumpeter Sandoval was granted political asylum in the U.S. when he fled his native Cuba in 1990. (His story was made into an HBO film starring Andy Garcia several years ago.) Although most of his songs are on the trumpet, he had always included one or two piano songs in each concert, until his wife finally persuaded him to create an entire album devoted to this instrument.

I saw Sandoval several summers ago, in Chautauqua, NY. Although his piano songs went well, the atonal trumpet songs caused dozens of audience members (including myself) to head for the exits between songs. “Hey, where are you going?” Sandoval said. “We’re only just getting started.” That didn’t stop the exodus, unfortunately.

But this is a grandly romantic composition. Sit back and let it engulf you.