Quote of the Day (Paul McCartney, on Early Concert Mistakes)

“When we first started out, I was terrified of doing anything wrong onstage. I got to learn, though, that people don’t mind. In fact, they kind of like it. People go, ‘I was at the show where he made a mistake!’”—English composer and rock ‘n’ roll legend Sir Paul McCartney, quoted by Hardeep Phull, “Paul McCartney Plays for the Kids at Frank Sinatra School,” New York Post, Oct. 9, 2013

I wasn’t that big a fan of Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles work in the Seventies, but I’m curious to see the recent documentary about that period, Man on the Run. 

It sounds like, more than half a century after he went on his own, we may be learning new, even surprising, things about one of the most significant forces in popular music in the 20^th century.

Quote of the Day (Tom Bligh, on Cover Songs)

“Movies get remade, songs get covered. A cover song comes with history attached. The song’s past blends with its present to create something surprising yet recognizable: two stories in one, two contexts, two visions. Covers are familiar enough that we know what to expect, plus there’s opportunity for the unexpected, an appealing combination of same/different. Our favorite songs slip away from us when overplayed. The familiarity does breed contempt. They become routine. We hardly notice what makes them special. A friend of mine says these songs don’t register until you’re drunk. Then they come through, fresh and strange; you appreciate them all over again. I propose another way to make old songs new: the cover song. The best covers show both artists in a new light.”— Fiction writer and Mount St. Mary’s Univ. English Professor Tom Bligh, “A Treatise on Cover Songs,” The Oxford American, Issue 54, Fall 2006 (Music Issue 2006)

Growing up, I never cared much to know if a song was a cover version or not. But as I’ve grown older, having witnessed the whole cavalcade of American rock ‘n’ roll and more fascinated by its history, cover songs have fascinated me more and more.

In fact, I’ll even search YouTube for songs by artists I enjoy, but covered by others.

Tom Bligh’s article From The Oxford American—which I came across again the other day—has some interesting things to say about this phenomenon, including that the “original artist” doesn’t refer to the songwriter, but rather the person who made the first public recording. (Case in point: Frank Sinatra, who did not compose songs himself but often was the first to release songs created by some of the prime names in the Great American Songbook, notably Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen.)

He also makes a telling observation about how performers “make the song their own”:

“When people like a cover, the common saying is that the artist ‘made it his/her own.’ That’s never entirely true. Bits of associative residue cling to even the best covers. The relationship of cover to original is not wax-museum dummy to real person. We don’t listen to a cover song because we can’t find the original—we listen to experience the pleasure of a familiar song in a different way.”

I think you might also like this article listing “75 Greatest Cover Songs by Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductees.” Yes, this list is entirely subjective, so I’m sure it’ll start more than a few arguments about what gets included, what doesn’t, and whether certain artists deserve to be ranked so high or low.

But I’m also sure nearly everyone will find songs that they will nod along in agreement with—and maybe sing along to. My personal favorites on the list, for what it’s worth, are (to list the cover artists with original performers in parentheses): George Harrison’s “If Not for You” (Bob Dylan), David Bowie’s “China Girl” (Iggy Pop), Rod Stewart’s “I Know (I’m Losing You)” (The Temptations), Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Got To Get You Into My Life” (The Beatles), and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s “Woodstock” (Joni Mitchell).

Over the years, I have created mixtapes for friends of cover songs. At some point I’ll share one or more of those lists—and maybe even the “liner notes” I included.

This Day in Pop Music History (Sinatra Concept LP, ‘Only the Lonely,’ Offers Torch-Song Toppers)

Sept. 8, 1958—Once again collaborating with master arranger Nelson Riddle, Frank Sinatra reached something like a career commercial and critical peak with his latest in a series of song cycles he had helped popularize, the “concept album.”

Though baby boomers associate the concept album (a song collection united by theme and musical motifs) with such collections as The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Who’s Tommy, and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Sinatra got there first, sensing, with the extra minutes afforded by the arrival of the LP in 1948, that he could make such records far more ambitious—and requiring closer attention by the listener—than a mere collection of hits and filler material.

In a little more than a decade, he would create several such compilations: Songs For Young Lovers, Swing Easy, Moonlight Sinatra, and, as he turned fifty, September of My Years.

While several of these would be uptempo, it was his more melancholy LPs that called out his soulful, sensitive side. There are those who prefer In the Wee Small Hours as an example of this tendency.

But the one that came out 65 years ago today, Frank Sinatra Sings For Only The Lonely (often shortened to Only the Lonely, as I will do here), struck a special chord with the public, reaching #1 on the charts and being nominated for five Grammys in the first time those recording industry awards were presented. It also measured up to the singer’s demanding standard, as it would be one of the ones he would cite toward the end of his five-decade career as his favorite.

The Best Album Cover Grammy—the only one that, ironically, the album did win—should have been a dead giveaway that the finger-snappin’, swaggerin’ swinger who had been riding the pop charts had taken a back seat to the self-described “saloon singer” who craved the intimacy of a nightclub to communicate with audiences.

Artist Nick Volpe painted Sinatra, amid a gloomy dark background, as a Pagliacci-like sad clown, and the singer had much to be sorrowful about during the recording sessions: his last attempt at a regular TV series, The Frank Sinatra Show, was about to be canceled, and though his divorce from Ava Gardner was finalized the year before, she still represented for him The One Who Got Away.

Sinatra joked that the bleak tunes on Only the Lonely were “suicide songs,” but those familiar with the singer-actor knew and fretted over his mood swings (and he had, in fact, attempted suicide several times at low points in his relationship with Gardner, and once in the early 1950s when he thought he was washed up).

In Nelson Riddle, Sinatra found a musical partner whose temperament and musical orientation meshed perfectly with his own. Another New Jersey native who was an only child growing up, Riddle was also dealing with heartache during the Only the Lonely sessions, having recently endured the deaths of his mother and daughter.

Paired with Sinatra by Capitol Records to help forge a more mature sound from the one that one that made him a teen idol in the early 1950s, Riddle had triumphed beyond expectations with a series of bestselling LPs that took advantage of Sinatra’s changing voice textures, which were evolving, in the words of Pete Hamill’s Why Sinatra Matters, “from a violin to a viola to a cello, with a rich middle register and dark bottom tones."

In an interview cited in Terry Teachout’s July/August 2021 Commentary article, “The Man Who (Re)Made Sinatra,” Riddle described what he had tried to do in the studio with his most famous musical project:

“First, find the peak of the song and build the whole arrangement to that peak, pacing itself as [Sinatra] paces himself vocally. Second, when he’s moving, get the hell out of the way. When he’s doing nothing, move in fast and establish something…build about two-thirds of the way through, and then fade to a surprise ending.”

On movie sets, he was infamous for an unwillingness to rehearse or maintain interest beyond a few takes. But with lyrics, it was different. He positively burrowed into each note, each line, and when he was done he had created a kind of musical short story in each tune.

Part of Sinatra’s magic stemmed from his exquisite sense of which songs worked for him. As with his other LPs in this period, he turned to some of the greatest lyricists and composers who comprised the Great American Songbook, including Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer (“Blues in the Night”), Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen (the title track). Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (“Spring Is Here” and “Where or When”), and Jule Styne (co-writer, with Cahn, of “Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry").

Three songs in particular fascinated me about this album. Carl Sigman and Robert Maxwell’s “Ebb Tide” would later be covered by the Righteous Brothers, but Sinatra and Riddle chose a different way to close out the tune than the rock duo and their producer Phil Spector, climaxing on the lyrics “I can tell, I, I can feel/You are love, you are real/Really mine in the rain/In the dark, in the sun” before receding with “Like the tide at its ebb/I'm at peace in the web/of your arms."

Arlen and Mercer’s “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)" had been written for the 1943 Fred Astaire movie musical The Sky’s the Limit, but Sinatra made it into an unsurpassed demonstration of his own powers of interpretation.

On movie sets, he was infamous for an unwillingness to rehearse or maintain interest beyond a few takes. But with lyrics for his albums, it was different. He positively burrowed into each note, each line, and when he was done he had created a kind of musical short story in each tune. You can see how he wove his magic in this YouTube clip.

Matt Dennis and Earl Brent’s “Angel Eyes” provided the ending to what Sinatra had billed as his “retirement concert” in 1971. It was surely a mistake, for someone who thrived so much on audience attention, to leave the stage while still only 55.  

But, had he followed through on his resolution, nobody would have ever been able to forget how he chose to go out. As seen in this YouTube video in the closing minutes of the June 13, 1971 show in Los Angeles, with smoke from his cigarette billowing and the spotlight on him dimming, he sang,

Pardon me, but I gotta run
Gotta find who's now number one
And why my angel eyes ain't here
Excuse me while I disappear.

If only he could have disappeared at this point! But he un-retired in short order. The success of his two late-career CDs, Duets and Duets II, was due more to the younger performers who blended their voices with his (unlike old days, not in the same studio) than to his own powers, which were on the wane at this point.

On February 23, 1995, in Japan, the 79-year-old Sinatra—confused and glassy-eyed, as remembered by drummer Gregg Field in this 2015 Vanity Fair article—performed in public for the final time, at a concert in Japan where he kept missing lyrics from nearby teleprompters.

The epitaph on “The Voice’s” tombstone came from one of his most ebullient songs: “The Best Is Yet to Come.” But the vulnerable spirit of his reported final words at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in L.A. in 1998 could have come as no surprise to close listeners of Only the Lonely: “I’m losing.”

Flashback, May 1973: ‘Rhymin’ Simon’ Continues to Propel Paul’s Post-Artie Career

The 50^th anniversary this month of the release of There Goes Rhymin’ Simon would have been reason enough to write about this LP that cemented the commercial strength of Paul Simon apart from longtime partner Art Garfunkel.

But two bits of news about the singer-songwriter over the last week may well bring to a close his remarkable pop career.

First, Simon released Seven Psalms, a CD that is, by all accounts, not a pop recording at all. With his continual quest to experiment with musical textures (including from outside North America), there is a real question if he cares to return to the rock ‘n’ roll or folk genres that inspired him in the first place.

The second bit of news is the report that, during studio sessions for Seven Psalms, he “quite suddenly” and mysteriously lost most of the hearing in his right ear. After nursing for several weeks the unsuccessful hope that his condition would soon improve, he now wonders if he will be able to perform live ever again.

Certainly other singers and musicians have dealt for years with hearing impairment (indeed, I was astonished to discover, from this 2018 AARP article, just how extensive that list is—everyone from Ozzy Osbourne to Barbra Streisand).

But, at 81 years of age and following a nasty bout of COVID-19 as well, Simon’s opportunities to take the stage will diminish, while his periodic bouts of insecurity and depression may very well increase. In that case, even the creative energy needed to compose a song may well ebb. So it becomes an open question whether we will hear from him in any creative forum.

The Wall Street Journal review that first alerted me to the release of Seven Psalms noted that it was only the 15^th studio album of Simon’s six-decade career. If it turns out to be an unexpected career valedictory, it makes it all the more worthwhile to retrace his artistic evolution--including There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, the second album in his solo career.

In a post from last year, I expressed my abiding enthusiasm for “American Tune” as a powerful lyrical statement on the state of the country, both at the time of its composition (the divisive Vietnam-Watergate era) and today.

I did not realize until further researching the song now, however, that it was based on the 18^th-century J.S. Bach chorale “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” (translated, appropriately enough, as “O Sacred Head Now Wounded"). The mood is one of resignation amid “the age’s most uncertain hour.”

It is a distinct outlier for an album otherwise brimming with looseness, optimism, and humor, reflecting Simon’s joy as a husband (“Something So Right”) and new father (“St. Judy’s Comet”).

In contrast, the album’s first single, “Kodachrome,” is a rollicking retrospective just before the onset of middle age, with the narrator recalling his school days and life as a bachelor. Its jaunty, carefree tone would have been one that other Americans who, like Simon, came of age in the Fifties would have identified with, as the nation indulged in a nostalgia craze that saw the Broadway premiere of Grease, the movie premiere of American Graffiti, and, on TV, the first episode of Happy Days.

“Going Home” was the original title of the song, but it was only a temporary phrase. As he told veteran deejay Scott Muni in a 1988 interview, "I was thinking as I was doing it, 'Well, I'm certainly not going to call the song 'Going Home,' there must be 250 songs called 'Going Home.' That's not going to do anything. 

Knowing his ambivalence about any association with his days with Garfunkel, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he also resisted any comparison with their hit “Homeward Bound.”

“Kodachrome” turned out to be a felicitous replacement, at least lyrically. (The use of a branded name led the song to be banned from the BBC.) From it emerged those “nice bright colors” in the refrain, and “everything looks worse in black and white” as a wry comment on the women he knew when he was single.

A couple of years after “Kodachrome’s” release, at an assembly at my high school, the opening line—“When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school”—provoked many students to leap to their feet, undoubtedly to the discomfort of the administration and faculty.

There Goes Rhymin’ Simon represented something of a studio departure for Simon, both in the number of multiple producers (not just Simon and his longtime producer from the albums with Garfunkel, Roy Halee, but also Phil Ramone, Paul Samwell-Smith, and even the accomplished Alabama studio musicians, the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section) and the number of multiple voices (also including the New Jersey folk music duo Maggie and Terre Roche, as well as the gospel quintet, the Dixie Hummingbirds).

In general, I prefer Simon’s songs from his collaboration with Garfunkel to his solo work. But his penchant for trying out new sounds and musical directions (demonstrated even more dramatically with Graceland and The Rhythm of the Saints) is something to be respected, and the results in these cases, as with the best of There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, are entirely admirable.

The public certainly embraced it. “Kodachrome” and “Loves Me Like a Rock” each shot to #2 on the singles chart, and the album as a whole sold two million copies in its first year alone. A late friend of mine said she regarded Bob Dylan as America’s pop poet and Simon as its pop psychologist. By that standard, Simon was expressing the mood of a generation transitioning from youthful protest to something approaching private happiness—still tentative, but hopeful.

Photo of the Day: Summer Singular Sensation, Chautauqua NY

I’m a sucker for a brass band in a small town on a mild summer’s day. I got what I wanted early one afternoon this month, when I photographed the Chautauqua Community Band and an appreciative crowd in Bestor Plaza at the Chautauqua Institution.

The architecture of this upstate New York village founded in 1874 is as picturesquely American as you can get. So was the band’s bill of fare—mostly Broadway tunes, along with John Philip Sousa’s “Washington Post March.”

That afternoon, I had to work on some writing that required the use of Chautauqua’s library, so I could not linger outside, much as I wanted to. But for several minutes, I smiled as the band, under the direction of Jason Weintraub, played the bouncy ragtime rhythms of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer,” and my heart lifted and kicked to the joyful strut of Marvin Hamlisch’s climax to the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical A Chorus Line, “One (Singular Sensation).”

Quote of the Day (Jody Rosen, on “Don’t Stop Believin’” as the Peak of Schlock Rock)

“ ‘Don’t Stop Believin’” hasn’t just stuck around: It has sunk its teeth into the collective unconscious. Today, the song sounds irrefutable; its dramatic slow-boiling arrangement — the tolling piano chords, arcing 16th-note guitar riffing, and mock-operatic vocals — is the essence of arena-rock grandeur….In short, 33 years after its release, ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’’ is pop-music Holy Writ. History has certainly been kinder to Journey than to the reviewers who savaged them....[T]oday Journey’s anthem haunts our culture like no other song from 1981. ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’ has become a standard not in spite of the qualities that repelled critics — the clichés, the pretensions, the overweening emotionalism, Steve Perry’s too-tight jeans and too-tremulous tenor. It has become a standard because of them. Put another way, ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’ has endured because it belongs to a tradition that has given us our most indestructible songs, a tradition as time-honored, as sturdy, as it is maligned: schlock.”— Jody Rosen, “In Defense of Schlock Music: Why Journey, Abba, and Lionel Richie Are Better Than You Think,” New York Magazine, June 2-8, 2014  

Quote of the Day (Linda Ronstadt, on ‘Why People Sing’)

“Someone once asked me why people sing. I answered that they sing for many of the same reasons the birds sing. They sing for a mate, to claim their territory, or simply to give voice to the delight of being alive in the midst of a beautiful day”—Linda Ronstadt, Simple Dreams (2013)

Quote of the Day (Dan Morgenstern, on Sarah Vaughan)

“While the voice has lost nothing, Sarah Vaughan the improvising musician has grown in stature. She always had an exceptional ear, and this enabled her to become the first (and perhaps the only) singer who could utilize the harmonic subtleties introduced to the jazz language by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie—not so coincidentally among her first fans and boosters. In terms of rhythm, she was able to keep up with the innovations in jazz as well. But in her earlier days, her playfulness sometimes interfered with the sense and intention of the songs. No such dangers now—she has become a great interpreter of great songs as well as a great singer, and she has accomplished this without giving up her sense of humor, which remains as delightful and unpredictable (and girlish) as ever.”— Dan Morgenstern, Living with Jazz: A Reader, edited by Sheldon Meyer (2004)

The quote above comes from a 1981 Morgenstern review. By this time, the voice and style of Sarah Vaughan—born in Newark, NJ, 90 years ago today—had changed, partly because of her smoking (which would result in her death by lung cancer in 1990) and partly because of song interpretations that had grown more baroque with age.

If you want to experience how the voice of this divine jazz singer could change over time, just compare her treatment of two standards: Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz’s “Dancing in the Dark,” a 1956 song of hers from Mercury Records, and Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns,” a staple of her concerts in the 1980s. “Dancing in the Dark” is lighter, airier, practically ready to take wing; three decades later, with “Send in the Clowns,” her tones felt darker, heavier, lingering over phrases, stretching syllables.

One might also compare Vaughan with Joni Mitchell, another singer whose voice became altered by smoking. Mitchell’s had coarsened in a way that Vaughan’s did not, even well into her 60s. The interpretations of both women, however, became supercharged with experience. (See, for instance, what Mitchell did with “Both Sides Now” in her 1969 version from the Clouds LP, then in 2000 from her CD also named Both Sides Now.)

One aspect of Vaughan, however, as noted by Morgenstern, did not alter with time: the irrepressible sense of humor that led to her nickname, happily alliterative and light: “Sassy.”

(The image accompanying this post is an August 1946 photograph of Sarah Vaughan at Café Society in New York, from the William P. Gottlieb Collection of the Library of Congress.)