V01-T09 Tra-La-La/The Banana Splits Theme

.....I've mentioned before that the nature of this compilation tape is to make a continuous listening experience from selections representative of my... heterogeneous music collection without choosing items so similar as to create themes where none was intended. Having introduced a poppy television theme (in the previous post), I needed something that could naturally follow a television theme without being a television theme.

Volume 1:THE PITCHFORK APPROACH, track 9

• 01:56 "BANANA SPLITS" [aka "TRA-LA-LA"] (Ritchie Adams and Mark Barkan)
• performed by The Dickies
• original source: A-side, 7" A&M AMS 7431 (UK) April 21,1979
• and my source: CD GREAT DICTATIONS A&M CD5236 (US) 1989

.....According to the Dickies' website, this song went on to become their biggest hit, selling in excess of a quarter million copies. I didn't know that at the time that I added it to the compilation, it just seemed like the route to take. And if you're going to take that route, you might as well be driving a Banana Buggy, n'est-ce pas?

V01-T08b Come On Get Happy

.....What song would be introduced with an interstitial about selling your soul to become a famous musician?

Volume 1: THE PITCHFORK APPROACH, track 8b

• 01:05 "COME ON GET HAPPY" (Danny Janssen, Wes Farrell)
• performed by The Partridge Family (i.e., David Cassidy, Shirley Jones and various session musicians)
• original source: television theme song [second version from seasons 2-4, 1971-1974]
• and my source: CD GREATEST HITS Arista ARCD-8604 (US) 1989

.....By several accounts the television series "The Partridge Family" was clearly inspired by the real-life story of the Cowsills, a family of teens and pre-teens who charted in the late 1960's with a number of pop and light rock songs. But the project was only approved so that it could be a vehicle for a Broadway singer, Shirley Jones, when Hollywood could no longer pay for movies made from Broadway musicals (blame "Finian's Rainbow"). Her stepson, David Cassidy got the part of her on-screen son and soon became a teen heartthrob. It was in later years that the public learned that his spin-off solo career was not entirely a product of the producers' conniving. Even as a teen, Cassidy's real objective was to be a rock musician and saw the TV series as a means to that end, despite the difference in musical styles. He believed that once he had a platform from which to be heard that he could create his own music. It wasn't until the show (and concurrent record album projects) had begun production that he learned that the music and vocals were to be recorded by anonymous professionals and that the cast would merely lip-synch on the show. He convinced the music director and producer that he could genuinely sing (he could, for their purposes, and would get better with experience) and began recording his own vocals, if not his own songs. When he felt he had written enough material for a solo act, he fought to leave the show. Eventually he discovered that although the show created a built-in audience, it was a built-in audience for The Partridge Family. After spending years playing music he didn't care about in order to play the music he loved, he had alienated the very audiences who would have listened to him and cultivated audiences who only wanted something else. Welcome to hell.

.....Having added a kitsch theme song to the mix I had opened a porthole in a submarine as far as the compilation tape was concerned.

V01-T08a "...My card, pretty lady..."

.....As a change of pace, the next interstitial required background research with IMDb, which for those of you who have never needed to use it is the Internet Movie Database, not Music.

Volume 1: THE PITCHFORK APPROACH, track 8a

• 00:36 [archetypal scene of The Devil bartering for a soul] (screenplay by Ken Sobol; music by Bauhaus)
• performed by Chris Wiggins (Devil), Annabel Kershaw (ingenue/Jan), Martin Lavut (flunky/Wheez), Laurel Runn (Jan's singing voice); music by Bauhaus
• original source: (dialogue) television feature "THE DEVIL AND DANIEL MOUSE" Nelvana (Canada) Oct/78
• original source: (music) radio broadcast of The John Peel Show, BBC Radio 1(England) April 12, 1982 (recorded March 13, 1982) as "PARTY OF THE FIRST PART"
• original source: (commercial release) from Bauhaus, A-side, track 2 of 12"EP [unprinted title:"Covers"] Beggars' Banquet BEG 83T (England) Oct/82
• and my source: CD SWING THE HEARTACHE Beggars' Banquet/RCA 9804-2-H (US) Aug/89

.....I know, that's an awful lot of disambiguation for a half-minute snippet, but it doesn't stop there. The dialogue from the 1978 animated cartoon was sampled and edited for use in the sound collage broadcast on the radio in the spring of 1982 and titled "PARTY OF THE FIRST PART". In the summer of 1982, Bauhaus recorded the Bowie song "ZIGGY STARDUST" and the Eno song "THIRD UNCLE" and released them as a 7" single in October. Weeks(?) later the 12" version of that single was released during a UK tour by following "ZIGGY..." with "PARTY..." on side A and "THIRD UNCLE" with a live performance of the band with Nico (doing "WAITING FOR THE MAN" recorded a year earlier) on side B.

.....While the domestic American pressings of Bauhaus' last two original albums (on A&M) were in print, their British counterparts were difficult to import (for reasons too complicated to go into here), which is a shame because the UK discs had four bonus tracks apiece and the US discs had none. Those bonuses included "PARTY..." on the 1988 UK pressing of "The Sky's Gone Out" album, meaning that we had to wait a year in this country to get the original radio session on "Swing The Heartache".

.....In 2005 there was a 2DVD release of Nelvana's 1983 theatrical feature "ROCK & RULE" with the entire "THE DEVIL AND DANIEL MOUSE" special as a bonus feature on the second disc. The main feature (which hardly touched the theaters) is a must for fans of the "Heavy Metal" animated movie and Ralph Bakshi's 70's-80's output.

.....Tomorrow I'll shed light on the song this interstitial introduces.

V01-T07 Vincent Van Gogh

.....Like many of Jonathan Richman's best songs, this one was inspired by his actual experiences in a museum:

Volume 1: THE PITCHFORK APPROACH, track 7

• 02:27 "VINCENT VAN GOGH" (Jonathan Richman)
• performed by Jonathan Richman
• original source: LP ROCKIN' AND ROMANCE TwinTone TTR 8558 (US) 1985
• and my source: the same

.....I believe this may be the only Jonathan Richman album I don't own on CD, only because it has never been mass produced in that format. A quick check at the label's website reveals that they have been offering "burn on demand" CD's for $15 plus postage since 2004. At the time I was putting together this compilation Richman was occasionally rerecording songs from his back catalog for his then-current label Rounder. He had already remade "I Must Be King" and reworked "Down In Bermuda" into a monologue. The year after I put this together he rerecorded three more in Spanish. This particular song was rerecorded in 2004.

.....Jonathan Richman is the perfect example of an artist who was failed by the label system. Passed over in favor of crash-and-burn one hit wonders and lip-synching clothes racks, he now has forty years of performing and dozens of albums to his credit. And Milli Vanilli? Christopher Cross? David Soul? I could fill a bus with similar chart-toppers from the past forty years and drive it over a cliff and it would not make a whit of difference in your life. More to the point, the music industry that spent millions of dollars shoving them in your face and hitting you over the head with them would barely shrug at the news of their deaths. Nine times out of ten the person who recommends Jonathan Richman to you wasn't paid to do so. They simply can't not recommend him. And even though he's done numerous songs in the first person, "VINCENT VAN GOGH" in a sense would make for a character study of him as much as it would the painter. Both created vibrant and colorful depictions out of a need to manifest what they felt. It would be difficult to believe for either of them that what they did was an affectation, that they would produce for so long and so consistently for so little reward. Richman at least gets the appreciation of live audiences during his lifetime. It's a shame that many people know him only as the troubadour in the movie "There's Something About Mary" or from his handful of appearances on Conan O'Brien's Late Night television series.

.....YouTube has a live performance of this song from June 2009 as of this writing, FYI.

V01-T06 Motorcycle Mama

.....After the 1987 release of the various artists' album "Sgt. Pepper Knew My Father", on which British post-punk and neo-psychedelic groups cover the entire Beatles' album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" track by track for its 20th anniversary, tribute albums briefly became popular among independent labels and their college music audiences. Eventually the majors noticed and soon anyone trying to find a copy of the Hendrix tribute "If 6 Was 9" would be sold "Stone Free", probably by a vacant-eyed teenage employee who would tell them, "That's THE Hendrix tribute. It has to be, it's the only one in our system." Even Leonard Cohen's tribute "I'm Your Fan" (already on Atlantic/WEA) was blotted out by the embarrassingly inferior "Tower Of Power"(on Polygram). In the middle of this, major affiliate Elektra (also part of WEA) celebrated its 40th anniversary by releasing a massive tribute anthology, not to an artist, but to a small independent label... Elektra.

Volume 1: THE PITCHFORK APPROACH, track 6

• 03:44 "MOTORCYCLE MAMA" (John Wyker)
• performed by The Sugarcubes
• original source: VA 2CD RUBAIYAT Elektra/WEA 9 60940-2 (US) 1990
• and my source: the same

.....The original version of the song was by an ad hoc southern rock band named Sailcat, essentially Wyker and a friend plus whoever was available. They were among the last acts to be signed to Elektra during Jac Holzman's time as president although neither Wyker nor the band make the index of Holzman's book, "Follow The Music". Their only album, named for the single, was released in 1972, the year before Elektra released the 2LP "Nuggets" collection of old singles, compiled and curated by Lenny Kaye. Kaye would later produce the "Rubaiyat" anthology in 1990.

.....(Technical Note: I remember this vaguely as a 3LP set on vinyl, but after twenty years the configurations of an album I've only owned in CD form are admittedly fuzzy. A quick scan of the commercial sites doesn't show anyone selling a vinyl copy at the moment but lindaronstadt.com seems certain it was 4 LP's. Sounds good to me.)

.....The premise of the compilation was for artists currently signed to the label to cover artists from the label's impressive back catalog. More often than not it works very well. In fact, if Michael Feinstein's hellacious cover of "Both Sides Now" had been near the middle rather than the end, it would have made a convenient bathroom break to an otherwise pleasant two-and-a-half hours of continuous play. One gets the sneaking suspicion that perhaps the intention was to have 40 songs for 40 years (there are 39 if you count both of the Cure's arrangements of the Doors' "Hello, I Love You", the faithful version and the deconstructed punkier version). There are some creative song choices, so the artists presumably are invested in their respective sessions. Some come from the label's first twenty years as a folk-heavy independent and some from the next twenty as a charter member of the Warner Group. Until WEA acquired Sire in the late 70's, Elektra was their home for punk, jazz inflected R&B and more experimental artists. Sort of the Simon to Atlantic's Theodore and Warner's Alvin. So it's not surprising that while some artists play to their strengths (Anita Baker's gorgeous cover of "You Belong To Me") others play with their own image and that of the material (Faster Pussycat's "You're So Vain").

.....A favorite urban legend surrounding this anthology involves They Might Be Giants and that idea of playing with image and expectations. Supposedly they agreed soon after being approached to contribute and had recorded a cover of a Queen song (I first heard it as being "Bohemian Rhapsody", but others claim it was "We Will Rock You" or "We Are The Champions"). Only after they'd finished their session did Kaye get confirmation to participate from Metallica... conditional on being able to do a Queen song (preferably "Tie Your Mother Down"). Having just turned in their first top ten album and top forty single the year before, the label executives wanted their participation. As the story goes, Kaye appealed to TMBG's penchant for drawing on multiple sources for their original material; surely they could apply some of that creativity to selecting another cover? TMBG submitted a Phil Ochs song for the final set and Metallica went with "Stone Cold Crazy", which the following year earned (?) them a Grammy and was revived as the B-side of "Enter Sandman", their highest charting single to that point and for the next five years.

.....The Sugarcubes, of course, are the Icelandic band that introduced Bjork to American audiences. For a group with two vocalists to choose to rework this song, of everything in a forty-year catalog, into a male-female duet was a stroke of inspired genius. It comes across like a demented version of Nancy Sinatra's "Jackson". It also makes for the third consecutive song on the compilation to (a) deal with pavement in some way and (b) come from the then-current decade. Readers may notice that in upcoming volumes I dig pretty deep into the past and I sometimes make a conscious effort to avoid getting stuck there. For most of the rest of this volume I hover about in the previous decade, the 80's, starting with the next track, which takes us from Iceland to Amsterdam. Kind of.

V01-T05 Concrete Beach

.....There are few examples in music history where a soundtrack album has outsold, by multiples, tickets to the movie. To paraphrase Rod Serling, I present to you for your consideration:

Volume 1: THE PITCHFORK APPROACH, track 5

• 03:09 "CONCRETE BEACH" (Joe Keithley)
• performed by D.O.A.
• original source: VA LP"Terminal City Ricochet - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack" Alternative Tentacles VIRUS 75 (US) 1989
• and my source: VA CD"Terminal City Ricochet - [~]" Alternative Tentacles VIRUS 75CD (Canada?) 1990

.....In the late 1980's it was common, even for major labels, to release an album on vinyl and cassette formats first, use their initial sales to gauge the album's longevity as a catalog item and then press CD quantities accordingly. Of course, when the CD format launched publicly, only Sony and Philips owned the means of manufacturing. EMI, RCA and WEA had to queue up and pay for the use of the plants. Until they realized that building their own means of production was worth the investment, they used that pricey access judiciously. Often times, they didn't bother making CD's for movie soundtracks at all. By the time a CD could get into the shops, the movie would likely be out of the theaters thereby losing what they believed was the main impetus for sales. That may seem strange if you consider that ten years later there were soundtrack albums for every 'extreme sports' event and 'Spy Kids' movie conceivable. For smaller labels, delaying the release of one format or the other was almost always a matter of cash flow. In the case of the "Terminal City" soundtrack, my CD copy has, in the innermost edge of the playing side in tiny little print, the name of the album and the numbers "452-129-007-E 01/15/90G". That date, January 15th, couldn't be the projected release date because labels like AT used too many 'mom & pop' forms of distribution to bother setting a national simultaneous release. It probably refers to the mastering or the pressing or both, meaning that the average street date was maybe a month later. At about that time Restless Records released the D.O.A. album, "Murder" containing the same song.

.....Many people may remember the Reagan-Bush era as a continuous, one-sided culture war but few are aware of the extent of the Soviet-style tactics used on artists and entertainers, mainly because they were so successful at suppressing dissent. The animated film "When The Wind Blows" was pulled from theaters because it showed the effects of radioactive fallout on inhabitants of a country (England in this case) not even engaged in the nuclear war that causes it. The reasoning was that if people were to know that these weapons had consequences besides the ones intended that the public might not support their use. Musicians Legendary Pink Dots and Echo And The Bunnymen were prohibited from entering the country on the grounds that they constituted a threat to national security. (In the case of the Scandinavian Dots, it's possible that that incident stemmed from a Bush appointee in the state department trying to extort a bribe from their managers, but in the case of the British Bunnymen, it was almost certainly because they criticized Thatcher and were very visibly leftist.) In that environment, "Terminal City" was shown much the way John Waters described 'distributing' his early movies almost two decades earlier: he drove around with prints in the trunk of his car, went to towns with colleges or bars nearby (something that says "risk-taking behavior") and found a theater that was doing meager business late at night and looked like it was privately owned (rather than a chain or franchise theater) and offered the owner an under-the-table cash deal for showing his movies. Unless you were very lucky, you didn't see "Terminal City Ricochet" in a theater. However, the soundtrack has been floating around in stores for years.

.....The song "CONCRETE BEACH" does not immediately bring to mind leftist politics, but skateboarding has been widely criminalized, largely prompted by insurance concerns but definitely promulgated in local politics by cultural prejudices. Nobody bans bicycles when a cyclist is hit by a car. Hell, nobody bans cars when they hit cyclists. But adults generally don't skateboard and teens generally don't vote, so... This certainly isn't the first or most popular skateboarding song (just look at the J.F.A. or Suicidal Tendencies catalogs prior to 1990), but it is defiantly positive. Catchy, too.

.....For the next track, we're still on wheels, but we've upgraded from a skateboard to a motorcycle.

V01-T04b Jamaican In New York

.....The preceding interstitial with New York DJ's speaking with some kind of Caribbean accents seemed the perfect lead-in to this next song:

Volume 1: THE PITCHFORK APPROACH, track 4b

• 04:19 JAMAICAN IN NEW YORK (Urban Radio Mix) (Sting[Gordon Sumner], with additional lyrics by E.C. Aiken, Jr.)
• performed by Shinehead
• original source: promo-only CD5 Elektra/African Love PRCD-8716 (US)1993
• and my source: the same

.....Press releases at the time suggested that Shinehead's childhood was spent being sent back back and forth between family members in Jamaica and New York. He was never really abandoned, per se. He was always with people who cared about him. But there was almost inevitably the paradox of feeling both at home and alien in both environments; of simultaneously belonging and not belonging. This enabled him to turn a sharp wit to things that he knew and bring them to life with the clear eye of an outside observer.

.....With that in mind, the liner notes that I wrote for my compilation tape in 1993 still hold up well enough: The original mix is on Shinehead's "Sidewalk University" album. I haven't heard it yet, but I do recommend his second album, "Unity", very highly. Shinehead has a history of stealing from thieves.On "Unity" he lifts from the Beatles' "Come Together", which in turn robs from Chuck Berry's "You Can't Catch Me". This song, more obviously from Sting's "Englishman In New York", which in turn borrows heavily from Quentin Crisp's memoirs and spoken word performances. (I even think he shows up in the video.)

.....All I can add to that is that the video I was referring to was Sting's and that it's possible that I've picked up "Sidewalk University" since writing this. I know I've got "The Real Rock" album and some other singles. I haven't seen much more from him but I don't know if that's because of the vagaries of the market or because it's that much easier to make witty observations when you're younger and everything is still new and grabbing your attention. It's common for artists to become less prolific with age, even when what they do produce is still of good quality. The reasons for that could be anything from physically tiring to becoming a harsher self-critic during the editing process.

.....Next up is another song about transplanting from a sunny, open setting to an urban landscape.