V04-T09 September Song

.....I've used a large number of covers over the course of this compilation series, but this one has nearly half a century between the original and the recording here.

Volume 4: "THE LITTLE BROWN ONES ARE THORAZINE, GEORGE", track 8

• 04:18 "SEPTEMBER SONG" (lyrics: Maxwell Anderson, music: Kurt Weill)
• performed by Lou Reed
• original source: VALP LOST IN THE STARS A&M SP9 5104 (US) 1985
• and my source: VACD LOST IN THE STARS A&M CD5104 (US) 1985(?)

.....If Americans know Kurt Weill at all it's probably for the song "MACK THE KNIFE" from the musical "Threepenny Opera", written in Europe with Bertolt Brecht. When the Nazis began rising to power Weill's productions became targets of their vandalism and he immigrated to the United States in 1935. Soon after, he met Maxwell Anderson. In Anderson, he not only found a new friend in an unfamiliar country, but potentially a prolific collaborator. They each bought a house in an artists' enclave in upstate New York and began working, but Weill was increasingly being offered lucrative work on Hollywood soundtracks he would have been foolish to pass up. He spent the last third of his relatively short life (1900-1950) in America and his only two collaborations with Anderson form bookends to that period. The first musical was "Knickerbocker Holiday"(1938), the source of the song "SEPTEMBER SONG". The second musical was a musical adaption of Alan Paton's "Cry The Beloved Country" that they called "Lost In The Stars"(1949), the source of this album's title track.

.....Producer Hal Willner made something of a cottage industry out of tribute albums, beginning in the early eighties and continuing into the past decade. Following this one and SGT PEPPER KNEW MY FATHER, a non-Willner production using post-punk British musicians in 1987 to recreate the Beatles' album track by track for its twentieth anniversary, there was a flurry of artist tributes on small labels like Communion on which current alt-rock acts acknowledged their (sometimes obvious) debts to then-under-exposed acts like Captain Beefheart, Syd Barrett and the Velvet Underground. After the flurry came the deluge. I have actually lost count of the number of reggae-only tribute albums there are to Pink Floyd (I think it was four when I stopped paying attention). Willner's were almost always superior. He had an uncanny knack for matching just the right performer to the material, usually a performer you never would have thought to consider yourself but who, in retrospect, seems perfect. For instance, on the 1989 Disney tribute STAY AWAKE he paired Sinead O'Connor with "SOMEDAY MY PRINCE WILL COME" and Tom Waits with the Seven Dwarves' "HEIGH-HO", both adapted from "Snow White". At the time Lou Reed recorded this he had been working professionally for 20 years (almost 30 if you count the singles he made as a teenager) and almost never recorded covers. (Just after this was an ill-advised remake of "SOUL MAN", but that's rarely heard outside the soundtrack album of the same name.) Whatever possessed Willner to enlist Reed to interpret musical theater was something that can't be adequately described by trite phrases like "thinking outside of the box". It requires not only an intimate familiarity with the material to be covered but also with the panoply of artists available from which to choose (and then persuade to participate).

.....Say, I mentioned a tribute to Disney earlier. There's a whole different kind of tribute coming up next.

V04-T08 Love Is All Around

.....At the time I put this tape together I was sorely tempted to pair this song with the completely different song by the same title by the Troggs. I'm not sure why I didn't; it may have been because I had just used one original hit from the 1960's and four sides into a compilation series that emphasizes the obscure it would seem unusual to have two so close together. You'll see that not everything I chose to use was rare or unusual. Avoiding the popular or commercially successful music in my collection wouldn't be genuinely representative of what I was listening to any more than using it exclusively.

Volume 4: "THE LITTLE BROWN ONES ARE THORAZINE, GEORGE", track 8

• 01:46 "LOVE IS ALL AROUND" (Sonny Curtis)
• performed by Hüsker Dü
• original source: B-side 7" SST 051 (US) August 1985
• and my source: CDEP EIGHT MILES HIGH/MAKES NO SENSE AT ALL SST CD270 (US) 1990

.....My original notes from 1994 still look relevant:

"Anybody who doesn't recognize this as the theme to the Mary Tyler Moore Show, hold out your hands to be slapped. Bonus points, however, to any who know that the connection between the fictional Mary Richards and the late Hüsker Dü is that they were both based in Minneapolis. Extra bonus points and a big wet kiss to anyone who recognized the style, which is pretty obscured here, of the song's author, Sonny Curtis. Yes, it's the same Sonny who wrote 'I FOUGHT THE LAW', better known from records by The Bobby Fuller Four and The Clash.

"Poor Minneapolis; so much talent, so little focus or cohesion. What is the Minneapolis sound? Hüsker Dü? Prince? Garrison Keillor? Is there some common unifying bond or trait amongst those three that I'm missing? I doubt it.

"Anyway, this track has made the rounds. This and another Hüsker Dü single were compiled onto a four-song 10" EP which in turn was reissued as a CD. All four songs are also found on an indispensable Various Artists CD called SEVEN-INCH WONDERS OF THE WORLD."

.....Now back in 2011, I've added a link to a fan-generated Hüsker Dü Database that provides descriptions of the various formats and configurations in which this recording has been made available. The reference to a Minneapolis sound came from a tendency in the late 1980's to promote upcoming bands by associating them with established bands who've come up through the same club circuit. In some cases the comparisons were valid; scenes would develop with a large number of musicians in one area forming and reforming bands by exchanging members and playing a handful of venues to, by and large, the same audiences. Inevitably they would share the same references and musical vocabulary. Today, with new groups promoting themselves nationally (and internationally) online, I'm not sure the concept of regional sounds has any relevance anymore.

.....Tomorrow, another love song, but with an international touch.