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.

V04-T07 I Want Candy

.....Sandwiched between two covers I placed the original version of a song better known as a cover.

Volume 4: "THE LITTLE BROWN ONES ARE THORAZINE, GEORGE", track 7

• 02:36 "I WANT CANDY" (Bob Feldman, Jerry Goldstein, Richard Gottehrer, Bert Berns)
• performed by The Strangeloves
• original source: A-side 7" BANG!Records B-501(US) 1965
• and my source: the same

.....I don't know if my copy is a first pressing but I don't think it would matter if it was. Unfortunately from a collector's standpoint it is a deleted sleeveless stock copy in rough condition and bought for chump change out of a bargain box somewhere. Still plays though. The reason that a first pressing would be a better conversation piece is that this is a little bit of rock history-- the first(?) official release from BANG! Records.

.....Atlantic Records was formed by Ahmet and Neshui Ertegun in the 1940's to indulge their love of American jazz and blues. By the 1960's they had diversified somewhat, as most successful labels will. In the course of their expansion they had enlisted a number of talented producers. In 1964 two of them, Bert Berns and Jerry Wexler, convinced them to launch a competing label as committed to purely commercial, hit-making producer's projects as Atlantic had been committed to capturing artists authentically. They called it "BANG!", named for Bert, Ahmet, Neshui and Gerald. Initially they recorded content for other labels, producing finished recordings instead of demos and shopping them around to other small labels in need of a chart hit. One such song was "LOVE LOVE(THAT'S ALL I WANT FROM YOU)" on the Swan label by three producers masquerading as a group called The Strangeloves. Feldman, Goldstein and Gottehrer could play instruments, but generally left the heavy lifting to session men. One day they laid down the instrumental backing for a cover of "BO DIDDLEY" that turned out so well, Berns suggested they make it the basis for a new song instead of squandering it on a B-side. The result was "I WANT CANDY".

.....Seeing that this single was catalog number B-501 with matrix numbers W-1003 and W-1004 (A and B, respectively), it occurred to me that the previous single would have been B-500 with matrices W-1001 and W-1002. Not only could I not find any release like that for any of the artists I knew to be on their roster, I found out that W-1001 is in the trail-off groove of a Neil Diamond album they released two years later.

.....When the single became a hit, Feldman, Goldstein and Gottehrer took four of the musicians from the session on the road with them to play concerts. They were Jack Raczka (guitar), John Shine (bass, vocals), Richie Lauro (sax, vocals) and Tom Kobus (drums). The line-ups were perpetually changing later, but this would have been representative of the studio band on the single. The three 'real' Strangeloves continued writing and producing with and without the pseudonym. In fact, Gottehrer was producing the Go-Go's when they recorded that B-side I used a few posts ago. The song's been pretty durable, too, covered by the Count Bishops (in the 70's) and perhaps most famously by Bow Wow Wow in 1982, changing the 'girl' in the song to a 'guy'.

.....Next up, a cover more appropriate than it immediately appears.

V04-T06 Academy Fight Song

.....You may have noticed that since this volume began that even those songs recorded in the 70's and 80's were from sources released within a couple years of 1990. This track is no different. A big part of the reason is that I was making last minute substitutions, as I've mentioned here before. I think that subconsciously I was also wary of being perceived as someone living in the past. It's just that if any ongoing collection is to be genuinely well-rounded then whatever in it is contemporary, regardless of when 'contemporary' happens to fall, is always going to be a small part of the whole. And of course, even that will soon be part of the past. Since I had already attempted to play around with the dates by playing older recordings I decided to indulge myself with a contemporary cover of an older song before fishing around for older sources. I felt I had been behaving myself were the covers were concerned and this one isn't archly deconstructionist or remotely campy.

Volume 4: "THE LITTLE BROWN ONES ARE THORAZINE, GEORGE", track 6

• 03:42 "ACADEMY FIGHT SONG" (Chris Conley)
• performed by R.E.M.
• original source: A-side 7" BOB32(UK)1992
• [free with magazine Bucketful of Brains issue #39/40(Mar-Apr/92)]
• and my source: the same

.....I'm going to reproduce my original liner notes again, with the exception that a specific institution's name will be redacted not merely for legal reasons but because it may no longer be an accurate reflection of campus life today. Also, Conley attended University of Rochester, NY and not the school discussed.

"Many British fanzines give flexi-discs (or used to, in the age of turntables). Few give hard-vinyl singles in picture sleeves. This live track opens with the announcement, "Mission Of Burma", the name of the band who recorded this song originally on their debut single [in 1980]. R.E.M., who are even better as a out-of-left-field-cover band than as radio hounds, do a pretty faithful job.

"I'm pretty sure that the song is about [a certain institution]-- the arrogance, cliques and hypocrisy. The 'fight' is against the academy, not for it. It was about this point in the tape that I realized how many overtures of rebellion I have been working into this thing. What distinguishes [this institution's] cliques (according to my personal experiences meeting people and the testimony of friends who were either students or professors) is an unavoidable sense of shallowness that comes from defining themselves in terms of others-- specifically what they choose not to like or else denigrate. It's not unheard of for a [~] student to confront someone with a laundry list of real or imagined personal faults the student feels that person should correct, and to react with shock and defensiveness if that person should have the nerve to tell them to fuck off.

"The song is sung from the perspective of someone wrestling against peer pressure to do exactly that; hence the line, 'I'm not judging you, I'm judging me'. The flip-side of the single, by the way, is a song by The Coal Porters."

That covers it. And for anyone reading who isn't from the northeast but knows that Mission Of Burma began their career in Boston, I should point out that the redacted school is not Harvard. Regardless of what national television may repeatedly tell you, Harvard is not in Boston, it's in Cambridge. On the other side of the Charles River. In another county. End of sermon.

V04-T05 I'm A Potato

.....My original notes on this spiraled off into a rambling diatribe about De-evolution, evolution, the Church of the Sub-Genius and the Industrial Revolution. I'm going to spare you that and stick to the track in question.

Volume 4: "THE LITTLE BROWN ONES ARE THORAZINE, GEORGE", track 5

• 02:38 "I'M A POTATO" (Bob Casale, Gerald V. Casale)
• performed by Devo
• original source: demo, recorded 1976 [possibly self-pressed single?]
• and my source: CD HARDCORE VOL. 1 1974-1977 RYKOdisc RCD 10188 (US) 1990

.....It may be debated for years whether Devo merely predicted the 1980's or actually caused them. Considering the number and scope of forces at work, I'm inclined to say 'predicted' but their theories of De-evolution seemed to be a blueprint for everything from the Reagan presidency to the Islamic revolution in Iran. Simplification, even over-simplification, became a rallying cry for people who could no longer bear the increasingly impossible burden of respecting others. Well, impossible for them, apparently.

.....The parallels to Ronald Reagan can sometimes be particularly chilling. Before he had the advantage of Peggy Noonan providing an articulate filter for his "the world was how I imagined it as a child" outlook, Reagan often wrote his own speeches in 1960's California. For his gubernatorial inauguration he wrote: "For many years now, you and I have been shushed like children and told there are no simple answers to complex problems which are beyond our comprehension. Well, the truth is, there are simple answers-- but there are no easy ones." At no point does he assert that the simple answers would work, you understand, only that the mere fact that they are simple is in itself a virtue and an end in itself. For Reagan, the point was never to solve the problem. The point was always to adhere to the principle. If you get your way, you win, regardless of the consequences of getting your way. The principle is never subjected to testing. The principle is never subjected to analysis. The principle is the only standard. Simple, simple, simple.

.....Devo never fell into the trap of believing that evolution is progress. The word "progress" implies moving forward, which further implies that there is an understood consensus on which direction is "forward". The truth is that 'evolution' is just the name that we slap on whatever process (and it's usually a process of elimination) that got us from where/what we were to where/what we are. It is not a process that moves toward a goal, it is really just a reaction to conditions as they are. Conditions change, and chances of survival with respect to this or that ability or trait change with them. It has long been a human conceit that whatever we happen to be right now is the pinnacle to which anyone might aspire. Devo have spent decades wryly turning that arrogance on its head by isolating those parts of our culture and civilization that are characteristically contemporary and sarcastically chiding us about the "wonderful world we live in; a beautiful, magic place". Reagan was a textbook example of the dangers of indulging that kind of fuzzy sentimentality. While most us grow up to lose some aspect of innocence and learn that the world is not entirely wonderful, it is usually not necessary to sit each of us down and explain to us that when we were children that the adults in our lives shielded us from many of the worlds more depressing aspects. That's the sort of thing most of us work out for ourselves when it becomes our turn to care for someone much younger and helpless, someone at the mercy of a world that can hurt them and scare them with very little effort. When we need to placate their anxieties we try to tell them only what we assume they can digest at their age. They can deal with more later. It makes us more forgiving of those who soft-peddled the world's evils to us when we were that age. The problem with Reagan is that he behaved, and certainly spoke, as though he thought that the world genuinely was the way it was presented to him as a child. He once said, incredibly, that labor strikes were unheard of when he was a kid and certainly not as violent as they had become in the 1970's and 1980's. Even more incredibly, no one in news media challenged that clearly false statement, probably because Reagan said it, as he said everything, with absolute conviction.

.....The point here is that Reagan was one of many raised to believe that humanity and more specifically western civilization in his youth were the pinnacle. When the world changed, when it proved unable to remain stagnant and dead for decades, he could only conclude that something had gone wrong. It was inconceivable to him that many of these changes were improvements over conditions of which he was unaware and that many more were never changes at all. He hadn't learned as many of us had that the world had not always been how we were led to believe it was and that the changes it undergoes aren't good or bad but merely developments to be dealt with. In "I'M A POTATO" we have Devo painting a nostalgic picture of what most people would consider a nightmare of chromosomal damage and failed elective surgery. The music sounds like an enthusiastic march (again, the illusion of progress, of moving 'toward' something) with electric guitars imitating a trumpet fanfare. It would take virtually no effort at all to write arrangements for high school marching bands to play at football games. All of which is to celebrate being a 'potato', a recurring image and metaphor in many of their songs. The potato actually has more genetic material than a human (48 chromosomes to our 46) with much of that information devoted to storing energy. Recorded in 1976,supposedly the year that the phrase "couch potato" was coined, this demo is already anticipating a time when over-simplification will be lionized as the epitome of human development. The potato becomes the ideal model for the future of human evolution. We would become big featureless inert sponges, soaking up information or some other unit of value and retaining it as long as possible, just as potatoes retain heat energy. What Devo is telling us is that this can be viewed as a problem to prevent or a paradigm to embrace. What is not as obvious is that our current evolutionary status can also be viewed that way. If we don't occasionally step back from ourselves and look objectively at what we are we may never realize that we are the mongoloids happily devolving and embracing ourselves as not only the best that we can be but the best that can be, as Reagan did. Devo painted that picture of mutant dystopia to warn us, but a decade later it seemed that the picture was adopted as a blueprint.