Who Moved My Cheese Metal?

WMMCM is taking flight for the next few days, with songs about airplanes and flying of all kinds. And we start with this charmer by John Denver.

He didn’t have the hit, of course, but Denver does do this a great deal better than the people who did. There was so much image-building  around the odd lot of pop stars topping the charts in the very early ’70s — Elton John, Neil Diamond, and Denver, primarily — that it’s sometimes hard for people who remember those mild radio days to listen to them objectively.

But Denver was a far better singer than he often got credit for. His powerful tenor is flexible and smooth without being slick, and a slight reediness that would be a flaw in a smaller voice merely makes him sound more distinctive. Good pitch one could still take for granted in those days, but Denver is also warmly, effortlessly expressive, and has diction and dynamics that make one sigh for an era of better singers.

“Leaving on a Jet Plane” is so easy to play that virtually any baby guitarist can get around it and it doesn’t demand much in the way of range, so there was a stretch of a few years when just about everybody with a guitar around the house played it and sang it. It’s sweet and touching and works equally well from a man or a woman, and it’s one of those songs that just feels good to sing.

But like other songs that seem easy (think “Yesterday”), feeling good while you sing it, and even hitting all the notes correctly, doesn’t mean you’re doing it right  — or that anybody’s going to want to listen. This version of “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” by the guy who wrote it, is a little master class on what a fine singer can get out of a simple song.

(Also, as this demonstrates, John Denver was a country artist all along, even if country and pop radio were both too silly to recognize it back then.)

After many long years of playing clubs, bars, road stops, camps as well as concert halls a band that had been around since the early ’70s finally got their break. 

They had become major stars in their native land while developing a reputation for helping other bands get the major exposure needed to become international stars. In 1987 it was finally their turn…

Diesel and Dust became Midnight Oil’s first major charting album in the U.S. hitting the 21st spot. The follow up album, Blue Sky Mining, did a little better reaching the 20th spot supported by their only U.S. number one hit, “Blue Sky Mine.”

While Midnight Oil wern’t able to maintain the popularity achieved with the Diesel and Dust and Blue Sky Mining albums in the U.S. They remained as one of the biggest and best selling bands in Australia until 2002 when lead singer Peter Garrett left the band to enter politics as a Member Of Parliament.

On occasion Midnight Oil will reunite as they did in 2005 for WaveAid to raise funds for the Indian Ocean Tsunami and more recently to aid the victims of the wild fires in Victoria.

In keeping with WMMCM’s look at music from “down under,” it’s time to explore some outback alternative music.

It is Sunday you know, at least when I’m writing this. In Australia it’s already Monday what with that pesky international date line and all so I doubt they’ll care too much about my posting time. So put another shrimp on the barbie and let’s go to church…

The Church was one of the last ’80s bands to rise up out of the dusty outback making their way to U.S. radio in 1988 with their third album, Starfish.

Starting with 12 string guitar and Steve Kilbey’s vocals, “Milky Way” sets it’s tone immediately.

“I think about, loveless fascination, under the Milky Way tonight.”

Once the full band joins on the second verse you have a pretty good idea of where this is going. Perhaps no idea of what it about, but you know it’s going to be an interesting ride.

Kilbey’s bass line is what really pulls everything along with the odd intervals he plays during each verse. The 12 string and drums keeping things full.

The multi-layered backing vocals on the chorus and parts of the verse put some edge into the end of each line emphasizing Kilbey’s lead vocals making them sound rather ethereal.

In the middle of all this moodyness comes one of the most unusual guitar solos you’re ever going to hear. The “bagpipe” sounds were produced by using an “EBow” on a standard Fender electric guitar.

“Under The Milky Way Tonight” is a delightfully creepy record with it’s dark mood and strange guitar solo. Unfortunately it would be The Church’s only lasting impression on the U.S. charts though the band is still active today playing and recording.

And another in our informal look at Australian pop, with Crowded House — an Australian band fronted by New Zealander Neil Finn. CH was a post-Split Enz project and at one time included both Neil and older brother Tim Finn, with Australians and Americans filling out the rest of the band’s various lineups over the years.

Crowded House had two top 10 hits in the mid-’80s, hitting number two with “Don’t Dream It’s Over.” (No embed allowed, alas.)  The verses don’t seem to me to add up to much, with the lyrics mixing images and making vague promises:

There’s a battle ahead, many battles are lost
But you’ll never see the end of the road
While you’re traveling with me

And some of it is pretty much nonsense:

My possessions are causing me suspicion
But there’s no proof

And several lines are a few syllables too long and have to be poked sideways into the tune.

But it is just so damn pretty, isn’t it? This one is all about the lovely, evocative, and inviting chorus, with words and melody that are both hopeful and sad. That chorus gives a good singer worlds of room to make an emotional impact — no wonder this is covered all the time.

Crowded House’s second top 10 hit was the pleasant and now pretty much forgotten “Something So Strong” and they’d probably be considered a one-hit wonder in the U.S. But “Don’t Dream It’s Over” is something rather special, I think — not a bad one hit to have.

We continue in an Australian mood on WMMCM, with Aussie popsters Little River Band.

LRB, formed in 1975, were very big stars in their home country. But In the U.S., they proved to be just one of those durable, useful bands that lasts for years, getting steady radio play and popping up regularly on the charts. This somewhat Seger-esque tune from ’79 was a nicely typical LRB single.

And their biggest hit in the U.S. was the charming “Reminiscing,” from way back in 1978:

Ignore the dated keyboards and the I-just-had-my-first-lesson bassline in the intro — it gets better when Glenn Shorrock starts singing. Isn’t that a grand vocal? So smooth, but so expressive; no wonder this is a soft AC and classic hits radio perennial. It was so nice when the majority of pop singers could sing, but that pretty much ended in the ’80s.

No, I’m not saying there are no good singers now, or that there weren’t in the ’80s. Or that everybody up until then was great. But the early ’80s was when technical singing ability became genuinely irrelevant in pop music for a number of reasons, not all of which had to do with MTV. Technical ability is not everything — but it’s not nothing either.

Who are your favorite Australian acts? Tell us in comments!

Sunday morning, sometime around 3am when most normal people even my age, (at the time), were fast asleep, a new song came on MTV. It was one of those songs that grabbed me from the first notes of the synthesizer intro and it just got better from there…

Back in the heady daze of MTV’s early years they would play darn near anything because there just weren’t enough music videos around yet to fill a 24 hour a day channel. They didn’t know it at the time but that was the best thing that ever happened to the soon to be overwhelmingly influential new idea in programming.

INXS was one of those early video pioneer success stories. They had finished their third album, “Shabooh Shoobah” in 1982 and were ready to take on the world with their own brand of rock and new wave. Having made a solid name for themselves in their native Australia, INXS were about to become one of the biggest bands in the world.

“I’m standing here on the ground.”

“Don’t Change” was an impressive mixture of the then fading new wave keyboard/synth sound with classic big guitar power chords and slammin’ drums. It caught my ear right away. The unfortunately unavailable “official” video was a very simple but memorable affair with the band playing in an abandoned warehouse, (it wasn’t so dated and cliche’d at the time…) and as they finish the song, they abandon their instruments and drove away. It made an impression.

So did this…

As was common for early INXS, the lyrics are quite simple but very sincere.  For a break-up song, or a nearly break-up song, “This Time” tells a bit different story that most.

There is hopefulness.

“I will believe you if you say it’s true,
Girl you know I need you more than any word spoken.”

Then there’s reality…

“I’ve seen you before turn and walk away
You say you won’t come back, it’s a game anyway.”

More hopefulness…

“This time will be the last time, that we will fight like this.”

Starting with a jangly guitar and Micheal Hutchence’s solo vocal, the emotion is obvious. While never going over the top, Hutchence’s voice conveys great frustration with their perdicament before ending with a burst of honest passion during the last verse.

“You know I can forget, we have fought before,
I’ve seen inside your heart and I know it’s breaking.

We are hoping, yeah and we’re praying.”

Lovely stuff!

And as I come back to blogging after a nice long stretch of 18-hour-plus workdays (curses on all conferences!), I find Pete has us getting our Australian on. So, on that note, here’s a fine little story song from an elegant pop star of the early ’70s, Helen Reddy.

She’s not perhaps much remembered now, but Reddy had no fewer than 15 top 40 singles and three number ones — the first of which was this record:

Sure, it comes off as pretty hilarious now, and indeed some people thought so at the time. But this song was a very big deal. What was then called “women’s lib” was in the air, and Reddy and her co-writer hit the pop-cultural mood dead center with “I Am Woman.” It was every bit as much a perfect reflection of the times as Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changing” was in 1964. And it was absolutely huge. (And by the time of this performance clip from ’75, it was already pretty dated. That is the trouble with being extremely timely and not being Bob Dylan.)

This wasn’t her first hit, but it was the one that did it, and Helen was a fixture on the pop scene for the next several years. And one of her more interesting hit records was this one:

This is a very, very nice vocal — precise and expressive, and every word perfectly clear (enunciation is the first obligation of those who choose to sing mysterious story songs). A friendless, mentally disturbed young woman dances with her imaginary boyfriends to the rock ‘n’ roll radio every night. And a neighbor boy who’s been peeping at her comes around when her parents are away, thinking he can take advantage of her. But he is so very wrong….

The ending is left somewhat open — the neighbor boy never gets home, but what exactly did she do? That was a topic of much discussion when this song was a hit in 1974.Did she kill him? Was it some sort of magic? (Perhaps.) In any event, a fine record — and exactly the sort of thing that would have no place at all on radio today.

With the advent of MTV in the early 80′s American music fans were favored with a second, (third?) invasion of British bands with a scattering of Germans here and there, filling things out like very loud rain storms. 

The English Beat, Duran Duran, Adam Ant, The Buggles and more were finding their way to your newly cable television connected TV set on the new “Big Thing.”

Joining the British bands from continental Europe, well, Europe, The Scorpions, Peter Schilling, Accept, (and how can you possibly forget Nena with her “99 Luftballons?”) MTV changed how music was listened to and how an artist was looked at and marketed in the now, truly, world market.

With this new-found access to American audiences, record companies were more willing to expose acts on MTV that would probably not have had much of a chance with only an exposure through radio. So, starting with 1982′s “Business As Usual” album by Australia’s Men At Work,  a new invasion had begun.

From the land “Down Under.”

Men At Work had been at it since the late 70′s before landing on our shores with a stuffed koala bear and a nicely twisted sense of humor for the sincerely weird “Who Can It Be Now” video before making it all the way to number one on the charts in the U.S. and back at home in Australia at the same time. That folks, really is a huge accomplishment.

The one thing they couldn’t do, was keep the fans interest. After their “Business As Usual” debut album, they quickly faded away into the long, cold, three dog nights of the outback, never to be heard from again.

While Men At Work opened the door, other ‘down under’ bands rushed in and quickly rose to the top of the U.S. and international charts.

INXS, Midnight Oil and later, Crowded House became favorites on MTV and the radio. This is not to say that American Radio had not heard Australian rock and pop before, Olivia Newton John, AC/DC and more had charted these waters much earlier, they just weren’t, well, so Australian.

What Men At Work did was to gain acceptance for a sound and style that was there own, not just people from Australia sounding like they came from Nashville or London.

Hats off to Colin Hay and the guys!

James Garner sings!!!!

Well, not really but it did get your attention, right?

This is actually the real, in the flesh, as much as music can be fleshy, theme from James Garner’s TV detective series that ran from 1974 to 1980. I always watched it when it was on. Garner’s first major TV series, Maverick  had come and gone before I knew about it. (Probably because it ended before I was born…)

For those die-hard Rockford Files  fans out there, how about this?

So for those of you out there that believe that I have lost my mind and am changing WMMCM into a television oldie blog, there is a madness to my method.

There is a place in northern Illinois called Rockford. It’s a small town, roughly 150,000 people lived there at the time James Garner returned to prime time televison. A band started in Rockford at the same time that the Rockford Files first came on the airwaves. Coincidence?

I give you…

Cheap Trick’s “If You Want My Love” didn’t make much of a splash on the radio reaching only the 45th position on the U.S. pop charts but, it did make it big with MTV as they were reinventing the popular music scene in 1982. It does however, have one of the best videos from the era with a simple performance premise and no explosions or dance numbers, just straight up rock!

Robin Zander’s usual blow-torch vocals are nicely supported by Bun E. Carlos’ extremely dynamic drumming on this one. Bun E. Carlos is always a simple but powerful drummer and he shows here how simplicity can really be the most effective sometimes. 

His snare drum hits emphasizing each line of the chorus, getting louder with each word that Zander sings and dropping off at the end of the phrase, then coming back as Zander goes through the roof right before Nielsen’s power chords shake the heavens and then settle down to a subtle riff before jumping right back into it all over again.

The three lights dancing along in time to the song just give me a bit of joy each time I see this…

Every now and then you hear a song that just really touches you in a way you can’t quite describe. It finds a spot somewhere in your head and your heart and you know you just want to hear the song over and over.  

A few years ago I was watching good old VH-1 Classic, which means that they were actually playing music videos, not that they do that now of course. Why would a music video channel want to play music videos? I’ll rant further about that sometime, as if I haven’t done so before but, on to my point.    

When a song really gets you, really brings you into it’s world, it’s one of those wonderful things that makes music such a huge part of my life.    

Why does this song have such an effect on me?  Starting out with the horn going, “dah, dah, dahah, dah,dah, dahah,” at first I really didn’t quite know what to think. It sounds kind of strange. As it goes on and singer Ian Broudie starts in with his soft vocal, he is so understated it really comes as a surprise after the way the horns hit you. When you let the words sink in you realize it’s about as sweet a song as you will find.

“Just smiling in the dark, shooting stars around your heart, dreams come bouncing in your head, pure and simple every time,   

Now you’re crying in your sleep, I wish you’d never learnt to weep, don’t sell the dreams you should be keeping, pure and simple every time.”

I think I will play this just one more time… Well, two more… Well…