Mondays being, well, Mondays, have quite a few songs written about them. I do know that I am not a big fan of Monday and I don’t suppose that too many people are but, I do have a favorite Monday song.
“Manic Monday” was The Bangles’ breakout hit reaching number 2 in the U.S.
Written by pop master Prince, it was originally recorded by his project group, Apollonia 6 but was never released. When Prince was dateing Susanna Hoffs, he gave the song to the band and a career was born.
This is about as close to a perfect pop song as you can get. It’s got great vocals, nice jangly guitars and a catchy piano riff that leads you right along into the itchy string section providing a cool touch of urgency in the chorus.
There’s a sunny optimism in this song that is just infectious. In 1986 when “Manic Monday” was released MTV was still actually playing music videos and The Bangles became an immediate favorite. With the ladies being so darn cute it was initially easy to dismiss them as a prettier version of the GoGos but they proved themselves many times over as real hit makers with two number one hits, “Walk Like An Egyptian” and “Eternal Flame” as well as five other top 40 chart makers before breaking up in1989.
In roughly three years at the top they sold over 9 million records with a 1990 greatest hits package going platinum as well.
1847 is not a year that usually comes to mind when discussing rock music. If you’re into Irish Rock well, yeah, then it comes up but for the rest of the world? Probably not.
Any Emily Brontë fans out there? In 1847 she published her only novel, Wuthering Heights. A story about the doomed love affair between Catherine and Heathcliff set on the Yorkshire moors in England. In 1847 this must have been pretty hot stuff.
In 1978 a very young Kate Bush released her debut single.
Now this is one truly wonderful track.
Yes, I must agree that the voice at first is rather jarring. Kind of reminds me of Carol Kane there for a second. But the passion is unmistakable. After the first few lines I really forget the edginess of her voice and by the chorus I am completely hooked.
The simple piano at the beginning of the song sets things up nicely. As the verse comes along the music gets fuller with the bass and drums sliding in to place. The descending counterpoint to the melody gives just the right touch of discomfort to match the plot of the song. It sounds beautiful but not quite right, setting up the feel for the chorus.
Bush’s vocal is so plaintive in the chorus that it is heartbreaking to listen too. I am completely convinced that she is “Cathy” singing her story.
As the verses move along the song swells with the addition of strings and then finally a moving guitar solo for the outro. The guitar solo was played by Alan Parsons Project alumnus Ian Bairnson and provides a satisfyingly emotional close to the song.
It was a number one hit in England and most of Europe but only managed to climb to 108 in the U.S. It did however attract some major attention if not sales in the states.
On her 1980 “Crimes Of Passion” album, Pat Benatar was the first major artist to cover the song.
I have been a fan of Pat Benatar since she first arrived on the music scene. This however does nothing for me at all. I can see exactly why she would want to cover the song, I mean it should have been great. It’s not.
As good a singer as Benatar is I don’t get any of the feel or the passion that is in Bush’s original version. It’s not bad of course but it just doesn’t sell me.
The arrangement is so pedestrian. Big guitars, big drums, big multi-tracked guitar harmonies with big multi-tracked vocal harmonies at the “BIG” moment. Just kind of blah… ( A Big Blah…)
There was one rather interesting cover version that I found. It’s a bit different.
Something for a Friday in Lent, for the people who do Lent, and just a fine version of a great song, for those who don’t!
I just came across this — Jars of Clay’s version of a Protestant hymn that’s a Southern Gospel standard (or chestnut, if you prefer).
I’ve heard about a billion takes on this, starting with the Dillards when I was a very little kid, but the Jars’ take rocks, and it’s oddly moving. (Please excuse the video — it’s not very well done, and the lyrics are not as sung. Best I could find.)
One of the elements of rock and pop music that is often left out of the discussion is about as basic as it could be: melody.
The ability to write a great tune is often taken for granted, and it shouldn’t be. Rock is often cliched and repetitive, plagiarism is and always has been rampant, and even a slick and highly produced song will frequently come down to a minimal, forgettable tune. Or it may have very little melody at all — try to plunk out, say, Rod Stewart’s “You Wear It Well” on a piano sometime.
Perhaps more attention should be paid when a songwriter has a gift for a beautiful, powerful, or original melody. The memorable melody or great hook that makes up for weak, obvious, or plain annoying lyrics — what’s more rock ‘n’ roll than that?
Like this:
The words are less goofy than the Moodys often were, but, aside from the lovely title image, this is a big ol’ stack of cliches and mixed images (tides, fires, sunshine turning to rain, curtains falling….). But that grand melody, both poignant and driving, makes this an all but irresistible record. I’m not a Moody believer in general, but this one just makes me want to play it over and over.
Or this one:
The melody may not jump out immediately on the TFF original, but we all know what happened when Gary Jules got hold of it:
The Jules version pulls to the forefront what turns out, at the slower speed, to be a startlingly beautiful melody. Tears for Fears came up with it, but they didn’t really get the most from it in their overamped original. It’s not much of a song lyrically, just sighing over unresolved childhood miseries, but the tune is so strong that the words didn’t matter when TFF did it, and mattered even less on Jules’ superior take.
A master of fine melodies was Ian Anderson, one of rock’s great frontmen and a wonderful (and often underrated) singer, but with a pretentious streak that kept him from ever being a first-rate songwriter. Here’s an album track from Minstrel in the Gallery, with a glorious tune and disappointing, all but incoherent lyrics (the second part, “0^{10} = Nothing At All” is even sillier lyrically, with a nothing-much tune as well).
(Of course, this is my problem, but I can’t hear “One White Duck on Your Wall” without thinking of this.)
Lennon and McCartney (to state the obvious) wrote some of the finest melodies in all of pop music — but they combined them, often, with great lyrics. Why is this one of the most covered pop songs ever? The fine, simple, heartbreaking lyrics fit the melody with such elegance and precision that every note, rest, and change seems inevitable. When a song seems to beg singers to give it a try, that’s probably a sign that the melody is something special.
What songs do you admire for their beautiful or powerful tunes? Tell us in comments.
Once in a while there is a song that becomes a hit and nobody really knows why.
Picture, if you you will, a Holiday Inn. Atlanta, Georgia.
It’s Friday night, eleven o’clock and the city has settled down for an evening of drinking, relaxing and letting off steam from a long work week. The crowd is enjoying the cool of an early summer night. The band is good. A local favorite. The people pull close to the stage when they hear the first notes of their favorite song.
The crowd is mesmerized by the ethereal sounds… Of
Starbuck!
Now back in ’76, this might have been pretty cool. I can only guess as I was pretty much in to Alice Cooper, The Who, Deep Purple and the whole hard rock/heavy metal scene so I wasn’t really paying that much attention to “pop” music. This song I do remember. Oh yeah.
I can’t say that I dislike it. I can’t say that I like it either. What I can say is that when I hear it these days I get a flashback to the Blues Brothers movie. (The original one, as in, the good one…) The whole “Murph and the Magictones” thing. Velvet covered amplifiers, really cheesy velvet suits, velvet guitar straps to match the velvet shoes…
The vibe is kind of creepy. The keyboard chukka, chukka, the smooth smarmy vocal with the disturbing laugh right before the chorus… I feel somewhat violated after hearing that. Every time.
Then the climax… (Had to say it. It just seems to fit with this song). The over the top marimba solo!!!
I really don’t want to offend any marimba fans out there. But, hey? Are there any other really rocking marimba solos in rock music? There is a rocking xylophone solo on the Violent Femmes song, “Gone Daddy Gone” but they were and are rather strange. And, it’s not a marimba.
The Who’s recent performance at the “Really Big Game Halftime Show” (please don’t sue me…) pointed out more than a few absurdities. I don’t know about the rest of you folks, but I am nearly always appalled at how crappy the sound at the “SB” is. I have a similar problem with American Idol. (Don’t sue me either… please.)
Somehow, with all the money in the world and access to more extremely expensive equipment then you could fit in my back yard, the sound is routinely awful. A constant A.I. problem is feedback, microphones being left off for some or most of people’s conversations, bad monitor feeds or no monitors feeds. I am constantly amazed at how roughshod it is.
For this “SB,” Queen Latifah, Carrie Underwood and The Who all had very obvious monitor problems. Queen Latifah actually removed hers early in the performance. What’s up with that? There is a particular irony in The Who having such difficulties with monitors, especially at such a major event.
Here’s The Who. Pay attention to the song transitions and the vocals at times.
“Why is that, Pete?” I hear you all asking.
Well, they can’t hear themselves. Now that certainly is a problem The Who have faced more than a few times over the years.
Let’s go back to the sixties, when rock and roll was first being played to large audiences at sports stadiums. The first band to do that would be the Beatles, of course. When they played their last stadium show, they were using custom made Vox “Super Beatle” amps, putting out a whopping 120 watts of power. That’s right, 120 watts. Practically any car or truck stereo you can buy these days would blow these things away. Can you imagine lining up four brand new Volkswagen Beetles near home plate at Candlestick Park, opening the doors and windows and cranking the stereos to play music for 40,000 of your closest friends?
The Who came up with one solution. Amplifier stacks. In other words, take as many amps as you can buy, rent or steal and stack them all up into a wall of sounds.
You can see from the Whiskey Man pictures how they would just throw more and more stuff up, making bigger and bigger stacks of amps to fill the venue. A few years after this, it reached a point where the performers would be dwarfed by these walls of amplifiers blazing away and the only people that could actually hear anything clearly were those in the audience, so the shows suffered from this performance disconnect. It’s hard to play well when you can’t hear yourself, or the drummer…
What to do about it? Well a young engineer who had been with The Who for a few years came up with a novel solution that is still the most common way performers hear themselves while on stage. The floor monitor. Usually referred to as a “wedge” because originally the sound engineer would take a standard speaker cabinet and cut the bottom at an angle to have the speaker point at the performer.
That engineer is named Bob Pridden. He has worked for The Who for over forty years and has been one of the most influential and talented engineers in music history. His idea of floor monitors was the first and most important step in the art of modern live sound reproduction. For the first time you could take most of the speakers and place them to the side of the stage and up on the towers we all know and love while keeping an amp or two on stage for the performer to use and, most importantly, keep the on stage sound level at a much more friendly and manageable level. This improves the quality of the performance and helps protect the musicians’ and audience’s hearing by keeping better control of the overall sound level.
Over the last twenty years or so, the venerable floor monitor has begun to give way to the “in-ear” monitors used by all the “SB” performers. They do work very well in most cases, but it has introduced a new problem in that the monitor engineer has a very difficult time hearing what the performer is hearing. The only way I have been able to solve that one is to have an “in-ear” setup for me to use while mixing the band. But that’s iyet another problem, as you need to be able to receive all the radio channels the performers are using. If there are four mixes, it’s not really that big of a deal. If there are ten or fifteen? That’s a lot of extra stuff to carry around.
All of you Who fans and anyone who enjoys live concert performances, give a thanks to Bob Pridden. The father of modern sound reproduction.
“She Drives Me Crazy” is fine as far as it goes, and, in the minds of classic hits radio, it’s Fine Young Cannibals’ only record. But they had another hit:
It’s got a ton more drive to it than “Crazy” — more energetic, more original, better vocal, and just a better record. I like the piano break — nice to hear an actual piano on an ’80s hit — and the lines “She came back/I was so happy that I didn’t ask….” The whole history of a silly relationship, right there.
In the news today, Pete Townshend said he and Roger Daltrey will be playing a “mashup” of Who songs at the Super Bowl on Sunday. Now, aside from it being cute to see old Pete use a term like “mashup,” what this means is that they will be playing, simply, a medley of hooks.
And that brings me to one of my small collection of rock ‘n’ roll axioms, stated here before:
A band or artist that plays a medley of hits and/or hooks in public at any time may consider its artistic credibility irredeemably lost.
Now, the Who peaked artistically with Quadrophenia in ’73 and lost whatever remaining identity they had with Keith Moon’s death in ’78, and they have been more or less spinning their wheels ever since. But it is nonetheless inexpressibly discouraging to hear they plan to do a damn medley. Tom Petty’s an old rocker, too, but he knows it: Real artists don’t do medleys, they do songs.
But anyway. Here are a few more of Bridey’s informal rules of pop:
If a band is capable of producing two really good albums, consecutively or not, they will probably produce a third good album, but will almost never produce a fourth.
Speaking of albums, hardly anyone ever does anything that works all the way through.
Making a concept album and/or rock opera is a bad idea. That Ziggy Stardust and Quadrophenia are great concept albums only means that it’s possible, not that it’s a good idea.
There never has been and never will be a concept album and/or rock opera where the concept involves Rock ‘n’ Roll Rebels against the Establishment that doesn’t suck.
When your frontman or at least half of your founding members are dead, it is time to hang it up, or at least call the band something else.
Want to debate? Got your own rules of rock? Put ‘em in comments!
