1964

1. The Beatles – I Want to Hold Your Hand. It’s hard for me to imagine the Beatles being mega-hits at this point in their career. It’s not that they’re far from greatness, chronologically speaking: even less than a year later, with songs like “A Hard Day’s Night” and “You Can’t Do That,” they’ve totally nailed their sound, and perform with the ease and confidence of a great band. But the musical gulf between those songs and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” is so enormous I find it amazing that they managed to bridge it at all. Here their singing is strained, their songwriting awkward. Just listen to the shouty high notes on the word “hand,” or the clumsy melodic and rhythmic break between the syntactically awkward lines “It’s such a feeling that, my love” and “I can’t hide.” If I had never heard the song, I would think it was by a mediocre Beatles knockoff band. Hell, there are Beatles knockoff bands who are considerably better than this: if you’re a Beatles fan and haven’t heard the Knickerbocker’s “Lies,” you’re seriously missing out.

2. The Beatles – She Loves You. Well, this one’s a little better. The lyrics are stupid (“She said she loves you / And you know that can’t be bad / Yes, she loves you / And you know you should be glad”) rather than merely simple (“But when I get home to you / I find the things that you do / Can make me feel alright”). But it’s got a nice chunky guitar riff before the verses, and a great falsetto “oo” — you can just picture John and Paul leaning into the same mike as all the teenage girls go wild over the unacknowledged homoerotic tension. And the end of the chorus includes an unexpected shift to minor, which would soon become a staple of the Beatles’ harmonic style in songs like “Another Girl” and “I’ll Be Back.”

3. Louis Armstrong – Hello, Dolly! I definitely wasn’t expecting Louis Armstrong to show up on the charts in 1964 — although now that I think back, I remember that I accidentally downloaded a 1961 version of his 1939 hit “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and it was clear from that recording that he was still going strong in the 60s. As for this specific song, it’s a charming, catchy guitar-based jazz number, the kind of thing I can imagine Django Reinhardt doing an instrumental version of, with a beautifully polyphonic improv break in which a clarinet and two trumpets vie for attention over a rich, lushly recorded bed of acoustic guitar, drums and possibly a buried piano. Interesting tidbit: although the song comes from a musical and wasn’t written for the pop charts, it still makes an explicit lyrical reference, just like Gary and Bing Crosby’s similarly retro “Simple Melody,” to the fact that its musical style is old-fashioned:  “The band’s playin’ / One of my old favorite songs from way back when.” I just checked out a clip from the original 1965 cast recording, and it’s done in a more modern style, with a string section, staid orchestration and a hint of tango — which means that Armstrong specifically chose a number about “songs from way back when” to record in his old-school, bouncy, polyphonic-improv style. The other difference between the cast-recording version and Armstrong’s is that in the original, the song is mostly sung by Dolly herself. Armstrong switches it to a mixture of second and third person, which means changing her flirtatious line “Find me an empty lap, fellas” to “Find her an empty lap, fellas.”  It’s an odd move that comes across a bit preumptuous and creepy, but since gender-bending post-punk covers hadn’t been invented yet in 1964, he didn’t have much of a choice.

4. Roy Orbison – Oh, Pretty Woman. Like “Cryin’”, a song I’d heard but never really listened to. I think I just don’t like Orbison all that much. The opening guitar riff is fantastic — it could be a textbook example of how much you can do with just a ninth chord, and I have the feeling the Beatles were paying close attention — but once the vocals come in I find the song rather blah. Sure, there are some nice touches, like Orbison’s throaty growl after the first chorus, which seems to imply that this seemingly romantic song is actually about raw lust, but when it comes down to it, it’s just not that interesting a tune.

5. The Beach Boys – I Get Around. An old favorite of mine, and it certainly doesn’t disappoint on the millionth listen. It doesn’t have the elegant simplicity of “Surfin’ USA”, but it makes up for it with early hints of the kaleidoscopic orchestration of Pet Sounds, like the squawking bari sax bassline and the fat Hammond organ riff in the verses. And then there’s the chorus, which is just ecstatic; maybe it’s because I first heard the song in a movie about a kid flying over Middle America in a spaceship, but it sounds to me like American youth’s need for speed translated directly into music, with its propulsive backing vocals and unexpected chord changes that are always reaching foward to the next moment.  And there’s also the song’s unexpected shift up a minor second during the bridge — a movie usually decried as cheesy, but to my hears it just contributes to the song’s feeling of irrepressible joy.  Wonderful.

 

1963

1. Jimmy Glimmer and the Fireballs – Sugar Shack. You know it’s really the 60s when you start getting songs about a guy’s love for a coffee shop girl with a black leotard and bare feet. And you know it’s still the early 60s when they wind up getting married. The music is also caught between eras: Glimmer’s voice is young and quavery in a doo wop kind of way, but his interjected “yeah”s make me think of Jefferson Airplane, and he’s accompanied by surf-rock bari saxes, muted reverb guitars, and Austin Powers piccolos (which at one point play something a lot like the closing guitar riff from the Beatles’ “I’m Looking Through You”). It’s really just a silly novelty song, but I find it exciting to see something new rising to the top. Maybe I was just projecting when I talked about pop music in crisis; maybe what I really meant was that I was getting sick of the dominant styles of the 50s.

2. The Beach Boys – Surfin’ USA. I’ve liked the Beach Boys ever since I heard “I Get Around” in the movie Flight of the Navigator at the age of six or seven, but I don’t think I quite understood why they were such an enormous hit until just now. Compared to what they were doing a few years later, “Surfin’ USA” is fun but primitive, a cheerful precursor to something more emotionally layered. But heard in the context of the hits of the early 60s, it suddenly stands out for its extraordinary compositional clarity. Like “Rock Around the Clock”, “Surfin’ USA” is a song with no fat on it: no superfluous strings, no rambly coda, nothing that doesn’t absolutely have to be there. In the verses, the main vocal line is accompanied by a simple alternation: a measure of four-on-the-floor bass-drum hits, then a measure with a classic surf-rock guitar lick and a long held chord in the backup vocals. When we get to the chorus, the guitar gets to keep the lick going and the backup vocals burst into activity, repeating the line “inside, outside, USA.” Later there’s a Hammond organ solo and a guitar solo, both simple, short and charming. It’s perfectly efficient songwriting, and it does a fantastic job conveying the image of a bright new youth culture that can be found, sporting “bushy bushy blond hairdos,” wherever there’s sun and sand.

3. Skeeter Davis – The End of the World. Another song I’ve heard before, but I’d always assumed it was from the 50s. It’s clear that, despite my comments above, doo-wop was still going strong in 1963 — and not just any doo-wop, but one of the most affecting songs I’ve ever heard from the genre. As Davis sings about how she can’t understand why the birds and the sun and the sea still exist now that her love has left her, with her slight Southern accent and air of youthful guilelessness, accompanied by plaintive piano arpeggios that slide through secondary keys with an emphasis on the desolate minor mediant (see also my comments on “Cryin’”), I could swear I’ve never heard anyone sound so alone. And because of the lyrics, it’s not just Skeeter Davis who’s alone: it’s the whole planet. We’re getting alarmingly close to “Twin Peaks” territory here.

4. The Cascades – Rhythm of the Rain. Here’s another song about lost love, but it couldn’t be further from “The End of the World,” emotionally speaking. With its folky vocal harmonies and bright, high-register electric piano riffs, it gives the impression of a song written mainly to be pleasant background music, with lyrics about a breakup only because the lyrics have to be about something. But there is one sad little chord change in the chorus, on the words “does that seem fair?” — and guess what? Once again it’s a move to the minor mediant. I guess I’ve discovered an effective little formula here. Maybe I can use it in my own music.

5. The Chiffons – He’s So Fine. A girl group number whose appeal I can’t understand at all. I guess I should give lead singer Judy Craig a bit of credit for being only 17 when the song came out, but I don’t particularly like her singing, which sounds strained to me, with a tight, tense-sounding vibrato. The songwriting is rather boring — the backing vocalists, for example, mostly sing “doo-lang, doo-lang, doo-lang” over and over again — and the lyrics are disturbingly self-effacing, with lines like “I’d do anything that he asked / Anything to make him my own.” Oh well — it seems there’s one every year that I can’t get much out of.

 

1962

1. Mr Acker Bilk – Stranger on the Shore. Unexpected things keep popping up on the charts. This time it’s a throwback to 1930s balladry, with a slow, romantic, rhythmically fluid melody and a book-chik guitar accompaniment buried deep below a lush string section. Instead of Judy Garland, though, we have the bowler-hatted, mustachioed British clarinetist Mr Acker Bilk, whose rich, warm, expressive style reminds me of Coleman Hawkins doing “Body and Soul.” It’s beautiful, but it’s so far from the dominant styles of early 60s pop music that it’s hard to imagine how it became #1 — or so I thought until I looked it up on Wikipedia and found that it was used as the theme for a BBC TV drama of the same name.

2. Ray Charles – I Can’t Stop Loving You. Obviously something was in the air in 1962, because here’s another retro song, again with boom-chik guitar part and string section, plus a pure-vowelled, high-sopranoed backing choir that wouldn’t feel too out of place in a Bing Crosby song. The retro effect is reinforced by the fact that the choir is recorded in mono — something which I assume was done specifically for that reason, since everyone else seems to have been recorded in stereo. Charles’s vocals and piano playing, by contrast, are modern, one part soul and one part lounge. Unfortunately, stylistic juxtaposition aside, I can’t say I find the song all that interesting.

3. Dee Dee Sharp – Mashed Potato Time. I like self-referential songs, and that includes songs about the dance you’re supposed to do to them. But this one is particularly loopy because it’s about how the Mashed Potato has been popular for a while, and how the kids like to find songs they can dance it to. Every verse ends with the name of another song, and every chorus includes some dopey reference to that song. For example: “They discovered it’s the most, man / The day they did it to ‘Please Mr. Postman’” — followed by “Mashed Potato, deliver the letter, yeah.” Another time it’s “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and “Mashed Potato, a-weema-weh, a weema-weh” (or however you spell that). It’s also got the word “boss” and an early instance of the word “groovy.” Musically, it’s pure doo-wop, with repeated piano chords, nonsensical backing vocals, a I-vi-IV-V progression and a bassline that could practically come from a Casio keyboard preset. Shannon’s got a bit of a Wanda-Jackson-ish country twang, though. Fun stuff.

4. Bobby Vinton – Roses Are Red. This is an odd one, especially compared to the other Bobby Vinton song I’m familiar with, “Blue Velvet.” First of all, there’s the arrangement: Vinton’s voice mixed high in the center, with all the accompanying instruments much quieter and panned way to either side: bass and tinkling saloon piano on the right, loping acoustic guitar, backing vocals, and occasional strings on the left. Then there’s the rhythm, which sometimes skips two beats so that the chorus is underway before you quite realize the verse has ended. Then there’s Vinton’s bizarre, Shatneresque pauses: “She looks … a lot like you,” “And when the …. big day came,” etc. And of course there’s Vinton’s voice, which has an Uncanny Valley quality a bit like Frankie Avalon’s, although I don’t like him nearly as much. And all of this is in support of a love song addressed to an old high school sweetheart who’s now married to someone else and has a kid — a kid who looks a lot like her, so much so in fact that someday a boy will write sweet things in her yearbook too. What are we supposed to be focusing on here: Teen pathos? Adult regret? Both at once? Either way, the music seems pretty much completely unrelated to the feelings the words are trying to convey.

5. David Rose – The Stripper. Here we have yet another song in an older style, namely big band – but a trashy, garish, exaggerated, overintensified version of the big band, as if the music were strutting on its long trombone legs, wiggling its drum-set ass, sticking out its long trumpet tongue at the audience. I’m not just saying that because of the title: the song’s heavy drums, trombone glissandi and timbral density are obviously meant to evoke burlesque. When I look at it in the context of a year when three of the top five songs are in retro styles, and a fourth is about a dance you can do to a bunch of hits from years past, I feel like this is big band reimagined for an era on the edge of a musical crisis, a time when people are looking for a new sound but don’t know about the rock explosion that’s coming up in a few years, so they turn to the past, only to find that it’s become a gaudy parody of itself, drained of its old meaning, reduced to playing a stripper in a dingy low-rent theater. This reading is based on a pretty reductive reading of pop music history — but makes for good listening!

 

1961

Well, it’s definitely been a while since I updated this blog. I can’t say I’ll definitely keep this up with any regularity, but I felt like listening to some early 60s pop songs, so here you go.

1. Bobby Lewis – Tossin’ and Turnin’. Very charming song about being up all night thinking about a girl. I love the perverse literal-mindedness of the lyrics, which mostly consist of naming things people do when they can’t sleep, from getting a midnight snack to turning the pillows upside-down. They’re set in an upbeat R&B style (I know very little about the genre, but it reminds me a little of 60s Marvin Gaye songs like “Pride and Joy” and “Heard It Through the Grapevine”), with a nice punchy sax section, staccato female backing vocals, and a great bridge where the alto sax is accompanied by a whiny, sharp, scratchy instrument that I think is probably an electric organ. And if you’ve ever read this blog before, you know I’m a sucker for nasty-sounding electronics.

2. Patsy Cline – I Fall to Pieces. I don’t really have anything to say about this very middle-of-the-road song. The melody isn’t particularly interesting, the arrangement isn’t particularly creative, the lyrics aren’t particularly moving. It’s just … there.

3. Highwaymen – Michael. A traditional spiritual set in a folk style that’s an obvious precursor to late-60s folk groups like Simon & Garfunkel and Pearls Before Swine: simple acoustic guitar strumming, simple vocal harmonies, a walking bassline. There’s almost nothing to the song, but the singers’ soft, vibratoless style is suffused with melancholy and longing, especially when they get to the lines “The River Jordan is chilly and cold, Hallelujah / Chills the body but not the soul, Hallelujah.” I can imagine a group of gentle bearded men singing this to flickering candelight, late some night on a long trek across the rural parts of America.

4. Roy Orbison – Cryin’. It’s weird to finally hear this song in its original form after hearing Rebekah Del Rio’s haunting unaccompanied rendition in Mulholland Dr. about a hundred times. Weird especially because, hearing just the melody, I actually misinterpreted some of the harmonies. I was right that in the chorus, when Orbison sings “over you,” the music moves from I to iii — a gesture that for some reason gives me the impression of a long-buried ache deep in the narrator’s soul. But in the bridge, when he sings “but the touch of your hand,” even though the melody lands in the same place, it’s harmonized differently: the music moves not from I to desolate iii but from I to hundrum V. Of course, if I’d known Orbison’s version first, that wouldn’t bother me at all — but I didn’t know it first, and Del Rio’s version has worked its way pretty permanently into my head. I’m also not crazy about the overblown ending, especially its clunky repeated bass-drum hits. But I do like the opening: Spanish-sounding percussion (is that why Lynch had the song in Spanish in his film?), a touching augmented chord, a verse melody that rises to 7 and then poignantly falls to 5 rather than moving resolutely up to 1.

5. Del Shannon – Runaway. Big shift in tone from the previous two songs! “Runaway” is half 1950s silliness and half 1960s badassery, with a cool-cat i-VII-VI-V progression in the verses but a doo-woppy I-vi progression in the chorsues, Spaghetti-Western guitar figures but a vocalist who’s willing to get his falsetto on to sing “I wah-wah-wah-wah-wonder,” and a rambly organ solo almost as screechy as the one in “Tossin’ and Turnin.” It’s a fun little piece of fluff, and at 2:19, it’s over much too quickly.

 

1960

1. Percy Faith and His Orchestra – Theme from “A Summer Place.” A pleasant, unassuming easy-listening orchestra piece which I gather comes from a movie called A Summer Place. I actually first heard this as part of a mashup by avant-prog singer and bassist Bob Drake, who used it as the accompaniment to the two-minute bloodcurdling scream from Art Bears’ “FREEDOM.” The irony struck me as kind of cheap partially because “Theme from ‘A Summer Place’” is so completely, uncomplicatedly nice. It’s hard to imagine anyone running out to buy the single, or calling radio stations asking to hear it. There’s barely anything there to want to listen to.

2. Jim Reeves – He’ll Have To Go. The scenario described in the lyrics of “He’ll Have To Go” is unusual, and I feel like it would make a good scene in a movie. The narrator is on the phone with a woman he loves. She’s with another man, and he’s asking her to make a decision: he’ll only talk to her if she tells him that “he’ll have to go.” But he seems to be calling from a public place: he mentions asking “the man” to “turn the jukebox way down low” (dropping to the bottom of his range on the word “low,” and since this is the first verse, every subsequent one has some other word falling on that low note). I can picture him in a nearly empty bar, looking a little like Humphrey Bogart, standing at the phone booth in the back, light falling across his face at an odd angle. It probably helps that Reeves’s voice has an old-school country feeling, albeit filtered through both the crooner and the doo-wop aesthetics: it makes me picture this story taking place in a small desert town, like something from The Last Picture Show. The recording also mixes his singing much louder than the sounds accompanying him (female backing singers, vibraphones, guitar, bass, drums), emphasizing every little crack in his voice and bringing a surreal quality to the song.

3. The Everly Brothers – Cathy’s Clown. Like the previous Everly Brothers hit, it reminds me a little of the early Beatles, but it’s got a blocky, static quality that doesn’t sound like anything else I can think of. There are no real verses or choruses, just two chunks of music that alternate over and over again, and nearly every phrase of the song, in both sections, ends on the tonic harmony. The drumming is surprisingly aggressive for a mid-tempo close-harmony song, with snare rolls that sound almost military, transferred to the cymbals in the B section. These are unusual musical decisions for the period, at least as far as I know — even the military drums have only appeared in explicitly war-related songs like “The Yellow Rose of Texas” — and I wonder if they’re supposed to reflect the blocked feeling of the narrator, a man who’s in love with a woman that ignores him, who feels emasculated by it, and who everyone else sees as ridiculous and pathetic: “Here he comes; that’s Cathy’s clown.” It’s a very specific, very painful situation, in a way that I associate more with the middle of the 60s than the beginning (think Rubber Soul or Pet Sounds), and even if the strange music isn’t actually meant to reinforce it, it does a very good job.

4. Johnny Preston – Running Bear. An “Indian” retelling of Romeo and Juliet, with characters named “Running Bear” and “Little White Dove” and “tribal” chanting underneath the verses. I know, I know, “it was another era,” but geez. Stereotypes aside, though, it’s kind of a fun song, particularly in the abrupt shifts between the verses (straight eighth notes, hand percussion and unassuming saxophones) and the choruses (swung eighths, drum kit and inappropriately sleazy lounge-jazz saxophones). I wonder if I should put together a little mix CD of musically pleasant but culturally disturbing old pop songs, with this and the Andrews Sisters’ “Rum and Coca-Cola.”

5. Mark Dinning – Teen Angel. I remember reading about this song years ago in Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs, and unlike some of the songs in the book, this one definitely deserves its reputation. Sung with oh-so-sensitive vibrato over oh-so-romantic acoustic guitars, “Teen Angel” is the song of a boy to his girlfriend who has died trying to retrieve his class ring from a railroad track. He hopes, he tells her, that she’s still his “one true love,” even in Heaven. Listening to it is like drinking a cup of Equal. One thing that may be worth noting, though: the opening, with the title phrase sung three times in close vocal harmonies, is remarkably similar to the opening of Les Baxter’s “Unchained Melody.” It’s even the same rhythm and the same chord progression. I have hunch that this isn’t an accident.

 

1959

1. Johnny Horton – The Battle of New Orleans. …and the number one hit of 1959 is a novelty folk song about the War of 1812. I swear, I understand American culture less and less as I do this project. This one almost feels like a song you’d learn at summer camp as a kid, with its endless verses and its last-minute profanity dodge (“We held our fire till we see their faces well / Then we opened up our squirrel guns and really gave ‘em — Well, we…”). There’s also a banjo, a military-march drumbeat, a bit of army chanting (“sound off”!), and a repeated verse where Horton scratches up his voice and adds country-bumpkin whoops to the end of his lines in order to sing about “the bushes where a rabbit couldn’t go.” It’s instructive to compare this to “Yellow Rose of Texas,” another 50s hit with a military vibe. While that song is aggressively macho in its patriotism, this one seems to be trying hard to sound like Billy-Bob sitting on his porch in the Appalachians. I’d have a hard time saying which song is weirder in its details, though.

2. Bobby Darin – Mack the Knife. I don’t know what possessed Bobby Darin to record Kurt Weill’s creepy murder ballad as a lounge song. I know Weill’s style is cabaret-like, but he also had political aims, and there’s a difference between gallows humor and light entertainment. And I know Darin wasn’t the first to record the song in a more explicitly pop style (Ella Fitzgerald did a version, for example), but still… lounge? With a smooth-and-smarmy singer and a big-band horn section that’s ten years out of date? It’s a pretty ballsy move. Even more ballsy is Darin’s decision to insert the name of Lotte Lenya — Weill’s wife and the best-known interpreter of his songs — into the list of Mack’s victims. Whether it actually works or not I couldn’t quite say.

3. Lloyd Price – Personality. This one’s kind of annoying. Price has a nice voice — reminds me a little of Marvin Gaye’s — but the chorus of the song has a backing choir repeating “personality” over and over again to a bouncy little repeated motif, and again I wind up feeling like I’m listening to a kids’ song, but this time not in a good way. In fact, I’m pretty sure it reminds me of a specific kids’ song that I don’t like, but I’m having trouble placing it.

4. Frankie Avalon – Venus. Oh, what a treat for someone whose perception of the 50s comes with a built-in David Lynch filter! “Venus” is absolutely drenched in reverb, with military drums, harpsichords, vibraphones and an old-fashioned backing choir creating a kaleidoscopic trip through what I can only describe as the Peppermint Candy Swirl Christmas Wonderland from Hell. Avalon, like my old creepy friend Johnny Mathis (and yes, I know I mention him all the time), sounds like a man half made of plastic, with a corporate-controlled, tranquilizer-induced smile on his face — and he’s especially alarming singing things like “Venus, if you will / Send a little girl for me to thrill.” Plus there are all those great major seventh chords. And for all of my half-ironic commentary, the song is both gorgeous and quite sophisticated, with melodic writing that sounds more like the Beach Boys or the Zombies than your average 50s pop tune (even “Volare“). Yes! Fantastic!

6. Paul Anka – Lonely Boy. Definitely a let-down after “Venus.” Simplistic lyrics, simplistic rhyme scheme, simplistic phrase structure, simplistic tune. Simplicity isn’t always bad, of course, but the song is boring. The one thing worth remarking on is the recurring alternation between I and flat VII — a gesture that to my ears sounds like psychedelic rock waiting in the wings.

 

1958

1. Domenico Modugno – Nel Blu, Dipinto di Blu (Volare). What a charming song! Modugno sings a catchy, upbeat tune full of unexpected harmonic divergences and triplets that recall Italian opera, accompanied by a cornucopia of sounds that suggest the 60s a little too early: girl-group backing vocals, Motown-ish horns, slippery strings, silvery Rhodes interjections, and electric organ lines that wouldn’t feel out of place in a spy movie. The whole thing makes me think of a certain shade of orange that I also associate with the 60s, even though the word “blu” appears in the title. (Since I don’t know Italian, I don’t actually know what the song is about, except that “volare” means “to fly.”) Anyway, great song. My only complaint is that it’s too short.

2. The Everly Brothers – All I Have To Do is Dream. A beautiful little song. The verses and choruses alone would be nice enough — guitars with a Spaghetti Western tremolo, and gentle voices (think Simon and Garfunkel) singing mostly in parallel thirds but going into unisons for the end of the chorus, over a basic but elegantly realized I-IV-V-I progression. What makes the song, though, is the bridge. Up until that point, the Everly Brothers are singing every time there’s a chord change. But here, when the instruments hit the iii chord — one of the few minor chords in the song — they do it alone, and the singers come in a beat later with the saddest, most affecting “gee whiz” I’ve ever heard. It’s the kind of moment that says: this is not just an example of a style; this is the work of someone brilliant, whose artistic imagination defies formula. And the fact that they can do that with the words “gee whiz,” of all things, is even more impressive. I think it might also be the missing link between doo-wop and early Beatles songs like “If I Fell” or “And I Love Her.”

3. Elvis Presley – Don’t / I Beg of You. God, 1958 is just full of these little gems! Here someone had the brilliant and slightly insane idea of processing the guitar to give it a low, throaty sound, a bit like an electrified banjo but more importantly like Elvis’s voice. In the verses it’s also accompanied by the backing vocalists, singing “bom-ba-bom-bom” in the same register and almost completely blending with it. And later, at the beginning of the bridge, Elvis grates his voice like Louie Armstrong, and at that moment he’s doubled by a police whistle. In other words, this song is all about duplicating the timbre of the vocals instrumentally. Who the hell thought that up? The tune is a good one too, from the leapy melody at the end of the verses to the odd emphasis on the sixth scale degree that keeps the song from feeling too harmonically settled.

4. David Seville – Witch Doctor. I was going to boycott writing about this on the sole basis that it contains Alvin and the Chipmunks, but it’s actually not the version I’d heard before, where the Chipmunks sing the whole thing. Instead they only do the magical phrase itself (“oo ee, oo a a, ting tang wallawalla bing-bang”), and they actually sing it simultaneously with Seville in his normal voice, which creates kind of a neat octave doubling effect. That said, this is still just about the dumbest song in the world, lyrically, and the music is definitely not interesing enough to make up for it.

5. Perez Prado – Patricia. Good god, what the hell is going on here? First of all, it’s recorded in extreme stereo, which I didn’t realize had been invented yet in 1958. On the right you have just the drums, and on the left you have fluttertongue trombones, some sort of organ that sounds like a calliope, and the world’s sharpest, most aggressive, trebley-est string section. (It actually sounds more like a Casio synth patch than anything you could possibly produce with real string instruments.) When the organ has the melody, it keeps inserting these isolated, staccato, dissonant notes and chords in between the phrases. Under all this freakish orchestration, the tune itself appears to be a pretty normal pop tune; in that respect, this reminds me of the Harmonicats’ “Peg o’ My Heart.” It doesn’t remind me whatsoever of Perez Prado’s previous hit. I mean, I like it, but why would anyone think to make this? And how did it become the fifth most popular song of the year?

 

1957

1. Elvis Presley – All Shook Up. Yay, more Elvis! This one is more in the vein of “Don’t Be Cruel” than “Heartbreak Hotel,” which is to say that it’s a pretty normal rock ‘n’ roll tune with a boogie-woogie piano part, a catchy tune and a countryish vibe. There’s a great moment in the middle when the accompaniment drops out and Elvis’s voice jumps up a sixth to sing the line, “My heart beats so, it scares me to death.” It’s not that big a leap, but it’s the only time in the song that he reaches that high, so it really stands out — a good example of how very limited styles make tiny deviations seem enormous. The other thing I keep thinking about as I listen is the way Elvis’s nervous, staccato vocal style — something that, as far as I can tell, had no precedent in popular music — has suddenly been given a narrative meaning, as he sings about being so “shook up” by the girl he likes that his “insides shake like a leaf on a tree.” Last post I compared him to the early New Wave vocalists, and this time he reminds me of David Byrne spitting out syllables in the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer,” as if to prove that he really is “real live wire.”

2. Pat Boone – Love Letters in the Sand. I feel like I’ve heard people make fun of Pat Boone, but I don’t hear anything that silly here. It sounds like a crooner tune with a doo-wop accompaniment. I guess the instrumental part is pretty formulaic — OK, it kind of sounds like a Casio keyboard — but that’s hardly an offense worthy of ridicule. Boone does a whistling solo when the bridge comes back, and he includes a few pretty impressive licks towards the end. As the song continues, the drumming gets strangely intense, keeping the song engaging just when you might start getting sick of it. In short, it’s totally inoffensive, with a few nice touches. And inoffensive is usually pretty hard to make fun of, isn’t it?

3. The Diamonds – Little Darlin’. My dad tells me that this song was intended as a joke, but I think it’s great. Yeah, the falsetto vocals sound kind of like Frank Zappa’s doo-wop parody-tributes, but they also feel like a harbinger of things to come, specifically the Beach Boys’ early singles, and they lend the song a sort of hyperactive energy. There are a lot of other elements thrown in, apparently without much regard for whether they would fit the style: castanets and flamenco guitars, a low-voiced spoken section in the middle that recalls the Ink Spots, and wild piano runs that bear only a tenuous harmonic relationship to the rest of the song. I guess you could cite all of that as parody too, but to me it just makes the song more exciting, especially compared to the inoffensive but bland “Love Letters in the Sand.”

4. Tab Hunter – Young Love. Hunter was 26 at the time “Young Love” was released, so he probably meant this tribute to high-school relationships to be nostalgic. My guess, though, is that the kids took it at face value, and I can see why: it’s actually a beautiful little song. The lyrics are a bit simple-minded, but the music is simple in an elegant way, from the yearning suspensions on the recurring word “I” (a B resolving to an A over an F major chord on “I-I kno-ow” and an A resolving to a G over a G7 chord on “I-I’ve fo-und”) to the unexpected cadence on the word “mine,” creating a six-bar phrase where you expect a four-bar one. The chorus is also based on six-bar phrases, as is the laconic guitar solo based on it. The song opens, though, with two four-bar phrases (basic “Heart and Soul”-style accompaniment), which means Tab Hunter is tricking you.
[Edit: Clearly I need to brush up on my counterpoint. They're not suspensions, they're appoggiaturas. Either way, though, they're beautiful.]

5. Jimmy Dorsey and His Orchestra – So Rare. Here’s someone I didn’t expect to see on here again, considering that his last hit was 13 years ago. He seems to be trying to keep up with the times by including voices singing “doot doo-doo” and “doo-wah” in the background of one section, but it’s really a big-band song, with a huge, aggressive brass section, jazz drumming and extensive sax solos. Except there’s this choir, and when they’re not singing nonsense syllables, they’re screaming at the top of their lungs just to be heard over the band: “You are perfection!!!! / You’re my idea!!!!! / Of angels singing the Ave Maria!!!!!” The nonsense syllables are just sung by men, but these lines are sung by everyone, including super-high sopranos with wild vibrato. It’s really kind of scary, and not very pleasant.

 

1956

Note:  This is the first year that every song in the top five has been under three minutes long.

1. Elvis Presley – Heartbreak Hotel.  I’ve loved this song for years, and I’ve been meaning to listen to it again ever since discovering that David Thomas, one of my favorite musical thinkers, considers it to be one of the most important songs in the history of rock.  According to Thomas, the song “is not about the Elvis Presley narrator but the bellhop who is witness to the hyperbolic, comical maundering of the Elvis character.”  Listening to it now, though, I can’t figure out where he’s getting that interpretation.  The bellhop is mentioned only once, and he himself is constantly weeping, making him even more hyperbolic than the narrator as far as I’m concerned.  What I get out of that verse is something very different:  the image of the weeping bellhop and the black-clad desk clerk, in a hotel that I can only imagine as cheap, dirty, run-down and lit in flickering neon, seems like something out of some dark, surreal, arty-but-not-too-arty movie — Barton Fink, maybe, or Wild at Heart.  Thomas is right that it’s comical as well as tragic:  the Heartbreak Hotel is on Lonely Street?  Seriously?  But the bellhop seems more like a setpiece than anything else.  Anyway, enough about the lyrics:  the music is what makes it truly great, from the saloon-style piano solo to the early choruses in which Elvis is accompanied only by an acoustic bass (which means that the verses are actually louder and more “climactic” than the choruses are).  Best of all is his voice, which is breathy, staccato, angular, and unlike anything else I know from the period.   I suspect that a lot of early New Wave singers, from Mark Mothersbaugh (Devo) to Andy Partridge (XTC), had him in mind when they were starting out.

2.  Elvis Presley – Don’t Be Cruel.  A more typical rock ‘n’ roll song than “Heartbreak Hotel,” with a boogie-woogie piano part, background singers providing “bops” and “aaaaaaaahhh”s, and even a few proto-Beatle-y harmonic turns.  He’s still got the staccato syllables and the odd vocal squeaks between them, but he’s less, well, hyperbolic, and the lyrics are generic love-song material rather than art-film tableaux.  Nice tune, though.  My favorite part is in the last chorus, where some additional background singers come in with an “oooh” every time Elvis says the word “cruel,” but they’re mixed much higher than the other singers and they’ve got a certain lounge-music smoothness to them, making them surprising and satisfyingly incongruous.

3.  The Nelson Riddle Orchestra – Lisbon Antigua.  A novelty instrumental in the vein of Ted Weems’ “Heartaches,” and a great one too!  I was just settling in for a pleasant couple of minutes of major 7th chords, orchestral string tremolos and disposable exotica, when suddenly Riddle hit me with a wordless male vocal line, muted trumpets and violent harp glissandi!  From that moment on he changes up the instrumentation so much that it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on.  At the climax, the music rises a minor second (officially a “corny” move; in this context a startling one) and a door opens onto a wide vista with trumpets in the sky, basses growing from the ground, pianos on the horizon and voices floating in the air like clouds.  The actual melody-harmony-rhythm part of the song isn’t much to write home about, but THIS GUY CAN FUCKING ORCHESTRATE.  (Come to think of it, didn’t he do a lot of Frank Sinatra’s orchestrations?  Wikipedia says yes.)

4.  The Platters – My Prayer.   An uneasy mix of feel-good doo-wop and anguished melodramatic ballad, with a dark, piano-oriented sound that for some reason makes me think of vampires.  The best moment is the end of the introduction:  up until that point, the music has consisted of lead singer Tony Williams’s dramatic minor-mode declamations, punctuated by individual chords delivered by the rest of the singers plus piano, in the manner of an 18th-century recitative.  Then, as soon as he hits the last word of the introduction (“pray)”, the guitar, bass, piano and drums suddenly enter with a generic, arpeggio-filled doo-wop accompaniment — in major.  Later there are melodramatic choruses (now I know where Mr. Bungle got their suicide ballad “Pink Cigarette”), and they culminate in an ending in which Williams is practically shouting, accompanied by repeated instrumental chords that are played with the intensity of a rock ‘n’ roll band.  I wonder how many people who hear this song pay attention to how complex it is.

5. Gogi Grant – The Wayward Wind.  Nominally country, but like “Riders in the Sky” it sounds more Western to me, though I can’t put a finger on why.  Something about the rhythm of the guitar strumming, I think.  More than anything, though, it sounds like it’s from a movie, with its dramatic orchestration, closing trombone solo, musical-theatre vocals and third-person narration (“He was born next of kin / Next of kin to the wayward wind”).  For some reason I picture the opening credits of The Sound of Music.  Honestly, I find the song kind of blustery and don’t have very much to say about it.

 

1955

1.  Perez Prado – Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White.  I’d been listening to Mr. Bungle’s album California for years before I started trying to track down the music from the 50s and 60s that inspired it.  I wound up tracing a lot of its stylistic hallmarks to a genre called “exotica,” which is more or less the musical equivalent of tiki bars.  But like California, exotica is itself an amalgam of elements from other genres.  When I listened to”Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White” just now, another part of the story fell into place.  Perez Prado is the so-called “King of Mambo” — according to Wikipedia, the guy responsible for even the term “mambo.”  The song is, for the most part, boring, obvious and repetitive, except for some kind-of-cool novelty trumpet slides.  But the percussion part behind it, rife with clicks, rolls and taps from an array of mostly wooden instruments, is of a type that’s very familiar to me from both exotica and Mr. Bungle’s avant-garde tribute to it.  It seems that exotica was already around by 1955, even if the name didn’t come around until a couple of years later:  Les Baxter, one of the fathers of the genre, is coming up a little further down in this post.  But since Perez Prado was recording as early as the 1940s (thanks again to Wikipedia), I’m going to assume that this is where that percussion style comes from — if it doesn’t derive from an even earlier form of Cuban music.

2.  Bill Haley and His Comets – Rock Around the Clock.  Ohhh yes.  “Rock Around the Clock” has all the virtues of early rock ‘n’ roll:  clean, clear, direct, with a punchy, percussive sound.  (I have to admit, though, rocking around the clock would be hard if all the songs were this concise.  It’s just two minutes and 11 seconds long, making it the third shortest song we’ve had so far, after “How High the Moon” (2:08) and “Come On-a My House” (2:00))  It’s got two instrumental breaks:  a guitar solo (featuring extensive use of the picked tremolo that would later be associated with surf rock) and a sax + guitar break in which the guitar hits sharp major triads and immediately slides away from them, making the sax sound a bit like a harmonica (traces of rock ‘n’ roll’s blues origins)?  I’m a bit surprised at how nerdy Bill Haley sounds — almost like Reynold of the Cheat Commandos, though that’s an exaggeration.  Had the genre not developed its rebellious image yet, or was this guy really seen as a dangerously libidinous character in 1955?  Or was it only black bands and that gender bender Elvis that made white parents so paranoid?

3. Mitch Miller – Yellow Rose of Texas.  ALARMING.  There’s a seemingly unstoppable military-march beat, and against it a few brass-balled, strong-jawed military men sing about the girl they’re coming back to after the war.  (Yes, “men.” Yes, “girl.”  She’s the “sweetest little rosebud that Texas ever knew”; they sing like their teeth are permanently clenched.)  The chorus is sung in harmony by what sounds like forty people recorded in an empty warehouse.  Periodically the singing is interrupted by a marching-band-style flute duo, and whenever this happens, the key abruptly jumps up a half-step.  “Rio Grande” is pronounced “Rye-O Grand.”  And the narrator’s idea of a nostalgic good time, like things were before the war, is “play[ing] the banjo gaily,” though it’s hard to imagine him doing anything gaily other than maybe saluting a flag.  According to Wikipedia, “yellow” meant “biracial.”  Was the banjo a race-associated instrument?  Was a white man recording a song about a biracial woman in 1955 seen as politically radical (even though he sings it with military clenched teeth, and even though the song goes back at least to the Civil War)?  I don’t know.

4.  Roger Williams – Autumn Leaves.   I guess this is part of the same tradition as Liberace.  Most of the song consists of an orchestra playing a mournful tune while a guitar keeps time (mixed so low that you can really only hear the timbre of the strumming) and Williams plays pseudo-Lisztian virtuoso piano stuff — mostly very fast chromatic scales.  However, there is one wonderful moment when everyone stops and Williams takes over the melody.  Pretty soon the guitar and strings are back, and his playing quickly becomes ornate again, but there’s a little window in the texture where it’s just him, playing three simple chords, and all of a sudden the music sounds like Brahms.  Unrelated weird thing: at one point the tune is identical to a bit of a Communist revolutionary song my mother sang to me when I was a kid, which goes: “So hear the thunder of / The mighty masses / All creeds and colors / Brain and brawn.”  It’s not that unusual a melody, so it could well be a coincidence, but it was still odd to run into it here.

5. Les Baxter and His Orchestra – Unchained Melody.  This is unlike anything I’ve ever heard, including anything else by Les Baxter (and it’s definitely not exotica, either).  I actually had to listen to it twice to figure out what to say about it.  It’s got a bunch of different sections:  slow, poignant late Romantic orchestral bits, groups of singers repeating “unchain me” over and over again, and a melancholy main tune that happens only once, sung by a couple of pure-voiced men in unison and accompanied by guitars.  The main tune reminds me to a startling degree of certain mid-period Beach Boys songs, most notably “You Still Believe In Me.”  I feel like I should find the song sappy, but I actually find it extremely beautiful.  It makes me imagine a brief reunion between two lovers separated by circumstances beyond their control, late at night in an airy white stucco building in rural Greece or Italy.  (The reunited lovers are actually in the lyrics;  the location is entirely in the music.)  I was definitely not expecting that.