Life of a Song
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Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Brewer’s, an imprint of Chambers Publishing Limited.
An Hachette UK company.
Copyright © Financial Times 2017
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All rights reserved.
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A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-47367-047-1
John Murray Learning
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Contributors
1. MY WAY
2. STARMAN
3. LIKE A ROLLING STONE
4. STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN
5. YESTERDAY
6. EVERY ROSE HAS ITS THORN
7. SURF’S UP
8. MIDNIGHT TRAIN TO GEORGIA
9. LADY MARMALADE
10. GOD BLESS THE CHILD
11. IN THE AIR TONIGHT
12. AMSTERDAM
13. WITHOUT YOU
14. IT’S THE HARD KNOCK LIFE
15. APACHE
16. 1999
17. SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT
18. LA VIE EN ROSE
19. SOME VELVET MORNING
20. HALLELUJAH
21. AMAZING GRACE
22. THE LONG BLACK VEIL
23. I HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE
24. BY THE TIME I GET TO PHOENIX
25. TOXIC
26. SMOKE ON THE WATER
27. THE HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN
28. SHIPBUILDING
29. ROCKET 88
30. JOHNNY REMEMBER ME
31. RED RED WINE
32. A CHANGE IS GONNA COME
33. DOWNTOWN
34. BORN IN THE USA
35. SONG TO THE SIREN
36. OVER THE RAINBOW
37. ENTER SANDMAN
38. WADE IN THE WATER
39. DARK WAS THE NIGHT, COLD WAS THE GROUND
40. THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND
41. BECAUSE THE NIGHT
42. MY FAVORITE THINGS
43. BALTIMORE
44. THE CHAIN
45. IKE’S RAP II
46. I BELIEVE IN FATHER CHRISTMAS
47. SUKIYAKI
48. ME AND BOBBY MCGEE
49. MY FUNNY VALENTINE
50. AULD LANG SYNE
Photo Credits
INTRODUCTION
The world’s oldest surviving complete song is the ‘Seikilos Epitaph’. Around the first century AD, its music and lyrics were engraved in Greek on a tombstone in what is now Turkey. What’s remarkable about this song is that a melody written around 2000 years ago still resonates today with anyone familiar with Western music: it’s a sweet, sad, memorable tune. The lyrics, meanwhile, are the stuff of songs through the ages: ‘Life exists only for a short while/And time demands an end.’
We do not know what instrument it was intended to be played on: perhaps a lyre, or a flute. But, inevitably, it has been picked up and reshaped by modern-day musicians in a panoply of styles: acoustic singer-songwriter, solo harpist, jazz, even dubstep.
This is what happens to good songs: once they’ve been written and released, they take on a life of their own, reshaped and given new life, often across the generations. And that is what this book is about: a compilation of weekly columns written for FT Weekend, it contains the stories of 50 songs that have been born, reborn reinvigorated, re-imagined, and sometimes hideously mangled.
The Life of a Song is not about singers, or stars, or chart success – although of course they come into the story. It is about the music itself. Each of the songs we and the writers have chosen has a rich biography of its own, often transcending and moving between musical genres. Here you will find a song that is now speeding through space, songs that have given rise to court cases, songs that have become funeral favourites, songs that have been used – and abused – by politicians. And every song in this compilation, from pop to jazz, folk, musicals and other genres, has something to say about the human spirit and the experience of being alive that makes them, like the ‘Seikilos Epitaph’, endlessly young.
David Cheal and Jan Dalley
CONTRIBUTORS
Peter Aspden
Peter Aspden is a former arts editor and writer for the Financial Times. He was brought up in Washington DC where he bought his first plastic Beatles wig to sing ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ in front of the mirror. He studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he thought that Californian soft rock would change the world. He has written about sport, books, travel and the arts for a wide variety of publications. He is currently thinking about writing a book, but has been sidetracked trying to work out the guitar chords of ‘God Only Knows’.
Helen Brown
Helen Brown is an arts journalist whose articles have appeared in the Financial Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Independent, the Guardian online, the New Statesman and The Spectator. Highlights of her interviewing career have included a lesson in playing the guitar with acrylic nails from Dolly Parton, birdwatching with Amy Winehouse and scouring corner shops for fine wines with Grace Jones. She lives in Essex with her two small children and too much vinyl.
David Cheal
David Cheal has been reviewing music since the early 1980s, and was a pop critic for the Daily Telegraph for 20 years. He now works on the Financial Times arts pages, where he writes and commissions the weekly Life of a Song column and also contributes reviews and features. When he was growing up, he wanted to be Jack Bruce but never got round to learning how to play the bass.
Richard Clayton
After a decade and more of mainly music freelancing for the Sunday Times and the Financial Times, Richard Clayton swapped tinnitus for timetables to retrain as an English teacher. He remembers interviewing Amy Winehouse over bacon and eggs, and small talk about cycling with Jakob Dylan. Proud to have been an early adopter of Wild Beasts, Kendrick Lamar and Father John Misty, he still hopes to write during the summer holidays.
Mike Hobart
Mike Hobart is the Financial Times jazz critic. He was a full-time musician for many years and still plays tenor sax. He now leads his own jazz quintet, whose CD Evidential was released last year through anotherworldmusic.
David Honigmann
Building on his misspent youth browsing in Sterns Records, pursuing an interest founded on his parents’ copy of ‘Missa Luba’, David Honigmann is now world music critic for the Financial Times. He was also a contributor to the Rough Guide Book of Playlists, and is the co-author of a range of children’s books. He has only missed one WOMAD this century.
Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
Ludovic Hunter-Tilney is the Financial Times pop critic and has also written for the Guardian, the Sunday Times and the New Statesman. In 2014 he won the London Press Club’s arts reviewer of the year award. He lives in London.
Hilary Kirby
Hilary Kirby has not yet given up the day job working as an FT picture editor, often finding pictures for The Life of a Song column. She loves music, from punk to country, and once (late at night) found her way on to the main stage at Glastonbury. She takes the
education of her children’s musical taste very seriously and her happiest moments are singing with them to an eclectic range of music in the car.
Ian McCann
Ian McCann is the editor of Record Collector magazine, and has written for NME, Q and the Independent, and worked as a reporter on BBC Radio 1. An obsessive accumulator of vinyl, he is a big fan of soul, jazz and reggae, and owns a hi-fi system so loud that it’s like the nuclear deterrent: let’s hope it will never be used.
Bernadette McNulty
Bernadette McNulty is the deputy arts editor at the i newspaper and has written about arts and music for the Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, The Observer, Harper’s Bazaar and the Yomiuri Shimbun. Her ambition growing up was to be a dancer on Top of the Pops. She still enjoys interpretive choreography while listening to music in her kitchen.
Charles Morris
Charles Morris was a journalist all his working life, for magazines and then newspapers. He worked for the Financial Times for 28 years. From 2006–9 he was the newspaper’s sports editor, and specialized in writing about football and tennis. Since retiring in 2014 he has taught journalism at the University of the Arts, London, and been a freelance journalist. He is currently writing a book, a family memoir about football.
Sue Norris
Sue Norris is a former associate editor of the FT Weekend magazine and is now a freelance writer and editor. Sue grew up on American soul and funk, and once thought nothing of spending a day’s wages on an American import from Contempo Records in London’s Hanway Street. She still spends rather too much time watching old episodes of Soul Train.
Fiona Sturges
Fiona Sturges is a writer and journalist who specializes in music and popular culture. For 20 years she worked as an interviewer and reviewer for the Independent. She is now an arts columnist for the Financial Times and the Guardian, and lectures in Popular Music Journalism at Southampton Solent University.
Cathi Unsworth
Cathi Unsworth is the author of five pop-cultural crime novels, Without The Moon, Weirdo, Bad Penny Blues, The Singer and The Not Knowing, all published by Serpent’s Tail. She lives in London where she gives regular talks, walks and hosts interviews for The Sohemian Society and Shoreditch House on subjects ranging from true crime, local history, pop art and punk.
1
MY WAY
‘I’d never before written something so chauvinistic, narcissistic, in-your-face and grandiose,’ says Paul Anka. But when the former teen idol wrote the lyrics to ‘My Way’ he was writing for (and in the persona of) his hero Frank Sinatra.
Ol’ Blue Eyes was at the end of his (admittedly short) tether in 1967. The Rat Pack was disintegrating, he was being hounded by the FBI over his mob connections, and his 1966 marriage to Mia Farrow was already on the rocks. When a Las Vegas hotel manager cut off his gambling credit (he was heavily in debt to them) Sinatra stormed out, found a golf cart, pushed Farrow into it beside him then drove it through the hotel’s front window. The hotel manager punched the caps off the singer’s teeth with one clean right hook. The headlines were humiliating.
‘Kid, I’m fed up,’ 51-year-old Sinatra told 25-year-old Anka. ‘I’m gonna do one more album and then I’m out of here. You never wrote me that song you always promised. Don’t take too long!’
Anka already owned the rights to a new French song of fading love called ‘Comme d’habitude’ by Jacques Revaux and singer Claude François (one of France’s bestselling singers, until he was electrocuted while straightening a bathroom light fixture in 1978, aged 39). Sleepless in New York, a few months after his dinner with Sinatra, Anka tossed aside François’ mournful lines about a couple who ‘make love, as usual/fake it, as usual’ and sat down at the piano in search of English lyrics.
‘There was a storm brewing,’ he recalls, ‘and as I played I suddenly sensed myself becoming Frank, tuning into his sense of foreboding. That’s how I got the first line: “And now the end is near, and so I face the final curtain.” I thought of him leaving the stage, the lights going out, and started typing like a madman, writing it just the way he talked: “Ate it up … spit it out.” When I finished, it was 5am. I knew Frank was in Las Vegas, but by then he’d be offstage and at the bar. I called: “Frank, I’ve got something interesting – I’m gonna bring it out.” When I played the song for him, he said: “That’s kooky, kid. We’re going in.”’
Sinatra had a minor hit with it in the US on its release in 1969 (where it peaked at Number 27) but it was huge in the UK, where it stayed in the charts for 122 weeks. As it became his signature song Sinatra grew to loathe it, forced to stand before his adoring audience and expose the ugly truth about his aggressive disregard for the thoughts and feelings of other people. ‘He was,’ says his daughter Tina, ‘a man who all his life looked outside for what was missing inside.’
Anka wasn’t the only aspiring artist who tried fitting English words to the French song. David Bowie also had a go with ‘Even a Fool Learns to Love’, later recycling the rejected material as ‘Life on Mars?’ Hundreds of covers have included a mawkish 1973 version by Elvis (whom Sinatra hated) and a gloriously defiant punk statement by the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious in 1978. In 2007 Anka (who recorded the song with Jon Bon Jovi) said his favourite covers are by a peppy Nina Simone (1971) and the Gypsy Kings (‘A Mi Manera’, 1987).
Although it is beloved of karaoke crooners around the world, avoid selecting ‘My Way’ in the Philippines, where off-key delivery can get you into serious trouble: at least 12 people were shot dead between 2002 and 2012 after altercations over the song.
In 2016 the UK’s Co-op funeral company revealed that ‘My Way’ is now the UK’s most popular choice of funeral song, although Sinatra didn’t have it played at his own, at which mourners were blasted with a recording of him singing ‘Put Your Dreams Away’.
Most recently Nashville-based jazz singer Erin Boheme sang it for Donald and Melania Trump’s awkward first dance at his inaugural ball in January 2017. When asked what her dad would think about the 45th president choosing his theme song for the occasion, Nancy Sinatra tweeted: ‘Just remember the first line of the song: “And now the end is near”.’
Helen Brown
2
STARMAN
Can a pop song change the world? There are many who claim that when David Bowie performed ‘Starman’ on the BBC’s Top of the Pops on 6 July 1972, the earth shifted a little on its axis. Into the dull brown living rooms of Britain was beamed the image of a skinny, slinky young man in a multi-coloured jumpsuit strumming a 12-string acoustic guitar and singing in eccentric vowels about the coming of an alien saviour. And when Bowie draped his arm gently around silver-clad, silver-haired guitarist Mick Ronson’s shoulder and pulled him closer to sing the chorus, it’s not hard to imagine a nationwide chorus of disapproving harrumphings and newspaper-rattlings. Bowie periodically fixed his eyes on the camera, addressing the viewer directly: ‘I had to phone someone so I picked on you-hoo-hoo.’ It was electrifying.
Perhaps it’s an oversimplification to reduce cultural history to ‘moments’ but there are certainly plenty of pop stars, fashion designers, artists and writers who claim that Bowie’s striking performance was for them a moment of awakening, a realization that they were not alone, that there were others who were ‘other’. Among them is Dylan Jones, editor of the UK edition of GQ magazine, who has written an entire book (When Ziggy Played Guitar) on those fateful few minutes; others include Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode, Marc Almond, Boy George, Holly Johnson, Ian McCulloch, Gary Numan and Neil Tennant.
But if Bowie was strange, the song was far from it: ‘Starman’ was an instant pop classic whose glorious chorus echoed the octave-leaping ‘Over the Rainbow’. Familiar, too, was the morse-code motif (achieved through a treated synthesis of guitar and piano), signifier of an urgent message and heard earlier on Glen Campbell’s ‘Wichita Lineman’ and on the Supremes’ ‘You Keep Me Hangin’ On’ (Vanilla Fudge’s version of the same song accentuates thi
s device).
Bowie himself had laboured for three years following his 1969 hit ‘Space Oddity’ without much success. ‘Starman’ was his moment; this was his breakthrough.
Over the years various cover versions of ‘Starman’ have been recorded, few of them noteworthy. One exception came from Brazilian singer Seu Jorge in Wes Anderson’s 2004 movie The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou; Jorge’s character Pelé dos Santos pops up throughout the film singing Bowie songs in Portuguese, and ‘Starman’ is beautifully rendered on a warm night with a simple guitar accompaniment and a cigarette. Also, the barmy Finnish band Leningrad Cowboys recorded a memorable cover of the song, all slabby metal guitars and growly vocals (a couple of chords are tweaked to give the song an unsettling edge).
Bowie himself ignored the song for many years but then seemed to fall in love again with his back catalogue in the late 1990s and reintroduced it to his live shows. And his former drummer, Woody Woodmansey, toured with a band that included long-time Bowie producer Tony Visconti, playing Bowie’s album The Man Who Sold the World in its entirety before cranking out faithfully rendered versions of Bowie hits including ‘Starman’.
But this is not the story of how a song has changed and shifted over time. Rather, it’s the story of how a song has shifted the times: in popular culture, in fashion, in music, in art. The Victoria and Albert Museum’s touring exhibition ‘David Bowie Is’ featured a massive video wall celebrating Bowie performances, including the Top of the Pops performance of ‘Starman’. It’s a tribute to the song’s power that a moment from 1972 has been elevated to the status of art installation.
David Cheal
3
LIKE A ROLLING STONE
In 2014, the handwritten lyrics to ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ became the most expensive popular music manuscript to be sold at auction when it fetched just over $2 million at Sotheby’s. The lyrics – eventually four verses and a chorus – were based on Dylan’s writings on his return from a tour of England in 1965, a vengeful stream of ‘vomit’ directed at an unknown antagonist, as he later recalled.