Life of a Song

by Jan Dalley

  Wilson went on to spend decades in the wilderness, but in 2002 he was well enough to launch a tour of the UK on which he performed, in its entirety, Pet Sounds. With his crack ensemble of players and singers, he then went back into the studio to complete Smile, which was released in 2004. As an album, Smile doesn’t quite hold together; it’s no Sgt Pepper. But ‘Surf’s Up’ is easily its finest moment, a little masterpiece of shifting keys and tempi, and it’s no surprise that few have attempted to cover it. There’s a hypnotically strange, woozy 2001 rendition by art-punk singer David Thomas and Two Pale Boys. Jimmy Webb, David Crosby and Vince Gill sang it faithfully at a 2001 ‘All Star Tribute to Brian Wilson’ in New York. But that’s about it.

  Discussions about the finest version, therefore, centre on the recordings made by Wilson and The Beach Boys, of which there are many: three alone on The Smile Sessions box set (released in 2011). One such features Wilson alone at his piano in 1967. Listen to his left hand; he seems to make the notes bend. And listen to the voice, both fragile and pure. It’s exquisite.

  David Cheal

  8

  MIDNIGHT TRAIN TO GEORGIA

  The great American soul band Gladys Knight & The Pips had one of their biggest hits in 1973 with the heartbreak narrative of big-city failure in ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’. The much-covered soul classic tells the story of a woman whose man once dreamed of superstardom in LA but, his hopes crushed, is retreating to – as the song puts it – ‘a simpler place and time’. The female narrator is declaring that her place is alongside him: ‘I’d rather live with him in his world/Than live without him in mine’.

  The tune joined a rich body of American, especially African–American, train songs in the US, stretching from the Delta blues to R&B, although this is a song of retreat rather than escape. Yet when singer-songwriter Jim Weatherly wrote it as a pop-country number in 1972, he was thinking not of trains or even of Georgia, but of a throwaway line from his former football buddy Lee Major’s girlfriend, Farrah Fawcett. Chatting on the phone to Weatherly, Fawcett – soon to be a superstar herself in The Six Million Dollar Man and Charlie’s Angels – said she was packing to catch a midnight plane to Houston. The line teased away at Weatherly, and ‘Midnight Plane to Houston’ was the title he gave the song that he recorded himself soon after writing it, in which it is the man who faithfully upends his life for a woman.

  The soul singer Cissy Houston (mother of Whitney) heard ‘Midnight Plane to Houston’ and decided to record its first cover version, in January 1973. But the title irked. It wasn’t the collision of Houstons – singer and subject – that bothered her, but one of authenticity. If she was going to sing this song, she had to feel it. And, she later said, ‘My people are originally from Georgia and they didn’t take planes to Houston or anywhere else. They took trains.’

  Cissy’s producer asked Weatherly for permission to change the title and lyrics to reflect that. ‘We said, “Change anything but the writer and publisher”,’ the songwriter told Gary James of the Classic Bands website. ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’ was the title that stuck, even when Weatherly re-recorded his own song in 2003.

  Cissy Houston had a respectable R&B hit with her account of the song, giving it a female voice and, by adding harmonica, a country-ish feel. It was this version that Gladys Knight was to hear soon afterwards. Gladys Knight & The Pips had already had a hit with another Jim Weatherly song, ‘Neither One of Us (Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye)’, in 1972. They recorded the renamed ‘Midnight Train’ in August 1973. They too added to and tweaked some of the lines, again with Weatherly’s blessing. It was Knight who upgraded the man’s longing for success in Los Angeles to an ambition to be a superstar. Knight’s version is also wordier than both previous recordings, to take account of the important vocal role played by the Pips.

  The song went on to hit Number 1 and to win a Grammy. But, as with the similarly travel-themed Glen Campbell song, ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’, some listeners challenged its logistics. Geoff Turner, a producer at Canada’s CBC Radio and ‘son of a rail nut’, only recently confirmed with Amtrak that there were no trains from LA leaving for Georgia at midnight in August 1973, or indeed any direct trains. In 2016 he got in touch with Weatherly about the apparent error, who explained the evolution of the title to him. ‘So many little miracles … happened to make that song get to where it got, in Gladys’s hands,’ said Weatherly. ‘It was just totally amazing to me.’

  Over the years Weatherly will have been grateful he insisted on his copyright, as covers emerged from performers as diverse as Aretha Franklin, Neil Diamond, Garth Brooks (who used the third person) and the comedian Sandra Bernhard.

  Gladys Knight’s version of the song is beautifully embellished by her backing singers, The Pips, with their signature lines and railroad ‘Whoo-whoos’. And in 1977 they had their moment in the spotlight on a Richard Pryor television special. Contractual difficulties had forced the band apart temporarily, so the Pips (billed, literally, as ‘And the Pips’) performed their entire backing vocals to ‘Midnight Train’ – alongside a spot-lit lone mic stand where Gladys Knight should have been. It was a triumph.

  Sue Norris

  9

  LADY MARMALADE

  It was seen as the height of sophistication in the disco era to include a little French in your lyrics; after all, ‘discotheque’ is French for ‘record library’. Grace Jones covered Edith Piaf’s ‘La Vie en Rose’. Chic chanted ‘Le Freak’ and produced French pop plodders Sheila & B Devotion, with Sheila’s Gallic accent to the fore. However, the francophone floor-filling trend was started by a veteran Philadelphia soul trio, Labelle, and their breakthrough ‘Lady Marmalade’ revealed the advantages of singing en français: many listeners and broadcasters didn’t realize how provocative the song was.

  Unfortunately, neither did the group’s lead singer.

  ‘Lady Marmalade’ had been dreamt up by Bob Crewe, a human hit machine whose credits included The Four Seasons’ ‘Rag Doll’ and The Walker Brothers’ ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore’. One of Crewe’s projects was a group called The Eleventh Hour, fronted by singer Kenny Nolan. In 1974 the pair wrote a gritty song called ‘Lady Marmalade’, its prowling groove reflecting a sleazy lyric. Crewe’s Lady Marmalade was a Creole sex worker in New Orleans, approaching men with the sassy line, ‘Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?’ He supposedly heard the phrase on the lips of hookers while visiting the French Quarter, although more likely he remembered Blanche DuBois purring it in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire.

  The Eleventh Hour’s version didn’t sell, so Crewe pitched it to Patti LaBelle. She told him: ‘I don’t know what that voulez-vous stuff means … but that’s a hit.’ Her group needed one: Labelle had been around for a decade in various guises, and despite the patronage of Dusty Springfield, the Rolling Stones and the young Elton John in the 1960s, stardom remained elusive. In 1974, armed with Crewe and Nolan’s song, Labelle flew south to work with Allen Toussaint, the linchpin of the New Orleans studio scene throughout the 1960s and 1970s. He shredded ‘Lady Marmalade’, placing the streetwalker at the heart of the tale rather than objectifying her. The cream of New Orleans’ soul musicians played on the session, including three-quarters of The Meters, articled funk legends. The result was a deeply funky tune dressed in disco glitter, and Labelle sang it like an empowering anthem. It went to Number 1 in the US. Some critics assumed Toussaint had written it, a myth repeated in some of his obituaries when he died in 2015, but he composed little of Nightbirds, the album it graced.

  The seductive nature of the song meant it was never short of cover-version customers. Québécoise singer Nanette Workman went the whole hog by singing it entirely in French in 1975. That year Latin bandleader Mongo Santamaria’s brassy instrumental interpretation sounded like a theme for a TV cop show. A former percussionist with Prince, SheilaE, gave ‘Marmalade’ a highly arranged R&B twist in 1991. Although Labelle’s single didn’t hit Number 1 in the UK,
All Saints rectified that in 1997, the female quartet singing it like a cross between Bananarama and Destiny’s Child in a sanded-down cover, complete with cheesy rap.

  The Camembert content climaxed with Christina Aguilera, Lil’ Kim, Mya and Pink’s update in 2001 for the soundtrack of the movie Moulin Rouge, making it the only song to top the charts twice in the US and the UK. With each subsequent version, the ‘sexiness’ grew more overstated and the empowerment factor fell.

  Patti LaBelle claimed she hadn’t understood the French come-on in ‘Lady Marmalade’ at first. She told Jet magazine: ‘Nobody told me what I’d just sung about.’ When she found out, she felt ‘I’d turned into some kind of bad girl’. Ironically, it wasn’t even the rudest song on Nightbirds. That dubious honour went to ‘You Turn Me On’, which details female pleasure in graphic terms. Perhaps Ms LaBelle didn’t understand that, either.

  Ian McCann

  10

  GOD BLESS THE CHILD

  For a song that has become something of a secular hymn, it’s strange that Billie Holiday’s plaintive ‘God Bless the Child’ grew out of a row with her mother. But then, as Tony Bennett said of Holiday: ‘When you listen to her, it’s almost like an audio tape of her autobiography. She didn’t sing anything unless she lived it.’

  ‘God Bless the Child’ is attributed to both Holiday and Arthur Herzog Jnr, although both later claimed sole credit for it. The song was hastily written in 1939, and Holiday said she wrote it in a rage after her mother refused to give her a small loan – at a time when Holiday was bankrolling her restaurant. ‘She wouldn’t give me a cent. I was mad at her, she was mad at me … Then I said, “God bless the child that’s got his own”, and walked out’, according to her autobiography Lady Sings the Blues. The vocalist stewed for three weeks before ‘a whole damn song’ fell into place and she rushed to Greenwich Village to ask songwriter Herzog to help sort the tune out. ‘We changed the lyrics in a couple of spots, but not much,’ she wrote.

  But Herzog tells a different tale, according to Donald Clarke’s biography of Holiday. Here, the still-angry singer told Herzog about the argument, and got to the part when she stormed off with the words ‘God bless the child’. Herzog interrupted with ‘What’s that mean?’ Twenty minutes later, they had a song. According to Herzog, Holiday’s only contribution, apart from the title and story, was to take one note down by a half step. Herzog found a publisher the next day, although Holiday did not record it until 1941, for the Okeh label with the Eddie Haywood Orchestra. It was a moderate hit, peaking at Number 25 in the Billboard charts. The lyrics interweave the original spat into seeming folk-mottos and biblical references. The opening lines, ‘Them that’s got shall have/Them that’s not shall lose/So the Bible says, and it still is news’, echo St Matthew’s parable of the talents: ‘For to all those who have, more will be given. …’

  But as the song progresses, the lyrics shift the parable – man’s duty to make the most of what you have been given – into a different context. The line ‘Rich relations give crusts of bread and such, you can help yourself, but don’t take too much’ captures survival in an unequal world.

  Holiday returned to the song several times before she died aged 44 in 1959, including with the Count Basie band in 1952 – a video clip shows her in front of the slowly swaying brass section. She sang it differently every time, altering phrasing, placement and pitch, yet creating in the listener the illusion that they were hearing each note exactly as originally written.

  Jazz instrumentalists later developed the song, though it took more than a decade for the song to resurface. Sonny Rollins recorded it first as an epic ballad on the 1962 album The Bridge, and later as a soulful canter over the new rhythms of funk on the 1973 album Horn Culture. Eric Dolphy’s rippling unaccompanied reading on the 1963 Illinois Concert confirmed the bass clarinet as a jazz instrument. A sombre, soulful and brassy vocal cover was a Top 10 hit for the jazz-rock band Blood Sweat and Tears in 1969.

  The best-known vocal versions tend to be from singers paying homage to Holiday. Diana Ross launched her film career capturing some of Holiday’s fragile strength in the 1972 biopic Lady Sings the Blues, and Tony Bennett duetted with the digital ghost of Holiday on the track for his 1997 tribute album Tony Bennett on Holiday. José James last year recorded a prowling blues-laced version on his Holiday songbook album Yesterday I Have the Blues.

  The song was part of the soundtrack in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List – jazz was banned under the Nazis, so the scene emphasized Schindler’s renunciation of the regime. Even The Simpsons slipped in some reverence on their 1990 The Simpsons Sing the Blues album, with a version that includes some tasty sax from Bleeding Gums Murphy, after Lisa Simpson demands a live band. The Moby and Oscar the Punk electronica remix was a mistake.

  The song’s title has even been pulled into service in an education debate in the US about the role of charter schools. It turns up at funerals and birth celebrations alike. Like the parable, the song has prompted many interpretations.

  Mike Hobart

  11

  IN THE AIR TONIGHT

  The coolification of Phil Collins is among pop’s most curious turn-arounds. The former Genesis drummer and frontman scored seven Number 1 singles in the US, and more than 100 million album sales worldwide, after launching his career as a solo singer in 1981 with ‘In the Air Tonight’. By the mid-1990s, though, his name was mud with critics, and as popular tastes changed, his earnest balladry came to be seen as corny as one of his flat caps.

  That today he is lauded by Lorde, the influential New Zealand singer-songwriter, covered by Kanye West and remotely fist-bumped by Brooklyn hipsters such as Yeasayer is largely down to gangsta rap, a Cadbury’s chocolate-promoting gorilla and the ‘gated reverb’ drum sound of ‘In the Air Tonight’.

  Hip-hop never got the memo about Collins being uncool. ‘Don’t mess with my Phil,’ Ice-T (of ‘Cop Killer’ fame) reportedly once told a disparaging hack. DMX sampled the eerie synth line and core lyric of ‘In the Air Tonight’ on ‘I Can Feel It’ in 1998. What he, and others including Nas and Tupac, heard in that song is probably the same emotional directness and atmospheric production that make it an obvious template for the current wave of murky, downtempo R&B, exemplified by acts from James Blake to The Weeknd. Built around the ominous chant, ‘I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord’, you might well call Collins’s track, the opener of his 1981 debut solo album Face Value, ambient blues.

  Having played with Brian Eno in the 1970s, Collins understood ambient music. He wrote the song at the lowest of ebbs and in the saddest of keys, D minor. His first wife had left him, so he set up a studio in his bedroom and poured out his pain over a Prophet-5 synthesizer and a Roland CR-78 drum machine. The words were mostly improvised. Collins continues to maintain he doesn’t know what the song means beyond it being a litany of ‘anger, bitterness and hurt’.

  It took Ahmet Ertegun, the boss of Atlantic, to encourage him to turn the demo into a proper record, and the rest is Collins’s solo career. The characteristic drum sound – which became a blueprint for much 1980s rock and funk – was a happy accident. It had been discovered by Collins and the engineer Hugh Padgham when the pair were working on Peter Gabriel’s third album. By chance, Padgham heard Collins’s drums in the studio through the ‘talkback’ microphone on a new console; with the room echo, they sounded huge and wonderfully distorted.

  Padgham added a ‘noise gate’ effect to increase the punchiness of the signal by cutting it off quickly: the sonic equivalent of not knowing what has hit you. With Padgham then producing the album Face Value, they recreated the technique to produce one of the most celebrated drum breaks on ‘In the Air Tonight’.

  The way the drums batter out of the album version is like a defiant snarl of rage, all the more powerful and surprising for the minimal build-up. For the single, Ertegun insisted an initial backbeat be overdubbed for easier listening. The song was only pipped as a UK Number 1 by John
Lennon’s posthumous chart-topper ‘Woman’.

  But the advertising agency behind a famous British 2007 chocolate bar television commercial shrewdly used the original. The drumming gorilla seems to have been waiting all his life before launching into his big fill (pun intended).

  Aged 66, Collins is now capitalizing on his newfound credibility by reissuing his catalogue under the rubric Take a Look at Me Now. Not everyone is pleased that he is ‘no longer in retirement’. Thousands of people have signed a jocular petition to ‘stop’ him returning to music. It would be churlish of even the most pernickety troll to deny that ‘In the Air Tonight’ still raises the nape hairs, 36 years on.

  Richard Clayton

  12

  AMSTERDAM

  Jacques Brel was born into a bourgeois Belgian family in 1929, but as he grew up he came to loathe what he called the ‘mediocrity of the spirit’ that infected his comfortable world. The songs that he went on to write when he moved to Paris and became one of the world’s foremost French-language singers and songwriters were the work of a man of many passions.

  One of his most torrid songs was ‘Amsterdam’, and the song’s birth testified to its emotional power. His publicist and mistress Sylvie Rivet later recalled that she and Brel were in the south of France in 1964. ‘One morning at six o’clock Brel read the words of “Amsterdam” to Fernand, a restaurateur who was about to set off fishing for ingredients for a bouillabaisse. Overcome, Fernand broke out in sobs and cut open some sea urchins to help control his emotion.’

  Brel’s ‘Amsterdam’ vividly portrays the lives of the sailors, drunks and whores of the port of Amsterdam, its 3/4 time signature evoking their dance steps; when he first sang it on stage at Paris’s Olympia in 1964, the crowd gave him a three-minute ovation. Footage of Brel’s performances of ‘Amsterdam’ shows him twitching, jerking and pouring sweat as the song’s feverish crescendo reaches its peak: then, blackout. Three minutes of pure drama.