Life of a Song

by Jan Dalley

SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT

  In a small town in Washington state in 1990, you had to make your own amusement. So it was that Kathleen Hanna and her friend Kurt spent an afternoon spraying graffiti on to a Christian teenage pregnancy advice centre and then returned to his rented apartment to drink. One thing led to another: Hanna ‘smashed up a bunch of shit’ and defaced the walls in marker pen. One of her phrases stuck in his mind. ‘Kurt’, the scrawl read, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. Teen Spirit was, in fact, the deodorant worn by his then girlfriend Tobi Vail, who was Hanna’s bandmate in embryonic riot grrrl band Bikini Kill. But, thought Cobain, it could be a song lyric.

  Grunge, a form of alienated music on the border of metal and punk, had been around for a while before Cobain and two friends formed Nirvana. But ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, released on the band’s second album Nevermind in 1991, made it an international sensation. Kurt Cobain’s influences included the Pixies and, less fashionably, soft-rockers Boston; the song’s elliptical lyrics (‘Load up on guns/Bring your friends … A mulatto/An albino/A mosquito/My libido’) hinted at troubled racial politics and AIDS panic without ever making anything explicit. When he chorused ‘I feel stupid and contagious/Here we are now, entertain us’ he summed up the new fin de siècle. Quiet passages alternated with rage: guitars crunched, drums crashed, Cobain howled. No doubt about it, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was the quintessential grunge anthem.

  Except, was it? A succession of musicians produced cover versions that, collectively, make the case for the song not being rooted in grunge at all. First up was Tori Amos, an American singer despatched to the UK by her record company in the hope that Britons would appreciate her Gothic confessionals more than her fellow countrymen did. In 1992, Amos was in her pomp: her version replaces Nirvana’s Sturm und Drang with moody Romantic piano. When Cobain first heard the record, he ‘couldn’t stop laughing’, but he later told MTV it was ‘flattering’ and claimed that he and Courtney Love danced to it over their morning cereal.

  So ‘Teen Spirit’ could land in a wide musical territory. But no one could have anticipated a metamorphosis a decade after Cobain’s suicide in 1994. In 2005 the Canadian-born crooner Paul Anka, best-known for writing the English lyrics to ‘My Way’, recorded the album Rock Swings, recreating the rock canon as swing jazz. Along with ‘Eye of the Tiger’, ‘Jump’ and ‘Everybody Hurts’ is, of course, ‘Teen Spirit’. Performing the song at the North Sea Jazz Festival a couple of years later, Anka prowled the stage, clicking his fingers. Where Cobain’s ‘Hello, hello’ had been a wary warning, and Amos’s a come-hither, Anka might have been welcoming the Rat Pack into a Las Vegas casino.

  It didn’t even need words. The Bad Plus, an avant-garde jazz trio matching Nirvana’s line-up but with piano for voice, deconstructed the song on a 2003 album. Ethan Iverson, the pianist, starts with the ringing guitar phrase but immediately drops it and warps the melody, taking off into sheets of atonal noise. The clamour drops out to expose Reid Anderson’s double bass nagging away at ‘With the lights out/It’s less dangerous’; finally the piano returns to the tune.

  The song is so well known now that there can be rap versions, comedy versions and a reading from Patti Smith; grunge, as a genre, is ancient history, but ‘Teen Spirit’ has outlived it. Hanna’s graffito never actually became a lyric, but it made a great title.

  David Honigmann

  18

  LA VIE EN ROSE

  Written in a pavement café on the Champs Elysées in 1945, ‘La Vie en Rose’ was a song whose giddy romance swept the French national spirit from the ashes of the Second World War and sent it soaring around the world. The sole author of this phoenix song was France’s ‘little sparrow’: Edith Piaf.

  Born Edith Gassion in 1915 and discovered singing on the streets of Paris’s red light district in 1935, Piaf was a singer whose career had taken flight during the Second World War. Though not a conventional beauty, the 4ft 10in diva was a volcano of drama, whose murky tales of murder, abandonment and prostitution were given an added frisson by her guttural vibrato. Although it’s often assumed that most of her songs were written for her by men, she wrote more than 100 of them herself and (unusually for the time) wrote many with other women.

  Piaf sang through the war as through the tragedies in her personal life, which included the death of her two-year-old daughter from meningitis in 1935 and that of her great love, the boxer Marcel Cerdan, who was killed in a plane crash in 1949. Performing for the occupying Germans as well as her fellow countrymen, Piaf was briefly branded a collaborator. But rumours of Nazi-pleasing were firmly quashed in 1945 when resistance leaders revealed that Piaf had smuggled maps and compasses to French POWs during her prison camp tours. She also posed for photographs with inmates; the photographs were used to create fake identity documents and enabled many prisoners to escape.

  After the war, as France sucked up Marshall Plan money and morale-boosting jazz records from the US, Piaf went for a drink with her friend Marianne Michel. The younger singer complained that nobody was writing her any new songs, so Piaf grabbed a piece of paper and dashed off ‘La Vie en Rose’ for her. The song’s central metaphor – of seeing the world afresh, through rose-tinted glasses – was something Piaf knew all about, having been blind for several years in her childhood and claiming to have been cured, aged seven, after the prostitutes working in her grandmother’s brothel pooled their earnings to send her on a Catholic pilgrimage.

  Michel recorded the song first – a sweet, xylophone-frosted version – with Piaf laying down her own, definitive version two years later. As a hymn to a love affair so beautiful that it allows the singer to forget all ‘les ennuis, les chagrins’ (weariness and grief), it saw the tragedienne, like her nation, transcend pain. Piaf’s melody whisks you up in its arms and takes you for a slow, dreamy twirl, briefly breaking hold for a few spoken sections before resuming the dance. Her version sold more than 1 million copies and made her name across the Atlantic, where Americans were startled to behold such a tiny woman in a simple black frock, exuding none of the Hollywood glamour to which they were accustomed.

  In 1950, Louis Armstrong gave the song a sumptuous treatment with a sleepy trumpet solo that starts out on a bed of solo piano glissandos and blooms against a big-band finale. Singing with one nipple slipping from her metallic négligée in the video, Jamaican supermodel Grace Jones sexed up the tune (with an insouciant guitar strum) for the disco generation in 1977. Fellow disco diva Donna Summer recorded a rather bland version in 1993. Punk growler Iggy Pop added a big slouchy beat to the Armstrong arrangement for the moody version that appeared on his 2012 album, Après.

  But it was Pascal of Bollywood who gave the best modern account of the song in 2003. Pascal, a French actor and singer (born Pascal Heni) known for reinterpreting Indian cinema songs, duetted with Bollywood star Shreya Ghoshal against a glorious, sari-pirouetting mix of Parisian pavement accordion, sitar, tabla and bansari (Indian bamboo flute). Pascal’s version conjures a luminous vision of a blissfully multicultural new France. A small beacon of hope for our dark times.

  Helen Brown

  19

  SOME VELVET MORNING

  There’s a glissando of strings, like waves breaking on a shore, then a man’s voice, rich and dark, intones the most enigmatic opening lines in pop history: ‘Some velvet morning when I’m straight/I’m gonna open up your gate/And maybe tell you ’bout Phaedra/And how she gave me life/And how she made it end/Some velvet morning when I’m straight.’ In response, a woman’s voice, light as a summer’s breeze, chants an invocation: ‘Flowers growing on a hill, dragonflies and daffodils/Learn from us very much, look at us but do not touch/Phaedra is my name …’

  The year is 1967, the setting is Hollywood. The bass voice belongs to writer/producer Lee Hazlewood, the soprano to his protégée, Nancy Sinatra. The legend they have just spun in vinyl, part rugged country, part fey folk, cloaked in psychedelia by Billy Strange’s haunting orchestration, will echo down the years, the puz
zle of its lyrics and otherworldly beauty of its sound offering seemingly endless interpretations.

  It first appeared on the album of Nancy Sinatra’s TV special Movin’ With Nancy, was then released as a single and finally placed in its most majestic setting, the 1968 Reprise LP Nancy & Lee. It crystallizes a moment between the optimism of the ‘summer of love’ and the darkness on the desert horizon, manifested in rogue hippy Charles Manson. Not for nothing was it voted the best duet of all time by British music critics in 2003.

  Barton Lee Hazlewood was born in Oklahoma in 1929, the son of an itinerant oilman, whose wanderings across the south imbued his son with a taste for the cowboy lifestyle and its music. Having served his country in Korea, Lee began working as a songwriter and producer for rockabillies Sanford Clark and Duane Eddy in 1956, hitting upon the novel idea of recording the latter’s twanging guitar inside a grain silo.

  In 1965, after bonding with Dean Martin over the song ‘Houston’ and a mutual love of whiskey, Lee was asked by Frank Sinatra to come to the rescue of his daughter’s career. Hazlewood duly delivered the smash ‘These Boots Are Made For Walkin’’, having issued his ingénue with the instructions: ‘You can’t sing like Nancy Nice Lady any more. You have to sing for the truckers.’ Thus recast, Nancy staked her claim to pop immortality and would record another album with the man she described as ‘part Henry Higgins and part Sigmund Freud’, Nancy & Lee Again in 1971.

  Her singing on ‘Some Velvet Morning’, however, is more the voice of an elemental, heightened by the name Phaedra – in mythology, the treacherous wife of Theseus, whose unrequited love for Hippolytus results in his watery death at the hands of Poseidon. Many of Hazlewood’s songs, including Nancy & Lee’s ‘Summer Wine’, involve sprite-like beings casting spells on cowboys that result in the loss of senses and spurs, and he based the logo of his record company LHI (Lee Hazlewood Industries) on a classical Greek profile.

  But, like the contrast between his vocals and hers, there is another, more carnal interpretation of what those lyrics might mean. Hazlewood’s sudden move to Sweden in 1971, at the height of his popularity, added to his mystery – had Frank Sinatra really put out a hit on Lee because Lee and Nancy had grown too close, or was Hazlewood just avoiding the taxman?

  This ambiguity has drawn many subsequent artists to their retellings of the myth. Lydia Lunch and Rowland S Howard made the perfect Gothic coupling on their 1982 single. Bobby Gillespie teamed up with Kate Moss to record a version for Primal Scream’s 2002 album Evil Heat, recently re-released on Ace Records’ Hazlewood covers compilation, Son-of-a-Gun. Shoegazers Slowdive and proto-grungers Thin White Rope have also taken cracks at the enigma.

  But most poignant is the final version Lee recorded before his death from cancer in 2007. On his 2005 swansong LP Cake or Death, he duets it with his grand-daughter … Phaedra is her name.

  Cathi Unsworth

  20

  HALLELUJAH

  It’s perhaps the most famous song written by Leonard Cohen, who died in November 2016 aged 82. And yet ‘Hallelujah’ almost didn’t get released; and when it was, it passed almost unnoticed.

  In the early 1980s Cohen was going through a fallow period, having not released an album since 1979’s Recent Songs. He was spending much of his time with his children in the south of France, but eventually a collection of songs came together. In the studio, Cohen took a new approach, with synthesizer-heavy arrangements, and a voice made deeper by ‘50,000 cigarettes and several swimming pools of whiskey’. Among the songs on the album was ‘Hallelujah’, an epic, hymnal composition with biblical allusions (David, Bathsheba and Samson are referenced). Cohen later said the song took him two years to write: ‘I remember being on the floor, on the carpet in my underwear, banging my head on the floor and saying, “I can’t finish this song.”’

  When Cohen took the album to his record company, Columbia, the suits were not impressed, judging that the album was not good enough to merit release in the US. So in 1984 Cohen released it through the independent label, Passport. It met with little acclaim. But Cohen included ‘Hallelujah’ in his live shows as he toured the world in the 1980s.

  His draft version of the song had around 80 verses, and many of them cropped up in his shows as he shuffled the pack. A 1994 live album features a version recorded in 1988 that is darker than the original, including lines such as these: ‘Yeah I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch/But listen love, love is not some kind of victory march/No it’s a cold and it’s a very broken Hallelujah.’

  The song was gaining traction, but it was properly popularized by John Cale, when his elegant piano-accompanied version was included in a 1991 Cohen tribute album, I’m Your Fan. Shorn of the clunky accoutrements of Cohen’s version, the song was allowed to shine.

  After that, ‘Hallelujah’ went viral. First to pick up the baton was Jeff Buckley in 1994, whose exquisitely pure tenor voice, recorded with a churchy echo, seemed ideally suited to the song’s religious themes. Since then, ‘Hallelujah’ has become one of the most covered songs ever, up there with ‘Yesterday’ and ‘My Way’.

  The hundreds of versions have tended to follow one of two templates: either stripped down and simple – Rufus Wainwright, accompanied, like Cale, only by a piano – or big and histrionic, like Cohen’s fellow Canadian kd Lang, whose swooping, soaring rendition became a staple of her live shows; she also adopted Buckley’s trick of going up an octave in the chorus.

  Inevitably, ‘Hallelujah’ was picked up by the reality-show juggernaut, with Britain’s X Factor winner Alexandra Burke going hell-for-leather in a version that reached the coveted Christmas Number 1 spot in the UK charts in 2008. Families up and down the country were doubtless split along generational lines as youngsters went mad for Burke’s version while their elders and betters sought refuge in the calm beauty of Buckley, Wainwright and Cale. (Cale’s version also popped up in the Shrek movie, although the soundtrack album featured Wainwright’s rendition.)

  Other versions of note include a gorgeous Yiddish version, with loosely – and creatively – translated lyrics, by Berlin-based singer-songwriter Daniel Kahn; and the English singer Kathryn Williams, who brings purity and elegance to the song. Bob Dylan, who was among the first to see Cohen’s lyric to the song when they met in Paris in 1984, has covered it many times.

  Cohen himself revisited the song on the world tour that he embarked on in 2008 after finding a black hole in his pension fund, bringing new depths of passion to an arrangement drenched in backing vocals and Hammond organ. In a recording made at London’s O2 Arena he clenches his fist and closes his eyes as he sings: ‘I’ll stand before the Lord of Song, with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah’.

  But what is the song about? Hallelujah is a Hebrew word, meaning ‘praise God’; but with its reference to Bathsheba, there’s sex as well as spirituality in the song. There is no ‘narrative’; it is, rather, a series of meditations. As Cohen himself said: ‘The song explains that many kinds of Hallelujahs do exist. I say: all the perfect and broken Hallelujahs have an equal value. It’s a desire to affirm my faith in life, not in some formal religious way but with enthusiasm, with emotion.’

  David Cheal

  21

  AMAZING GRACE

  If you want to summon the soul of black America, invite Aretha Franklin to a solemn occasion and ask her to bring ‘Amazing Grace’ with her. She performed it at the funeral of soul singer Luther Vandross in 2005, and at the White House in 2014 for President Obama, who sang it himself a year later at the eulogy for Senator Clementa Pinckney, a member of the South Carolina Senate who was killed in a mass shooting at his church.

  In 1972, the song marked Franklin’s return to gospel music when it gave a title to her live album recorded at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in South Central Los Angeles. Bearing witness that day were Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts, and gospel legend Clara Ward. Franklin would deliver the song again in seven months, at Ward’s memorial service. She eve
n sang it for Pope Francis in 2015.

  ‘Amazing Grace’ is touching and beautiful, an apparent hymn of emancipation woven into the fabric of African–American life. But its roots lie in one of the biggest crimes committed against humanity: slavery. This is not a freedom song written by a former slave; it’s a redemption hymn composed by a slaver.

  ‘Amazing Grace’ began life as a poem. John Newton was born in 1725 in Wapping, east London, going to sea aged 11. In 1744 he was pressed into joining the Royal Navy, and was flogged after trying to desert. He transferred to a slave ship, Pegasus, but the crew disliked him and Newton was abandoned with a slave trader in West Africa, who handed him to his wife, Princess Peye of the Sherbro people, in what is now Sierra Leone. Peye treated Newton like a slave, too. He later declared himself to have been an ‘infidel’, ‘libertine’ and a ‘servant of slaves’.

  In 1747 he was rescued and sailed to Britain. But the ship was holed in a storm off Donegal and, facing death, Newton prayed to be spared. When he was, he adopted evangelical Christianity, renouncing his profane ways. However, this did not stop him captaining several slave ships until ill health forced him on to dry land in 1754; he continued to invest in the trade.

  A decade later he was ordained as a priest in Olney, Buckinghamshire. In 1788 he published a pamphlet condemning his former occupation, supporting William Wilberforce’s campaign to abolish slavery. Newton had plenty to repent. His 1779 poem ‘Faith’s Review and Expectation’ was an attempt to do exactly that: ‘Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me’. The poem was set to music more than 20 times before it settled on the melody of the folk song ‘New Britain’ in 1835, ten years after Newton’s death.

  His lyric was not popular in England, but in nineteenth-century America it gained traction, with added verses that were popular in African–American communities. The first recording of the song was by the Original Sacred Harp Choir in 1922. Gospel giant Mahalia Jackson released it in 1947, and sang it at civil rights marches in the 1960s. It was adopted by the folk movement: Pete Seeger performed it. Judy Collins’ celebrated 1970 version sprang from her battle with alcohol abuse: she said the song helped her ‘pull through’. Her rendition spent more than a year in the UK chart, where it was joined, in 1972, by a cover from the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards.