Life of a Song

by Jan Dalley

  In the latter was Pat Boone’s deeply peculiar samba/big band treatment for In a Metal Mood (1997), an album of rock covers that seemed to have been made with the sole intention of showing that this white-bread singer had a sense of humour.

  Similarly baffling was the finger-clicking swing-jazz version by the now-disgraced Australian entertainer Rolf Harris for his LP Rolf Rules OK, on which he employed his usual jaunty singing style, even while uttering the words, ‘Watch it burn’.

  It’s a measure of the enduring regard for ‘Smoke on the Water’ among guitar obsessives that it is repeatedly used in attempts to break the world record for the number of guitarists playing at once. In 2014 Ian Gillan joined scores of amateur rockers in playing the song on the beach in Lyme Regis in the UK, though they failed to beat the record achieved at a festival in Wroclaw, Poland, in 2009 when 6346 guitarists performed it together, led by current Deep Purple guitarist Steve Morse.

  After their early ambivalence, the members of Deep Purple have evidently developed an affection for their most famous song, safe in the knowledge that, as long as people play guitar, it will never go out of favour.

  Fiona Sturges

  27

  THE HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN

  Surging with idealism, 22-year-old archivist Alan Lomax set off on his 1937 tour of Kentucky with high hopes. His aim was to find songs. Not new songs, but the so-called ‘floating’ songs that resounded all over the US, entertaining crowds at medicine shows, keeping rhythm for the railroad workers. Funded with a grant from the Library of Congress, he aspired to capture the ‘democratic, interracial, international character’ of American folk tradition. He wanted to codify and classify the inchoate soundtrack of the country’s daily rituals.

  Some were more wholesome than others. In the mining town of Middlesboro, he came across 16-year-old Georgia Turner. She sang him a minute-and-a-half of a sliding blues song that described the wicked allure of a devilish institution down in Louisiana: ‘There is a house in New Orleans they call the Rising Sun/It’s been the ruin of many a poor girl and me, O God, for one.’

  Lomax included the charismatic performance in his 1941 collection Our Singing Country. He learnt of another recording of ‘Rising Sun Blues’, made in 1933 by the Appalachian duo Clarence Ashley and Gwen Foster. Here was a true floating song, a morality tale, some speculated, imported from England, resembling folk ballads such as ‘Matty Groves’ and ‘The Unfortunate Rake’.

  Whatever its provenance, the song enthralled a generation of artists. Woody Guthrie recorded a version in 1941. Josh White tweaked the lyrics in his 1947 effort, and Lead Belly made two stabs at the song in the same decade.

  And then, another generation joined in: the peacenik troubadours, Pete Seeger in 1958, and Joan Baez in 1960. Back in New Orleans, the search was on for the ‘Rising Sun’. Was it a bar, a brothel, a boarding house? There was no definitive answer, but plenty of plausible theories. It was a house of ill repute run by a Madame Marianne LeSoleil Levant (get it?) in St Louis Street; no, it was a hotel for ‘discerning gentlemen’, as a local newspaper ad described it, in Conti Street. The thicker the mystery became, the greater the song’s appeal.

  Bob Dylan included it on his first, eponymous, album in 1962. His arrangement was copied from Dave Van Ronk, the singer-songwriter claimed. But the song was free-floating now, impervious to ownership claims. In the same year, Nina Simone recorded her first version, a perfect confluence of her own intensity and the song’s portentous moralism.

  Then the British, like true rebuffed colonialists, got in on the act. The Animals’ 1964 version of ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ was a sensation. Singer Eric Burdon had heard the song in a Newcastle club, and the group responded with an electric (and electrifying) arrangement. Its arpeggio guitar introduction and Alan Price’s frantic organ solo remain forever associated with the song. It was released as a single, despite a then-inordinate length of four minutes 29 seconds. Producer Mickie Most conquered his own initial misgivings. ‘We’re in a microgroove world now,’ he explained to all those remonstrating dust bowl hobos. The floating song had travelled a long way.

  Watch its mutation on the original Animals video: the group wear absurd ‘Beatles’ suits as they circle their way around the drum kit in single file. They look like the kind of nice boys who would not have made it past the entrance of the Rising Sun. Laugh as you like: this, more than the triumphant opening salvo of the early Beatles’ singles, really did mark the British invasion of American popular culture. Lomax had been right. The tradition of American folk music deserved a higher place in the pantheon of art, and would one day help conquer the world.

  Peter Aspden

  28

  SHIPBUILDING

  A rattle of dry sticks on drums, then piano and double-bass descending in parallel. ‘Is it worth it?’ sings Robert Wyatt’s distinctive, thin voice. ‘A new winter coat and shoes for the wife/And a bicycle on the boy’s birthday …’

  In 1982, in a town of mass unemployment, everyone is talking about whether the shipyards might reopen. There is an unspoken subtext: the only reason the yards might again employ men is because Britain is at war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands.

  Elvis Costello, who wrote the words of the song while the war was still being fought, is not always subtle in his politics. (When he imagined the then still-far-off death of Margaret Thatcher, in ‘Tramp the Dirt Down’, the surrounding lyrics were less nuanced than that title makes it sound.) But here he has the lightest of touches. ‘Dad,’ says a teenager, ‘they’re going to take me to task [that is, to the naval task force dispatched to recapture the islands]/But I’ll be back by Christmas’ – an ironic echo of First World War optimism, although in fact by Christmas 1982 the task force was indeed back in Britain.

  ‘Shipbuilding’ was pretty much the last time a popular song about war made a mark on the public consciousness in Britain. Vietnam had spawned a whole sub-genre; there were plenty of songs about the Troubles in Northern Ireland. By the time the war on terror rolled round, popular music in the English-speaking world had abandoned political commentary. Iraq and Afghanistan and the surrounding paranoia were nowhere directly addressed.

  Although ‘Shipbuilding’ is specific in its time and setting, it has been covered surprisingly often. Costello’s own version has Chet Baker on trumpet, lending the smoky atmosphere of a working men’s club. Tasmin Archer released an EP of brightly-sung Costello covers in 1994, leading off with a reading of ‘Shipbuilding’ that smooths out its unease. Britpop Bowie-obsessives Suede recorded the song in 1995 for a charity compilation. Their reading is faithful, Brett Anderson’s glam accent a fair approximation of Wyatt’s reedy treble, a guitar solo by Richard Oakes taking the place of Baker’s trumpet.

  Other memorable versions are rooted in concept albums. June Tabor, from landlocked Warwickshire, has always been obsessed with the sea, and her nautical album Ashore includes the song, with Huw Warren’s piano navigating around the original melody. And The Unthanks’ side-project Songs from the Shipyards offers a version in the accents of Tyneside. Adrian McNally sings the verses, while Rachel and Becky Unthank – as the ‘women and children’ – chorus ‘it’s just a rumour, just a rumour that was spread around town. …’ It makes the community’s divisions starker than ever.

  One reason, perhaps, why Costello’s lyrics are so measured is that the political left in Britain was unsure how to react to the war. The initial impulse was to see it as an imperial adventure; on the other hand, there was a risk of being seen as objectively pro the Argentine junta. Hence, perhaps, the decision to focus on the human cost of the conflict rather than explicitly taking sides.

  Indeed, although Costello’s 2013 song ‘Cinco Minutos con Vos’, conceived as an Argentine answer to ‘Shipbuilding’, begins with a dig at Thatcher urging Britons to ‘rejoice’, its central image is not of conscripts going down with the torpedoed Argentine warship General Belgrano. It is of a dissident being thrown out of a plane into the
River Plate. ‘And down I went down, like the twist of a screw/Down into the silver, above me the blue.’ So, was it worth it? The question still unsettles. And the jobs in the shipyards never did come back.

  David Honigmann

  29

  ROCKET 88

  The life of this song is the story of an entire musical genre. ‘Rocket 88’ was a hit in 1951 for Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats. Brenston was a saxophonist, the Delta Cats an R&B band led by Ike Turner; together they created an explosive song that is considered by many historians of popular music to be the first rock ‘n’ roll record.

  Among the factors that have led to the singling out of ‘Rocket 88’ is the fuzzy guitar sound, achieved thanks to a damaged loudspeaker (pop history is littered with damaged speakers: see The Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’).

  But was ‘Rocket 88’ actually the first rock ‘n’ roll record? It’s tempting to reduce musical history to a series of key ‘moments’ but in truth it is a process, and ‘Rocket 88’ was only the latest in a series of recordings that took the structure of the 12-bar blues and, both figuratively and literally, electrified it. The song’s immediate antecedents were the ‘jump blues’ or ‘jump ‘n’ jive’ songs of players such as Chris Powell and Louis Jordan. Check out ‘Rock the Joint’ by Chris Powell and the Five Blue Flames from 1949, or Jordan’s ‘Caldonia’ from 1945 (and don’t get distracted by the subplot involving Jordan being attacked by his wife with a knife). The roots of rock ‘n’ roll are clearly audible: the bassline, the beat, the energy.

  The bassline in all these songs, played on an upright bass, is a direct descendant of the left-hand in boogie-woogie piano, the blues-based form that became a craze in the 1930s and 1940s, popularized by players such as Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson and Meade Lux Lewis. This music emerged from the logging camps of Texas and Louisiana and has been dated back as far as the 1870s; these camps would have had a shed, a supply of drink and a piano. There were even pianos aboard the trains carrying workers from one camp to the next.

  As for the origins of the term ‘rock ‘n’ roll’: according to the state of Ohio, which erected a plaque in commemoration, it was popularized by the DJ Alan Freed, who, from 1951, played the music on his Moondog House Rock ‘n’ Roll Party radio show. But the term has history going back long before Freed’s days. In 1933 the Boswell Sisters performed, on film, a song called ‘Rock and Roll’; in a stylized maritime setting, the three singers sit aboard a mocked-up boat that is rocking and rolling – though this is just one big visual euphemism: the term’s origins are sexual. In 1922, for instance, blues singer Trixie Smith sang, simmeringly, ‘My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll)’. But ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ had connotations that were sacred, too. In a 1910 recording, the black vocal harmony group the Male Quartette sing about ‘Rocking and rolling in your arms/In the arms of Moses’.

  Even if ‘Rocket 88’ wasn’t the first rock ‘n’ roll record, it marks a turning point: it’s about a car, the covetable Oldsmobile Rocket 88. Boogie-woogie is the sound of a train running along the tracks, a connection made explicit in Louis Jordan’s 1946 hit ‘Choo Choo Ch’Boogie’ (‘Take me right back to the track, Jack’) but, by the 1950s, black Americans were moving north, earning better money and buying cars. ‘Rocket 88’ is a song about mobility, with the car also serving as a metaphor for sexual prowess.

  As for cover versions: Bill Haley and the Saddlemen (earthbound predecessors of his Comets) recorded it later in 1951, but theirs is a thin, countryish approximation. In 1958 Little Richard stole the song’s piano intro, virtually note for note, for ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’. But few have attempted to record ‘Rocket 88’ because this thrilling, eruptive song is unimprovable.

  David Cheal

  30

  JOHNNY REMEMBER ME

  Early in the 1960s, a morbid craze seized hitsville. The charts were haunted by songs such as Ray Peterson’s ‘Tell Laura I Love Her’ (1960), the Everly Brothers’ ‘Ebony Eyes’ (1961), Twinkle’s ‘Terry’ and the Shangri-Las’ ‘Leader of the Pack’ (both 1964) – all eerie evocations of teenage hot-rodders revving up and riding straight to hell. British movies such as Beat Girl and The Leather Boys were portraying juveniles playing for kicks in car races and bike burn-ups, too – so our moral guardians had to act.

  Attempting to suppress further fetishization of the ‘live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse’ credo, the BBC banned these so-called ‘death discs’. But Auntie Beeb could do nothing to stop the creepiest of all these fatal 45s: John Leyton’s ‘Johnny Remember Me’ which, despite the BBC censor, went to Number 1 in July 1961, stayed there for six weeks, then left behind its own trail of tears.

  The song was born out of a séance held by two of music’s most unworldly characters, producer Joe Meek and songwriter Geoff Goddard. The tale of a lonely cowboy haunted by the ghost of his girl ‘Who I loved and lost a year ago’, the recording was drenched in echo and the disembodied voice of backing singer Lissa Gray, who sounded as if she really was performing from beyond the grave – she was actually standing in Meek’s toilet. Leyton was an actor who played a rock star in the series Harpers West One, and when he performed the song on the show, its rise was unstoppable.

  Both Meek and Goddard were obsessed with the occult. Meek claimed to have received a message from ‘the other side’ about the impending death of his idol Buddy Holly, who died on 3 February 1959. Meanwhile, Goddard was training to become a medium. Their partnership would create a pre-Beatles hit factory for Meek’s unconventional recording methods. Like a walking microcosm of the 1960s, Meek, a working-class outsider, set a collision course for infamy. He rose to the greatest of heights with his 1962 transatlantic smash ‘Telstar’, performed by the Tornados, which earned him both an Ivor Novello Award and a writ for plagiarism from a French composer that resulted in Meek’s royalties being frozen.

  It wasn’t his only misfortune: amphetamine addiction, obsession with his protégé Heinz Burt and an incident in a public toilet that led to his being blackmailed for his then illegal homosexuality cemented his fate. Goddard left in 1965, accusing his collaborator of stealing material. Burt followed soon after, suing for missing royalties. In 1967 Meek took a shotgun to his landlady, Violet Shenton, and then turned it on himself. Again the date was 3 February.

  The multiple untimely deaths of those surrounding him became known as ‘the curse of Joe Meek’. Burt and Goddard died within a month of each other in 2000, aged only 57 and 62 respectively. Meek’s greatest rival Phil Spector, whom Meek imagined to have bugged his studios to copy his techniques, murdered actress Lana Clarkson at his Los Angeles mansion in 2003. The date was 3 February.

  Yet Johnny’s ghostly girl continues to call. The song has been covered by many who share Meek’s aesthetics, including The Meteors in 1983, Bronski Beat and Marc Almond in 1985, Dave Vanian’s Phantom Chords in 1990 and Spell (Rose McDowall and Boyd Rice) in 1993. Nick Moran retold the Meek–Goddard séance in his 2008 movie Telstar, with The Leather Boys star Rita Tushingham as the medium. They tried to ban her, they tried to bury her, but no one, it seems, can forget her.

  Cathi Unsworth

  31

  RED RED WINE

  When the British reggae band UB40 released an album of reggae covers in 1983, Labour of Love, it revitalized their career, delivering four hit singles, the biggest of which was ‘Red Red Wine’. The group had been known for their British update of the 1970s Jamaican roots reggae sound, and for their loosely political lyrics. Abandoning the latter for the time being, Labour of Love served a dual purpose: the band wanted to acknowledge the origins of their sound, as credibility is everything in reggae, and Jamaica’s musical history was packed with little-known songs with commercial potential.

  The album’s success delighted the writers of the songs and brought some their first substantial payday. However, when it came to ‘Red Red Wine’, UB40’s knowledge of musical history let them down: they had assumed that the song was penned by an unknown Jamaican si
nger. ‘Even when we saw the writing credit which said “N Diamond”, we thought it was a Jamaican artist called Negus Diamond,’ claimed the group’s toaster, Astro. The song’s publishing royalties did not reach a struggling ghetto resident. It was not written by a Negus Diamond, but a Neil.

  Neil Diamond had recorded ‘Red Red Wine’ in 1967 for Just for You, his second album. Business was slow for the jobbing songwriter back then, and he had time to help out in his father-in-law’s haberdashery shop, where things were also slack – allowing him to write songs while he worked. One was ‘Red Red Wine’, which Diamond envisaged as a maudlin country ballad about drinking to forget. Once his career took off thanks to composing several smashes for The Monkees, Diamond enjoyed a couple of hits in his own right before falling out with his record label, Bang. Once he’d moved on, Bang added backing vocals and strings to ‘Red Red Wine’ and made it a small hit in the US.

  Minor success seemed to be the limit for ‘Red Red Wine’. In 1968 British soul singer Jimmy James made an orchestrated version, which scraped into the UK Top 40. In 1970, Vic Dana, a protégé of Sammy Davis Jr, took a middle-of-the-road cover to Number 72 in the US, sounding like an anaemic Roy Orbison. But it was another small hit that changed the song’s direction: a version by Jamaican singer Tony Tribe in 1969.

  ‘Red Red Wine’ was Tony Tribe’s first record, and he was such an unknown that the record label credited it to ‘Tony Tripe’. Recorded in the UK, its jerky ska rhythm was anachronistic even then. But it worked somehow, reinventing the song as a reggae ditty. British skinheads, obsessed with reggae at the time, bought it heavily, and the record reached Number 46 in the UK. But while his record pointed to the song’s future, sadly, its singer did not have one: as his second single was being released, Tribe was killed in a car crash.