Life of a Song

by Jan Dalley

  The song languished during the 1970s, though country balladeer Roy Drusky covered it in the style Diamond had intended. Then came UB40’s 1983 revival, which spent three weeks at Number 1 in the UK, and five years later, topped the chart in the US. It has since been regarded as a reggae song, as Elan’s 2001 dance hall cut makes clear. Even Neil Diamond performed it on stage in a Jamaican style, complete with an approximation of the toast delivered by UB40’s rapper Astro. In time for Christmas 2016, UB40 squeezed one last drop from the song when the group began marketing their own brand of red wine.

  Ian McCann

  32

  A CHANGE IS GONNA COME

  When Sam Cooke wrote ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’, it was a risky departure from the singer’s sensational line of more than 30 crossover pop hits. Not only did it mine Cooke’s gospel roots, it was political too. It was the kind of pairing that could, in the US of 1963, jeopardize Cooke’s presence on white radio playlists.

  Cooke had always admired Bob Dylan’s civil rights song ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’. He pulled it straight into his own live repertoire, but still, as biographer Daniel Wolff wrote, something troubled him: ‘Geez, a white boy writing a song like that?’ A 2005 biographer, Peter Guralnick, said that Cooke was ‘almost ashamed not to have written something like that himself’.

  During his long tours across the US, Cooke wrote the song that would be referenced, decades later, in the 2008 ‘Yes we can’ speech made by the first black president-elect of the US: ‘It’s been a long time coming,’ Barack Obama told ecstatic crowds in Chicago. ‘Change has come to America.’

  The anthem on which Obama drew – ‘It’s been a long, a long time coming/But I know a change gon’ come, oh yes it will’ – was released posthumously, as a B-side, in December 1964. That month, Cooke was shot dead at 33 by the manager of a $3-a-night motel, under circumstances that are still disputed. Cooke had once asked his friend Bobby Womack what he thought of the song. ‘It sounds like death,’ said Womack.

  Cooke had cut the song first as a track for the album Ain’t That Good News. But between album and single, the song lost a controversial verse alluding to segregation. Ironically, for what was to become a civil rights anthem, he was forced to drop the rebuke: ‘I go to the movie and I go down town/Somebody keep telling me, don’t hang around’ – lines written after Cooke was arrested at a Holiday Inn when he and his band were denied entry.

  Singer Otis Redding, who told a reporter that he wanted to ‘fill the silent void’ left by Cooke’s killing, quickly picked up the song for his album Otis Blue. Redding’s account, called simply ‘Change Gonna Come’, is sparer than Cooke’s symphonic original – and sticks (though loosely, and more wordily) to Cooke’s single.

  Rolling Stone magazine ranked ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ at Number 12 in its list of 500 greatest songs ever written. In 1992, the film director Spike Lee used the song in his movie Malcolm X, deploying it brilliantly in the moments leading up to the activist’s assassination.

  Covers have ranged from those by Aretha Franklin and Al Green – both steeped in the church – to Seal and Van Morrison. It is a frequent and often incongruous visitor to TV talent shows, although a 2009 American Idol finalist, Adam Lambert, invested the song with substance by performing it in make-up and changing a line to ‘my change is gonna come’. Lambert, whose open homosexuality had been stoutly ignored by the show, went on to top the Billboard charts, as well as touring in the Freddie Mercury spot with Queen. Lou Reed performed it in 2011 at a benefit for the Clinton Foundation, changing the opening ‘I was born by the river in a little tent’ to a more plausible ‘in this little apartment’.

  Obama returned to the song at his inauguration, when Bettye LaVette and Jon Bon Jovi credibly sang it as a duet. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the song did not make an appearance at 2017’s presidential inauguration.

  Sue Norris

  33

  DOWNTOWN

  In 1965 the man who coined the phrase ‘special relationship’ died. Winston Churchill was 90 and had lived long enough to witness pop music realize the ties he argued for between Britain and the US.

  It was the second year of the British invasion of the American charts. On 23 January, the day before Churchill’s death, Petula Clark claimed the tenth British invasion Number 1 with ‘Downtown’, almost exactly a year after ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, by The Beatles. Clark was the first British woman to top the charts in the US since Vera Lynn’s ‘Auf Wiederseh’n, Sweetheart’ in 1952.

  ‘Downtown’ is a perfect example of Anglo-Americana. It was written by the London-based songwriter and producer Tony Hatch after visiting New York. The lyrics describe a wanderer finding solace in Manhattan’s noisy streets. Bright orchestral pop gives the bustle an enchanting swing, until at the end a wild trumpet solo muscles in like a young tough from West Side Story.

  Among the crack musicians was a young Jimmy Page, later of Led Zeppelin, at the time a session guitarist. Hatch meant to offer the song to an American group, the Drifters. But Clark, a former child star whose career had stalled, pounced when he played her an unfinished version. Thus a song full of Americanisms was immortalized by a singer from Surrey with impeccable tones, the sort of voice that speaks of jolly good shows, not ‘sidewalks’.

  The British invasion habituated American listeners to pop songs sung in the accents of the old country. But Clark’s Englishness was pronounced. The effect was amplified by the lyrics’ transatlantic lingo and the tendency of other invasion acts, such as the Dave Clark Five, to use mid-Atlantic accents.

  Hatch feared an American audience wouldn’t accept Clark’s cut-glass pronunciation. But an American record label executive knew better. Joe Smith of Warner Bros, which released the song in the US, understood that its sparkle lay precisely in its mingling of similarity and difference. Hatch’s inexpert grasp of American urban terminology, for instance, meant the song should really be called ‘Midtown’, the actual location of the neon signs and movie theatres it lauds.

  The song re-established Clark as one of the UK’s biggest singing stars. Covers followed almost instantly, as with the identikit version on Sandie Shaw’s debut album a month later. Frank Sinatra attempted a breezy interpretation in 1966, when he was trying to keep up with the new pop generation, but badly misjudged the song by treating it as a joke. Glenn Gould was more respectful in 1967 when he published a dense musicological essay in praise of Petula Clark. ‘Downtown’, according to the classical pianist, was an ‘affirmative diatonic exhortation in the key of E major’, while the singer’s voice, in a catchier phrase, ‘was fiercely loyal to its one great octave’.

  The song has continued to bounce back and forth across the Atlantic, as when Dolly Parton turned it into splashy Nashville pop in 1984. But it has resonance outside the Anglosphere too. When Clark made ‘Downtown’ she was based in Paris, having reinvented herself as a chanteuse after her British career flagged. She recorded a French version of the song called ‘Dans le Temps’ in which New York turned into Paris. She also sang a German version (‘Geh in die Stadt’) and an Italian one (‘Ciao Ciao’). ‘Downtown’ isn’t just a peerless example of Churchill’s ‘special relationship’, it also marks pop’s evolution into a global lingua franca.

  Ludovic Hunter-Tilney

  34

  BORN IN THE USA

  In September 1984, Ronald Reagan was coasting towards re-election as president of the US. Addressing a crowd in Hammonton, New Jersey, he paid tribute to a local hero. ‘America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts; it rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about,’ – the lyrics uncannily like one of Donald Trump’s own tweets.

  Springsteen was not pleased. ‘The president,’ he noted drily at his next show, ‘was mentioning my name the other day and I kinda got to wondering what his favourite album musta been. I don’t think he�
��s been listening to this one.’ And he launched into ‘Johnny 99’, a stark ballad from the incomparably bleak Nebraska, sung from the viewpoint of a multiple murderer.

  Assuming Reagan was not a secret fan of Nebraska, he had probably been pointed towards Springsteen by the columnist George Will, who had recently praised Springsteen’s song ‘Born in the USA’ for its ‘grand, cheerful affirmation’. In fact, ‘Born in the USA’ tells the story of a minor criminal who gets ‘in a little home-town jam’ and is shipped off to Vietnam, only to return with PTSD, unable to find employment. Critics musical and political gleefully fell on Reagan’s ‘error’, confident that they had a better grasp of the nature of American patriotism than the Great Communicator (who, two months later, carried 49 of the 50 states).

  But if Reagan and Will thought that mood trumped content, they were not necessarily wrong. As originally recorded, Springsteen alone with a guitar, the song’s anger is transparent. The chorus is flat, affectless. But when he and the E Street Band came to re-record it for the album that would bear its name, they pumped it up. The melody is pushed to the top of Springsteen’s vocal range (in the same way that ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ crescendos to impossibly high notes) so that the whole song sounds like its own climax. Roy Bittan’s synthesizer fanfare is as bright as cocaine. Max Weinberg’s drumbeats explode like artillery shells. The song sounds like a Roman triumph.

  Many excellent songs have come out of mixing pop and politics; the dangerous combination is mixing pop and politicians. Donald Trump’s playlist of campaign songs had their singers rushing to distance themselves from him, from REM to Adele. He entered the Republican convention in July 2016 to the strains of ‘We Are the Champions’, over protests from Queen’s Brian May.

  British politicians have had an equally uneasy relationship with pop, from Harold Wilson courting The Beatles with OBEs, to Tony Blair (a lead singer manqué) wooing and being snubbed by everyone from David Bowie to Noel Gallagher. Another former prime minister’s penchant for early 1980s Mancunian indie earned him a rebuke from Johnny Marr: ‘David Cameron, stop saying you like The Smiths, no you don’t. I forbid you to like it.’

  According to the moral foundations theory propounded by the American psychologist Jonathan Haidt, political progressives stress ‘care and fairness’ while libertarians favour ‘liberty and fairness’, whereas conservatives also respond to ‘loyalty, authority and sanctity’. Examining ‘Born in the USA’ through this lens is revealing. Springsteen is famously progressive, and all rock musicians are secretly libertarian, so ‘fairness’ resonates throughout the song. But the chorus also sounds like an appeal to in-group loyalty, and the music is stamped with authority. No wonder conservatives – including Donald Trump, who of course played it at his rallies – also respond to it.

  Springsteen is still infuriating politicians: in spring 2016 he cancelled a concert in North Carolina in response to the state’s new law on transgender access to bathrooms. He does still perform ‘Born in the USA’, but nowadays it comes with curled, bent acoustic guitar notes, as if Woody Guthrie were performing it in the 1950s. Harder, now, to miss the message. Even for a politician.

  David Honigmann

  35

  SONG TO THE SIREN

  To the ancient Greeks, they were hybrid creatures, part bird, part woman, who lured sailors to their deaths with the spell of their music. In 1967, singer and songwriter Tim Buckley and poet and lyricist Larry Beckett paid tribute to those deathly seducers with ‘Song to the Siren’, a haunting ode to doomed love whose story is the stuff of pop legend.

  The story began when Beckett wrote the lyric and took it to Buckley’s house. Buckley took a look, had his breakfast and within minutes ‘Song to the Siren’ had emerged, almost fully formed. The following year Buckley, then a figure of some standing for his adventures in folk-jazz-rock, sang it on the last ever episode of The Monkees television show, introduced off-camera by Micky Dolenz’s dramatically curt ‘This is Tim Buckley’. In the YouTube footage, the segment’s psychedelic visual effects cannot distract from the song’s simple sweet-sadness, Buckley’s 12-string guitar ringing out, pure voice singing ‘Long afloat on shipless oceans …’

  But it would be another two years before Buckley released the song. Beckett’s lyric featured the line ‘I’m as puzzled as the oyster’, which attracted derision; Buckley was stung, and abandoned the song. Eventually Beckett rewrote it as ‘I’m as puzzled as the newborn child’.

  In the meantime, in 1969, country crooner Pat Boone released an absurd, horn-drenched misreading of the tune that opens with him laughing ‘Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum’. In 1970, Buckley set the record straight, releasing ‘Siren’ on his experimental Starsailor album, which flopped.

  Buckley died in 1975 from a heroin overdose and remained a peripheral, cultish figure. But ‘Song to the Siren’ continued to exert its siren-like attraction to the music cognoscenti. Ivo Watts-Russell, co-founder of the quintessentially indie label 4AD, counted the song among his favourites. In 1983, he was assembling a group of musicians under the name This Mortal Coil to record a single. As a B-side, he wanted ‘Song to the Siren’. This Mortal Coil’s musicians included guitarist Robin Guthrie and singer Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins, and it was they who recorded ‘Song to the Siren’. Their reading set the template for those that were to follow – drifty, druggy, drenched in reverb, a perfect setting for lyrics such as ‘Did I dream you dreamed about me?’ Fraser, a Scot, embellished the melody with melismas that seemed part-Caledonian folk, part-Middle Eastern ululation. The B-side became an A-side, and went on to sell half a million copies.

  After which, the sirens lay largely dormant until the turn of the century when major figures began to pick up the song. In 2002, Robert Plant covered it on his Dreamland album, garnished with his characteristic ‘oh-ohs’. In 2007, George Michael opened his gig at the new Wembley stadium by singing ‘Siren’ from offstage (he later released it as a single).

  The solo career of Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante is decorated with sublime moments of lo-fi brilliance, and his 2009 version of ‘Siren’ is one of them, catching the song’s druggy wave with droning keyboards and a vocal that sounds as if it was recorded in a neighbouring studio. Sinéad O’Connor’s 2010 version is heavily indebted to This Mortal Coil’s mystic-Celticism. Bryan Ferry’s version for his Olympia album (also 2010) is layered, dense and dark; after a while Ferry disappears from the song, leaving the insistent music to exert its pull.

  There’s a curious and tragic coda to the story. In the mid-1990s, Fraser struck up a relationship with Buckley’s son, Jeff; they recorded together (though not ‘Siren’). In 1997, after they’d separated, Jeff Buckley was in Memphis, preparing to record songs for the follow-up to his debut album, Grace. One evening, he went swimming in a channel of the Mississippi, singing Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’ as he swam. His body was found six days later.

  David Cheal

  36

  OVER THE RAINBOW

  A cry of despair from the forgotten, rural heartland of the US, beaten down by years of economic depression. A deep yearning for a technicolour fantasy land where ‘troubles melt like lemon drops’. The journey towards a strange old man in a tower who pretends to be more than he is …

  The year was 1938, and MGM was making a movie of L Frank Baum’s 1900 book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. America needed cheering up as it struggled to haul itself from the Great Depression. War loomed in Europe. Two Jewish American songwriters – both sons of immigrants – were commissioned by the studio to knock out a number for 16-year-old Judy Garland. Harold Arlen and Edgar ‘Yip’ Harburg had already collaborated on hits such as ‘It’s Only a Paper Moon’ and ‘Lydia the Tattooed Lady’. Harburg was best known for the song ‘Brother Can You Spare a Dime?’, which brilliantly captured the human cost of the Depression.

  ‘I grew up in the slums,’ Harburg once said. ‘I know what it is to have your father come home from the sweatshop after workin
g 12 hours a day.’ So he didn’t want to write ‘a maudlin lyric of a guy begging. I made it into a commentary. It was about the fellow who works, the fellow who builds, who makes railroads and houses – and he’s left empty-handed. This is a man proud of what he has done but bewildered that his country with its dream could do this to him.’

  Harburg saw the story of The Wizard of Oz as a parable about what might be achieved under President Franklin D Roosevelt, if his countrymen rediscovered their hearts, brains and courage and worked together to build a brighter future. He had a passionate belief in the power of music to win hearts and minds. ‘Words make you think a thought,’ he said. ‘Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought.’

  Arlen dreamt up the melody of ‘Over the Rainbow’ – opening with a bold leap straight up an octave from middle C – while parked outside Hollywood’s famous Schwab’s Pharmacy. Harburg initially thought the tune too schmaltzy. But he took it to his old classmate, Ira Gershwin, who thought it would work if they picked up the tempo. The sweetness was offset by darker underlying chords.

  Garland delivers the song five minutes into the film, yearning to escape the monochrome of Kansas into the vibrant colours of Oz. Producer Louis B Mayer initially wanted to cut it because it slowed the action and his star sang it ‘in a barnyard’.

  There were also concerns that they wouldn’t shift sheet music because that opening octave hop would put the song beyond the range of the average Joe. He was talked around. The song won an Oscar, ultimately voted the best ever song in a movie and the greatest song of the century by the Recording Industry Association of America in 2001. It became Garland’s signature song, its optimism increasingly painful as her life imploded and her voice cracked. She gave a hollow laugh as she sang it at her final concert in Copenhagen in 1969, three months before her fatal overdose aged just 47.