Life of a Song

by Jan Dalley

  Legend has it that Smith wrote the verses while waiting for a phone call from her new boyfriend, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, with whom she would later settle down and have two children. Released as a single, the song was a huge hit on both sides of the Atlantic. In her book Just Kids, she recalls ambling around downtown Manhattan with her friend and ex-lover Robert Mapplethorpe and hearing ‘Because the Night’ blaring out of successive storefronts. ‘Patti,’ he remarked, archly. ‘You got famous before me.’

  If Mapplethorpe was supportive of Smith’s success, some of her fans were less approving and accused her of selling out. Not that she cared: ‘I liked hearing myself on the radio,’ she told New York Magazine. ‘To me, those people didn’t understand punk rock at all. Punk rock is just another word for freedom.’

  Springsteen has always credited Smith for turning the song into a hit, though he hasn’t altogether relinquished his stake. He frequently performs it at concerts, replacing the sex-induced sweat of Smith’s version with a different kind of perspiration – that of the working man labouring under the hot sun. It has become his go-to track for starry duets: in 2004 he sang it with REM’s Michael Stipe in a ‘Vote for Change’ concert in support of the would-be president, John Kerry, and has performed it multiple times with Bono.

  Indeed, one of the song’s more startling renditions came during a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th anniversary show, when Bono invited both Springsteen and Smith to perform it together with him. On this occasion they went with Smith’s lyrics.

  The song has proved to be cover-version catnip to other artists. 10,000 Maniacs did an elegant if somewhat vanilla interpretation for an MTV Unplugged performance in 1993, complete with a string section. Garbage restored the heat and the power for their 2013 collaboration with Screaming Females, released to coincide with Record Store Day.

  At 70, Smith still delights in playing the song in her live shows, a joyful explosion of lust shoehorned between darker tales of misfits and outsiders.

  Fiona Sturges

  42

  MY FAVORITE THINGS

  For a while in the late 1950s and early 1960s New York jazz musicians competed to turn unlikely tunes into modernist gems: Sonny Rollins, for example, transformed ‘I’m an Old Cowhand’. But fellow saxophonist John Coltrane’s choice of ‘My Favorite Things’ as a 13-minute album track seemed perverse. The song’s waltz tempo, unusual structure and frothy emotional palette were at odds with prevailing jazz practice.

  The song came from the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway show The Sound of Music, where it was first performed in 1959 by Mary Martin and Patricia Neway. Would-be nun Maria is told by her abbess she is to work as a governess for the von Trapp family. The now so-familiar ‘Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens/Bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens’ are part of a nostalgic list that Maria summons to cheer herself up. The shifting cadences and final reassuring shift to a major key capture brilliantly the two women’s emotions.

  McCoy Tyner, Coltrane’s then pianist, recalled that a song-plugger showed Coltrane the sheet music. Intrigued, Coltrane put it in his set, reworking it as a minor-key vamp. In October 1960 he made it the title track of his album, improvising on soprano sax on the raga scale introduced to him by sitarist Ravi Shankar. Coltrane’s choice of soprano reintegrated the instrument into jazz, where it had long been out of favour. An edit released as a single pushed the album to sell 50,000 copies in its first year – remarkable for a jazz LP. One commentator likened the track to ‘a hypnotic eastern Dervish dance’ and Coltrane’s refashioning helped to filter Indian music to a wider audience, five years before The Beatles’ ‘Norwegian Wood’ became the first Western pop song to use a sitar. The Doors’ guitarist Robbie Kruger used elements of Coltrane’s vamp to spice up the instrumental breaks of the band’s 1967 hit ‘Light My Fire’.

  In 1965, Hollywood picked up the stage show to release one of the most successful musical films ever, with Julie Andrews as Maria delivering the definitive version of ‘My Favorite Things’. The film shifts the song from the stage version’s abbey to Maria’s new bedroom, where she comforts the von Trapp children during a thunderstorm. It was a perfect vehicle for Andrews’ precise, reassuring and slightly prim English cadences, and possibly a greater comfort to the children than ‘The Lonely Goatherd’, the song assigned this duty in the original stage musical. Many subsequent stage productions have kept to this reordering.

  The song has become a Christmas staple, ranging from Jack Jones’s version in 1964 to Mary J Blige’s cover on her 2013 Mary Christmas album. The Danish film director Lars von Trier turned the sentiment on its head in his 2001 film Dancer in the Dark, starring the Icelandic singer Björk. Here the song takes place – haltingly, miserably – in a prison cell as Selma, Björk’s character, faces death.

  Lady Gaga performed the song at the 2015 Oscars as part of a medley marking the 50th anniversary of The Sound of Music. Julie Andrews joined her on stage at the close of her tribute, but composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim called Gaga’s performance ‘a travesty’. Several parodies of the jaunty original have done the rounds, including a ‘senior’ version that rails at ‘thin bones and fractures and hair that is thinnin’’. Of the many jazz versions, guitarist Grant Green’s perfectly weighted 1964 cover stands out.

  Coltrane himself repeatedly reworked the piece, burrowing ever deeper into phonics and abstraction. The renditions captured on his album Live at the Village Vanguard Again, and his final live recording The Olatunji Concert, are intense epics that take the song into new and uncharted territory. Compared with the stage-show original, Coltrane’s ‘Favorite Things’ becomes almost unrecognizable.

  Mike Hobart

  43

  BALTIMORE

  ‘Hard times in the city, in a hard town by the sea.’ Thus Randy Newman sums up the city of Baltimore, Maryland on this song from his 1977 album Little Criminals. Newman is renowned for his darkly comic songwriting – also on the album is the irony-drenched ‘Short People’ – but on ‘Baltimore’ he plays it straight: this is a threnody for a hardscrabble town in the throes of de-industrialization.

  Apart from its grim lyrics – hookers, drunks, hopelessness – what is interesting about the song is that it takes an age to reach the chorus. A piano motif circles, the tension builds, until relief of a sort finally arrives when the drums kick in properly and Newman stretches out with ‘Oh, Baltimore’. (His studio band, incidentally, included several members of the Eagles.) Eventually Newman’s lyric concludes that the only thing to do is to escape, so he packs a family in a ‘big old wagon’ and sends them off to the mountains, never to return.

  The following year, the song was picked up by Nina Simone and it became the title track of her Baltimore album. Although her reggae treatment smoothes out the contrasts between verse and chorus that distinguish Newman’s original, it nevertheless conveys a deep sense of unease.

  This, however, is as nothing compared with the profound mood of despair that inhabits another reggae version, released in 1979 by Jamaican band, The Tamlins. Propelled by the immaculate rhythms of Sly and Robbie, the Tamlins’ treatment brings an almost biblical quality to the song.

  Over subsequent decades ‘Baltimore’ has been covered in a kaleidoscope of musical styles that testifies to its flexibility and durability. It was included in 2001 on a posthumously released EP by Scottish singer Billy Mackenzie, whose take on it is almost abstract – a wash of synths, and Mackenzie’s vocal delivery eschewing his customary hysterics in favour of something dreamy and distant. For years it was also a staple of David Gray’s live repertoire, his version adding urgency through a pulsing beat.

  Today, Newman’s portrait of Baltimore seems just as pertinent as it did when he wrote the song in the 1970s. The TV series The Wire reflected a city that has never recovered from the loss of the old heavy industries (90 per cent of local jobs are now in the low-paid service sector), while Serial, the podcast about the murder of 18-year-old Baltimore high school stude
nt Hae Min Lee, touched on the city’s high crime rate. Baltimore’s homicide figures, though now declining, still make grim reading – 217 recorded murders in 2014 gave the city the fifth-highest murder rate in the US for cities with populations over 100,000.

  Newman himself has received some criticism from Baltimore’s citizens and civic authorities for painting such a bleak picture of their city. In fact the lyrics had sprung from a fleeting visit, and he later told the Baltimore Sun: ‘I couldn’t legitimately defend my extensive knowledge of the town. The song just came out.’

  There’s also a tragic postscript to the life of this particular song. Beneath Newman’s version on YouTube are various comments from viewers, one of which reads: ‘King Steelo brought me here. RIP.’ This is a reference to the rapper Capital Steez, whose track ‘Hard Times’ (featuring Dirty Sanchez) is based on a looped sample of Newman’s piano riff and vocal. The ‘RIP’? In 2012, Capital Steez – real name Courtney Everald Dewar, Jr – killed himself by jumping from a building in New York’s Flatiron District. He was 19. Hard times in the city.

  David Cheal

  44

  THE CHAIN

  In early 1975, two Americans, Lindsey Buckingham and his girlfriend Stevie Nicks, had just joined a once-famous British blues band now down on its uppers. Buckingham, a perfectionist, buzzed around showing the other members how to play their parts on the songs he was bringing to the project. The bassist was unimpressed. ‘The band you’re in is Fleetwood Mac,’ John McVie told him. ‘I’m the Mac. And I play the bass.’ And that – as Mick Fleetwood, who was the Fleetwood, records in his autobiography – was that.

  A couple of years later Buckingham and Nicks had been integrated into the band, and the new line-up had a successful album under their belt. It was now Fleetwood and McVie together who laid down the signature bass-and-drums riff that would define what was (with all due deference to former members Peter Green, Jeremy Spencer, Danny Kirwan and Bob Welch) the high-water mark of Fleetwood Mac: ‘The Chain’, from their globe-conquering album Rumours.

  Fleetwood Mac were in the throes of romantic geometry so complex it would have bemused the Bloomsbury Group, and recording in a Sausalito studio in a blizzard of liquor and cocaine. All of them were writing bitter songs about each other. Stevie Nicks essayed a song she called ‘The Chain’. ‘I’m down on my knees/Begging you please/Baby don’t leave me’, she sang – presumably to Buckingham. In demo form, at least, the song is pretty but abject.

  At the same time, Christine McVie, John’s by now former wife, was working on ‘Keep Me There’, a throwback melodically to her solo album of a few years previously. The opening may have been nugatory, but the chord progression up into the chorus had a driving tension. And three minutes in, her ex-husband let fly with that ten-note bass riff and the song raced through an extended coda, with Christine McVie playing jazzy electric piano.

  Nearly all the elements were there. The two songs were forged together. New lyrics emerged, turning the submission into defiance. ‘Damn your love, damn your lies’, Nicks now sang. The sound-world of the song became bleaker. McVie’s keyboards were toned down. To knit the whole thing together, Buckingham recycled the instrumental guitar passage that opens ‘Lola (My Love)’ from his and Nicks’s earlier Buckingham Nicks album. The resulting amalgam simultaneously hymned the pain of personal separation and the strength of community within the band: ‘I can still hear you saying/You would never break the chain.’ It was the only song from this line-up credited to all five members of the band.

  Many songs from Rumours were released as singles, but not ‘The Chain’. In the UK, though, the song achieved ubiquity when the BBC used it as the theme music for its Formula One coverage – the Doppler rush of the instrumental break perfectly mirroring the head-turning swivel of watching race cars. This must have delighted Fleetwood, at least, a car enthusiast from his youth.

  Cover versions are surprisingly rare. The Saskatchewan hair metal band Kick Axe fuzzed the riff into unintelligibility. Florence and the Machine performed it at Glastonbury in 2010, casting around valiantly for the appropriate key but fully channelling its tribal intensity. American country-folk singer Shawn Colvin, tasked with reproducing the song for a 1998 track-by-track version of Rumours, made ‘The Chain’ slinky and soulful; her take fades out just before the bass riff. By contrast, the Los Angeles punk experimentalists Liars, on Mojo magazine’s Rumours Revisited, doubled down on the darkness: their reading is glitchy, murky, obsessive – and again, riffless.

  But the world of hip-hop can tell a powerful riff when it hears one. Cleveland rappers Bone Thugs-n-Harmony’s ‘Wind Blow’ is essentially freestyle rap over a more-or-less unchanged middle section of ‘The Chain’, foregrounding the bass melody. A more ingenious homage came in ‘Up Your Speed’ by the British rapper Sway DaSafo. His song is a tribute to automotive antisocial behaviour, with a video full of souped-up monster cars performing doughnut handbrake turns. It ends with just a snatch of the outro from ‘The Chain’, combining the band’s imperiousness with a cheeky nod to Formula One. Fleetwood Mac themselves fell out, broke up, recruited new members, grew up, and eventually reunited in their five-piece form. The centrepiece of their live sets is still, inevitably, ‘The Chain’.

  David Honigmann

  45

  IKE’S RAP II

  The Tennessee-born musician and actor Isaac Hayes was a man of many parts. He started out as a songwriter for the Southern soul label Stax in the 1960s, penning hits for the likes of Sam & Dave. Then his own genre-bending albums, mixing a sensitive ‘lover-man’ persona with a lush cinematic sound, won Grammy awards in the early 1970s. In the meantime, his acting career took him from being a figurehead of so-called Blaxploitation movies such as Shaft to stealing the show in the scurrilous 1990s cartoon South Park as the voice of Chef.

  Generations of rappers have been inspired by Hayes’s forceful character and taste for blingy gold chains. Yet one of his most lingering musical influences is the sonic odyssey that the strings score of his 1971 confessional ‘Ike’s Rap II’ has subsequently gone on – not so much the life of a song, as the life of a sample.

  It featured first on Hayes’s double album Black Moses, a record that includes downtempo, extended ruminations on Bacharach & David numbers such as ‘Walk On By’. Those tracks proved instructive when the British band Massive Attack – founders of the racially diverse Bristol scene of the 1990s – were mapping out their ‘dance music for the head, rather than the feet’. A moody synthesis of stoner beats and melancholy snippets, muttered raps and gospel-infused singing, the style came to be known as ‘trip-hop’, and the strings from ‘Ike’s Rap II’ are integral to not one but two of its most memorable songs, Portishead’s ‘Glory Box’ and Tricky’s ‘Hell Is Round the Corner’.

  Portishead was the project of Massive Attack’s former tea boy, Geoff Barrow, while Tricky (aka the erratic rapper Adrian Thaws) was a key contributor to Massive Attack’s debut album, Blue Lines. Their closeness explains why Barrow and Thaws allegedly came to be squabbling at the 1995 Mercury Prize bash over who initially sampled Hayes’s aching strings and remorseful rhythmic progression.

  ‘Glory Box’ was released in August 1994 on the album Dummy. ‘Hell Is Round the Corner’ followed the next February on Maxinquaye. The principals disagree about who made the earlier demo, and when one first played his effort to the other. Gentlemen, please, it really doesn’t matter: both tracks are touched by greatness.

  Sounding retro and modern, as it runs John Barry-like atmospherics into a crescendo of dubby bass, ‘Glory Box’ has a timeless poignancy. It could be the cri de coeur of every girl James Bond ever stood up, with the singer Beth Gibbons unforgettable as the leading lady.

  ‘Hell Is Round the Corner’, meanwhile, is a complex weave of paranoia and pleasure. ‘Let me take you down the corridors of my life,’ Tricky mumbles, and you’re sucked in to his fever dream. Twenty years on, it’s still acutely pertinent to ethnic minority experience in what w
as once called ‘the mother country’.

  Debate continues today about whether Hayes himself may have been influenced, consciously or not, on ‘Ike’s Rap II’ by the hippie Belgian band the Wallace Collection’s 1969 reverie ‘Daydream’. It’s difficult to prove. Some melodies are just in the ether. In 2015 ‘Ike’s Rap II’ resurfaced again, with Hayes’s vocal haunting the background, on the Canadian Alessia Cara’s debut single ‘Here’. The then 18-year-old Cara does a decent job as a trainee Amy Winehouse, although she was the first to credit her producers, Pop & Oak, for adding the Hayes loop. Prior to that, it was squeezed thin and submerged by the London rapper Maverick Sabre in his 2011 song ‘Let Me Go’.

  South Park, and particularly his complicity in the self-parodic ‘Chocolate Salty Balls’ song, has made Hayes, who died in 2008 aged 65, a figure of fun for many people. Yet he deserves to be remembered as an artist of huge originality and reach, who spawned work – both his own and that of the brilliant Bristolians – of enduring urgency and passion.

  Richard Clayton

  46

  I BELIEVE IN FATHER CHRISTMAS

  It’s warm, catchy as hell, one of the most enduringly popular Christmas songs, and yet its roots lie in that thoroughly un-poppy genre, prog rock. ‘I Believe in Father Christmas’ was written by Greg Lake, who died in December 2016 at the age of 69, and Pete Sinfield; Lake was bassist and singer with the hyper-technical trio Emerson, Lake & Palmer, while he and Sinfield had previously been members of prog pioneers King Crimson (Sinfield it was who wrote ‘21st Century Schizoid Man’ with its apocalyptic couplets such as ‘Cat’s foot, iron claw/Neuro-surgeons scream for more’).