Life of a Song

by Jan Dalley

  ELP’s keyboardist Keith Emerson had encouraged each member of the band to come up with solo material, so in 1975 Lake teamed up with lyricist Sinfield to create something out of a ‘Christmassy’ chord sequence Lake had written. The result was thoughtful, but melodic too: a humanist, anti-consumerist Christmas song that also manages to warm the cockles. And by adding a snippet of twinkling sleigh-ride music by Sergei Prokofiev, they summoned the sparkle of Christmas, creating, as Sinfield has said, ‘a picture-postcard Christmas, with morbid edges’.

  The lyrics are mostly Sinfield’s, and the first two verses juxtapose his own early memories of Christmas (‘eyes full of tinsel and fire’) with his subsequent loss of innocence (‘And I saw him and through his disguise’). At this point Sinfield was concerned that the song would be too bleak, so he resolved matters with a more uplifting final verse (‘I wish you a hopeful Christmas’).

  Meanwhile, Emerson – whose love of classical music had led ELP into crossover adventures in their Moog-driven arrangements of pieces such as Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition – suggested inserting the Prokofiev snippet. This section of the story is worthy of a Life of a Song of its own. At the time he wrote it, Prokofiev was living in Paris, pining for his homeland, a former proponent of dissonance who had steadily turned to composing the more melodic material favoured by his Soviet paymasters before his eventual return to Moscow in 1936.

  In 1933, Prokofiev was commissioned to write the score for the satirical film Lieutenant Kijé, and the resulting composition was well received. These were early days for film composers, and the jaunty ‘Troika’ section eventually used by Lake was one of the first pieces of film music to become an orchestral suite. In the film itself, the troika sequence features not, as might be imagined, a magical three-horse sleigh journey through glistening snowscapes, but a drunken night-time trip in which one of the characters is so addled by drink that he tumbles off the sleigh. The melody is initially sung; Prokofiev’s tune comes from an old Hussar drinking song which runs, dissolutely: ‘Like a roadside inn is a woman’s heart, where travellers stop and stay; checking in or checking out, all the night and all the day.’

  ‘I Believe in Father Christmas’ was a hit worldwide, kept from the UK Number 1 slot only by Queen’s gargantuan smash ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. It has subsequently become a perennial on radio playlists and, ironically, given its anti-commercial lyrics (‘They sold me a dream of Christmas’), supermarket soundtracks. The promotional film for the single was a curious affair, shot partly in the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.

  Lake re-recorded the song several times with his ELP colleagues and with orchestras, but the original, with its resonant acoustic guitar, remains the best. Cover versions range from the excruciating (2009 X Factor winner Joe McElderry’s version has a jaunty beat that’s wildly inappropriate) to the bombastic (U2’s Bono batters listeners into submission when he goes up an octave). Susan Boyle’s version has a Caledonian lilt. The British band Embrace strip it back to piano and voice, and the result is touching.

  Also worth mentioning in dispatches is a rendition, available on YouTube, featuring Lake alongside fellow prog-rock veteran Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, on flute. They were performing in St Bride’s Church in London in 2006, and the recording is not of the highest quality, but with Anderson’s delicate flute ornamentations, and bolstered by the church organ, the song’s spirit shines through.

  David Cheal

  47

  SUKIYAKI

  In June 1963, a Japanese pop song soared to the top of the American Billboard Hot 100 chart. More than 50 years later, ‘Sukiyaki’ remains the only Japanese song to have done so. Ironic, when you learn that lyricist Rokusuke Ei wrote it partly as a lament over the Japanese government’s capitulation to a treaty extending the status of American bases in Japan.

  Born in 1933 and raised in the grounds of Buddhist temple, Ei was evacuated to the countryside during the war, which informed a passionate, life-long support of pacifism. A popular radio personality right until his death in 2016 at the age of 83, Ei defended the military-renouncing Article 9 of the post-war constitution, and condemned a recent campaign to revise it.

  In the late 1950s he teamed up with piano prodigy Hachidai Nakamura, who had been turned on to jazz by American military radio. Both young men were part of a new generation bored by the sentimental and formulaic ‘mudo kayo’ songs popular with those drowning their post-war sorrows in Japan’s blue-collar bars. Nakamura wrote light, free, danceable melodies and Ei used vernacular lyrics: together they revolutionized Japanese pop.

  Despite Ei’s commitment to leftist causes, their catchy hits were part of a fluffy, escapist cultural movement targeted at the new, aspirational urban middle classes. Translating roughly as ‘I look up as I walk’, ‘Ue o Muite Aruko’ reflects Ei’s determination to remain optimistic for his newborn son in the face of political events that included the treaty with the US, the death of a student on a protest march and the assassination of a socialist leader live on TV by a samurai sword-wielding rightwing teenager.

  When the song was premiered live in August 1961, Ei was upset that 19-year-old rockabilly singer Kyu Sakamoto bopped so glibly through his profound expressions of ‘hitoribocchi’ (loneliness). But the song was an instant earworm. British record executive Louis Benjamin snapped it up for jazzman Kenny Ball’s Dixieland band while on a visit to Tokyo in 1962. Suspecting that the original title was too difficult for Western audiences, Benjamin rechristened it, somewhat disrespectfully, after his favourite Japanese beef stew: ‘Sukiyaki’.

  Soon American DJs caught on to the original record and Sakamoto’s version became an international bestseller (though it kept its title, ‘Sukiyaki’). Writing for the BBC on the song’s 50th anniversary, American John Taylor said its popularity marked a turning point as his countrymen ‘began to see Japanese people not just as a former enemy or some mysterious, exotic race, but as people with feelings no different from their own, and capable of expressing beautiful, tender emotions’.

  Covers soon blossomed in many languages. 1963 welcomed a Portuguese version by Brazil’s Trio Esperança, and Indo-Dutch duo The Blue Diamonds sang it in German. Soul man Jewel Akens wrote the first English lyrics on his brassy ‘My First Lonely Night’ (1966).

  The best-known English lyrics were written by Californian disco duo A Taste of Honey, who turned it into a break-up ballad in 1980. The duo’s singer Janice-Marie Johnson was heartbroken herself when she recorded it and credits ‘Sukiyaki’ with ‘teaching me you can’t cry and sing at the same time’.

  It was A Taste of Honey’s version that infiltrated early hip-hop, sung by London-born Slick Rick (on 1985’s dexterous, misogynist ‘La Di Da Di’) and Snoop Dogg on his 1993 tribute ‘Lodi Dodi’.

  In 2015 X Factor runner-up Olly Murs gave it a nasal, noughties spin as ‘I Look at the Sky’, complete with whistling and fresh lyrics by Yoko Ono.

  The most poignant recent rendition came from British-born violinist Diana Yukawa, whose father was killed (before she was born) in a plane crash in 1985. In 2000, aged just 15, she played it on the mountain where Japan Airlines Flight 123 hit the ground after 32 minutes of worsening technical failures during which some passengers had time to scribble final words to their loved ones. Five hundred and twenty people were killed; also among the dead was the song’s original singer, Sakamoto.

  Helen Brown

  48

  ME AND BOBBY MCGEE

  Few artists embodied the 1960s counter-culture as fully or as fatally as Janis Joplin. A self-described Texan ‘misfit’, she outrageously lived – and died – the rock ’n’ roll life, blasting the Monterey Pop festival with her volcanic eruption of a blues voice, dressing in tripped-out granny chic and commissioning the cult cartoonist Robert Crumb to create an album sleeve. A heroin overdose killed her in October 1970, but the following January one of her last recorded songs became a Number 1 single in the US. Joplin’s telling of ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ wou
ld be her epitaph; its vocal shot through with all her ‘hurts and confusions’ yet also her immense vitality and rowdy romantic vigour.

  Joplin’s version might be definitive – it’s easy to imagine her travelling every mile of the lovers’ journey from Kentucky to California – but she didn’t write ‘Me and Bobby McGee’, nor was hers the earliest cover. Kris Kristofferson, an old flame, was the author, although he didn’t write it for her either, and his song proved an instant country classic. A former army captain and Rhodes Scholar, Kristofferson would become a successful actor and singer, but in the late 1960s he was jobbing as a studio gopher in Nashville as he tried to make it as a songwriter.

  ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ was his breakthrough, but it wasn’t entirely his idea. Fred Foster, the boss of Monument Records, challenged Kristofferson to write a song with the title ‘Me and Bobby McKee’, about a pair of drifters, with the twist being that Bobby was a girl. Bobby McKee was a secretary in Foster’s building. Kristofferson misheard her name as ‘McGee’, but took on the assignment. He had been hanging out with a fellow Texan musician, Mickey Newbury, and it was the metre of Newbury’s ‘Why You Been Gone So Long?’ that guided Kristofferson’s melody. Kristofferson’s most quotable line – ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose’ – was inspired, he later said, by a scene in Fellini’s film La Strada, in which Anthony Quinn leaves Giulietta Masina and comes to regret it.

  ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ was picked up by the ‘King of the Road’ singer Roger Miller. His original recording, with boxy drumming and an almost mariachi flourish at the end, became a hit in 1969. Miller, too, was from Texas. ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ had many of the characteristics of the musical style attributed to that state called ‘outlaw country’: rootsy yet wordy, gritty and reflective, unafraid to cross the borders into folk and blues.

  The song’s subsequent recording history is a Who’s Who of that renegade genre, with versions from Charlie McCoy to Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings to Chet Atkins, as well as delightful performances by female stars such as Dottie West and Loretta Lynn. The hippies’ favourite jam band, the Grateful Dead, turned it into a platform for Jerry Garcia’s rueful guitar soloing on the 1971 live album known as Skull & Roses. Kristofferson’s own elegiac rendition was released on his debut album of April 1970.

  But two other versions of that era were soon better known: Gordon Lightfoot’s solemn acoustic take and the up-tempo country pop of Kenny Rogers & The First Edition. More recently, Melissa Etheridge, LeAnn Rimes and Pink are among those influenced by Joplin’s con belto approach (without ever really coming close). In 2002, the actress and singer Jennifer Love Hewitt bizarrely did it with bongos. There have also been covers in Swedish, German and Italian – the latter Gianna Nannini’s funky little noodle in 1979.

  Kristofferson heard Joplin’s account the night after her death. It broke him up. Yet interest in his work soared after her posthumous Number 1. Kristofferson surely kept such success in perspective. ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ is about loving and losing. ‘Feelin’ good was good enough for me – and Janis,’ he ad-libbed in a concert in 2010. I reckon he meant it.

  Richard Clayton

  49

  MY FUNNY VALENTINE

  The 1937 Rodgers and Hart musical Babes in Arms, which gave generations of grateful cabaret singers ‘My Funny Valentine’, also virtually invented the ‘Hey, let’s put on a show!’ genre. They did childcare differently in those days – in the musical, a group of home-alone teens must do something useful with their time to stop the local sheriff carrying out his threat to send them to the work farm. This is the Great Depression, and the parents are off working the vaudeville circuit.

  The plot was flimsy and later much parodied, but the show produced several classic hits: ‘The Lady Is a Tramp’, ‘Where or When’ and ‘I Wish I Were in Love Again’. ‘My Funny Valentine’ became such a ubiquitous torch song over the years that, as the writer Alec Wilder noted in American Popular Song (1972), the owner of one New York club ‘inserted in all contracts with vocalists a clause which stated they were forbidden to sing it’.

  The original Rodgers and Hart number was sung by a female lead, fondly listing the faults of the lead male, Valentine LaMar. ‘Is your figure less than Greek?/Is your mouth a little weak?/When you open it to speak, are you smart?’ But deeper feelings are revealed when the rhythm kicks in and she sings the refrain: ‘You’re my funny Valentine, sweet comic Valentine/You make me smile with my heart’. A Variety reviewer worried that ‘no nudity, no show girls, no plush or gold plate may mean no sale’, but the 1937 Broadway show stretched to 289 performances.

  In 1939 Busby Berkeley directed a film version of Babes in Arms starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. However, both plot and songs were drastically altered; ‘My Funny Valentine’ was one of nearly a dozen numbers set adrift. It resurfaced in the 1957 Frank Sinatra and Rita Hayworth vehicle Pal Joey, lip-synced by Kim Novak in a nightclub setting, imbuing the song with the bittersweet hints of doomed romance that were to remain its stock-in-trade.

  Meanwhile, the composition made slow but steady inroads into the jazz repertoire. The song charted briefly with a sweet-toned big-band version recorded by the Hal McIntyre Orchestra in 1944. As became the norm, the introductory verse was removed and the band cut straight to the bittersweet refrain. Baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan picked it up for his Quartet in 1952 and the austere, piano-free reading was the perfect vehicle for Chet Baker’s trumpet.

  Among the many instrumental versions around, pianist Bill Evans and guitarist Jim Hall’s up-tempo duet on the 1962 album Undercurrent stands out. In 1954, Sinatra included it on Songs for Young Lovers, his first collaboration with bandleader Nelson Riddle. Baker recorded the tune again – this time as a vocalist – on his 1956 hit album Chet Baker Sings, and revisited it many times over the years, especially in live performance.

  The song had gone mainstream, and the consensus on how many artists recorded it stands at about 600. Ella Fitzgerald recorded the song in its entirety – a rare thing – in a pristine 1957 cover featuring the Buddy Bregman Orchestra. Miles Davis also made the song part of his repertoire and recorded it several times. The best is a live 1964 concert recording of a fundraising benefit for black voter registration in Mississippi. It is a 15-minute, shape-shifting, mood-changing masterpiece.

  A Babes in Arms subplot concerned a wealthy southerner bankrolling the show on the proviso that two African–American kids were sacked from the cast. So it’s pleasing to note that a Chaka Khan account of ‘My Funny Valentine’ was part of the award-winning soundtrack of the 1995 Whitney Houston movie Waiting to Exhale, which featured an all African–American cast.

  But it is with Baker that the song has come to be most identified. In a nightclub scene in the 1999 film The Talented Mr Ripley, Matt Damon’s Ripley performs a version, closely emulating Chet Baker’s singing style to conjure a tangible sense of the late 1950s. A song that started life in a Depression-era musical comedy ended up associated with the boom years and a musician, Baker, whose life ended in tragedy.

  Mike Hobart

  50

  AULD LANG SYNE

  In the closing scene of the 1989 romcom When Harry Met Sally, the titular friends-turned-lovers have kissed at a New Year’s party. ‘Auld Lang Syne’ is playing. Harry (Billy Crystal) is struck by a thought. ‘What does this song mean? My whole life, I don’t know what this song means. I mean, “Should old acquaintance be forgot”? Does that mean we should forget old acquaintances, or does it mean if we happen to forget them, we should remember them, which is not possible because we already forgot them?’ Sally, played by Meg Ryan, responds: ‘Well, maybe it just means that we should remember that we forgot them or something. Anyway, it’s about old friends.’

  Sally has hit the nail on the head: the title of this sentimental air translates from lowland Scots as ‘old long since’, and it’s about reunions as much as separations. But where did it spring from? In the latter years of his life the
poet Robert Burns became an avid collector of Scottish folk songs and ballads and, having heard ‘Auld Lang Syne’ from ‘an old man’ in 1788, he transcribed and embellished this ‘exceedingly expressive’ lowland song.

  Burns sent the lyric to two publishers. The first was James Johnson, who included it in a collection called The Scots Musical Museum (1796); in this version, it was set to an old Scottish melody that Burns himself did not much care for. The second was George Thomson, who published it in A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs in 1799, three years after Burns’ death. It was set to a tune known as ‘Sir Alexander Don’s Strathspey’ (a strathspey being a type of dance), and it’s this tune that is widely sung today.

  The song quickly became popular at Hogmanay gatherings, and as the Scots diaspora scattered around the globe, the song travelled with them. (In today’s parlance, it went viral.) In the 1914 Christmas truce, British and German troops emerged from their trenches to play football and sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’. The song has also become hugely popular in Southeast Asia. And many Japanese department stores play ‘Auld Lang Syne’ over the PA system to signify that they are closing. International scout jamborees often close with it.

  Even before the arrival of the talkies, Hollywood had cottoned on to the song’s potency, often using it to highlight unhappiness through juxtaposition. In Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 silent weepie The Gold Rush, revellers in a saloon bar link hands to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ while Chaplin’s character mopes in his cabin. It features in the tearful climax to It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Billy Wilder’s 1960 classic The Apartment ends with Shirley MacLaine, miserable at a New Year’s party with the dreadful Mr Sheldrake as the band play ‘Auld Lang Syne’, before she takes her leave and ends up playing cards with Jack Lemmon. And while it may seem sacrilege to mention 2008’s Sex and the City movie in the same paragraph as these classics, that film does feature a moving New Year montage with ‘Auld Lang Syne’ in its original melody, beautifully sung by Mairi Campbell.