Harvey's Wallbanger

The radio market out here really fascinates me. Denver is hardly the hippest city in the nation, or even in the Mountain States region, yet our radio choices are lively and different and plentiful. I'vd written before about the late, unlamented Martini on the Rockies, which has now morphed into something called Indie 101.5, playing the choicest of current indie rock. It's really kind of shockingly good.

What's really remarkable is how well they choose the older stuff they play (and how unapologetic they are about playing older stuff). This morning I heard PJ Harvey's incredibly fierce "Sheela-Na-Gig," which I've heard on the radio maybe once before in my life. (Is it supposed to go "Put money in your idol hole," or "Put money in your idle hole"? Maybe I'm better off not knowing.) Every so once in a while you hear a song on the radio and think, "That's the best song I'm gonna hear all day," and that's what I thought when I heard "Sheela-Na-Gig."

Still, there was some competition: This afternoon, I heard "See a Little Light," from Bob Mould's Workbook, heretofore best known as the last vinyl album I bought before getting a CD player. This suggests that someone at Indie 101.5 is programming the station by rummaging through my record collection circa 1995.

What makes it even bolder is that there's already a Modern Rock station in town, which the offhandedly cool Indie DJs dismiss as teenager music. I'm not a teenager, so I wouldn't know. This idea of taking a format another station is already purveying and doing it better seems pretty common in this market. A year or two ago a station called KCUV started playing smart adult-alternative rock, sort of like WXRT in Chicago, in direct competition with the World Class Rock of the venerable Boulder-based Whole Foods-ish KBCO. KCUV closed up shop last Labor Day, but God bless 'em for trying.

But yeah, "Sheela-Na-Gig." Greil Marcus once wrote a whole column in Esquire about how alarmingly great Sleater-Kinney's "Start Together" was, but concluded that it could never be a hit because it would make everything else on the radio sound silly. That's probably what happened to "Sheela-Na-Gig." Hide the small children and anyone with a heart condition:

Even the President of the United States

In anticipation of Bob Dylan's upcoming album Together Through Life, the Bard has submitted to a fairly lengthy interview, which is posted at BobDylan.com. In it, Bob offers his take on Barack Obama:

He’s like a fictional character, but he’s real. First off, his mother was a Kansas girl. Never lived in Kansas though, but with deep roots. You know, like Kansas bloody Kansas. John Brown the insurrectionist. Jesse James and Quantrill. Bushwhackers, Guerillas. Wizard of Oz Kansas. I think Barack has Jefferson Davis back there in his ancestry someplace. And then his father. An African intellectual. Bantu, Masai, Griot type heritage - cattle raiders, lion killers. I mean it’s just so incongruous that these two people would meet and fall in love.

Bob's way too smart to be taken in by all this pretty storytelling though:

Do you think he’ll make a good president?
I have no idea. He’ll be the best president he can be. Most of those guys come into office with the best of intentions and leave as beaten men. Johnson would be a good example of that … Nixon, Clinton in a way, Truman, all the rest of them going back. You know, it’s like they all fly too close to the sun and get burned.

Incidentally, the most Dylanesque thing I have ever seen was an old man missing a ring finger who was playing a little electric organ in a subway station in New York City. I had to go back and check the lyrics of "Desolation Row" to see if "the nine-fingered organist" was in there.

Sufferin' Saltwater

Isn't that common songwriting trope of drowning in one's own tears - cf. Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds' "Don't Pull Your Love," Ray Charles' "Drown in My Own Tears," Dolly Parton's "Endless Stream of Tears," Bon Jovi's "I'll Be There for You," Otis Redding's "That's How Strong My Love Is," Eric Clapton's "River of Tears," the Bee Gees' "Tragedy" - actually kind of gross?

So Sweet and Clear

I recently had the good fortune to be asked by the winsome editor of Oklahoma Today, Louisa McCune, to write an article on Leon Russell, the Master of Space and Time (and isn't that ever one of the great lost rock & roll nicknames), for that magazine's upcoming special Rock and Roll issue. One thing I discovered, but did not have room for in the story, was that Leon wrote the song "Superstar," which the Carpenters took to Number Two back in the fall of 1971.

(Karen and Richard, by the way, had four songs stall out at Number Two, plus two more that peaked at Number Three. But they also had three Number One hits, so no one should cry for them, unlike Creedence Clearwater Revival, who had five Number Two hits and no Number Ones. But I digress).

Leon actually co-wrote "Superstar" with Bonnie Bramlett, when they were on tour with, among others, Rita Coolidge, who originally had the idea for a song about a deranged groupie. Rita also gave it the title "Superstar," for reasons that elude me. From there it was picked up by Bette Midler, who sang it on The Tonight Show - which I guess could be true, and has been printed in a major magazine, but would mean that Bette was on Johnny long before she ever released an album, which makes me skeptical - where Richard Carpenter heard it and brought it to Karen.

The Carpenters altered the words slightly to make the song more palatable to their audience: “At that time, Top 40 radio in America would not have played something that said 'can hardly wait to sleep with you again,’" Richard told Blender magazine. "So I changed it to 'be with you again.’ ”

Once again, I'm skeptical; I think he was deferring more to Karen's sensibilities than to those of radio programmers. One song that kept "Superstar" out of the top spot had Rod Stewart asking Maggie to wake up, so sleep was not unheard of at the top of the charts back then. It was the Seventies!

Applause, Applause

How many songs have hand-clapping that lasts throughout the entire song? I can think of only one: "Right Back Where We Started From," by Maxine Nightingale. (Actually, I thought of another, but now I can't remember what it was.)

Are there any others?

Etta's Place

Speaking of Etta James, she had nine Top Forty hits between 1960 and 1968, and the highest-charting of these was "Tell Mama," which hit Number 23 in the early days of 1968. (This is the same song, co-written by Clarence "Patches" Carter, that would become a staple for Janis Joplin.) At a guess, I think this makes Etta James the artist with the most Top Forty hits who never had a Top Twenty hit. I realize that it's highly unlikely that anyone would ever check out (or even care about) such a thing other than me, but I will see what I can do to confirm it for you.

What's most surprising about this is that "At Last" is not one of those nine Top Forty hits. Etta's recording of "At Last" came out in April 1961 and went to Number Two on the R&B charts, but only Number 47 on the Hot 100. I'm not sure why it didn't cross over better, because Miss James had already had three Top Forty pop hits by then.

I Just Wanna Stop Gino Vannelli

The irrepressible Mark Lerner, who is just full of fun and games, has suggested another little amusing diversion for us in the comments to On and On. It's a game called "A song, a singer, a sentence," with a variation called "A singer, a song, a sentence." The challenge is to come up with a singer and a song that combine into a sentence, such as, as Mark suggests, "Blow Away George Harrison."

Other contributors have already made suggestions in the comments to that thread. Here are some that I've come up with:

I Do Lisa Loeb
The Marvelettes Please Mr. Postman
The Beatles Can't Buy Me Love
I Need to Know Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
J. Geils Band Must of Got Lost
I Hear You Knocking Dave Edmunds
Don't Stop Til You Get Enough Michael Jackson
I Can't Go for That Daryl Hall and John Oates
You Can Make It If You Try Sly and the Family Stone
Keep a-Knockin’ Little Richard
Nirvana Smells Like Teen Spirit
Let’s Get It on Marvin Gaye

Some of these aren't quite sentences, but I thought they were funny anyway:

Fastball out of My Head
Vienna Calling Falco
I’m Henry VII, I Am Herman’s Hermits
Sometimes When We Touch Dan Hill

Once I Understood

So I was driving through northern New Mexico today and noticed a sign alerting the population of I-25 that Foreigner was making an upcoming appearance at an Indian casino, as well as the fact that opening for Foreigner would be the band Think. You may remember Think as the studio concoction that perpetrated "Once You Understand" on this great nation of ours back in 1972. That was the half-spoken-word hit that featured arguing between teenagers and their parents, with a chorus going "Things'll get a little easier once you understand" all the while. Then there was an ending that was most chilling, although probably not in the way the producers intended:

Mister Cook (yes)
You have a son named Robert
Robert Cook, age seventeen (yes)
I'm sorry, Mister Cook
You better come down
To the station house
Your son is dead (dead, how)
He died of an overdose (oh, God)

Now, even I'm not dumb enough to think that that Think is going to be sullying the good name of Foreigner at an Indian casino in New Mexico. There must be some new band that was so enamored with "Once You Understand" that they decided to cop the name.

But why would anyone in their right mind name themselves after a band that was famous for being horrible? If you were starting a band would you call it Milli Vanilli? Or Johnny Hates Jazz? Or the Doors?

No Foolin'

You may have noticed that all of the April 1st posts here at OPC were undeniably true. We believe that so-called April Fools' jokes primarily consist of someone telling a lie, then insisting that the lie is true over and over again until the listener finally agrees that it's true. At that point, the liar announces that the listener has, by believing the lie, done something wrong.

We don't find that funny.

On and On

I always thought it strange that two of Marvin Gaye's biggest hits, and arguably his two signature hits, both end with that little dangling preposition "on." How many song titles even end with "on"?

In fact, there are only three songs that have gotten to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 that ended that way. They are:

"You Keep Me Hangin' On," by the Supremes
"Let's Get It On," by Marvin Gaye
"My Heart Will Go On," by Celine Dion

And "What's Going On"? It got stuck at Number Two for three weeks, but never ascended into the top spot, depriving Marvin Gaye of the honor of having fully half the Number One hits that end in "on."