The Rites of The Rosebud

97. IT’S RAINING MEN, The Weather Girls
Produced by Charles Koppelman; written by Paul Jabara & Paul Shaffer
Entertainment Co 03354 1983 Billboard: # 46

True story. In the fall of 1983, I was sharing a house in Massachusetts with three other guys, all law students: a Marine going through law school on the JAG office’s dime who rented the house as a way of making a little extra for himself while dry-docked in Trusts & Estates, etc.; a Californian with a porn star moustache who hoped to make as much as possible after graduation, preferably defending seal clubbers who worked for Standard Oil--his dream, not mine; and a British ex-punk, with two fiancées, who had beaten up Billy Idol in a barfight, and who subsequently ended up serving two terms in Parliament for Labour. (I swear, on both my parents’ graves, this is a true story, gang, even though I’m not going to give any real names.)

I think the only time all four of us actually socialized together was at the end of that year, at the Marine’s bachelor party, which was held at a sad suburban strip club called the Golden Banana. Even the tequila in that place had lost the will to live. Most nights we negotiated TV usage with each other. We had HBO, but this was back in the era before the explosion of basic cable, let alone DVRs, so we were usually stuck with the three major networks. Some could tolerate Magnum, PI if the others wanted to watch it; some could tolerate St. Elsewhere if the others wanted to watch it; all of us could deal, for different reasons, with Hill Street Blues.

The 11 o’clock news, however, was a different matter. Two of us loved the President, and two of us hated him. One of the former owned the TV. As a result, we latter two (me and the Brit) often went out at 10:59 for a “study break.” The place we ended up at nine times out of ten was a bar called the Rosebud. The name had nothing to do with Orson Welles,


















or with sexual symbolism. It was just a name. The place was seedy but not sleazy, the sort of place where drug deals regularly went down but no actual violence really occurred. The front looked liked a diner, except with booze. The only food there was packets of Beer Nuts and chips—or as my roomie called them “crisps.” On both sides of that front part, there was a narrow passageway that led to a pachyderm-in-the-python sort of space where the bathrooms and dartboards were. All the way in the back, in a section that had almost certainly been added on in the 60s or 70s, were a more open bar, a small DJs booth, and a dancefloor. That was where we ended up most nights, not because we wanted to dance, but because the guys in the front all seemed like old farts. (They were probably, on average, at least ten years younger than I am now.)

Those studybreaks at the Rosebud are probably the laziest looking for dates I ever did when I was single. My roomie—oh heck, let’s give him a name: Ralph (pronounced “Rafe,” of course)—Ralph and I would talk in theory about the “birds,” we’d engage some in conversation, maybe dance a song or two with someone, but it was amazingly passive. Neither of us ever really thought about going home with any of the women that we met there, or even of getting phone numbers, he because he already had two fiancées, I because I had very little interest in bringing anyone back to that place. But we casually enjoyed being there, chatting, looking, feeling no pressure. The beer was longneck Bud, the music was stuff neither of us would be caught dead listening to, but somehow it was still preferable to the triumphal late twentieth-century March of Time that we knew was waiting for us back at the house.

Most nights, we stayed until last call, at 1 am. That fall, I swear, every night we went there, last call was the same song: “It’s Raining Men.” Obviously, something neither of us would get caught dead listening to, right? But every night that song transformed the dancefloor. Without a word, all the guys left, even the ones who were there with dates. There were only women out on the floor, they danced with each other, they danced by themselves and in their own worlds, and there were was more passion, more excitement, more sheer exuberance in the way they danced to that song than in the way they danced to all the other songs in the night combined. It was joy, but you could also easily read it as ecstatic relief. If a guy were insecure, it might give him a complex.

In an atomized, postmodern world, where one’s discriminating taste in music can often serve as an essential part of one’s identity, the music that moves someone else—especially the obviously commercial pop music that does it—can often serve as an object of disdain. My god, they like that? Nevertheless, I’ve never been able to wholly dismiss the Weather Girls. I know all the intellectual excuses that I could give myself for appreciating the song—the reasons camp could excuse my love of it, and with Paul Shaffer involved as one of the writers and arrangers, I can just go on and on about irony—but after my nights in the Rosebud, I’ve come to honestly embrace that song, not for its possibly ironic intention, but for the semi-sincerity in which those single Massachusetts women embraced it. Those nightly dances were a dream of utopia, they were ritual, my God they were practically church. I wish you could have seen them to know what I mean. The Weather Girls might have not sung to my world, but I saw that song create a community, a floor full of heterosexual women united by a feeling, and that is no mean feat. Trust me: no matter what anyone tells you, pop music isn’t easy, not on that level. God bless Mother Nature! She’s a single woman too . . .

If Philo Vance Organized a Clipfile of NME Reviews (A Preface in Process)

This blog is an emerging "answer song" written in response to Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock and Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made. I hope that it will be completed at some point in 2009 to mark the 20th anniversary of the publication of Marsh's original book. As many critics noted back in 1989, Marsh's book can seem willfully wrongheaded at points, but over the last twenty years it has more frequently struck me as under-appreciated, misunderstood, and thoroughly wonderful, especially in those places where I find my own taste most at odds with the author's. You can find a virtual version of the book by clicking on the title for this particular post, but I would suggest you go out and buy your own physical copy right now, read it, then come back here.

{Sound of Jeopardy theme played several thousand times}

Okay, good. Now we can talk.

As you can see, Marsh's book is an argument in list form. If you read it from start to finish it has some interesting things to say about Western popular music in the late twentieth century, particularly about the role of the single as opposed to the album, and about the cultural gumbo that is pop music. The book's center of gravity is the mid-1960s. As someone who was starting grade school at that time, I owe whatever appreciation I have of artists like Paul Revere & the Raiders or the Rivingtons to what Marsh has to say about them in this book.

However, as someone who came of age a little later than Marsh did, I also find his argument has little room for some of the pop artists of the 1970s, 1980s, and later who have meant the most to me. Moreover, even though Marsh offered (in his preface to the book's tenth anniversary reprinting) a list of 101 singles from 1989 to 1998 that might have "made the list" had he revised it, they seem almost beside the point. His book describes a phenomenon, a world of pop music that developed in the 1950s, as r & b slid into rock & roll (whatever that is), and dissipated into generality during the 1980s. As Marsh shrewdly notes in that tenth anniversary preface, the flowering of punk and hip hop in the 1980s made a "new world" out of the old one and effectively ended the story that he had written about. In a way, it seemed as if the trans-racial pop art of the Beatles/Motown era was a thing of the past, never to be recreated in an age in which many would-be popular artists equated widespread popularity with aesthetic failure. In twenty-first-century America, we call this the "Jonathan Franzen syndrome," but it was certainly in evidence as early as the 1980s when the corporate motto of independent SST Records proudly proclaimed "Corporate Shit Sucks."

But a funny thing happened as we moved from Reagan and Bush to Clinton and . . . well, Bush: pop didn't die. It didn't get dumb--at any rate, no dumber than it was in the early 1960s. And even if you deplore the atrocity that is American Idol as much as I do, I still think Western pop today is a fascinating stew, one that can very much challenge its audiences, if only its creators take pop seriously.

This blog will be an attempt to tell that story, the sequel (or "answer song") to the story that Marsh told in his book twenty years ago. In terms of strict chronology, it will stretch back to the early 1970s and forward to last week--or sometime next spring, about a year from now. Like Marsh's book, it will be an argument in list form, but in homage to S.S. Van Dine's The Greene Murder Case, another orphan book that I love, I will be throwing the list up out of order on purpose. Think of it as a Dickensian era serial novel that emerges from the shotgun collaboration of Mark Danielzewski and Lester Bangs; or as music criticism as written by a post-Swan-implosion Desmond Hume.

And you. Add comments. Disagree vehemently. Suggest artists and singles that you think I'm neglecting. If you're eighteen years younger than me, tell me the story I'm missing by putting my center of gravity in . . . oh, but that would be telling. As the singles I hope to write about frequently demonstrate, harmony may begin far more easily in dissonance than it ever does in mere identity.