Virginia Slims Rap I (1966-1971): Strings and Women's Souls

204. RONETTES, "I Wish I Never Saw The Sunshine"
Produced by Phil Spector; written by Jeff Barry & Ellie Greenwich
Philles Records--Recorded in 1966; unreleased until 1991

205. CARLY SIMON, "That's The Way I've Always Heard It Should Be"
Produced by Jerry Brandt; written by Jacob Brackman & Carly Simon
Elektra 45724 1971 Billboard: # 10

How fast did second wave feminism take hold? In social terms, it may never have fully done so, at least not enough. In cultural terms, the reversal in just a few years was striking.

Take these two songs: both fairly sad; both co-written by a man and a woman; both still based in that post-Broadway/Leiber & Stoller belief that deeply felt emotion requires strings if not a full orchestra to attain full expression.

But the earlier song is clearly one that was given to the singer. It's a song for a girl, getting over a crush, even though Veronica Bennett (soon to be Ronnie Spector) was twenty-three when she recorded it. Many feel that this track contains her best vocal ever, but it is almost drowned out by all the instruments that Ronnie's soon-to-be husband feels he needs to pile on top of it. On a song like "Be My Baby" or "Baby I Love You, that had worked, but here it feels as if Ronnie is desperately trying to sing her way out of Phil's oppressive arrangement--or maybe I'm just reading their future marriage back into this earlier single. In any case, when this song resurfaced on Spector's 1991 Back to Mono set, many people were bowled over by it, most notably Beth Orton, who sang a beautifully stripped-down version of the song on her album Trailer Park four years later that put the narrator's emotions front and center. The revolution that made Orton's recording possible, though, began almost twenty-five years earlier, with 1970s artists like Carly Simon.

It's often forgotten now but when Simon first emerged on the scene, she was taken by many for a lightweight bimbo too--an upper-class bimbo even, too rich to be political and too pretty to be intelligent. Not yet attached to James Taylor, she was nevertheless often viewed in the shadow of her male collaborators, in this case Jacob Brackman, who cowrote several songs on the album.

Sheila Weller details the full story of how this particular song was written in her wonderful book Girls Like Us, but even without reading it, could anyone seriously think that a man had dreamed up this scenario? Particularly in 1971, when there were no Women's Studies courses on most college's campuses in which young men could have their consciousnesses raised? (I don't know: maybe he had a sister???)

This is the story of a young woman's fear of marriage and every word of it rings true and fatalistic. But my real point here, as usual, is to listen to the music as well as the words. Here the strings capture the bittersweet nature of the singer's emotion. By contrast, the strings on the Spector track are the idea of a man who thinks he knows what the woman he idealizes is thinking. In the earlier case, they drown out a woman's voice with male projection; in the later case, they amplify the woman's voice and make it loud enough to be heard. That's a revolution--forty five per minute actually--in just five years.

Talking Vernacular Blues

876. GLENN FREY, "Smuggler's Blues"
Produced by Barry Beckett, Allan Blazek, & Glenn Frey; written by Glenn Frey & Jack Tempchin
MCA 53546 1985 Billboard: # 12

877. JOHNNY CASH, "Singing In Viet Nam Talking Blues"
Written by Johnny Cash
Columbia 45393 1971 Did not make pop charts

Oh Lord, he's talking Miami Vice again.

But seriously folks . . .

There's a traditional form in twentieth-century folk music called the "talking blues." The talking blues is not a "protest song" per se. It's more like a broadside, a song of indeterminate length in which words about recent events are more accompanied than set to music. The point of talking blues is to pass along information to the listeners, be it about the sinking of the Titanic, a strike at a shoe factory, or a day trip to Bear Mountain. Diehard folkies would probably suggest that there can't be such a thing as a pop talking blues, because the presumed slickness of pop would have to distract by definition from the self-conscious information drop of the words. Nevertheless, when Chuck D famously referred to rap "the CNN of black America," he as good as suggested that in the closing decades of the twentieth century, the talking blues had migrated into pop, into the undeniably polished tracks of contemporary hiphop.

But what about white Americans? One could argue that they don't need a muscial CNN because they already have the 24-hour news version, but no American above the age of eight would seriously suggest that what comes out of the mainstream news organizations is what we seriously need to know. Certainly in the pre-internet, not-yet-really-cable-ready 1980s, it wasn't. This is why, to complete their instruction about Reagan-era diplomacy in the Western hemisphere, many mainstream Americans needed . . . Miami Vice. The series was not just "anti-authority," as so many pieces of post-Vietnam American culture were. Episode after episode of the show, right down to the series finale, were premised in the idea that, no matter what the President might say, the War on Drugs would always suffer because its true success would undermine the supposed cause of fighting anti-communism.

In no case was this more true than in the episode entitled "Smuggler's Blues." Glenn Frey, who also appeared as an actor in the episode playing a shady pilot, even wrote this song for it, and its verses punctuated the narrative transitions from location to location. The song isn't exactly a summary of the episode's actual plot, but it does borrows amply from it, right down to the punchline "It's the politics of contraband," which is uttered near the end of the episode by Don Johnson as the frequently sockless Sonny Crockett.

As in most talking blues, the music here is instantly forgettable. The words are the point, and even they contain no self-conscious flourishes that might draw attention away from the data they wish to impart. We are taken through a drug deal from start to finish but we are asked to see it in organizational terms. For a Reagan-era pop troubadour, drugs are not just recreation or a scourge on society. They're part of our foreign policy strategy for winning the Cold War. As Jackson Browne almost acknowledged when he rewrote "Cocaine" at a Christic Institute concert a few years later, this was the politically self-aware drug song that that more-respected singer-songwriter wished he had written.

Johnny Cash's "Singing in Viet Nam Talking Blues" is a more respected song than Frey's and a more obvious heir of the classic talking blues tradition so I won't belabor my analysis of it. But I would point out that Cash almost does the opposite in this song of what Frey would do in his song fourteen years later. Frey took something considered personal and recreational and connected to global politics, whereas Cash takes the most pressing geopolitical issue of his time and takes it down to the level of the personal. From the opening scene at the breakfast table, this is a song about a married couple who go on a trip. The purposefully understated, even labored folksiness of it is meant to disarm the listener. It reduces our trip through the war zone to a human level, which in turn makes the rain of shells even scarier. This is not the world of either Barry Sadler's or John Wayne's Green Berets. This is a scary environment in which the politics of the war seem ultimately irrelevant.

By the end Cash could shout, as almost no other country singer of his time could or would shout, for the "boys" to be brought home "IN PEACE!" and no one could mistake him for being pro-communist. Like Frey, he wasn't just preaching to a left-leaning proudly folkie choir. He was using the musical vernacular of his time, and spreading the news to a mediated crowd.

Nixonian Longing

425. CARPENTERS, "Superstar"
Produced by Jack Daugherty ; written by Bonnie Bramlett & Leon Russell
A&M 1289 1971 Billboard: # 2

Since I lived through the 70s the first time, for me the Carpenters are a love/hate thing. Actually, it's mostly hate, because I despise nearly all their orchestrations. If Phil Spector's overstuffed arrangements had taken the longing of the early 1960s and raised it to operatic levels, Richard Carpenter's arrangements for the tracks he and his sister Karen laid down in the early 1970s made passion and even desire safe for mass consumption. And of course, when Herb Alpert's one of your bosses, it never hurts to throw in a few peppy horns on the choruses, no matter how depressing the song is supposed to be. After all, you want to make sure all that those L.A. session players can keep drawing a semi-regular paycheck.

What keeps me coming back to the Carpenters, though, is what keeps anyone coming back: Karen Carpenter's voice. That voice may be safe, but it's not shallow. There is a sadness there that haunts even a song like "Close to You" that's supposed to be about indescribable bliss. In retrospect, we know now that Karen Carpenter's sadness killed her. It almost literally ate her up from the inside out, and no matter how much I appreciate her performances, I would much rather that she had been happy than successful. I would never have wanted to be her boyfriend, but part of me might have liked to have been the brother that a sweet soul like her deserved.

Supposedly, the vocal for this song was recorded on the first take, because Karen was uncomfortable with the sexual contact implicit in the lyrics. As it was, watchful brother Richard rewrote the original lyrics of the song so that "sleep with you" became the more ambiguous "be with you." Nevertheless, the Carpenters chose to record this song, even if it was a little out of their comfort zone. That's what makes the single interesting, of course: that it is a little out of the Carpenters' comfort zone. Birds and butterflies and beasts and children are easy. Waking up to realize that the love of your life was a one-night stand is hard.

Before Karen stepped up to the microphone for that single take, this song had already been sung by Bonnie Bramlett of Delaney & Bonnie (who cowrote it), Bette Midler, Rita Coolidge, and Cher. Subsequently, it would be recorded by Luther Vandross, Sonic Youth, and Chryssie Hynde. And you know what? Karen Carpenter still owns it. Even though I wish her brother Richard had left the lyrics the way they were, I don't think "Superstar" is primarily a song about sex or its aftermath. It's a song about unfulfilled longing and the confusion that it brings. And something makes me think that Karen Carpenter had more of a handle on that than all the rest of those singers put together.

It's Always the Sweet Ones You Have to Worry About

771. OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN, "Banks of the Ohio"
Produced by John Farrar & Bruce Welch; Traditional
Universal 55304 1971 Billboard: # 94

Look at her: she looks so sweet and wholesome, doesn't she? No no no, look closer. Look at the eyes. Cold-blooded killer? Mmmm . . . . could be.

Personally, I've never bought the transformation at the end of the film version of Grease--it just feels too much to me like hoop-earring dressup (even if she does nail one line: "Tell me about it, stud")--but this early ONJ single scares the hell out of me.

This is an old, old song. Most earlier versions of it feature reedy country voices or hushed respectful tones. In my opinion, the aggressive cheerfulness of this version somehow makes it a thousand times more frightening. Ladadadada sing the women, bom-bom sing the men, and suddenly sweet Olivia is plunging a knife in this guy's chest. I buy the knifeplunging, but the contrition of the next verse sounds a little forced. Oh no, she may kill again. Gulp.

I don't think either Newton-John or Farrar, her longtime producer, have a transgressive bone in either of their bodies, so that probably means they were doing this in total seriousness and I have to classify it as camp. I don't care. If Olivia Newton-John ever comes over to my house for dinner, I'm locking up all the sharp objects.