If you are going to waste time, might as well waste it like this: some of those one-offs I like and you might, too

NB The soundfiles posted here no longer worked as the method I was using was wrecked by Google revamping its sites feature. So I have found another way of posting them. 

Woke up this morning with good intentions and abandoned them within a minute or two. Was going to go to the gym - I got home on Monday night instead of tonight, Wednesday, because blah, blah, my daughter decided blah, blah, so I’m having a longer ‘weekend at home’ than usual blah, blah and didn’t get to the gym this week - and then retire to the genius centre, the newly decorated and inaugurated genius centre to do whatever I intended to do there, but, you know, as it is, one of those things, lay in bed a little longer, came downstairs, dawdled a little longer, you know how, we’ve all been there and anyhow, I got down to something else.

We’ve all heard of one-hit wonders and one-off hits, and I’m sure we all have a list of such songs, songs we like and get to hear every so often by chance, on the radio or in someone’s house. I don’t suppose my collection below, or part of my list because there are many more, can really be regarded as songs by ‘one-hit wonders’ because the artists involved most certainly had other hits and long careers. It’s just that apart from the particular song - of some of these - I like the song but had no more interest in the artist themselves and don’t really know - or care - what else they have done. Well, below are a few or my songs.

The first is Eric Carmen’s All By Myself which is a great, great song to listen to if you have a bottle of cheap red or white wine handed and, crucially, have been dumped. If it doesn’t bring you within a close sniffle of weeping, you are not human. I can’t actually remember listening to it as a new dumpee, but I have always liked it ever since Carmen released it in 1734 (a great year for pop, incidentally). This is a longer version I found on Spotify and which I had never actually heard before, and I am assuming it is an album version. The bonus is that there is a piano interlude of several minutes which, if you think it was great, you might like to know it wasn’t written by Carmen at all but by Sergei Rachmaninov.

Carmen was a mean pianist (and guitarist and violinist) who had been playing piano since he was very young and openly admits his song cribbed the chord sequence from Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto. I’ve included a recording of that, too, so if you have the inclination (and you might already be familiar with it) give it a listen. It is well worth it. I don’t, as a rule, like an awful lot of late 19th-century Romantic music and find a little of it goes a long way. But I have a definite soft spot for Russian Romantic music which - at least the music I have heard - seems to avoid the often stodgy sickliness of some, especially late German. (For the record Richard Wagner leaves me very cold indeed, and then some.)

All By Myself - Eric Carmen 

and

Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto - Second movement

. . .

After that, I’ve got a recording of Bette Davis Eyes by Kim Carnes. What’s to say, it’s just a great song. And I haven’t heard anything else my Ms Carnes and don’t intend spending any time seeking out any more of her work.

Bette Davis Eyes - Kim Carnes

. . .

Then there is Fly By II by Blue, a band I have otherwise no interest in at all, but I love this song. I first heard it while using the gym at work and for catchy pop song it has it all. And there’s not much more to be said about it.

Fly By II - Blue

. . .

Blue also released a version of Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word by Elton John (who also sang backing for their version), and that song is another of my favourites. Thing is my feelings for Elton John himself veer dangerously close to ‘can’t stand the cunt’, and I find his voice grating in the extreme, all phoney emotion and the rest. On his version it isn’t as bad as on most of his other song, but I was gratified to discover while looking it up on Spotify that there are several other versions, including one by Joe Cocker. But the one which really grabbed me was the one below, by Diana Krall.

Krall has a great voice and her take on the song would be great if it didn’t lose a little on points where a rather twee instrumental interlude takes the song from feelings to sugar and back again (it is those bloody flutes, never trust flutes. Oh, and strings can sometimes teeter on the edge). But it’s not enough to ruin the recording for me.

Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word - Diana Krall

. . .

Another song I heard in the gym at work and which immediately grabbed me was Cooler Than Me by Mike Posner. Catchy isn’t the word. For some reason, and in a bout of odd enthusiasm I bought the his debut CD which has this song, and after listening to it once, have never listened to it again. But this one stands out. It’s simple, too, just three chords, and if I’m not mistaken the same three chords as George Michael’s Careless Whisper.

Cooler Than Me - Mike Posner

. . .

Kendra Morris’s Banshee, also grabbed me the first time I heard it, on Ray Donovan (with Liev Schreiber), and I have loved it ever since. I also bought the CD on which it appears, also I think a debut album, but unlike Posner’s I do listen to it again and again. She has a great voice.

Banshee - Kendra Morris

. . .

Then there’s another favourite of mine, again one I happened across while watching a film (I never finished watching the film, which wasn’t very good), and identified by googling the lyrics. It’s by a singer/songwriter called Lina who is from Denver, Colorado. She covers so many areas I love with her style, soul, jazz, R&B and her sound often oddly harks back to the Thirties (if that doesn’t sound too fanciful. The rest of her stuff isn’t half bad, either.

I’m Not The Enemy - Lina

. . .

PS It’s just occurred to me that is also quite interesting to do this process in reverse: list the songs I dislike (although, for very obvious reasons, not go to all the bother of tracking the songs down, working on them, lodging them in cyberspace so that they are available, then linking to them on my blog with the appropriate code). And there are quite a few awful songs, many of them sodding ‘classics’.

So, in no particular order, songs that make me grit my teeth, leave the room or otherwise avoid include John Lennon’s Imagine (drippy, dreary shite), Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, Don’t They Know It’s Christmas by everyone whose manager could get them in on the act to win the brownie points going round, and coke, I should think, too.

By the way, as someone pointed out, the song was uniquely inappropriate for the starving of Muslim Ethiopia given that being Muslim, they don’t celebrate ‘Christmas’ and many are not likely to know what it is anyway. So, no, they probably didn’t know it was Christmas. The song is a useful example of just how self-centred the West is: even when attempting to do good - and their intentions were admirable - they still see the world from their perspective.

Then there’s Art Garfunkel’s Bright Eyes, which almost makes my skin crawl, any song whose lyrics include the word ‘destiny’, anything and everything by the ginger-haired tosser from Simply Red (and do you Yank or other non-Brit readers understand the word ‘tosser’? I’m sure you have your own versions, but to make it clearer, it’s synonymous with ‘wanker’).

Now I’m trying to think of the songs I loathe, none are readily coming to mind, and I’m certain far more will occur to me once this addendum is posted and I am a million miles from a computer. But hey-ho, life is tough.

What’s this hang-up with ‘meaning’? Might it explain by Dylan was so slow to collect his Nobel Prize. I do think it might

NB There are soundfiles in this entry which your browser might not be able to play. I don’t think Opera does well on that score. In that case, try another browser (assuming, of course, that you actually want to hear (originally ‘here’, none of us is perfect) the songs).

I am well aware, especially since a friend pointed it out, that the introduction to these posts can be very discursive, and it has occurred to me that not everyone might like that. I am in the habit of, say, starting a piece with a number of choice platitudes (most of which are usually cribbed from the Economist) about the danger of Trump starting a World War III over North Korea’s nuclear threats or how no one understands the worldwide implications of Guatemala’s foreign policy, only eventually within a few paragraphs to get to the main thrust of the piece, the low standard of contemporary hair conditioners or why minimalists artists always seem to come across as so small-minded.

All that occurred to me when I was considering how to get this post started. I must confess that some might well feel my approach is a more than a tad pretentious (a pretension made all the more egregious by these two rather fey opening paragraphs), to which I can only respond that I am resolved to leave no doubt on the matter that I loathe pretentiousness avec une passion sauvage. On the other hand, well, tough.

. . .

I had my first ever guitar lesson (or as my good friend Pete would point out, every first is always a ‘first ever’ so ‘first ever’ means nothing and is just a waste of four perfectly good letters which might well be more usefully employed elsewhere, but there you go. Hi Pete) last Friday afternoon. That’s not to say I have decided to learn to play guitar, because I have, in fact, played guitar for the past 54 years, although I am the first – but not only – man to admit that for far too many of those years I played with more far more enthusiasm than skill. And like too many of my ilk, I am an incessant noodler, playing a bit of this for a minute or two in this style, then long before anything can get going, breaking off and playing something else in that style, before soon losing interest and taking off in yet another direction.

I have now decided that enough was enough and that I should get a little more serious about it all and get proper tuition to become a little better rather as a mediocre tennis player might be able to improve a little by being coached by someone who knew what he (or, or course, she) knew what they were talking about.

A week or so ago, I asked Nigel who works at Craig’s Music in Bodmin who he could recommend, and he said go to Paul Berrington in Padstow. Not only will he help you (he helped me a hell of a lot, said Nigel), but he’s also a nice guy. Well, I did, and true to Nigel’s prediction Paul has already helped a hell of a lot in just one lesson and even though we spent almost 90pc of the time talking music and chord theory – that is, he was talking and I was listening - and hardly touched a guitar (well I didn’t). But that is only the first stage in this discourse (which I’m hoping is also the noun related to ‘discursive’).

Whenever I want to learn a song – over these past few months, these have included Cry Me A River, Julie London’s version not Justin Timberlake, or Me And Mrs Jones – these days I go to YouTube where there is any number of useful videos, and many more other useful videos just about playing guitar – Marty Schwartz of Nextlevelguitar.com is one of my favourites. Well, most recently I decided I finally wanted to learn a favourite tune of mine, Steely Dan’s Pretzel Logic, which you can listen to below. I found three videos, and after cannibalising them came up with a pretty good chord sequence which 1) is satisfying and 2) I can play. As always with Steely Dan the chords are not at all straightforward, although in this case they are rather less not straightforward than usual. They involve major sevenths and major sixths and ninths, and I don’t know what else, which, to my ears at least, are a damn sight more interesting than the usual G, C and D and Am, Em and Dm we all start out on.

A bonus is that if you have a certain feel for rhythm and, it has to be said, chutzpah (and I do have some of the first and a little of the second), you can play major sixths, sevenths, ninths and thirteenth or whatever chord of that kind takes your fancy in almost any order and bullshit that you are a rather competent guitar player. Certainly, a good guitar player will suss out the bullshit within seconds, but ordinary Joes will be impressed.

The point it that I know just how good I am – which is pretty well not that good at all - which is why I decided the time has come to try a little harder and so I shall be a regular of Paul Berrington’s once the holiday/tourist season has ended and getting to Padstow is less of a two-hour schlepp and once again the usual 20-minute drive. And so on to the main point of this blog entry (or, if you like, after all the above discursive shite the equivalent for this particular post of why modern hair conditioners can’t hold a candle to those we sometimes used in the 1970s and 1980s): wondering why everyone seems to keen to know the ‘meaning in songs’.

. . .

Steely Dan, that is Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, and their songs are, I think it’s fair to say, in a league of their own, both musically and lyrically. ‘Sophisticated jazz rock’ and ‘clever, ironic/wry and witty lyrics’ are some of the gush about their music you will get from music journalists (and mention of which – and their ‘gush’ - obliges me to repeat the quote from Frank Zappa: ‘Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read, ‘ and that pretty much hits the nail on the head.’) But the ‘clever, ironic/wry and witty’ plaudit notwithstanding, Messrs Becker and Fagen do, at least, write interesting lyrics, lyrics which are often far more interesting than those written by many other songwriters.

On the other hand, I, for one, don’t think the ‘meaning’ of their songs is all that important. And sometimes (as in the case of Bob Dylan, of whom more later (©Daily Mail/Geoffrey Levy and other of the paper’s feature writers) the hunt for meaning can, as far as I am concerned, get very out of hand. The thing is that - at the very least, in the case of Steely Dan and Dylan, but I’m sure with other artists, too, fans want – no they demand - meaning. They just can’t do without it. I, on the other hand, am perfectly content with lyrics just ‘sounding good, interesting and intriguing’ and to fuck with meaning.

Becker and Fagen’s song Pretzel Logic also has ‘obscure’ and ‘wry’ lyrics, all two short verses of it and the bridge, that is, which is not a lot of lyrics. And they are good lyrics. The lads themselves are quoted extensively as saying the song is ‘about time travel’. Really? My reaction to that is simply, up to a point, Lord Cooper. I don’t doubt that when they came to write the song, the notion of ‘time travel’ played a part in its genesis, and when you read the lyrics, you can see that the notion of time travel might well have been one starting point. But as to saying anything whatsoever about time travel and saying something useful or meaningful, the honest observation is: bollocks. Here us the song:


Pretzel Logic


and here are the lyrics:

First verse:

I would love to tour the Southland / In a traveling minstrel show
Yes I’d love to tour the Southland/ In a traveling minstrel show
Yes I'm dying to be a star and make them laugh / Sound just like a record on the phonograph
Those days are gone forever / Over a long time ago, oh yeah

Second verse:

I have never met Napoleon / But I plan to find the time
I have never met Napoleon / But I plan to find the time
'Cos he looks so fine upon that hill / They tell me he was lonely, he's lonely still
Those days are gone forever / Over a long time ago, oh yeah

Bridge:

I stepped up on the platform
The man gave me the news
He said you must be joking son
Where did you get those shoes?
Where did you get those shoes?
Well, I've seen 'em on the TV, the movie show
They say the times are changing but I just don't know
These things are gone forever
Over a long time ago, oh yeah

There are various sites on the web giving ‘the meanings of songs’, and one such includes suggestions as to what Pretzel Logic means.

Songmeanings.com is useful if you are into that kind of thing. I, on the other hand am not, and I am even bemused by what I regard as an obsession to discover ‘meaning’ (and not just in songs, I should add, but here I’ll just restrict myself to songs). I am interested in how a song came to be written, what might have been in the writer’s head at the time, but I’m pretty certain a great many ‘meaningful’ words and phrase are chosen not because they mean something at all, but because they sound right at that point in the song, or because the songwriter hits upon a phrase which exactly matches the beat of the song. In the above example, explanations of ‘meaning’ and just how time travel is described in the song is a ludicrous as suggesting that the line ‘I stepped upon the platform’ refers to the singer – the time traveller who hopes to meet Napoleon – steps ‘on the platform of the time machine’.

. . .

To my mind Dylan, a great favourite of mine, suffers even more from the insistence of those who listen to his music that his lyrics, even the most obscurely outrageous must ‘mean’ something. That isn’t to say that often he is trying to ‘say something’. A good example of when Dylan was trying to describe the world and what might be going on would be Blowin’ In The Wind. Conversely, a song which might sound as though it were full of meaning could be A Hard Rain’s Gonne Fall: ‘Twelve misty mountains/six crooked highways/dozen dead oceans/newborn baby with wild wolves around it’ are all great portentous phrases and they all sound great, but do they ‘mean’ something? I don’t think they do. They just sound right, intriguing and interesting and fit the rhyme scheme of the song.

Dylan himself is on record as being becoming pretty pissed of quite soon in his early days as being regarded ‘the voice of a generation’. And – this is controversial and I cannot prove it or give any supporting evidence – I suspect his silence for many weeks, months even, about being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 was a mixture of embarrassment, incredulity and honesty: he is on record as describing himself as ‘just a song and dance man’ and even though that was a lighthearted comment made at a press conference, it seems to be pretty much the honest opinion of an honest man who has spent the past 58 years doing what he always wanted to do: make and play music and write songs, no less and, pertinently, no more.

That isn’t, of course, to say that there will be many of his songs which don’t have a meaning, perhaps a personal meaning, perhaps songs in which he does want to make a comment – Oxford Town, Masters Of War, from the early days are good examples. But a great many of his other songs are pretty much – well, there’s no other way of saying it – ‘pop’ or ‘rock’ or ‘folk’ songs and no more than that. But that doesn’t deter the hunters after meaning who, for example, haunt this website, bob-dylan.org.uk There you’ll find all kinds of explanations of songs lyrics as well as, I do not doubt, what the wise man prefers eating for breakfast and what brand loo roll he endorses.

Finally, though, and this for me is the clincher that often, if not always, Dylan simply wrote lines and phrases which ‘sounded right’, I few months ago, I watched a two-part TV documentary about Dylan celebrating one thing or another (in which he took part and again struck me as rather more down-to-earth than he is given credit for). In it, Joan Baez, a one-time Dylan girlfriend recalled how once on tour and they were sharing the same apartment or hotel room or something, Dylan was sitting at a typewriter writing portentous lyrics and giggling to himself along the lines of ‘they will have a great time trying to work out what this one means’.

Quite. And that last story makes me like Dylan all the more.

. . .

For comparison here are three more songs. The first is by another favourite of mine, Little Walter and his song My Babe. I can't think too many people will spend too long trying to work out the ‘meaning’ of this song. Essentially, the singer’s girlfriend won’t under any circumstances countenance the singer having sexual relations with any other women as in if he screws another woman that’s it. As lyrics go, I particularly like the completely unambiguous phrase ‘midnight creepin’.


My Babe

Then there’s Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind which I do think he wrote with something in mind, that is ‘we haven’t a clue what the future will hold’.


Blowin’ In The Wind

Finally, there’s his song Went To See The Gypsy. I heard or read somewhere that he did have a particular woman in mind who is ‘the gypsy’, but apart from that, well your guess is as good as mine. Or rather you do the guessing, because I shan’t be bothering.


Went To See The Gypsy

More snaps from the past, rescued from Guy's House, that old, old renovated 16th-century cottage none of us knows much about.

I took a week off work last week and set about clearing what we call Guy’s House of all the shite that has accumulated there over since my father died more than 26 years ago. Guy’s House is a very and small granite cottage which was a ruin when my stepmother arrived in St Breward in the mid-Seventies. Her cottage is one of three, all part of the same structure.

My father was still married to my mother, so he was still having an affair with my stepmother, staying at her flat in South-East London during the week and often travelling down to Cornwall at weekends where she had bought her cottage. Then my mother died in 1981, and my father sold our family home pretty soon afterward and the money made from the sale went on extending the cottage, making the kitchen far bigger and above it extending the bathroom and building another room which my father (who had been working on ‘his book’ pretty much since I can remember) used for his writing. But it did not use up all the dosh.

A few years later, my stepmother’s sister, who was becoming more and more disabled bought the cottage at the end of the row (her’s was The Hollow, then there came Middle Cottage, then there was Rose Cottage, my stepmother’s where she still lives). Whoever owned The Hollow also owned Guy’s House (and, by the way, I have no idea why it was called Guy’s House and can only make the pretty obvious suggestion that at one point in its long life it was owned or at the very least occupied by a ‘Guy).

When I first saw it in the mid-1980s, Guy’s House was a tumbledown ruin, covered with ivy. When next I saw it, a few years, later (my father and I went through a period of estrangement, though I have to say it was his decision not mine, but it would be boring for you and futile all round if I went into details here) Guy’s House was transformed. It is not big, but downstairs a small bathroom with a shower had been installed as well as a small ‘wine cellar’, and upstairs, which my father used as his study were all his books in custom-made shelves along two of the walls.

When I say Guy’s House had a long life, I mean it. I have no idea quite how old it is, but it would well have been built in the 15ft century. At one end downstairs his a large granite fireplace with the usual bred ovens on either side. I should imagine that when it was occupied, and though it is small, it housed about 10/12 people because in those days privacy was not something ever expected. My father died in 1991, and since then Guy’s House has slowly been on the skids.

At first it was used as a convenient place for visitors to sleep. I’ve stayed there several times myself. But gradually over the years it became the repository of all the shite was wasn’t wanted or which was superfluous, some of it mine. When my stepmother’s sister died, her cottage was first let out as a holiday cottage, but then in 2007 my stepmother suffered her first stroke and the cottage was subsequently let out to drum up some money to pay for the care home in which she lived. Which is all fine and dandy, but why am I telling you? . . .

Well, last week, I took annual leave and set about clearing out as much of the shite as I could. And boy was there a lot of it. I was pretty ruthless, too. When you are cleaning out, there can be no room for sentiment. But among the things I found there were some a few of the pictures I took in the 1980s when I was still living in Cardiff. That was, of course, in the days before digital, and involved developing film, then printing the pictures and it was that, mucking around in the darkroom, which I liked as much as taking the pictures.

For one thing if you print your pictures, you can try and do all kinds of things with them (things you can these days do as a matter of course, such as cropping). I also used to dick around with a set of dyes, to colour up BW prints. Anyway, here are four of the prints I salvaged. The picture of the women’s legs was taken in Hamburg when I went to stay with my cousin in about 1988. The one of the incurably handsome dude in shades was taken by her and modesty prevents me from revealing that utterly cool man’s name.

The last two were taken in a nightclub or other, I forget with. I particularly liked using fast film with an ASA of 3200 to take pictures in natural light. Not only did it give nice effects, but you could take snaps of folk when they were not aware and, thus were not posing. And using flash well is also by no means easy.

And here is a link to other pictures of that era have previously post here. As for Guy’s House, when it is not occupied - my cousin, his wife and young son are staying there for a week - I shall take a few more pics to give you a better idea of what it is all about.