The Mamas and the Papas, "Dancing Bear"

Filed under "Be careful what you wish for": Denny Doherty and his fellow Mamas and Papas sing in "Dancing Bear" (I like that abbreviated live clip, but go here for the full song) that rather than being a humble chimney sweep, "I'd rather be the gypsy / Who's camped at the edge of town." Sounds nice, a slice of '60s idealism of freedom, until you get to the verse not included in that live perf: "And when I am a grown man / I'll taste just what I please / The honey from the bee / The shellfish from the sea / The earth, the wind, a girl / Someone to share these things with me."

None of those are promised to any of us as grown adults ... especially the latter. Especially for us gypsies of the cosmos.

Or, put another way:

Lost in Space (a/k/a Poem for a Gypsy)

Some of us have muses,
Some inquisitors, interrogators;
But what of the man who has no inspiration,
No collaborators?

Some of us get married,
Have our children, have our houses;
But what of the man who has no close relations,
No spouses?

Some of us have legacies,
Carry names for offspring to come;
But what of the man who has no generation,
No home?

We're a mobile and free culture, for the most part and increasingly. But increasing disconnection is a consequence, and disconnection is a drag sometimes.

Friday Funtime: Pop Argot's Pride Set

In honor of NYC GLBT Pride taking place this weekend, a few songs celebrating and otherwise recognizing homosexuality within humanity:

1. Franz Ferdinand, "Michael"
2. Soft Cell, "Sex Dwarf"
3. George Michael, "Jesus to a Child"
4. Elvis Presley, "Jailhouse Rock"
5. t.A.T.u., "All the Things She Said"
6. Mott the Hoople, "All the Young Dudes"
7. Lou Reed, "Walk on the Wild Side"
8. Randi Driscoll, "What Matters"
9. Village People, "San Francisco"
10. Miracles, "Ain’t Nobody Straight in L.A."

PS: For fuller view, I must also add 10 songs that acknowledge the struggles of the GLBTs in our world:

1. Rod Stewart, "The Killing of Georgie"
2. Bronski Beat, "Smalltown Boy"
3. Elton John, "All the Girls Love Alice"
4. Blow Monkeys, "Digging Your Scene"
5. Bruce Springsteen, "Streets of Philadelphia"
6. Indigo Girls, "This Train Revised"
7. Timbuk 3, "Legalize Our Love"
8. Garth Brooks, "We Shall Be Free"
9. Rubettes, "Under One Roof"
10. Tom Robinson, "Glad to Be Gay"


ETA: Shame on me for neglecting to include Joe Jackson's intelligent and powerful "Real Men" in this weekend's songs of celebration and triumph.

Katy Perry, "I Kissed a Girl"

Fuck you, Katy Perry.

Seriously. F-U-C-K Y-O-U.

A formerly contemporary-Christian artist called Katy Perry has just scored the 1,000th #1 hit of the rock era with "I Kissed a Girl", an obnoxious, braying Pink-ish rocker about, well, kissing a girl. Not in the sense of coming out of the closet, mind you, or even in the sense of poking fun at guys for being unappreciative of women (as Jill Sobule did with her far more clever song of the same title a dozen or so years ago), but of manipulatively turning her boyfriend on by playing into some tired old tropes. Fuck that gay shit, but two chicks—that's hot, man! You can almost smell the Cro-Magnons as they give each other fist bumps when this comes on at some trashy strip club.

In the video, Katy pets her pussycat (wow, subversive and subliminal!) and sings of getting tipsy enough to suck cherry Chap Stick off another girl's lips ("I hope my boyfriend don't mind it," she adds with a Hilton-worthy wink; and no, that's not a compliment to her). Of course, the video ends with her realizing it was all a dream, from which she wakes next to said boyfriend, safely straight, safely normal. She likes it because she doesn't have to apprehend the reality of it.

Faux lesbianism is antifeminist, it's tedious, and it sets the real gay-rights movement back a few steps every time it rears its vapidly giggling head. It's the exact opposite of what Pride is all about, and I'm going to scream every time I hear it this weekend. Katy Perry, you suck, and I hope you call your next inane song "I Shoved a Stick of Dynamite Up My Hoo-Ha." I'd like it!

Lighthouse, "Pretty Lady"

Yesterday I linked to a YouTube clip (Stories' cover of "Mamy Blue") that had been uploaded by a guy who calls himself Music Mike. In his uploading of lesser-known clips with history-lesson introductions, he seems to have styled himself after the classic oldies DJs of the rock era — the Dick Bartley and Cousin Brucie and Casey Kasem types — which I think is a genius idea. For lack of a better term, I call people like Music Mike YouJays; they're seeking to function as tastemakers in their spheres of influence, and we need more of those now, with so few radio DJs anymore serving as tastemakers.

So I owe Music Mike and his "Flashback Favorites" series a debt of gratitude: he introduced me last fall to not only Stories' version of "Mamy Blue" but also a song that has rapidly barreled into my all-time Top 10.

And I do not take my all-time lists lightly.

"Pretty Lady" was an almost-hit for a Canadian jazz-rock ensemble called Lighthouse, who scored two decent-sized hits in the early '70s: "Sunny Days" and "One Fine Morning," the latter of which is also a major fave of mine. The songs share driving rock beats, engaging horn charts with clever fills, gruff vocals, and delightfully pristine and intricate productions that allow each member of the multitude to shine. I've always adored brass rock, that melodic punch of trumpet with a steady beat behind it, and "Pretty Lady," with its gorgeously ornate arrangement and soaring backing vocals, is really the greatest brass-rock song ever recorded. It unconscionably petered out at #53 on the charts in 1973; I've been thinking it shoulda been an easy Top 10.

PS: I find it kind of fascinating that a person as obscure as Skip Prokop (the band's drummer) should have written three of my absolute favorite songs: those aforementioned Lighthouse tracks, and Three Dog Night's "I'd Be So Happy," a ballad of regret that actually bookends kind of nicely with "Mamy Blue."

Los Pop Tops, "Mamy Blue"

YouTube is quite underrated as a music-discovery tool. Anyone reading this has been sent any number of YouTube links, so you know what it's all about; but when you watch music clips that way, do you often look through the other clips posted by that person and see what their tastes are like or discover more from the artist?

I find an incredible amount of material this way—material from my preferred rock era, 1967-1975. And it was via YouTube that I discovered "Mamy Blue", a #57 hit for a mostly Spanish combo called Los Pop Tops in 1971. (Don't mind the uneven lip-synching in this clip.)

Sometime last year, someone had recommended to me "Oh Lord, Why Lord," a Los Pop Tops song from '68 that had missed the charts here. I checked it out: words beseeching ethnic tolerance, set to Pachelbel's Canon in D (one of my very favorite of all melodies). But it was one of the "Related Videos," "Mamy Blue," that really drew me in.

The song, composed by Frenchman Hubert Giraud, is a mournful ode to a mother left behind and now gone, presumably dead, and in the sobbing rasp of Trinidadian lead singer Phil Trim, it becomes amazingly powerful. "I may be your forgotten son," he begins, "who wandered off at 21 / It's sad to find myself at home /And you, you're not around. / If I could only hold your hand / And say I'm sorry, yes, I am / I'm sure you'd really understand." The second verse tells us how much he cherishes his childhood memories, tells us he regrets not spending time with her, doesn't tell us why he's her "forgotten" son. He's "been through all the walks of life," but he finds no cause for celebration in that. I imagine the untold storyline as being something like Diana Ross and the Supremes' "I'm Livin' in Shame," only without silly details about knives and plates, which I guess makes it something like Imitation of Life, which is all to say it's a story of how Mom raised an elitist ingrate. (See also: "Someday Mother will die and I'll get the money / Mom leans down and says, 'My sentiments exactly, you son of a bitch.' " —TMBG)

But I digress. "Mamy Blue" has been recorded numerous times since its Pop Tops rendition, most versions lacking any real feeling. Stories, who'd just gone to #1 with "Brother Louie," took a rocked-up version to #50 in 1973. I've been thinking that in hindsight, having just pushed America's buttons with a song about a mixed-race relationship, Stories' releasing a song with the title "Mamy Blue" may not have been especially shrewd.

Night Ranger, "Sentimental Street"

This weekend I heard an almost-forgotten chestnut, Night Ranger's "Sentimental Street", on a rerun of an old Casey Kasem American Top 40 countdown. I've got no great intellectual observations to offer about it or them; I just sometimes miss how simple life seemed in 1985, when I could listen to a four-hour countdown without other demands on my day, when I could actually dwell on sentimentally missing someone instead of always moving forward and trying to keep up with things. I feel like I don't get to look backward much anymore.

And I've been thinking that Sentimental Street, or anyplace else in the Avenues of SF, would be a pretty nice place to be right now while I endure another East Coast heat wave.

Friday Funtime: Pop Argot's Top 10 "Summer" Songs

1. Billy Stewart, “Summertime”
2. Lovin’ Spoonful, “Summer in the City”
3. Nuclear Valdez, “Summer”
4. Isley Brothers, “Summer Breeze”
5. Partridge Family, “Summer Days”
6. Johnny Rivers, “Summer Rain”
7. War, “Summer”
8. ABBA, “Summer Night City”
9. Millie Jackson, “Summer (The First Time)”
10. Elk City, “Summer Song”

Alice Cooper, "You and Me"

Alice Cooper found a clever little niche for himself in the mid-'70s when, having realized he could move seamlessly from the shock-horror to the Hollywood Squares crowds (OK, the Squares were their own kind of shock-horror), he applied the same cross-genreational techniques to his music, resulting in stuff like "Welcome to My Nightmare" that was equally at home in a dank rathskeller or on The Muppet Show.

And indeed, it was on The Muppet Show back in 1977 that I got to know "You and Me", one of a few Alice ballads of the mid- to late-'70s that suggested he'd really absorbed Elton John's Blue Moves period. It's refreshingly anti-rockstar in its longings: "You and me ain't no superstars / What we are is what we are / We share a bed, some lovin', and TV, yeah / And that's enough for a workin' man / What I am is what I am / I tell ya baby, you're just enough for me." His workaday life is fine with him, as long as he's got his special someone in bed beside him.

I'd be lying if I said I shared those prosaic aspirations. But that doesn't mean I enjoy the song any less. (I don't get into big-bosomed ladies with Dutch accents either, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate the similarly styled "You're in My Heart" from Rod Stewart.) There's an unsatisfied striving going on in my world that runs counter to everything "You and Me" stands for; sure, it's a good thing to strive, but at the cost of feeling ever unsatisfied? It's both a blessing and a curse to not know yet what's "enough for me."

Hercules and Love Affair, "Blind"

It's way too hard to keep up with the interesting developments in music today -- mostly because pop radio as we know it now keeps up with mostly the uninteresting developments. Ever since the Stylus Singles Jukebox, for whom I was once a pop-singles reviewer, ended its fine run, I've struggled to find new stuff that really clicks with me.

Fortunately, it still happens. I became aware of "Blind" by Hercules and Love Affair earlier this spring through the invaluable I Love Music message board, but I didn't get around to listening to it until iTunes offered it up as a freebie a few weeks ago. In the ILM discussion, I couldn't escape one smart-aleck's reposted comment from the iTunes boards: that "it sounds like an old man moaning in pain because his hip broke in the middle of a nightclub. And as he falls, someone plays the trumpet."

It's funny because it's true! The lead vocals, supplied by Antony (he of the Johnsons), do indeed connote equal amounts of early morning's aging and late mourning's pain; I found myself thinking about the scenes in Studio 54 in which an old woman pranced joylessly about the floor. (No, I don't mean Liza Minnelli; and no, I don't mean Truman Capote.) "Blind" is evocative and open to interpretation, but for me, it's about the conundrum of aging as lived out on the dance floor. Can you be too old to dance in public? Can you be too old to have fun? I imagine Madonna makes a point of not listening to stuff like this.

At any rate, it's a hypnotic and dynamic groover, easily one of the best and most interesting tracks I've heard in 2008, and I'm glad the iTunes tastemakers thought so too.

Jason Mraz w/ Colbie Caillat, "Lucky"

It was a pleasant surprise, to say the least, to see California’s willingness to not merely recognize but legalize same-sex marriages, and I was actually kind of afraid to say anything about it yesterday lest some last-minute legal challenge defer us once again. I understand that it's still a subject of debate for many, but at least it’s not the wedge issue it was in ’04. No one will accuse me or those I love of risking things for Obama.

My own proximity to marriage amounts to buying the Brooklyn Bridge — I’ll never get married, you know that’s not my scene — but I’m enough of a sap that I sometimes fantasize about having a Big Day and about being able to say and sing in full honesty and security, as Jason Mraz and his duet partner Colbie Caillat do on this new track, “Lucky I'm in love with my best friend. Lucky to have been where I have been. Lucky to be coming home again.”

Mraz, the writer of those words, is a wise man, a guru in a skateboarder’s body, a Bodhisattva with bedhead, and he deserves better on the charts and in the hearts than he’s gotten so far from the pop cognoscenti. He's just the kind of cornball we need, and I've been thinking We Sing. We Dance. We Steal Things. will be my #1 album of 2008 — and "Lucky" is my pride anthem of now.

ABC, "The Look of Love"

I have a large and oft-professed love of a radio concept called “10@10”: a station plays 10 songs in a row from one year, interspersed with news clips and pop-culture ephemera from the period. The originator of the concept is San Francisco KFOG DJ Dave Morey, whose show I’ve been listening to since October 1998 (tip of the hat to fellow Schwab co-workers Thomas Growney and Mark Schroeder, who clued me in to the station’s greatness).

Recently Dave played a set from 1982 that included Brit synth outfit ABC’s first and cheeriest hit, “The Look of Love”. An absurdly overdramatic vocal performance from Martin Fry distracts attention from everything else: he’s a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, careening from knowing (“When the world is full of strange arrangements”) to hostile (“Look, for your information,” he sneers to his well-meaning friends who’d asked the innocuous question “What’s the look?”, seeming to momentarily prefer the look of Faye Dunaway), to meta (“Me, I go from one extreme to another”), to maudlin (his friends say “Martin, maybe one day you’ll find true love,” and he replies, “Maybe,” heaving a sigh like a weather balloon), to unhingedly celebratory (“hip hip hoo-ray-yay!”). It’s quite an exhausting listen.

But on hearing it, the song’s second line, “and gravity won't pull you through,” struck me as oddly familiar. Then later in the week, en route to work, I was listening to Nina Simone’s version of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” and there it was: “gravity fails and negativity won’t pull you through.” How utterly random for ABC to toss a sideways glance in Dylan’s direction in the midst of their glossy pop bombast. Yippie-yi, yippie-yi-YAY-YAY!!

PS: A belated Happy Father's Day to all to whom it's applicable, and happy b'day to Mwox.

Elton John, "Where to Now, St. Peter?"

I bought the newly reissued Tumbleweed Connection this week. I'd known several of its songs from a lifetime of radio listening, but hearing the album as a whole, I was awed by its tight construction; it might as well have been a concept album. Recurring notions of wild-West Americana are the most obvious thread, but there are also recurring notions of duty, mostly filial.

Filial duty will have to be a topic for another day, though, because my attention's more on "Where to Now, St. Peter?", a post-death conceit that economically asks some important spiritual questions.

"So where to now, St. Peter, if it's true I'm in your hands?" our narrator asks, upon realizing that he's become an ex-he. "I may not be a Christian, but I've done all one man can." For a guy who's spent much of his spiritual life boxing with God, I find Bernie Taupin's lyric here strikes more than a nerve; it strikes the whole damn spine. Taupin's his usual elliptical self here, but his message is clear: The narrator has been a good person, lived a good life; if his only sin is disbelief, is that really a sin? To that I would add: shouldn't that be even more of a testament to his worthiness, since he's acting out of implicit intrinsic righteousness rather than gunning and gearing for some great reward?

Whether we believe in heaven and hell, reincarnation, what have you, most of us contemplate an afterlife of some sort, and many of us (whether we'll admit it or not) rely on it as the hopeful payback for all the indignities and sufferings we endure this time round. But Elton and Bernie's character in WTNSP desires no reward other than clarity as to the new road that lies ahead. That's a more secure kind of faith, something to admire and emulate.

And I've been thinking how much I'd enjoy hearing this song performed as a five-man madrigal.