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Here’s something weird: a cosmic-rock power ballad by a brother-sister duo known more for their soft-rock love songs, which is actually a cover of a song by a Canadian band named for the hero of one of the most famous pre-Star Wars science fiction movies. Intrigued? Naturally!
This began the other day whilst The Wife and I were driving around doing errands. We have Sirius XM in her car, and we usually tune to one of several classic rock stations, a 70s station, and an 80s station, depending on what’s on where. (The Wife, not being a fan of The Doors, is likely to change the station if they come on. Ditto me for various other groups that don’t trip my trigger.) On this particular morning we were on the 70s station, which in turn on Saturdays will play old episodes of Casey Kasem’s American Top 40.
This is always an entertaining listen. It’s an obvious time capsule, a very specific snapshot of the state of pop and rock in a single week, usually around 40 years ago. You get to hear Casem say things like “Rising up the charts this week is the newest song from that hit machine, the Steve Miller Band!” or “Still holding their place atop the Albums charts, it’s Fleetwood Mac with Rumours, now at week number 20 in the top spot!” It’s fun to remember that the hits that are now the indelible soundtrack of decades of our lives were once vibrant new songs that were still being heard for the first time.
But also fascinating are the songs that hit the Top 40 back then, hung around for a while, and then disappeared back into the rockiferous aether; songs that aren’t remembered except by superfans of these particular artists, or if it’s an artist that only had that one hit, might even be virtually forgotten today. We joke about “one hit wonders” all the time, but for every one-hit wonder we remember–Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit In The Sky”, or maybe “Build Me Up Buttercup” by The Foundations–there are probably a dozen one-hit wonders whose hits aren’t remembered much at all. It’s nice to listen to the old American Top 40 shows and be reminded of these once-vital, once-new songs that only had one moment in time.
There’s yet another category of song you hear on old Top 40 broadcasts, though: hits by groups we know and remember for other, bigger hits, but which now are pretty obscure, having retreated from their original hit status to the hallowed title of “deep cuts”. This is one of those. I had never ever ever heard this song before I heard it the other day, and it’s just so, so weird!
The song? It’s by The Carpenters, that duo known for “Top of the World” and others, and who are heard each year on all the Christmas stations (their wonderful rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” would be nearly perfect if it didn’t use the wrong lyrics, but more on that in December). This song is called “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft (The Recognized Anthem of World Contact Day)”.
If you’re used to The Carpenters’ general sound of guitars and a soft drum, this is a bit mind-blowing as it includes a full rock band, a chorus doing background vocals, and a full orchestra. This is one of those big 70s tracks with oddly-long running time, an intro from a fake radio station broadcast in which aliens call a radio stations to make a request, and a very dense sound courtesy some obviously-intense work by the sound engineers.
“Calling Occupants” was a cover, though. It was written and recorded first in 1976 by a Canadian band called Klaatu. I’ve heard of this band, but I honestly couldn’t tell you when I’ve heard their work, or what of their work I’ve heard. They were around for a while (1973 to 1982, with several reunions since then), and according to Wikipedia, they were even occasionally called “The Canadian Beatles”. Ha! Suck it, Rush! (Unfair, I guess, since Rush was probably the Canadian Led Zeppelin.)
Klaatu was named for the hero of the great 1950s sci-fi thriller The Day The Earth Stood Still; Klaatu is the alien visitor who comes to basically tell humans to cut the shit regarding nuclear armaments. (He also has a robot guardian who, once unleashed, can only be commanded to stand down via the world “Klaatu barada nikto”.)
“Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft” is obviously rooted in 70s-era UFO mysticism, in which our putative alien visitors were seen as wise and enlightened beings of higher consciousness. Looking back at UFO culture of that period it’s pretty easy to see the influence of certain consciousness-altering substances of horticultural origin, but from this vantage point there’s a rather endearing innocence to it all. This song obviously comes from the same headspace that informs the most enduring classic from this particular subculture, Steven Spielberg’s great 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (and, to a lesser extent, his ET: The Extra-Terrestrial five years later). The era was rife with this sort of thing, though: for more “the aliens are benevolent beings”, see Escape to Witch Mountain, or a little-seen movie called Earthbound! For non-UFO related “heightened consciousness” stuff, many people my age might remember an after-school special or a book called The Amazing Cosmic Awareness of Duffy Moon.
All of this is precursor to the various kinds of “New Age” thinking that would later blend UFO lore with all manner of mysticism and parapsychology stuff. It’s all fun to think about and these ways of thinking definitely led to pop culture artifacts that are invariably fascinating to behold, many of which still influence the creative work of my generation (including me–look at all the “mystical powers of dodecahedrons” in my Forgotten Stars books!). So here are The Carpenters, with “Calling Occupants of Planetary Craft”. Sit back, turn the lights down, light a candle (or something else–ahem), and enjoy!
I found this piece quite randomly. The other day I wanted to listen to the famed Adagio from Aram Khachaturian’s ballet Spartacus, and while doing a quick YouTube look-up I happened upon the same composer’s Symphony No. 3, which is subtitled “Symphony-poem”. It’s a single movement work that supplements an already large orchestra with about a dozen extra trumpets and a pipe organ. It’s about twenty-four minutes long, and since I had about twenty-five minutes left on my lunch period at work that day, I listened to it in its entirety.
And to be quite blunt, this may be the single most insane piece of classical music I have ever heard.
This work is colossally strange in ways that almost defy description. Here’s what I read about this work on Wikipedia:
Originally conceived as a symphonic poem, it is a single movement symphony featuring an organ solo and fifteen trumpets conceived as a hymn of praise of the Soviet Union, with Khachaturian saying that he “wanted this work to express the Soviet people’s joy and pride in their great and mighty country”.
That’s…something.
As you might expect from a work intended to inspire patriotic fervor–which the Soviets often went well out of their way to do–Khachaturian’s Symphony No. 3 opens with a big, brassy intro. But the thing is, the work stays big and brassy for almost the entirety of its duration. It’s fanfare upon fanfare upon fanfare, flourish upon flourish upon flourish, just a constant upping of the ante that will more than once have you thinking that Khachaturian’s just got to be almost finished, and then you check and see how much time is left on the video and you realize he’s nowhere near being done.
I really can’t assess this work in terms of quality. I’m sure it rewards multiple listens and there’s a lot going on in it, but for now I can simply say this: Any time anyone claims that classical music is dull, safe, quiet music for old farts, cue up this thing. This whole work is the ultimate musical expression of the word “Yikes”.
Here it is. Yikes, indeed.
The “whole thing” being a pork tenderloin sandwich at Frank Gourmet Hot Dogs, a favorite joint of ours. Luckily for us, Frank is located in one of the northern suburbs of Buffalo, a good 35-minute drive away, which means that we don’t get there all that often. This is bad for our love of good food. This is good for our love of good cardiovascular health.
I never had a pork tenderloin sandwich until my college years. These are a Midwestern thing, so that was the time for having them. I loved them almost immediately, these wide patties of pork, pounded flat and breaded and fried and served on a bun that’s too small so a lot of the pork overhangs the sandwich.
The folks at Frank take that last part to extremes. I was probably halfway to being full by the time I had even eaten my way to the bread part of this sandwich. Then I still had the entire sandwich portion of the sandwich to contend with. Oh, and fries.
This was at lunchtime on Saturday. Part of me is still full.
(BOTD: Born On This Date. An idea I’m brazenly and openly stealing from Sheila O’Malley, who is the master of these kinds of posts.)
Today is the birthdate of Fanny Mendelssohn. She was a pianist and composer, but her own work was supplanted in her time by virtue of her being a woman and her younger brother, Felix, being one of the great musicians of her day. Fanny’s skill as a performer was substantial, but apparently she rarely performed for anyone outside her own familial circle, and adding insult to injury, a number of her compositions were credited to Felix, with modern scholarship only correcting that record in the last several decades. As with Clara Schumann, a musician whose gifts were also mostly in thrall to those of a better-known man, I wonder how music history would shine all the brighter if we’d been able to really harness all of the musical talent that existed, instead of just half of it.
Fanny does leave a lasting mark on music, though, and not just through her own compositions. She and Felix had a warm and collaborative relationship, and Felix took her constructive criticisms very seriously. Apparently at one point Fanny and Felix were discussing creating an opera based on the legends of the Nibelungs, which would have predated Richard Wagner’s titanic quadrilogy had they ever got the project off the ground. Alas, it wasn’t to be. Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn both died the same year, 1847, with neither being very long-lived: Fanny died at 41, and Felix went less than six months later at 38. Fortunately both Mendelssohn siblings left behind their voluminous correspondence. Here is an example of such, Fanny congratulating her brother on being appointed to a prestigious position in Berlin:
If one is a member of the people walking in darkness who don’t know when they will see you, the Great Light, in person, then one probably had best proceed with the help of quill, ink, and paper, standard accouterments of absence, in extending one’s thanks and congratulations. I had actually thought that it wouldn’t be necessary to write for a while, but that isn’t the case yet. I therefore congratulate you, Herr Music Director, upon attaining the highest human office next to Privy Councillor and Pope. Kapellmeister is a proper title, insofar as it shows what sort of a person one is, whereas Doctor could just as easily refer to a tooth puller or midwife, God be with us!
There we have it: Privy Councillor, Pope, and Kapellmeister. The pinnacles of human achievement! You can practically hear Fanny’s laughter as she is writing this.
Here’s a good article on Fanny Mendelssohn’s life and times, and here is a piano trio of hers. It’s a good work, indicative of a clear and logical musical mind. Mendelssohn composed this trio in her last year of life, and it was published posthumously. I have always been rather behind in my chamber music listening, but this work seems to me an excellent example of the chamber music of the mid-Romantic era, in the tradition of Fanny’s younger brother, Robert Schumann, and an early Johannes Brahms. Would that she had been as encouraged and allowed to flourish as her brother was!
Feels like it took longer than usual this year, but it’s finally here!
I reserve the right to get sick of the stuff once my traditional cut-off date, St. Patrick’s Day, rolls around (though for some reasons to be revealed later, my tolerance for snow this year might actually be increased). But for right now, I am happy as a clam, because SNOW!!!
Singer Jay Black of Jay and the Americans died several weeks ago at the age of 82. Jay and the Americans were a 60s rock band who had a number of hits, of which this one is most familiar to me, owing to its prominent use during a comedy-action sequence in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. I like this song’s faux-“South of the Border” sound (the little punctuation chords by the brass after each verse are an especially nice touch), though I suppose you really couldn’t get away with this sort of thing these days–appropriation and all–but there is sometimes charm to be found in that sort of thing.
Here is “Come a Little Bit Closer”.
Thank you for the music, Jay Black and bandmates!
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