The other day I saw this joke on Facebook and shared it:
That’s a funny bit about how easy it is to disappear oneself into a rabbit hole…plus, for an 80s kid like me, it’s a fun reference to one of that decade’s iconic pop songs!
And then a friend commented in reference to a slow acoustic version of the song.
Now, for reference, here’s the original (with the equally-iconic video, with comic-book style animation):
“Take On Me” is an 80s kind of bubblegum song: up-tempo, cheerful, and loaded with 80s synthy goodness. It’s ear-wormy as hell; everybody knows this song and it’s impossible not to hum it after hearing it.
But…that slow acoustic version. I had to hear it.
And now, so do you.
This is definitely an interesting take on the song (by the original artist!). The band, a-ha, has a reputation for being a one-hit wonder group in the 80s, but that’s only true if you think of the American pop music scene exclusively. a-ha was actually a big group in Europe for a long time. The band formed in Norway in 1982, and has been active ever since (with a few “break-up” periods here and there, never lasting for more than a few years). a-ha has recorded more than a dozen albums, and they parlayed their pop-cultural cachet from “Take On Me” in 1985 to performing the title song to 1987’s James Bond movie, The Living Daylights.
This live recording, by the way, was recorded in 2017. Thirty-two years after the original song hit MTV like a pipe-wrench through a plate-glass window. (Watch the video of the original, if you don’t get the reference.)
Listening to SiriusXM last week, I was struck by a song I’d never heard before…or rather, a performance of a song I’d never heard before.
“Mr. Bojangles” is most famous as Sammy Davis Jr.’s “signature” song, I suppose; until the other day that was really all I knew about this song. I’m not a big Sammy Davis Jr. listener, so I’m therefore really not very familiar with this song at all. (Disclaimer: That is to say, Sammy Davis Jr. is an artist with whom I am largely unfamiliar. I’m not a big listener of his in the sense that I haven’t heard much of him, not in the sense that I don’t care for his work much. I have almost no opinion.) All I do know of this song is that it has a gently rocking kind of triple-time waltz rhythm and that it’s about a guy named Bojangles who dances.
But last week, SiriusXM’s 1970s channel served up “Mr. Bojangles”, performed by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. I’m not a whole lot more familiar with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band than I am with Sammy Davis Jr., but I know that they’re a country band whose album Will the Circle Be Unbroken is one of the great bluegrass albums of all time, so this got me wondering about “Mr. Bojangles”, which I had always figured was an older song, to be so strongly associated with a Rat Pack guy like Sammy Davis Jr.
Turns out, though, that “Me. Bojangles” was written in 1968 by country singer-songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker. The song got covered a bunch over the next batch of years, but Sammy Davis Jr. really made it his song. For more on that, read this wonderful article–but for now, here’s that rendition that stopped me in my tracks, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and “Mr. Bojangles”.
I’m going to put Something for Thursday on hiatus as well until after Christmas, again for the same reasons: my available time for blogging and listening to music is going to take a bit of a hit in a week or so, and I’d really rather not pressure myself to post stuff out of obligation.
But speaking of obligation, I feel that I should observe the passing of a giant, Stephen Sondheim.
I am by no means an expert on Sondheim’s work, unfortunately. He’s another on a long list of names of artists whose work I need desperately to engage. But I’m familiar with some of his work, no doubt! The lyrics to West Side Story, for example…and this song, which is one of those classics that might feel like it has become something of a cliche by this point. But often you go back and listen to songs that have become cliche, and you realize why they ever lasted long enough to become that way: because they’re great.
Here is Frank Sinatra, singing Stephen Sondheim’s “Send In the Clowns”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWshC8PaL1o
Thanks for the body of work, Stephen Sondheim! I’m going to listen to more of you, I promise.
“Something for Thursday” will return in several weeks!
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!
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.
So I’m trying something new with this post.. I am actually dictating this into my phone’s keyboard app so we’ll see how this works.
I’ve noticed over the years that my favorite sports movies aren’t exactly about sports at all…at least, not in the way we usually think of sports movies. I’m not really into the “chasing the championship” kinds of movies, like Hoosiers; for me the best sports movies always illustrate the world of sports without necessarily pursuing a “quest for the trophy” story. I’m thinking movies like Field of Dreams or Bull Durham.
I missed Moneyball when it came out, but I was highly impressed when I finally watched it. It illustrates one baseball general manager’s work to overcome the unfair nature of Major League Baseball’s economic system, in which small-market teams with little TV revenue are trying, and often failing, to compete with the deep pockets of the New York Yankees. It’s a good movie that packs a lot of data and what should be boring talkiness into a compelling drama. (It’s co-written by Aaron Sorkin and Stephen Zaillian, which is one reason I think it works so well: the presence of another excellent writer helps put Sorkin’s good points on display while hiding his more annoying tendencies.)
Moneyball features a meditative score by Mychael Danna, but what always catches my ear in this movie is the title song, which I have just discovered isn’t even a part of Danna’s work, but a song by an instrumental rock band called This Will Destroy You. The song, called “The Mighty Rio Grande”, is long and dreamlike, meditative and rhythmic and driving. It fits well with the decidedly un-romantic nature of Moneyball‘s approach to baseball: there’s something slow and methodical about baseball, but a look at its use of numbers and statistics reveals a kind of industrial heart to what is generally seen as a pastoral game.
It’s fitting that Moneyball ends with Billy Beane, having turned down a rich offer to be GM of the Red Sox, driving through the drab industrial landscape of outer Oakland.
Here is “The Mighty Rio Grande” by This Will Destroy You.
(Oh, I stopped the dictation thing after the first paragraph. Nifty capability and I do plan to get better at it, but for now I got a bit too “um” and “er” and “uhhh” for my own good. Still, moving forward and all that!)
You probably didn’t realize you wanted to hear a suite of music from The Lord of the Rings arranged for solo piano, but thankfully, I realized that you needed to hear it!
Here you go:
This arrangement is really quite well done, and at points it really highlights some aspects of Howard Shore’s original orchestral work that’s easy to miss, such as the shift in the initial Shire music from the bouncy, Percy Grainger-esque folk sound to the more lyrical tone that follows as we get to know our Hobbit heroes better and get more acquainted with the deeper nature of their pastoral character. A fun listen!
That certain night, the night we met
There was magic abroad in the air
There were angels dining at the Ritz
And a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square….
I have nothing much to add by way of discussion; sometimes it’s good to just get out of the music’s way. Here’s Tori Amos.
I watched the Blue Origin flight yesterday, in which William Shatner joined three others in the very short up-and-back-again space shot yesterday in Jeff Bezos’s interestingly-shaped spacecraft. I have to admit to a certain amount of cynicism as I’ve watched the breathless reactions in recent years to the achievements of a tiny handful of ultra-wealthy white men who have apparently decided that the best thing to do with their vast sums of money, sums that it seems to me a sane society would make it impossible to accumulate in the first place, is to replicate things that the United States government did sixty years ago.
I don’t even mind, really, that this is the way it’s shaping up. The really ground-breaking stuff, the envelope-pushing stuff, needs to be done at the government level, because that’s still the level that can operate in the amounts of capital needed to do the experimental work. If the rich then want to test the waters that have already been explored, that’s great. And that’s what’s been happening…only with a sense of worship about what the Bezoses and the Elon Musks of the world have been accomplishing. I’ve even heard it suggested that maybe now we can just do without NASA entirely, get government out of the space game, and let “Private enterprise” or “the Free Market” or “capitalism” get about the work of really making space exploration happen.
As always, to this I say, “Bollocks.”
But…but!
On the other hand…a spaceship launched yesterday, and it blasted a capsule into space. Then the launching craft didn’t just tumble back to earth to be swallowed by the sea; it fired its thrusters again, extended four landing legs, and landed right where it started. Meanwhile the capsule completed its trajectory, entered space, arced back down, and parachuted back to earth.
The passengers (I trouble to call them “astronauts”, in all honesty) climbed out then. Three of them hugged and high-fived and cheered and hooted and hollered and sprayed each other with champagne. But the fourth? He, Mr. Shatner of Star Trek (and others) fame, stood off to one side, as if gathering his emotions. This flight had moved him deeply; you could see it in the way he stood. Then he started talking, and said, among other things:
“I mean, the little things, the weightlessness, and to see the blue color whip by and now you’re staring into blackness. That’s the thing. This covering of blue is this sheet, this blanket, this comforter of blue around that we have around us. We think ‘oh, that’s blue sky’ and suddenly you shoot through it all of a sudden, like you whip a sheet off you when you’re asleep, and you’re looking into blackness – into black ugliness. And you look down, there’s the blue down there, and the black up there, and there is Mother Earth and comfort and – is there death? Is that the way death is?”
Look, I can be as cynical as anyone about rich people and them treating space like it’s their playground and ignoring the problems of the world and the fact that they profit greatly on some pretty nasty labor practices. But…there’s still space! My heart will never not thrill to a rocket ship blasting away from Earth, or to space passengers disembarking their spacecraft after returning to Earth. And I will never not be moved to hear those returning to Earth talking about the planet’s blue blanket.
Great human achievements are never just so…but they are still great.
Oh yeah, this is supposed to have some music, isn’t it? It’s a Something for Thursday post. Here’s a suite from Bill Conti’s score to The Right Stuff.
Compilation-arrangements that gather selections from Broadway musicals are a long-time staple of “pops” concerts everywhere, and for good reason: when they are done well, there’s a certain kind of charm to these compilations in their own right.
Robert Russell Bennett wrote a number of these arrangements, and his were some of the very best. This is because Bennett was a fine composer on his own, and it’s also because Bennett worked closely with many of the great Broadway composers in the first place. He wasn’t a composer who decided to try his hand at arranging these songs; he was the original arranger, and he was steeped in all that music. Bennett had his finger on the pulse of Broadway for decades, and that‘s why his concert arrangements make for such wonderful listening.
In my orchestra performing days, I only got to play one of Robert Russell Bennett’s compilation arrangements. I’m glad it was this one. The particular show it’s from has its problems, but the songs certainly aren’t one of them. Here is Robert Russell Bennett’s Selections from Camelot.
