Tag: Something For Thursday

 For some reason I have Jim Croce on the mind, so here are two of my favorite songs of his. Both are sad songs about the endings of relationships. “Operator (That’s Not The Way It Feels)” is the better known of the two. It’s one side of the conversation between someone who is pining for a lost love, and the operator on the other end of the phone line as the singer searches for that lost love. Why? Not to catch up with them or to learn about their new life and new relationship (with “my best old ex-friend Ray”), but from a standpoint of vengefulness. He just wants to show them that “I’ve overcome the blow, I’ve learned to take it well”…but in the very same breath, without even a pause, he admits that he wishes his words could convince himself. He sings all this in a kind of breathless rush; Croce was very good at using different melodies and even different rhythms to suggest complex meanings in his songs.

Ultimately, he doesn’t make the call, concluding “There’s nobody there I really wanted to talk to.” He closes the call by telling the operator “You can keep the dime,” which I suppose is something that would have to be explained to listeners today, like, oh, that line from “Easter Parade”: “You’ll find that you’re in the rotogravure.”

The other song might be sadder. “Photographs and Memories” isn’t sung to some third party, like a telephone line operator. It’s addressed to a lover long gone, though it’s clear from the lyrics that the lover isn’t there to hear it. Is the singer going through old belongings and thinking about how that’s all that’s left? Maybe.

Photographs and memories
Christmas cards you sent to me
All that I have are these
To remember you

Memories that come at night
Take me to another time
Back to a happier day
When I called you mine

But we sure had a good time
When we started way back when
Morning walks and bedroom talks
Oh how I loved you then

There’s a beautiful sadness to the tune in the first two verses, but then Croce does something else with the chorus: he adopts a more cheerful tune as he remembers that “We sure had a good time….” But the verse ends on an unresolved chord, and so does the song. It’s like he can only get so close to finding happiness in his old memories before he returns to sad reverie. There’s something about sad memories of relationships that ended badly, isn’t there? You can remember the good times, but somehow the sadness takes them over and you almost feel guilty for remembering the earlier times with a smile.

Anyway, here’s Jim Croce with “Operator (That’s Not The Way It Feels)” and “Photographs and Memories”. Oh, and pay attention to Croce’s guitar work. There’s some very deft playing here, especially in “Operator”, where the guitar almost forms a kind of countermelody to the tune he is singing.

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 Here’s a deep cut from a classic musical! Singin’ in the Rain would be my favorite musical of all time if not for My Fair Lady, and like all the greatest musicals, it is packed with songs and numbers, some of which are classics in their own right. But there are several other numbers in the film that aren’t as well-known, for one reason or another. One of these is the “Beautiful Girl Montage”.

This number appears in the film just after the silent film industry has been absolutely rocked by the first “talkie”, The Jazz Singer, which is forcing all of the studios to adapt to the new sound format. Among other things, the arrival of sound in motion pictures kick-started the Golden Age of the Hollywood musical, which this montage illustrates. But after a brief montage in which several songs (“I’ve Got a Feeling You’re Fooling”, “The Wedding of the Painted Doll”, and “Shall I?”) are mashed together (mash-ups aren’t at all new!) in a pretty frantic, zippy sequence before the tempo slows and we settle into a single number: “Beautiful Girl”.

In the film, “Beautiful Girl” is a number that is being shot for a new movie by the studio that our main characters work for. It’s kind of an odd-duck of a number that features exactly none of the main leads, except for Debbie Reynolds, who is in the number only as one of the “girls” who looks adoringly at the guy who sings the song (who is only seen in the film long enough to perform this number).

As for “the guy who sings the song”, he’s an actor named Jimmy Thompson who seems to have had very little by way of a career. He had thirteen credits, the biggest one probably as one of the crewmen in Forbidden Planet. He would show up in another Gene Kelly musical, Brigadoon, but for his one big number there, “I’ll Go Home With Bonnie Jean,” his voice was dubbed. Come to that, I don’t know if he was also dubbed for “Beautiful Girl”, in which he seems to have a bigger, actually impressive voice.

“Beautiful Girl” is not one of the more popular numbers from Singin’ in the Rain, but I’ve always loved it as a bit of scene-setting and world-building, with its 1920s aesthetic. It doesn’t really move things along other than to provide and in-universe reason for Debbie Reynolds’s Kathy Selden to be in the same place as Gene Kelly’s Don Lockwood, but so what? I’ve never been one to insist that the plot must be advanced at all moments. Plus, I love some of the wordplay in this song and it’s swinging tune.

Here’s the “Beautiful Girl Montage” from Singin’ in the Rain.

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 Here’s Judy Garland, because…Judy Garland.

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 Classic rock is often on the playlist at Casa Jaquandor, for many reasons. This is the popular music I grew up with, the “soundtrack of my youth” as it were, though in my case, not as strongly as for others (because the main part of the soundtrack of my youth was John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, and their comrades). Nevertheless, I couldn’t help hearing a great deal of classic rock as it was new, in restaurants and on car stereos and in bars and camps and generally all over the place. I tend to associate a lot of this music with the road, since the car radio was often the way much of this stuff was consumed, and between moving and road trips a-plenty, we spent a lot of time in the car when I was a kid. (In and out of it…I don’t want to convey an idea of endless automobile-related experiences as a kid, but my parents were of a general mindset that if you live within a few hours of something neat, why on Earth wouldn’t you drive there and check it out? More than once, if it turned out to be really cool? I have adopted much the same mindset later in life.)

Oddly, though I’ve heard a great deal of classic rock and many of the songs are familiar or even well-known to me, I am often not very good at all at knowing which band did what song, or even what each song is! The age of Google, with the ability to search for song lyrics and then mobile devices whose search engines are equipped with song identifiers, has been a boon for people like me. Here’s one song that shows up a lot on the Pandora classic rock station The Wife plays or on the Sirius XM classic rock station I enjoy sometimes. For years I’ve known neither the name of the song nor which band it is, but I enjoy its lyrics about failure to commit to a relationship and yet wanting the relationship to endure, and I love the song’s opening guitar hooks and the general beat of the song. This isn’t just the soundtrack of my youth; in a lot of ways songs like this are the soundtrack of the road trips of my youth.

And to think, I didn’t know the name of this song, or who played it, until yesterday. Go figure. Here is “Sister Golden Hair”, by America.

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 Sorry to be so late with this! Crazy week here at Casa Jaquandor (nothing bad, just busy). Anyway, here’s something cool: the “official video” for Elton John’s classic song “Tiny Dancer”. The song dates from the 1970s, well before the notion of music videos, so this is a newer development: a short film that tracks several people through their daily lives in Los Angeles.

One of my favorite uses of “Tiny Dancer” comes in the Cameron Crowe film Almost Famous, in which an underage teenage kid is using journalist credentials to tour with a rock band called Stillwater. The band isn’t good enough to be an A-list band, but they aren’t good enough to just peter out, either. This scene comes around halfway through, depicting the point where the initial excitement of being on tour has worn off and all that’s left for now is the grind.

Here’s that scene:

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 A Zoom performance, by the reigning crew of Wicked.

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 I’ve made it one of my many missions in life to sing the praises of the United States Marine Band, because they’re great, but let’s not forget the other armed services! The United States Army Band is also really good. Here they are, playing the theme from The Mandalorian.

I love those recorders at the beginning! The recorder is often a first musical instrument for kids (I had one!), so it’s easy to forget that the recorder is a serious instrument capable of serious musicmaking.

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 It’s fun to look up live performances of anime music on YouTube, because Japan takes this stuff very seriously but also does a lot of interesting stuff with this sort of thing. If you want just standard orchestral renditions, you can find that…but if you want to hear your favorite anime theme played by an orchestra and a marching band as it marches through a stadium, you can find that, too!

Here’s a concert performance of Joe Hisaishi’s main themes from Laputa: Castle in the Sky. This one is somewhere in the middle in terms of how flashy it is. I love this music and I’d love to hear one of these concerts one day!

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