1966 Tom Jones: Green Green Grass Of Home

And to round off the year, I'm going to complete a trilogy of childhood reminisces by saying that as a boy, I'd always taken Tom's Welsh background and my knowledge of the film 'How Green Was My Valley' to mean that 'Green Green Grass Of Home' was somehow autobiographical, or at least written to order. It's not of course, it's a much covered Curly Putman country song that comes complete with Putman's trademark schlock emotional overkill that Tom grabs with both hands.

Opening in a mode of warm nostalgia, Tom leads us around the sights of his hometown after a period of absence with the pride and self satisfaction of one who's come home for Christmas. But by verse three the rug is pulled - this has all been a dream and Tom is in fact sitting on death row waiting to be executed when the sun comes up; the only green grass of home he's going to see again is from the other side when they bury him under it.

It's a dubious premise to generate sympathy from and the cheap trick is made cheaper by Tom's bombastic diction that deep fries the song in ham. To get the listener onside in all of this it's wise to mine a little sympathy from the lyric, but Jones' wounded bull bellow shatters any fragility into china shop shards so that when the spoken revelation comes, we feel cheated by his cocksure bluster ("Then ah AWAKE and look around me, at FOUR GRAY WALLS that surround me, and ah realise, that ah, was, only, dreaming")

I'm probably being a tad harsh here though - Tom does what Tom does and to expect anything less is like asking an angry dog to bark quietly. But 'Green Green Grass Of Home' is country mawk at its most mawkish, no matter who's on vocal duties. It's an ace of hearts cynical slice of surface deep exploitation with no regard to subtext morality (just what unspecified crime is he being executed for?) and the whole package makes for a very curious Christmas number one.

1966 The Beach Boys: Good Vibrations

One of my favourite pastimes as a boy was going into our local sweet shop with a fistful of small change and picking out a selection of penny chews. There was always jar after jar to choose from - blackjacks, fruit salads, flying saucers etc, each costing a single penny. Yet though the mix and match possibilities were endless, I was always able to home in on exactly what I wanted without too much dithering and then I was on my way. Not so my mate though who, although generally having half as much money as me, tended to always take twice as long in picking out what he wanted. He'd send the poor shopkeeper mad with his constant chopping and changing until the man would snap and decide for him, usually throwing him out of the shop the same time. There's a fine line between knowing what you want and being overwhelmed into paralysis by unlimited choice (or how far you can push a shopkeeper).

Whenever I hear 'Good Vibrations' I hear the sound of a man walking the wire that divides those two young boys lost in time. Previous releases from the Beach Boys had been glass sharp shards of sunshine on vinyl with head boy Brian Wilson in control of the beach buggy, knowing exactly what went where and which jar to open next to unlock the music in his head. Post 'Good Vibrations', Wilson inhabited the crazed world of the laboured 'SMiLE' project, a that presented so many possibilities of how its undefined scope could be presented that he wasn't able to throw a mental lasso around them all and bring them to heel. And so the shopkeeper in the form of Capitol and the rest of the band did it for him by throwing him out of the studio and releasing the lesser 'Smiley Smile' album instead. It's fair to say that Wilson was never the same man again.

'Good Vibrations' is one of those 'classic' songs I talked about earlier, a monolith of inherent self importance born of fame and familiarity that, from the title in has passed into the national consciousness and which both dares and invites criticism. Not content with defining an idealised image of California with a success that their own official tourist board could only dream of, the Beach Boys were now laying down their own code as to how its inhabitants should behave in a song that bursts with more shapes and colour than a row of jarred sweets on a shelf. So where to start?

Well for me the key to the song is the scene setting, dream-like opening of the girl who catches the eye as she walks by - "I love the colourful clothes she wears, and the way the sunlight plays upon her hair". This unnamed girl is an impressionist painting made flesh; the focus is not her eyes or her legs or her (gulp!) tits and ass so beloved of latter day rap from that same West coast, but a serendipitous arrangement of colour, shape, sound and scent ("I hear the sound of a gentle word, on the wind that lifts her perfume through the air") that come together at one fleeting yet precise point in time.

It's the same love preceding sensory overload that XTC went for in 'Senses Working Overtime' and which left Andy Partridge gobsmacked - "I can see, hear, smell, touch, taste, I've got one, two, three, four, five senses working overtime". And like Partridge's struggle "to take this all in", the observer in 'Good Vibrations' changes perception into a personal physical reality as the song grows a backbone with the "I'm pickin' up good vibrations, she's giving me excitations" chorus that builds to an orgasm of excitement ("Good good good good vibrations") until it all gets too much and has to be blotted out ("Close my eyes, she's somehow closer now") before the cycle begins again.

Nothing on 'Good Vibrations' sounds forced, overcooked or clever for the sake of being clever - despite the sum of it's innumerable parts, everything has its place the end result is a self contained work that floats on air in the same way that a theremin floats over the song's conclusion to express joy when mere words run out. For a single of it's length and complexity, 'Good Vibrations' is also as delicate and inconsequential as the wings of a butterfly. The lyrics and tune couldn't stand up by themselves - without the music (and more importantly, the moods it generates), 'Good Vibrations' would crumble like a vampire in sunlight (if you don't believe me, check out the 'rock' version cut by The Troggs in 1975; the aural equivalent of recalling a recent dream to a mate only to find it loses all its charm, logic or personality in the telling and instead becomes something faintly ludicrous and downright embarrassing).

And it's success is all down to Brian; those Impressionist artists were wont to throw paint around with abandon to capture a mood or moment, but Wilson's 'teenage symphony' was spliced together from hours of session tapes with a razor blade, cutting block and the single minded vision of a genius. Bootleg label 'Sea Of Tunes' have released hours of music from the sessions which offers a glimpse of the sheer volume of material that was recorded, sifted and discarded in the pursuit of perfection.

Brian would have doubtless reduced my shopkeeper to tears, but at this point in time and left to his own devices then he would have got there in the end and selected the perfect mix of sweets for his money. The tragedy is that this crystal clarity of vision would soon cloud, the choices would become less easy to make, work on his masterpiece 'SMiLE' would be abandoned and the shopkeepers in their various guises would keep him out of the store for pretty much the rest of his career, save for the occasional glimpse of the counter. Which is why I always hear an element of tragedy amongst the sheer joy of 'Good Vibrations' - a last perfect slam out of the park before the ball became too hard to see and an incongruous mix of emotions that always stops me in dead my tracks in the same way a pretty girl once stopped Brian in his.

1966 The Four Tops: Reach Out, I'll Be There

Growing up, I didn't get to hear a lot of Motown. Glam rock yes, prog rock yes, but not much Motown. Yes, I was familiar with the bigger hits of Stevie Wonder and The Supremes etc via a process of casual osmosis, but to me it was all just so much black pop for black kids the way the Bay City Rollers and The Osmonds were white pop for white kids. Moving on through the years when my tastes diverged and my appreciation grew keener, I still regarded Motown's output as a box of soft centres dripping with an 'ooh baby baby' goo that were fine as a rare treat but weren't designed for a binge and it wasn't until 1986 that my eyes were opened fully.

Why 1986? Well two things; firstly, and on the back of a television advert for Levi jeans that wallowed in shameless nostalgia, Marvin Gaye's 'I Heard It Through The Grapevine' became ubiquitous for a few months. I'd heard the song before of course via that same process of osmosis, and I also knew The Slits' punky reggae deconstruction, but this was the first time I genuinely 'heard' Gaye's song and I was knocked flat at how he made betrayal and suspicion sound so goddamn sexy.

Secondly, and a few months later, Billy Bragg released his 'Levi Stubbs Tears' single which, being as obsessed with all things indie as I was at that point meant it couldn't fail to blip my radar even if I had no idea who or what Levi Stubbs was (to my eternal shame I'm happy to confess that I thought he had something to do with those jeans Marvin's ghost was flogging). Curiosity then led me to buy a cheap Four Tops compilation and, if 'I Heard It Through The Grapevine' weakened my jaw, song one side one's 'Reach Out, I'll Be There' sent it crashing through the floor.

It begins deceptively enough with a sweet flute motif and a galloping horse refrain that could have soundtracked any B movie Western, but a drumcrack announces the immediate arrival of Mr Levi Stubbs to supply one of the most astonishing lead vocals you're ever likely to hear and with one sweep all bets are off - forget the sugary goo, Stubbs goes at the lyric the way a chainsaw goes at a tree with a performance that Greil Marcus once memorably compared to the sound of a soldier calling out to his wounded buddy in a firefight. It's a good image, but I see Stubbs' bark as an administering of some tough love - lest we forget, Stubbs isn't reaching to help, he's demanding somebody reaches out.

And to encourage co-operation he attacks like a drill sergeant - "Now if you FEEL that you CAN'T go on, Because ALL of your hope is GONE", bawling out a litany of failings (there are some backing singers in there somewhere too but Stubbs pays them no mind) before falling silent to allow four crucial heartbeats to pass until a tension busting 'HAH!' provides the 'eureka' moment to usher in the life affirming resolution of the chorus. "'I'll be there with a love that will shelter you, I'll be there with a love that will see you through", it's a statement of such love and delivered with such generosity it can, depending on your mood, elicit smiles or tears.

'Reach Out, I'll Be There' is a gut punch of a song, as sandpaper raw as the emotion it carries. Stubbs may be addressing a "girl" in the lyric but in truth he could be speaking to anybody - wife, father, lover, brother, potential suicide jumper - it doesn't matter; the message is there for anybody looking for a totem of stability or a rock to lean on when everything else has gone to seed. Which is a summary of events in that Billy Bragg song, the story of a woman physically crippled by a violent lover and the strength and joy she derives from listening to Stubbs' secular message of hope and support.* Which is why 'Reach Out, I'll Be There' isn't just one of the jewels in Motown's crown, it's an iconic masterpiece that just keeps on giving.


* "When the world falls apart some things stay in place
She takes off the Four Tops tape and puts it back in its case"

1966 Jim Reeves: Distant Drums

There's a delicious irony at work here; it's 1965 and three number ones from the end of the year when Ken Dodd's 'Tears' pulls a handbrake turn on the relentless forward momentum of the music in the charts to send listeners back in time to an almost pre-war era of slow dances and Brylcreem. Fast forward twelve months and three number ones from the end of a year of quite startling number ones and we find Jim Reeves pulling hard on that same brake to once more send the space/time continuum 180 degrees until we're facing the other way.

Like Doddy, 'Distant Drums' pitches up from nowhere - country star Jim Reeves was no stranger to the UK charts, but he'd been in his grave two years already (meaning this wasn't carried on the wave of grief and goodwill that took 'Three Steps To Heaven' or 'Voodoo Chile' to the top). And though the song's war theme had a certain contemporary relevance with the escalation of the Vietnam conflict, that was largely an American concern and no British were being sent aboard. A mystery then as to why this was taken to our national hearts so readily.

'Distant Drums' can be read as an unofficial prequel to 'Tie A Yellow Ribbon'; Jim is hearing the distant drums and bugle calls of a war he may have to fight in and so he urges his Mary to marry him now "for now is all the time there may be". As a song, 'Distant Drums' is cynical in it's emotional manipulation and almost blind acceptance of war ("And if they call for me to come, then I must go and you must stay"). Reeves treats the lyric with respect, but it's the surface reading of a bored parent reading his child a bedtime story but investing no depth or involvement. True, 'Distant Drums' doesn't allow much room for interpretation, but its blandness has the appeal and functionality of an army recruitment poster - that "If you love me Mary, Mary marry me" is too pat to be truly involving, it grates in its neatness and the cartoon parps of bugle calls are a cartoonish romanticism of conflict that's borderline offensive.

Try as I might, I cannot - will not - accept that the same public who bought 'Paint It, Black', 'Out Of Time' et al also handed over their cash at the tills for this. There are battle lines that would have been drawn then once drawn not crossed and I think if 'Distant Drums' is to serve any purpose now it's to illustrate the sheer numbers of the public who were willing to buy a song they liked. But whatever stream of common consciousness that this managed to dip its toes into in 1966 has long dried up and it's a song that, once it starts to play, I can't wait to be over.

1966 Small Faces: All Or Nothing

There's a great generosity about these mid sixties number ones listings. Away from the dominant axis of The Beatles and The Stones, there's a sense of fair play in that most of the major British names that made the decade swing all have at least one entry recorded for posterity. The Hollies, The Kinks, The Troggs, Dusty Springfield, The Tremoloes, Procul Harum, Manfred Mann, The Searchers, The Dave Clark Five et al all have (or will) pop up on these lists to help define the era that's collectively known as 'The Sixties'. Fair, but it has to be said that the tracks that did make the top were not always the artist's best or most representative work, an observation that's highly applicable to uber mods The Small Faces.

'All Or Nothing' is a song of promise that ultimately fails to deliver. "I thought you'd listen to my reason, but now I see you don't hear a thing. Got to make you see how it's got to be" lead Small Face Steve Mariott lays down the law to an errant girlfriend over an opening guitar motif that dwindles like a coda but builds into something more raucous as soon as he runs out of things to say. Which unfortunately comes at around the 1:40 mark where a "ba ba ba" middle eight gives way repetitions of the title that veer from threatening ("I ain't telling you no lie girl, so don't just sit there and cry girl") to something bordering on self pity ("All or nothing ...... For me, for me, for me....we're not children"). A drunkard ranting at his girlfriend outside the pub for flirting with the barman, it's neither pleasant nor sympathetic and it wears itself out long before the song limps to a close. 'All Or Nothing' sounds half finished, an initial idea that went nowhere but was stitched up into a single anyway. It gave them their sole number one, and by definition their 'Greatest Hit', but even so it's always a bit part player on any 'Best Of'.

1966 The Beatles: Eleanor Rigby/Yellow Submarine

“We live as we dream, alone”

Yet another double A side from The Beatles and a 'taster' for the then forthcoming 'Revolver' album (and it only seems like yesterday I was talking about 'Rubber Soul'). This time, both songs would appear on that album, though in a perverse twist they'd turn out to be the two least representative examples of the music on that album.

Which isn't to say that that was the sole reason for the pairing - it's passed into common knowledge that we won't be meeting the 'Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane' twofer on this road, but if we did then I'd be pointing out that the disparate mix of experimental psychedelia ('Strawberry Fields Forever') and almost vaudeville nostalgia ('Penny Lane') were united by a chord of childhood memory that ran through the hole at the centre of the single to join the both sides. There's a symmetry there that belied the actual sounds in those grooves. Similarly, both 'Eleanor Rigby' and 'Yellow Submarine' compliment the other with one a song of friendship and camaraderie while the other is a sorry tale of loneliness and social alienation.

Unique at the time in The Beatles' canon, 'Eleanor Rigby' does not actually have any of the band playing on it; the spare string backing is provided by an octet of studio musicians and arranged by McCartney. George Martin scored it and in the sharp and brusque sweeps of violin I can hear more than a shade of Bernard Hermann's score for 'Psycho'; there's horror in 'Eleanor Rigby' too, but it doesn't come from a knife. Combined with her very name, its busy despair provides a vivid pen portrait of how Eleanor must have been in life - a key element of John Major's picture postcard vision Britain as a "land where warm beer is served to the distant echo of leather on willow and the tring-a-ling of bicycle bells rung by spinsters on their way to Holy Communion", an idealised, stereotypical image that McCartney flips to give a taste of the reality beneath.

A hymn to the 'lonely people', McCartney précis the Rigby's life in a series of beautifully underwritten images drawn with the black ink precision of a draughtsman's pen. To my mind, it shares bloodline with Ralph McTell's 'Streets Of London', but whilst McTell was showing the loneliness beneath the surface to provoke a reaction from the listener ("So how can you tell me you're lonely?"), McCartney's lyric is far more observational. Like the ghosts leading Scrooge through his present and future, McCartney offers up a series of interlinked scenes involving two characters for us to examine, but provides no comment on what he reveals. "Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been"- there are a lot of gaps there; why is Eleanor picking up the rice? To tidy the church before Communion? Or is it a symbolic of her longing for a possible life she never had? McCartney doesn't say, but he doesn't need to. We know.

Then there's Father McKenzie, alone with his God "writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear. No one comes near". Did he know Eleanor I wonder? Did he notice her at church at any time before she actually died there? And being the only mourner at her funeral - was he there as friend or because of his duty? McCartney doesn't say, but it leaves a nagging feeling of something wasted, of two with the potential to have found happiness had they been aware of the need in each other. But it's too late now, and McCartney presents a devastating 'well that's that' summation at the closing "Father McKenzie, wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave. No one was saved" that's heartbreaking. Their God has failed them both. The horror, the horror.

What would Eleanor have given to join the party on the flip side I wonder? A world away from the spare chamber piece of 'Eleanor Rigby', 'Yellow Submarine' is a smorgasbord of sound and colour that paints an arms linked portrait of friendship and togetherness as told by a man who left Eleanor's lonely town behind for a life on sea. Or under it. Bill Hicks did a memorable skit on how The Beatles were so strung out on drugs in 1966 that they not only wrote a sing about a yellow submarine, they even let Ringo sing it.* I've no doubt Bill's tongue was in his cheek, but even if it wasn't I'd suggest there's a far greater clarity and purpose behind this than an acid fuelled daydream.

Because what interests me most about 'Yellow Submarine' is the effort that went in to it; foe something that is essentially a children's sing song, this is nevertheless The Beatles with the lid off, pulling rabbit after rabbit out of the hat in a Heath Robinson style that Wikipedia sums up very well:

"On the second session the studio store cupboard was ransacked for special effects, which included chains, a ship's bell, tap dancing mats, whistles, hooters, waves, a tin bath filled with water, wind and thunderstorm machines, as well as a cash register,which was later used on Pink Floyd's song "Money". Lennon blew through a straw into a pan of water to create a bubbling effect, McCartney and Lennon talked through tin cans to create the sound of the captain's orders, at 1:38-40 in the song, Ringo stepped outside the doors of the recording room and yelled like a sailor acknowledging "Cut the cable! Drop the cable!", which was looped into the song afterwards, and Abbey Road employees John Skinner and Terry Condon twirled chains in a tin bath to create water sounds".

Put simply, it's something I doubt could have been recorded at any time prior to 1966. Drugs may have aided by loosening their minds, but with their star in such an ascendancy they were allowed free reign to create such mayhem in the studio just to furnish a pop song, something I very much doubt they or anybody else would have been allowed to do even a few years previously. But put even simpler, 'Yellow Submarine' is a song that never fails to make me smile. And that's good enough.

I opened this review with a quote from Joseph Conrad's 'Heart Of Darkness' because I think it neatly sums up the dark heart of the world of 'Eleanor Rigby'; Eleanor lived 'in a dream' too, and then she died alone. But change the 'Of' of the source to 'And' to get 'Heart And Darkness' and you get a description of the duality at the core of this single. Would Eleanor have been saved had she'd been asked aboard that submarine, and would she have even gone? If I know Eleanor then probably not. On both counts. But away from Conrad's pessimism, that doesn't mean there's no joy to be had from companionship and friendship. And that's all I have to say on that. A magnificent pairing.


* And when Starr sings "and our friends are all aboard", he means it - Brian Jones, Donovan, Pattie Boyd, Marianne Faithfull and Neil Aspinall are all there singing along in the background.

1966 The Troggs: With A Girl Like You

There was always something apt and neatly symmetrical about a band called The Troggs scoring a hit with a song called 'Wild Thing'. Just written down it kind of reviewed itself, and when it started playing how could anybody be surprised to hear it sounded like it did (i.e. caveman wild). The same band pitching up with 'With A Girl Like You' doesn't present anything so clear cut in terms of expectations - what sort of girl would a Trogg fall for I wonder and how would they express it? Clumsily as it turns out - 'With A Girl Like You' is a pastiche of American pop played with forced restraint by a band sounding like they're halfways through an anger management therapy program.

The Troggs try to moderate their usual clenched fist touch, but there's a definite heavy handedness about all this that clumps where it should float - take those 'Ba Ba Ba Ba Baaa's, usually a safe bet as background dimmer switch to lighten the mood of any pop but here they hit like errant slaps to the face. But that's ok really, I've always enjoyed the rough coyness of Reg Presley's vocal - "I tell by the way dress that you're so refined, and by the way you talk that you're just my kind" - it's the hard as nails docker sidling up to the pretty girl at the bar and forgetting how to speak for fear of looking soft. Love doesn't have to come dressed as a sonnet and 'With A Girl Like You' is no less genuine or charming for wearing hob nailed boots.