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Somebody once commented that the entire career of Jeff Lynne and the Electric Light Orchestra consisted of little more than endless attempts to re-write 'I Am The Walrus'.* Bitchy perhaps, but it contains no small kernel of truth. Yet much of the immediate, post Pepper Magical Mystery world inhabited by The Beatles always seemed to me the sound of a different, lesser band riding on the Sergeant's coattails to produce a pastiche sound of that source material which ticked all the boxes but fell short as a whole. Much like ELO and 'I Am The Walrus' in fact.
It's this studio enhanced jiggery pokery that gives 'Hello, Goodbye' sufficient substance to make it stand upright. And it needed it - it's as if McCartney was out to prove that whatever Lennon couldn't do on 'All You Need Is Love', he couldn't do either; like Lennon's song, 'Hello, Goodbye' is a phantom of a song with a fragment of a lyric that wraps itself limpet tight around it's own catchiness. Unlike Lennon's tune however, 'Hello, Goodbye' has precious little to say for itself beyond showing off its own sparkle.
"You say yes, I say no, you say stop and I say go, go, go" sings McCartney unhelpfully, but it's just an excuse to get to the steaming "I don't know why you say goodbye I say hello. Hello, hello" chorus/middle eight that repeats like a mantra and is kept fresh by some powerhouse key changes, a monster false ending and George Martin's smoke and mirrors production that shovels fake jewels with abandon to hide the base metal beneath. The chug-a-lug "Hela, heba helloa" outro anticipates the arms-liked sing song of 'Hey Jude', but though this party is fun while it lasts, the pleasure doesn't linger long.
* Which despite being the stronger song by a king's ransom, was relegated to a definite B side rather than a double A. Which is why I will say no more about it here.
From the same pen* as the previous 'Baby Now That I've Found You', 'Let The Heartaches Begin' is a volte face from that song's celebration of finding love to...well, the heartache of losing it. In terms of presentation too, the fixed grin glee is swapped for a string swept, minor key ballad as all six foot seven of Mr Baldry pours a gallon jug of tears over the listener.
Baldry has the voice for the blues lord only knows, but I find his performance on this as insular to the point of impenetrability. "And with each glass of wine I feel a glow, and very soon I know I was a fool to let my baby go" - Baldry is the drunk on the stairs at the party, wallowing in his own self pity just waiting to buttonhole the passing unwary to unload his tale of woe until he's sing speak babbling on the final round of the chorus.
Nobody likes a good wallow in self pity more than me, but this is all one way traffic; Baldry ostensibly wants sympathy, but his downtrodden demeanour suggests he's getting some masochistic pleasure from the act of suffering itself until his cry of "So let the heartaches begin" is less the dread of another lonely night than a warm welcome to an old friend. As a song, 'Let The Heartaches Begin' presents scope for a read between the lines subtext, a back story waiting to be told, but Baldry effectively smothers it with his open wound of a vocal. And I say 'effectively' because it IS effective. On the first verse anyway, but by the time the song ends I kind of wish he'd go away and bother somebody else. Lisa Stansfield maybe.
*Tony Macaulay and John MacLeod. We'll meet Macaulay again as the man behind The New Seekers' 'You Won't Find Another Fool Like Me', David Soul's 'Don't Give Up on Us' and Edison Lighthouse's 'Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)'.
You don't see too many home-grown bands imitating Motown. Whilst many sixties acts were happy to plunder American blues and R&B then put the likes of Muddy Waters and Bobby Womack through their own filters and make them more palatable to a white audience, Motown tends not to be so open to the same effect. Why? Well probably because a song and performance like 'It's All Over Now' offers scope enough for the rough edges to be knocked off (watered down even) and replaced by architraves anew that are part imitation, part imitation. But to apply the same process to the more poppy sounds from the motor city will give you......what exactly? In more often than not already offering insanely catchy pop, the main stars of the label never were an acquired taste and we Brits were happy to take them to our hearts exactly as they were; we didn't need a Mick Jagger to re-interpret and sell it back to us as a second hand knock off.
On 'Baby Now That I've Found You', British band The Foundations embraced the Motown sound with such a crushing hug that it comes as no small surprise to find out that they ARE in fact British. From the off, The Foundations pitch up as the missing link between The Four Tops and The Temptations and in going about their business here they are utterly convincing. And I think that's an important point to make; after writing the entry for '(Reach Out) I'll Be There' the other week, I listened again to the first four Four Tops albums back to back and I'm confident in saying that 'Baby Now That I've Found You' is better than at least 50% of the material on them (and as good as 75% of it).
In terms of the complete package that is - Clem Curtis's vocal falls somewhere between the sandpaper intensity of a Levi Stubbs and the sweetness of an Eddie Kendricks, but he's not called on to carry this alone; the finest of Motown recordings would be held together by an iron mesh of space filling harmony vocals, but here Curtis is constantly buoyed by a claphappy white boy stomp that almost pre-empts the bash of glam but not to the point of swamping the soul.
Glam yes - there's a definite seventies aura surrounding The Foundations and 'Baby Now That I've Found You', it's exactly the sort of one shot at the title performance that would appear on and win New Faces or Opportunity Knocks in much the way that other Brit soul bands The Real Thing and Sweet Sensation would in that decade. But whereas the faint whiff of cabaret pegged both of these acts as being from these shores, The Foundations (on this at least) managed to hold a mirror up to their inspirations and play them at their own game.
'Always different, always the same', so commented John Peel on The Fall, but in essence it could be applied equally to The Bee Gees too; over the decades the brothers have dabbled in a cross section of genres, yet as soon as the harmonies kick in then there's no doubt who's behind it. And so it is here; 'Massachusetts' is lush, orchestrated pop that walks a similar line to 'Green Green Grass Of Home', a regret tinged longing for a place the narrator may or may not see again. Unlike the morbid specifics of Tom's song though, 'Massachusetts' comes shrouded in vague mystery that stretches all the way to its title - the Gibbs chose it simply because of the way it sounded in the context of their song; few would be able to point to it on map and when the Gibbs sing "Feel I'm going back to Massachusetts" then they may as well be heading back to a suburb of Mars.
But then why are they heading back? To "do the things I wanna do" and see a girl "I left her standing on her own". Jilted at the altar perhaps? We're never told, and that's the beauty of the song I think; without being pinned down to a strong narrative we're able to replace 'Massachusetts' with our own totemistic time and place 'rosebud' we'd like to revisit or reprise - who isn't egotistical enough to believe that soaring "the lights all went out" when our own mistake was made and will stay out until the wrong is put right? 'Massachusetts' shamefully plays to the human condition of conscience, memory and the search for lost time but offers no respite to it - the repeat to fade at close of "I will remember Massachusetts" suggests that despite best intentions he never will get back there, giving credence to the notion 'you can't go home again'.
This isn't a film blog I know, but it's useful at this point let you know that if pushed on what I think is the worst film I've ever seen, I tend to plump for 'Elizabethtown'. Which might surprise many; after all, there are clearly plenty of objectively 'worse' films out there than Cameron Crowe's 2005 epic, but when you weigh in the balance the big studio production, the acclaimed director, the (then at least) A list stars in their pomp then the sprawling, uninvolving, emotionless, directionless, humourless, cod-philosophical car crash of celluloid waste is one of the most painfully unenjoyable things I have ever sat through. For its entire 123 minute running time, nothing about it works. Absolutely nothing.
And so to 'The Last Waltz'. Again, I'm not going to say that it's the worst number one we're going to come across here because it isn't. Not by a good margin. But like 'Elizabethtown', nothing about it works. Absolutely nothing. Les Reed and Peter Sullivan aim for easy Bacharach pop on the opening verse, but Humperdinck steamrollers his way over it with an eye bulging intent that crushes any subtlety with the grace of an elephant in a field of daisies and it's soon abandoned in favour of balladic carpet bombing that reduces sentiment to cold hard rubble in its wake.
Not that there is much subtlety to be wrung - Hump spies a girl across a dancefloor, they dance, they get it on ("IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII fell in love with you") but he's left heartbroken when the "flame of love" dies. But just as it all gets too much he pulls himself together to go off piste with some bi-polar "la la la la la" - ing that only need him to stick his fingers in his ears child-like to demonstrate he's not actually listening anymore. Which makes two of us I guess. Awkward, stilted, bombastic - 'The Last Waltz' is an empty vessel making a lot of noise, an awful single of boom and bust that's as emotionally empty as the hole in the middle of it. But at least it's two hours shorter than 'Elizabethtown'.
It's a useful point of contrast - from a song that in spite of its shortcomings has epitomised an idealisation of the sixties by simple virtue of the passing of time to one that sought to celebrate it on the hour it was released; 'San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair)' was written by 'Papa' John Phillips to help promote the Monterey Pop Festival he had a key role in organising. A self aware counter culture self promoting is always going to wave a red flag of warning with me and so it goes here as McKenzie reels off the virtues of the era in a manner that's now as clichéd as a fancy dress shop 'hippie' costume of flares, kaftan and headband (with flowers, natch).
"If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. If you're going to San Francisco, you're going meet some gentle people there" - I don't know how much passing trade the city got from the UK record buying public, but I've always found McKenzie's wide eyed pigeonholing of a generation slightly patronising, and its bland descriptiveness fails to promote the new culture of youth in any way that's truly engaging - at least the shameless 1967 cash-in from the UK's own The Flowerpot Men 'Lets Go To San Francisco' injected an air of yearning aspiration to the notion that made you want to tag along for the ride. McKenzie doesn't. In fact, 'San Francisco' makes it sound all very cliquey - you might "meet" the gentle people, but unless you're part of the in-crowd then you're going to be locked out of the love-in.
Was San Francisco in 1967 one big free love extravaganza staffed by the gentle people? Is that really all there was to the place? I don't know, but the songs and imagery of the time and place that have been filtered through the decades have cemented it in a freeze frame of popular consciousness like the bodies in togas preserved at Pompei. Closer to home, I can compare it with shops of twenty first century London selling picture postcards of 'punks' decked out in green hair and safety pins. In other words, idealised nostalgia as out of time as it was inaccurate in its own. And though I lack first hand knowledge, a comparison with the music coming from the bands on that stage in Monterey (Jefferson Airplane, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding et al, none of whom can be described as 'gentle') means I can't help but feel 'San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair)' is singing from the same hymn sheet.
For the first live global television link in June 1967 ( 'Our World'), The Beatles were asked to contribute a song on behalf of the United Kingdom. In many ways it's the Eurovision Song Contest redux, albeit on a larger scale and without the contest element - a broadcast to such a mass audience needed something that was going to garb and hold the attention across cultural divides from the off, and in its favour that's the one thing that 'All You Need Is Love' does well - the title itself has become a neat and convenient summation of exactly what the sixties were meant to be 'about' and ironically, provides a legacy rather more lasting than the song itself.
When the surviving Beatles reconvened in 1995 to oversee the Anthology project, there was much ballyhoo beforehand regarding the 'new' song ('Free As A Bird') that was being used to promote it. Initially a low key, lo-fi demo of Lennon at the piano, The Beatles treated the fragment as if he'd just "gone for a cup of tea" and has tasked them with finishing it off. Yet for all the 'novelty' of the undertaking, I see 'All You Need Is Love' as arriving via a similar process some thirty years earlier; here Lennon provides an anthemic chorus and some guide lyric verses as a bridge to get there, but it's left to George Martin and the studio to craft the doggerel into something more substantial.
Doggerel? Did I say that? Well Ok, 'All You Need Is Love' is a trick bag of horns, orchestra, overdubbed drums, a trumpet solo, a snatch of 'In The Mood' and a blast of 'La Marseillaise', all designed to dress up sloganeering as a proper song, a move Lennon himself would revisit on 'Power To The People', 'Give Peace A Chance', 'Merry Christmas (War Is Over)' etc. It works up to a point, but the strain of repetition shows early and it's no surprise that 'All You Need Is Love' is forced to fade out in an arms linked singalong as Martin chucks every kitchen sink he can put his hands on into the mix to try and keep interest levels from waning as a shouted reprise of 'She Loves You' wades against the current to close it.
Yes, 'She Loves You' - a sarcastic piss take, or a longing throwback to an earlier time when simplicity had it's own virtue in letting quality songwriting speak for itself? Because The Beatles would never have been able to record 'All You Need Is Love' in 1963, there's just not enough song to go round four people. And with no song to speak of all that's left is that title, a title that, as I mentioned above, has transformed into a sixties artefact of greater or lesser cultural/iconic importance. It's a pedestalled piece in the museum of common cultural knowledge and part of the pithy soundbite yin of a CND symbol, Woodstock, Carnaby Street and 'flower power' to the pithy soundbite yang of Vietnam, Kent State University, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Prague Spring or Christine Keeler straddling a chair. As a song from The Beatles, it's small change.
Somebody once commented that the entire career of Jeff Lynne and the Electric Light Orchestra consisted of little more than endless attempts to re-write 'I Am The Walrus'.* Bitchy perhaps, but it contains no small kernel of truth. Yet much of the immediate, post Pepper Magical Mystery world inhabited by The Beatles always seemed to me the sound of a different, lesser band riding on the Sergeant's coattails to produce a pastiche sound of that source material which ticked all the boxes but fell short as a whole. Much like ELO and 'I Am The Walrus' in fact.
