You Don't Really Care for Music, Do You?

Thanks to its overexposure on all the various amateur-singing TV shows, Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" has become one of the most covered songs of our time. But do you know who was the very first person to cover that song? It was none other than our old friend Bob Dylan, who sang it a couple of times on the earliest shows of the Never Ending Tour, in the summer of 1988. Dylan must have gotten the song off Cohen's 1984 album Various Positions, which was so prepossessing that CBS refused to release it. That was before Cohen sang it on an episode of Austin City Limits at the end of 1988 - which is where John Cale heard the song and was inspired to record it for the Cohen tribute record I'm Your Fan, which is when it really took off. That's the version Jeff Buckley heard.

That tidbit comes to you from Alan Light's The Holy and the Broken, a biography of "Hallelujah." The book, which is quote good, reminded me of nothing so much as Dave Marsh's Louie Louie: The History and Mythology of the World's Most Famous Rock'n'Roll song; Including the Full Details of Its Torture and Persecution at the Hands of the Kingsmen, J. Edgar Hoover's F.B.I., and a Cast of Millions; and Introducing, for the First Time Anywhere, the Actual Dirty Lyrics.  Both books track a song from its little-known creation by a lone genius, through the cover version that made it a worldwide sensation, and then to a version that even the writer seems a little embarrassed to have to discuss. For Light, it's a version that appeared on a Susan Boyle Christmas (!) album; for Dave Marsh, it was the performance of "Louie Louie" by a kazoo band assembled by a Philadelphia DJ for the purposes of setting a record for the largest kazoo band in history. I wonder if that record still stands. 

Silence Night

So let me see if I got this straight: Back in 1964, Simon and Garfunkel released their debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., which contained a spare little track called "The Sounds of Silence." The record stiffed, S&G went to England for a while, and, as everyone knows, Dylan producer Tom Wilson invented the remix by overdubbing a rock band onto the original acoustic track. This version became a hit, so much so that it became the title track of the next S&G album.

Well, almost. That album was called Sounds of Silence, with no The. That's not such a huge change, but still.... Can you think of any other albums that are almost named after the hit single? I can't.

But Paul Simon (I presume) wasn't done tinkering with the title. By the time of 1972's Simon and Garfunkel's Greatest Hits, the name of the song had been tweaked as well, and was now listed as "The Sound of Silence." It's also listed that way on the track listing for 1982's The Concert in Central Park. According to the official Simon and Garfunkel Web site, the phrase "sound of silence" is used three times in the song, while "sounds of silence" is used but once. So that would explain it.

I guess that's more or less the official title now. The single sleeve you see above is completely obsolete.

It's a Long, Long Road

One morning last week, I was listening to an American standards station out of Garland, Texas - many of you probably were as well - when the announcer noted that the date was the anniversary of the opening of Boys Town, the home for orphans in Nebraska, back in 1917. (The town it's in is actually now known as Boys Town, Nebraska, just outside of Omaha.)

The announcer went on to describe a scene in the 1938 Spencer Tracy movie, in which a boy carried his little brother for miles to bring him to the home. When he arrived, someone - possibly even Spencer Tracy, although I haven't seen the movie - asked the boy if it was difficult to carry the boy all that way. He replied, "He ain't heavy. He's my brother."

Now, you probably recognize that as the title of a popular song recorded by the Hollies, which went to Number Seven in 1970. Did you know that phrase dated back to Boys Town? I sure didn't, although there are many things in this world that I do not know. I apologize if I'm telling you something familiar. The phrase fits in well with that 1970, Room 222, hippie generation; those people loved to sling around words like "heavy" and "brother."

Most of the Hollies' early hits has been written by Graham Nash, but he had departed by that point, to be replaced as lead singer by Terry Sylvester of the Swinging Blue Jeans. "He Ain't Heavy" was written by the team of Bobby Scott (who had earlier composed "A Taste of Honey") and Bob Russell, who had primarily written lyrics for songs used in films. Russell was no hippie; he was 55 by the time the Hollies recorded his song, and dead before it came off the charts. Elton John played piano on the track, which I find hard to believe, but there you go.

Neil Diamond took his own version to Number 20 later that same year. But it was the Hollies' version that sounded so sweet coming out of the AM radio on a cool Texas morning:

The Babys by the Numbers

Number of Top Forty Hits for the Babys: 3

Total Number of Words in the Titles of Those Hits: 14

Average Length of Those Words, in Letters: 3.36

Length of the Longest Word in Any Babys Hit-Song Title: 5 (in alphabetical order, "Again," "Every" and "Think")

Roxy Music Album Covers, As Ranked (in Inverse Order) by the Intensity of the Model's Relationship With Bryan Ferry

Manifesto (1978) Model: They're just mannequins.

Flesh + Blood (1980) Models: Apparently, no one knows who they are. They were just models hired by the photographer, and the cover was designed by Peter Saville with no input from Ferry.

Roxy Music (1972) Model: Kari-Ann Muller. No relationship with Ferry that I can find, although she later married Mick Jagger's little brother.

Country Life (1974) Models: Constanze Karoli and Eveline Grunwald. Incredibly, had no personal relationship with Ferry other than to help him translate some lyrics into German for the song "Bitter-Sweet."

Stranded (1973) Model: Marilyn Cole. Ferry had noticed her when she was Playboy's Playmate of the Month for January 1972, and they dated briefly after the shoot. She is now a boxing writer. No, I am not making that up.






For Your Pleasure (1973) Model: Amanda Lear. She was briefly engaged to Ferry, according to Wikipedia, with the affair apparently starting after she had been asked to pose for the cover. This was all in between affairs with Brian Jones(she was the inspiration for "Miss Amanda Jones" on Between the Buttons) and David Bowie, and she also served as a longtime muse for Salvador Dali. Also, may have been born male, which if it's true, the surgeons did a good job.

Siren (1975) Model: Jerry Hall. During the cover shoot, Ferry gallantly held an umbrella over the 19-year-old's body to keep her blue body paint from melting off. She fell for it. Five months later, Ferry proposed to her. The following year, Mick Jagger invited the two of them out for dinner, and later chased her around a Ping Pong table trying to steal a kiss until Ferry ran him off. But in 1977, with Ferry away on tour, Jerry found herself at Studio 54, seated between Mick and Warren Beatty. Mick won, and Jerry dumped Ferry. He never spoke to her again.

Avalon (1982) Model: Lucy Helmore. You can't even see her face, but she was the keeper: She married Bryan Ferry in 1982, and they had four sons together. (Lucy, by the way, is not the dancing socialite in the "Avalon" video.) One of them, Otis Ferry, is a pro-hunting activist in Great Britain. I wonder if he hunts falcons.

The Wrath of Cons

Mark and I started watching Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan the other night. It was especially interesting to me because I had never seen any of the original Shatner-Nimoy group of Star Trek movies. Nor have I seen any episodes from the original Shatner-Nimoy series. I haven’t seen the recent J.J. Abrams reboot movie, either. Nor have I seen any episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Or any of the feature films therefrom. Or Star Trek: Enterprise. Or Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. If there are any other iterations of Star Trek, I haven’t seen them either.

I had heard that The Wrath of Khan was the best of the Star Trek movies, but to me it didn’t seem like anything more special than an episode from a TV series. Yes, Shatner is kind of a genius, and the young Kirstie Alley as the Vulcan apprentice captain is pretty easy on the eyes. Montalban has a great time with Khan, whom he had played on the original series and agreed to portray again for the meager sum of $100,000.  But every time there was an explosion or the Enterprise got hit by some sort of enemy fire, there was just a puff of white smoke and the crew sort of threw themselves across the room. Maybe it gets better, but it felt pretty cheesy to me.

One thing that struck me was that the film featured not one, not two, but three actors who had recently played killers on Columbo. William Shatner was a murderous actor, Leonard Nimoy was a murderous doctor, and Ricardo Montalban was a murderous ex-bullfighter. That has to be a record, no? What other film stars three washed-up alpha males?

And we haven’t even finished watching it. Maybe Robert Culp shows up as a Klingon in the last reel.

Nine Tonight

To the best of my knowledge, there were never more than about five people in Wings, which brings up the question of why there are nine suit-clad figures with cutesy pointing-gun fingers on the cover of Band on the Run. The answer is that Paul McCartney wanted to mix in some of the stars of the day in addition to the band members, as sort of a low-rent Sgt. Pepper's cover, for what he called "a bit of a laugh." A very little bit.

Unfortunately, old Paulie's conception of who is and who isn't a star is probably quite different from yours or mine. The only really recognizable face on there belongs, at the top, to Schlitz Light spokesman James Coburn. The others are from left to right:

Michael Parkinson A Thames talk-show host who supposedly agreed to appear on the cover in exchange for an interview with McCartney. McCartney didn't give him the interview until 2001.

Kenny Lynch British singer and game-show host who had a hit in the U.K. with "Up on the Roof"

Paul McCartney Bassist for Wings

Clement Freud (with beard) Broadcaster, writer chef, Liberal politician and grandson of Sigmund

Linda McCartney (sans beard) Keyboardist for Wings

Christopher Lee Horror-movie staple

Denny Laine (kneeling) Former Moody Blue, jack of all trades for Wings. His government name is Brian Hines.

John Conteh Liverpudlian light-heavyweight boxer

Don't let the cover dissuade you from listening to the album, though. It's real good.

The Whole Platter

 For those of us who grew up with the option to listen to music either on AM/FM radio, a vinyl long-player or an audiotape cassette, it's pretty heady to realize how many options we have these days, even if most of us never listen to anything other than our phones. I recently discovered a new option, one I have been taking great advantage of: listening to entire albums on YouTube.

The album as a sequential art form is more or less dead at this point. If we don't shuffle through them on our iPods, we stick a CD into the car's dashboard and pick through the songs we want to hear. When I want to hear a record in its original entirety, I generally have to make the necessary adjustments on my iPod, and even then it's not foolproof. For some reason, the stupid thing seems to think that "Baby Stop Crying" is the leadoff track on Street-Legal.

But when you listen to a whole album on YouTube, you listen to the whole thing, straight through, no picking up the needle and putting it down after "Wild Honey Pie" is blessedly over. Your choice is to hear the whole record, as the artist intended, or to stop listening altogether.

It doesn't seem natural to me at all that people would post entire albums to YouTube, so I don't know how the whole thing started. But there are quite a few of them out there now, mostly of the classic rock variety. It sure is fun to listen to something that you might have passed over for the subsequent greatest-hits package, or something that somehow never made it onto your iPod. Or that you just haven’t heard for a long time. Like After the Gold Rush, maybe, or Music From Big Pink. Or Remain in Light, which deserves to be heard in a single sitting.

And there's some great obscurities out there, ones that I bet aren't in your collection. All four of Brian Eno's ambient-music series are available, even though the first one, Music for Airports, is the only one you need. Eno and Fripp's Air Structures is also on there, and well worth hearing. And that stuff sounds great when you're forced to listen to it all the way through.

I don't pretend to know how YouTube works, so I don't know why these things have waivers from the traditional YouTube ten-minute limit. But that allows me to watch old-timey football games on there, so I’m not complaining.

I encourage you to give it a try, listen to What's Going On all the way through - I'm sure you haven't done that in decades. And tell me what else you find out there.

Songs from the White Album That Don't Feature a Quorum of the Beatles

"Wild Honey Pie" (Paul only)


"Martha My Dear" (Paul only)


"Blackbird" (Paul only)

"Don't Pass Me By" (Ringo and Paul)

"Why Don't We Do It in the Road?" (Paul and Ringo)

"Julia" (John only)

"Mother Nature's Son" (Paul only)

"Revolution 9" (John and George supposedly both have vocals in there)

"Good Night" (Ringo only)

The Greatest Name in Rock & Roll

The greatest name in the history of rock & roll – and I will brook no disagreement on this – is clearly Randy California of the 1960s-1970s band Spirit, most famed for their hit “I Got a Line on You.” It’s original, euphonious, evocative, distinctive, and unlike the closest competitors in this contest – Tre Cool of Green Day, Lee Ving of Fear, Blackie Onassis of Urge Overkill – you could actually believe for a few seconds, if you didn’t think about it too hard, that Randy California was his real name.  

It’s not just that last name of “California” that is so gorgeous. Let’s face it: Bob California or Eustace California wouldn’t have worked. Randy is a perfect name for a late-1960s American rock star, conjuring up visions of long ringlets and cutoff shorts. And it was so contemporary; none of Bill Haley’s Comets were named “Randy.”

California got the name when he was in Jimi Hendrix’s band the Blue Flame for three months circa 1966. There was another Randy in there as well, and Jimi distinguished them by calling one Randy Texas and the other Randy California. He tells the story starting at 4:22 on this clip, thoughtfully provided to yours truly by Debris Slider Eric Banks:

Randy California died, tragically, in 1995, while trying to save his 12-year-old son from drowning off the coast of Molokai, Hawaii. The boy survived.