Saturday, September 12, 2015

The Thrill is Gone (1970)

Performer: B.B. King                                             Writer: Roy Hawkins & Rick Darnell
Highest US Chart Position: #15                            Label: ABC Records
Musicians: B.B. King, Hugh McCracken, Paul Harris, Gerald Jemmott and Herbie Lovelle

By the time “The Thrill is Gone” became a chart hit for blues star B.B. King, it was already nearly twenty years old. The song had originally been composed in 1951 by Los Angeles blues singer Roy Hawkins, who released the song on Modern Records and saw it become a hit, going all the way to number six on the rhythm and blues charts. The song featured Hawkins’ piano playing, and his singing in a Charles Brown style, along with the saxophone of the great West Coast tenor Maxwell Davis. But Roy Hawkins saw himself become the Erskine Hawkins of rhythm and blues. In the same way that Erskine had his hits co-opted by jazz bands like Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman, Roy found his songs covered by the likes of Ray Charles, James Brown and, of course, B.B. King. King’s version most likely became a hit because of the departure of the sound from the tradition Memphis blues style he had been playing in since the late fifties. Producer Bill Szymczyk had been working as an engineer in the mid-sixties and took a pay cut to work for ABC Records in order to become a producer. He wanted to update King’s sound to appeal to a wider audience by adding strings and a more polished sound. He succeeded in producing the artist’s first ever, top 100 album as well as the biggest hit of his career, and one that would remain his signature song for the rest of his career.

The song begins just like any other ballad from the late sixties, with drums and electric piano. Herbie Lovelle plays a pickup on the drums that hits on the and of two, rests on three, and on the and of three plays sixteenth notes into the downbeat where B.B. King hits a ringing, single-string note. Underneath King’s unique blues playing, Paul Harris adds some licks of his own on the Fender Rhodes. King continues to play through a complete verse with some interesting chromatic runs, supported by Harris and the guitar of until Hugh McCracken, until the first vocal verse comes around. Bill Szymczyk managed to get some incredible separation on the production because all of the instruments, including Gerald Jemmott’s bass, can be heard very clearly as they work together. The progression is a straight, twelve-bar blues, but the minor key makes the turnaround feel as if it’s more unique than it actually is. On the second verse a small string section playing sustained chords is suddenly pushed up into the mix behind the vocals. When King’s solo section begins, the strings are pushed up even louder, this time playing quarter-note phrases that comprise something of a counter melody, all while the guitar’s vocal emulations strain to be heard over the top. A third verse is followed by a fourth with the instrumentation--especially the drums and a low McCracken guitar part--building in intensity to match King’s vocals. Then the song finally fades out across two verses of King’s guitar solo and the string countermelody.

There’s no chorus in the song. Instead the title line is sung at the beginning of each verse, with the rest of the verse explaining why the narrator no longer has the feelings he once had for his lover. The album version is slightly longer than the single, adding an extra minute and a half of King soloing over a vamp on the tonic and a much slower fadeout. The song entered the charts in 1969, a couple of days after Christmas, at the very bottom in spot number one hundred. A month later, at the end of January, it was halfway up the chart, and in another month it reached its peak position of fifteen on February 21st, where it stayed for another week. The B-side is “You’re Mean,” another song pulled from King’s album, Completely Well. The tune is a medium tempo number with King doing some blues shouting about his woman. Like the flip side, Paul Harris’s electric piano is prominent in the mix. I was too young to have heard the song on the radio, but I did have the pleasure of playing it in a blues band I joined in the mid-eighties. After playing pop and rock for years, I left music for a while to go back to school, but then I saw an advertisement in a music store looking for a sax player. Thrilled with the idea of not having to play guitar and keyboards and instead focusing on my first instrument, I joined the band shortly after and they were the best group of musicians I have ever played with. I may have been vaguely familiar with the song before, but B.B. King’s version of “The Thrill is Gone” would forever after hold a permanent place in my memory thereafter.

Monday, September 7, 2015

Every 1's a Winner (1979)

Performer: Hot Chocolate                                     Writer: Errol Brown
Highest US Chart Position: #6                              Label: Infinity Records
Musicians: Errol Brown, Harvey Hinsley, Larry Ferguson, Patrick Olive and Tony Connor

Back when I was listening to the radio in high school I wasn’t really aware of the distinctions between U.S. and British groups. In fact, other that those artists I knew to be British already, like the former Beatles or David Bowie, I’m pretty sure I assumed every song on the radio was by an American group. And I certainly didn’t know there was any difference between the U.S. and British charts. Hot Chocolate was known to me primarily as a one-hit wonder for their terrific single, “You Sexy Thing,” back in 1975. But what I hadn’t known at the time is that they were much more popular in England and had already recorded a string of hits by 1975. One of them was actually my favorite song of 1973, “Brother Louie” by The Stories. Before the American group covered it, though, it had been a top ten song in England, and the fifth of their top forty hits in their home country before achieving even greater chart success a year later with the number three “Emma.” While that song made it to number eight in the States, it wasn’t something I remembered hearing on the radio. I can remember vividly, however, in the middle of my junior year thinking that Hot Chocolate had made a nice comeback with their newest single, “Every 1’s a Winner,” when in fact they had never left the charts in Britain, continuing to write chart hits that included the number one UK single “So You Win Again” from the same album.

The song begins with a backward strum by Harvey Hinsley on the guitar that sustains while a pulsing bass and keyboard rhythm punctuate the downbeats of every measure, an effect similar to the one Don Henley would use four years later on “Dirty Laundry.” Then comes the unmistakable sound of Hinsley’s distorted guitar playing the signature sixteenth-note lick of the song over a grinding wash of keyboards in the background. After two times around, the equally distinctive singing of the song’s composer, Errol Brown, comes in on the verse. His vocals are heavily processed giving them a distant quality that, again, was wholly unique in pop music at that time. The background on the verse is simply the steady beat of Connor’s drums with the pulsing keyboard bass of Larry Ferguson and bass fills by Patrick Olive, along with the occasional backward strum of the intro by Hinsley. Beneath the chorus that includes the title line, the band hits on the first three notes of every two-bar phrase, but in a subdued way that isn’t jarring, allowing the dance pulse to continue uninterrupted. In the second half of the chorus, horns join the three-note accent, and female background vocals enter and hold into the next of Hinsley’s intro licks. After another verse, chorus and intro, the horns assert themselves and a lengthy vamp concludes with a short solo by Hinsley punctuated by the horns. This is followed by another chorus, and more improve from Hinsley that fades out the song.

The song entered the U.S. charts in mid-November of 1978 at number seventy-five, then made an impressively gradual climb to number twenty-two by the end of the year. It entered the top twenty at the beginning of January, and by the end of the month had edged into the top ten, finally peaking at number six in early February. The B-side of the single is Harvey Hinsley’s “Power of Love,” which retains the pulsing bass line of the A-side, but softens the sound by featuring the piano work of Larry Ferguson and leaving Errol Brown’s duskier vocals unprocessed. What’s interesting about the group is that, despite having a U.K. hit in every year of the seventies--a feat only equaled by Elvis and Diana Ross--the group was not well received critically and was for the most part ignored by the music press during the decade. “Every 1’s a Winner” was pulled from the album of the same name, and also released as a 12-inch dance version, which simply extends every aspect of the original tune to make it twice as long. For me, it was simply part of the soundtrack of my junior year, and wasn’t one of the few songs I purchased as a single. Nevertheless, it is now a song that seems essential to me and an example of a major hit that, while embracing the ethos of disco in order to gain popularity and airplay, eschews the clichés that had made the genre such an anathema, even at the time.

Sunday, September 6, 2015

Ariel (1977)

Performer: Dean Friedman                                   Writer: Dean Friedman
Album US Chart Position: #26                              Label: Lifesong Records
Musicians: Dean Friedman, Rick Witkowski, Tony Levin, Rick Marotta and George Young

I’m not a big fan of wordplay in pop songs, especially of the John Lennon variety. But there are a couple of exceptions. The first is “Year of the Cat” by Al Stewart, which has one of my favorite lines of all time. The other is the far less sophisticated, yet still grin inducing lyrics of Dean Friedman in “Ariel.” My associations with the tune began, of course, by hearing it on the radio. Despite not cracking the top ten, it had a very impressive run of twenty-two weeks on the charts in the spring and summer of 1977. But it was probably a year later, when I was dating my first real girlfriend, that acquired a copy of my own. She and her younger sisters had the 45 in rotation on their giant console stereo in the living room and I borrowed it along with a bunch of other songs I didn’t own and recorded it on my 8-track tape recorder. I’m not really sure I noticed the lyrics at all at the time, however, as I’ve always been much more interested in melody. The distinctive chorus was the real draw and was absolutely captivating for me. The single was released in late April and debuted at number eighty-six, peaking two months later at twenty-six on June 25th after having sat at twenty-seven for the previous two weeks. Interestingly, after dropping down to forty-seven the next week it began to inch upward for the next five weeks until it reached thirty-two before taking another five weeks to drop off completely.

The song begins with a Ricky Marotta drum pickup on the and of three and four, Dean Friedman’s piano and the bass of Tony Levin entering on the downbeat with a repeated descending pattern. The lyrics begin with Friedman talking about meeting a girl who lives in Paramis, New Jersey, “deep in the bosom of suburbia.” Rick Witkowski’s guitar comes in on the second half, as she was collecting money for a radio station and Friedman sings, in the first nice turn of a phrase, “she was looking for change and so was I.” The first verse is followed by a second in which Tony Levin takes some liberties with the bass line. Friedman falls in love, invites her to hear his band, and when he picks her up he sings the classic line, “Hi, and she said, ‘Yeah, I guess I am.’” Then he launches into the wonderfully Frankie Valli-esque chorus that consists lyrically of simply the title sung over and over again and ends with three staccato beats and two beats of silence, In the third verse, which is only on the album version, the couple stops at Dairy Queen before the dance with some humorous background vocals that hold throughout the second half. The next chorus is followed by a great fifties style R&B George Young sax solo. Young also makes some well-place honks in the following verse with Friedman and his girl on the couch, “fooling around with the vertical hold,” and finally making love to the sound of fireworks on the television as it’s signing off for the night. The final chorus modulates and then, in the album version, oddly goes into the first part of the first verse before suddenly ending.

There was a bit of controversy over the song from Friedman’s label, Lifesong Records, but it wasn’t about the drug reference, or the fact that Ariel “wore a peasant blouse with nothing underneath.” Instead, they objected to the fact that she was a “Jewish girl.” The label demanded that Friedman remove the line, not because they were racist but because they thought that radio stations would use it as an excuse not to play the record. They also stuck a chorus between the first and second verse and removed the third because they felt the song was too long to be a single. Friedman was unhappy about the changes--though removing the first verse reprise from the end and fading out on the last chorus is a much more satisfying ending. Nevertheless, with assistance from the Jewish Defense League, Friedman was able to convince the company to leave his original version on the album, though the single edit remained. Lifesong was a small record label with limited distribution, and the reason for the song’s strange chart journey is that the label actually ran out of records, causing the song to stall in the mid-twenties. A fresh infusion of 45s was the reason for the uptick on the charts but by then it was too late for it to break into the top ten. The B-side, “Funny Papers,” has Friedman playing piano and singing with a jazz trio including George Mraz on bass and Mel Lewis on drums. “Ariel” is sometimes interpreted as a reminiscence of early sixties love, but it clearly reflects an early seventies sensibility and remains one of my favorite songs from 1977.

Saturday, September 5, 2015

Don't Go Breaking My Heart (1976)

Performer: Elton John & Kiki Dee                         Writers: Elton John & Bernie Taupin
Highest US Chart Position: #1                              Label: MCA Records
Musicians: Elton John, Kiki Dee, Davey Johnstone, Kenny Passarelli and Roger Pope

I never really liked Elton John all that much. With the exception of Barry Manilow, I usually preferred guitar bands to those led by a pianist. For the first half of the seventies he saturated the Top 40 airways, but by the middle of the decade his hit streak began to diminish. Still, there are a couple of his tunes that will always be among my favorites. The first is from my all-important summer of 1973, “Saturday Night’s Alright.” The other is this song, “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” from the summer of 1976. My father had nearly died the summer before, from cancer, and miraculously it went into remission. He and my mother had traveled somewhat before, but after surviving this scare they began to go regularly, several times a year. I’m pretty sure this was their first trip after his recovery, and they decided to take the whole family along with them to Hawaii. For me, it was the summer between junior high and high school. We probably went in July, and that’s just about when the song was released, entering the charts at an impressive sixty-six on Independence Day of that bicentennial year and working its way up during our time on Maui and Oahu. The duo took only four weeks to claim the top spot from The Manhattans and stayed at number one for the entire month of August, part of a twenty-week stay on the charts that wouldn’t end until mid-November, accompanying the start of my high school career.

The song begins on the downbeat, with future film composer James Newton Howard on the electric piano and Kenny Passarelli on the bass for two measures, then joined by the string section heading into the third measure. A measure later the cellos are pushed up in the mix and joined by Roger Pope on the drums, while a distinctive guitar lick by Davey Johnstone takes everyone into the first verse. Most duets follow fairly traditional structures of alternating verses and harmony on the chorus, but this one is unique for employing a call-and-response pattern throughout. Elton John opens the chorus by singing the title line, and Kiki Dee answers him after every line. At the end of the verse the band holds while the strings and drums lead the band into the bridge, which actually functions more like a chorus, while the chorus line at the end functions more like a bridge. The orchestration of the strings, also done by James Newton Howard, is very intricate on the chorus and, combined with the conga playing of Ray Cooper, makes for a wonderfully dense sound on the chorus. A variation of the intro, again heavy with cellos, leads into the second verse, with the strings playing a sort of harmony with the singers right into the second chorus. During the third verse Howard has the strings playing the solo section to good effect, and the vocals return for the third chorus with both singers taking liberties with the melody while background singers vamp on the title line throughout a lengthy fadeout.

As per usual, the song was written by Elton John and his longtime collaborator, Bernie Taupin, and though it was originally intended as a tribute to Motown’s duets featuring Marvin Gaye, the presence of James Newton Howard’s orchestrations make it something much more. The first choice for the female vocalist was Dusty Springfield, but she was too ill at the time and the offer finally went to British singer Kiki Dee, one of the only white artists to record for Motown on their subsidiary, Tamla, but was at this time signed with John’s label, Rocket Records. The two singers weren’t even in the same studio when the song was finished. John had actually recorded the track in Toronto, and then sent it back to London to have Dee put her vocals on afterward. One surprising fact about the song is that although Elton John had achieved a string of number one hits in the United States, this was the first time he had been able to reach the top spot on the British Charts as well. The duo also managed to reach number two in England seventeen years later with a Cole Porter’s “True Love,” but only made it to number fifty-six in the States. The B-side of the single is “Snow Queen,” which seems almost stripped down in comparison with the flip side. John sings the medium tempo verses himself, with just bass, drums and acoustic guitar accompaniment, and Dee harmonizing on the chorus. “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” was the number two song of 1976 in America and will always be associated with my first trip to Hawaii and my first year of high school.