Week ending: 19th May
Well, the couple-week run we've been on of mellow and/or silly songs had to end somewhere. And what better to end up with?
Wild Thing - The Troggs (peaked at Number 2)
I don't think I've described a song as "primitive" before. But if any song has earned the title, it's this, the Troggs, with a that that couldn't be any more basic. It's garage rock, taken to its simplest extreme, a song that after it's cool, yowling, pitch-bent opening note couldn't be simpler. It's literally built around a three note riff, that the guitar player just hammers away on, like a Kinks song, but more basic. And it's just by the sound of things guitar, drums and some pretty minimal bass. It's real simple.
Lyrically, it's also pretty straightforward, with lyrics that aren't challenging anyone. And that's maybe part of the appeal. It's a really simple love song, the Troggs singing wild thing / You make my heart sing / You make everything groovy / Wild thing. That's the majority of the song, right there. Nothing crazy, though the delivery's a bit more interesting, with its stop-start pace and its frequent spoken word bits, as lead vocalist Reg Presley (everybody's second-favourite Presley) by turns declaims snottily into the mic and then practically purrs in your ear, all with this strangely detached, languid tone, like he can't quite be bothered with it all.
There's also an ocarina solo in the middle. Not much more to note there, just that more songs should have an ocarina solo. They even do this cool flutter-tonguing thing that gives it a really weird tone towards the end. It sounds fabulous, though I suspect it's only in there because ocarinas are fairly easy and cheap to obtain, and not too difficult to learn to play - which fits with the DIY, slightly punky vibes to the whole thing. It feels like a song made on the cheap, with minimal actual musicianship involved. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, mind you. The Troggs had a song in them, and they wanted to put it out on the world, and whether it sounded good or not was largely secondary. There's something kind of cool about that - and for once, the record-buying public seem to have agreed.
Paint It Black - The Rolling Stones (1)
And then we get, this, coming in with a swirling, delicate bit of sitar. It's an intriguing start, kind of minor, kind of exotic, a little ominous. It's the product, apparently, of Brian Jones, one of the band's founding members, studying sitar under Harihar Rao, himself a student of Ravi Shankar. There have been a few sitars in rock songs, at this point, and they're clearly quite a trendy thing, but they still sound very striking to me, very unusual. I'm sure they must have stood out a mile on the radio of 1966.
And then, a scant eight seconds in, a very brief pause and then in come the rest of the instruments, a thumping drum hitting on every beat of the bar, the sitar coming back in a heavier, Arabic-inspired mode, all of it a lot more driving and heavy-sounding than before. The pitch of it all seems to bend around slightly, slipping and sliding about in ways that must have sounded alien and strange to Western audiences. Heck, this is still quite a weird-sounding song today. It's very chromatic, dying away to a serpentine sort of meandering melody that weaves its way around, only to pick up and gain in intensity in each chorus, a sort of mini-version of the "rave-up" that you get with the Yardbirds.
But the most striking thing about this song is absolutely the lyrics, which are maybe the darkest, heaviest lyrics we've seen so far. Ambiguous, but allusive, they paint a really vivid picture of a person in some sort of depressive episode, singing about how I see a red door and I want it painted black / No colours anymore, I want them painted black. And it gets worse, I see the girls walk by, dressed in their summer clothes / I have to turn my head until my darkness goes. That's a serial killer line, right there. But it's also relatable, in a rather extreme way, the idea of being so very down that seeing anything else good or bright in the world just hurts you, you literally can't stand it. We then get a line of cars, and they're all painted black - a funeral cortege, we can assume, given the next line about how they're there with flowers and my love both never to come back. People won't look at our narrator, and, left alone, he is stuck doing some introspection, only to find that I look inside myself and see my heart is black. Lines about how I could not foresee this thing happening to you speak of the grief of an unexpected death. And finally, we get lines about how if I look hard enough into the setting sun / My love will laugh with me before the morning comes. Which is at best delusional, and at worst vaguely suicidal-sounding.
All of these are stunningly dark, heavy lyrics, and they fit incredibly with the music itself, which feels brooding and dark in tone. This feels like the darker flipside of the drugs and the hippie spiritualism of the era; rather than finding enlightenment and harmony, the Stones have stumbled into grief, madness, existential dread and the horror of a particularly bad trip. And it doesn't really resolve, either. They float the possibility that maybe they can see their love again if they just stare into the sun hard enough, then we end on a big old fade-out as Mick shouts, increasingly wildly about how I wanna see the sun blotted out from the sky. There's this absolutely insane pitch-bent bass sound - one of the first uses in recorded music of a fretless bass, apparently? - and things get faster and less controlled, and that's it, that's the whole song. It's unsettling, no comfort, no sense of closure, just the feeling of something running itself out of energy. Which, in a way, feels like a statement, in a song that's so much about grief and death and the spiral it can send you on. Like I said, heavy stuff.
Sorrow - The Merseys (4)
I have no memory if the Merseys have come up before in this project. A quick glance back at the archives suggests they haven't. They have the most bandwagon-y, 1963-coded band name out there, though. It's maybe the laziest thing you could possibly come up with in this era. "What, there's a genre of music called Merseybeat that's all the rage? Based in Liverpool? Where the Mersey is? Well then..." The band do win some points back for actually being Liverpudlian, though, and actually part of the original wave of beat bands, playing the Cavern Club with the likes of the Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers. So perhaps I did them an injustice. They're OGs. They're just, like, a few years behind the trend.
All that said, it's a fine song? It's a cover, of a song originally by the McCoys, who we recently heard with Hang On Sloopy, a song I definitely enjoyed. And I quite like this one, too. There are strings, smooth and pretty, which give way to a fairly upbeat main tune, some perky brass, a good sense of movement to it all, even a bit of organ in the background - and if there's anything this project has been teaching me recently, it's that organ improves most songs. The harmonies are a little cheesy, but on-point, and the solo in the middle, all twangy guitar and bright horns, is pretty fabulous. I also think, listening a bit more, that what I took for an organ is a harmonica. So kudos to the Merseys for including a harmonica but being subtle about it. More artists who use harmonicas ought to take note.
Lyrically, it's a bit more bitter than the upbeat lyrics would suggest. The "sorrow" of the title is primarily due to the Merseys' love, it seems, who causes them all sorts of misery. With your long blonde hair and your eyes of blue, they sing, the only thing I ever get from you / Is sorrow, sorrow. She spends all of their money, plays high-class games and never does what she really ought to. Something tells me you're the devil's daughter, they sing, which feels a bit exaggerated, if you ask me, but perhaps this is a case of the Merseys protesting too much. Because for all they complain about this woman, they do still seem pretty attached to her, noting that I tried to fight her but I couldn't resist her / I never knew just how much I missed her. So you know. She brings them sorrow, but they're not keen to give her up, not just yet.
The only other thing to note, here, is the Northern accents. Which you get with all of these Merseybeat groups, but I think I notice it here a bit more, not least because combined with their delivery, it actually makes me think of a bunch of 90s Britpop bands from that neck of the woods - not Liverpool, all of them, but the North, for sure. I'm hearing Pulp, a little bit, for example, especially in the bit right after the solo, where they sing in counterpart. Or perhaps another band of the same ear. I'm notoriously bad as voices, but still. It's interesting. I'd love to know if anyone else hears the similarity, of if I'm talking nonsense.
Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 - Bob Dylan (7)
Now time to round off with some Dylan. This is not a Dylan song I know, and it's from an album that I also don't really know, though I will say that it's got just some rubbish album art, this out-of-focus, dull, slightly wonky picture of Bob looking kind of wrapped up to walk somewhere, I guess? He's in an alleyway, and wearing a coat and scarf that does look fit for a rainy day, I guess. But still. Bob's one of the big music artists of the mid-60s, you'd have thought he'd have made a bit more of an effort for his album covers.
And then the song starts, and it's for sure a weird one. It's jazzy, with this oom-pah brass band march feel to it, plus trombone, tambourine, honky-tonk piano, and lots of people shouting and cheering absolutely wildly in the background, or chipping in with little ad-libs and yeee-ha cries, giving a country funfair atmosphere to the whole thing even before the singing begins. It's very American, but drawing from country traditions, blues and jazz traditions, marches and ragtime - you name it, there's bit and pieces in here. With its unpolished sound and harmonica, it vaguely even reminds me of the jug band sound you got a few weeks back on the Lovin' Spoonful's Daydream, though the overall effect's quite different.
The lyrics, as often with Bob Dylan lyrics, are kind of weird. The verses seem to allude to some sort of martyr complex, Bob setting himself up as a figure that people want to come for and attack. Hence lines, delivered in Bob's usual lurching, mostly-spoken tone about how they'll stone you when you're tryin' to be so good / They'll stone you just like they said they would / They'll stone you when you're tryin' to go home / Then they'll stone you when you're there all alone. This establishes Bob as a figure of popular hatred, somebody who people want to attack in an almost Biblical, Old Testament fashion. This feels like a development of the bitter, cynical streak we saw on Positively 4th Street, which was also basically a diss on the haters. But then you hit the chorus, as Bob counsels you, I would not feel so all alone / Everybody must get stoned. This can be read as a shrugging off of the haters' criticism. But it's more obviously a drug reference. Or perhaps it's both, a sort of slightly lame pun. Bob, reviled for his music, doesn't care, because he's on the good stuff. He sings like he's a bit stoned, too, with a slight giggle and a rather dazed tone throughout. I can't say I love it, but it's definitely... well, it's something.
The biggest mystery, for me, isn't any of the lyrics. It's the title. Who are the titular "rainy day women"? What exactly is a "rainy day woman"? Why is Bob numbering them? And what relevance, if any, do they have to this particular song? Alas, I fear that the answer, whatever it may be, is the sort of thing only apparent to somebody who is, as I've said, on the good stuff. A brief Google suggests a reference to Proverbs 27:15, which would fit with all the stoning talk, but all that tells me is that “a continual dripping on a rainy day and a contentious wife are alike". Which doesn't get me much further, except feeling vaguely misogynistic, taken out of context like Bob is doing. Also, still irrelevant to the song, unless it's the two women of the title who are making all the stoning threats? In which case, honestly, I feel like Bob probably did something to incite them. Just going on vibes, he feels like quite an irritating guy to be around for long.
What a quartet of songs! All four were reasonably interesting, and I feel like it was a much needed palate-cleanser, after all the chill, happy songs we've had. Between Paint It Black's dark, doom-laden sitar and everybody getting stoned, we're still in our hippie era. But it's all taken a bit of a dark turn that I enjoyed this week.
Favourite song of the bunch: Paint It Black
