2. “Sugar, Sugar,” remains popular at weddings, a grand generalization I base solely on the fact that it played at mine during the cutting of the cake. Our version was by neither Pickett, nor The Archies, but Bob Marley:

Indeed. So two of our favorite singers of all time have covered this song. They do a pretty good job of it, considering what they’ve got to work with. Not that they haven’t gotten a little flack for it from the critics.

3. The song, while certainly catchy (burrows-into- your-brain catchy), was the product of a manufactured band assembled by a producer. Music mogul Don Kirshner formed the group after a split with his earlier creation, The Monkees. Where The Monkees were real people who wanted more artistic control and bridled at the sheen of inauthenticity, The Archies were considerably more malleable given their status as a bunch of cartoon characters (the Archie comics characters, in fact) whose performances were provided by studio musicians. New York Magazine has an interesting little article about the creation of The Archies in ’68, in which Kirshner says that their music will be the type that’s played in clubs, but will appeal to all ages—and by all ages, he means starting with the “2-to-11″ year old market. (If you’re familiar with the Kirshner vs Monkees mess, the article has an interesting paragraph in which songwriter Jeff Berry recounts a story that ridicules Monkee Mike Nesmith for having musical pretensions. Nesmith, one of The Monkee’s true musicians, is the bandmember who made their private, internal tensions with Kirshner public.* It also mentions Kirshner’s next project, a collaboration with the film producer Harry Saltzman, that would feature a band composed of “an English guy, a girl, a Negro and a white Southern guy.”**)

As for the origins of these covers? Pickett seems to have covered “Sugar, Sugar” for the same reason he covered a lot of songs during a period in his career (“Hey Jude, “Born to Be Wild”, “Hey Joe”): the pursuit of continued pop success and broad appeal.

Meanhile, Marley’s version is supposed to have come at the suggestion of a producer, the Chinese-Jamaican music mogul Vincent Chin.

*On a purely digressive note, Nesmith was the heir to the Liquid Paper fortune.
**My guess is this became the film Toomorrow, a space musical that starred Olivia Newton-John and by all accounts is a mess.

“Steamboat Willie” was the first Mickey Mouse cartoon. [First distributed in theaters, not first produced —Ed.] It premiered November 18, 1928, at the Colony Theater in New York City. It was also the first cartoon to have synchronized sound.

If you watch the whole thing, which I had never done until last year, you’ll see it’s also a catalog of animal abuse that would not pass muster today.

Since I mention abuse: About halfway through, the song “Turkey in the Straw” starts playing. I never gave much though to the single verse of lyrics that my brother and I learned for this song as kids. (I also never learned that version asking if your ears hang low.) A quick look at Wikipedia suggests that they were from a variation sung by George Gobel on television in the ’50s. Ours went a little like this:

Oh, I had a little chicken and she wouldn’t lay an egg,
So I poured hot water up and down her leg,
Oh, the little chicken hollered and the little chicken begged,
And that darn little chicken laid a hard-boiled egg.

Ouch! Poor little chicken.

Like folk music in general, this song has undergone all kinds of tweaking and transformations. In fact, one of the earliest versions had the unfortunate title “Zip Coon,” a minstrelsy reference to an African-American who was sharply dressed, urban, and free. Or, to use another more subtly charged word that is still around: uppity.

Maybe that earlier song variation could makes sense in the Steamboat Willie context, given the criticism of Mickey Mouse as minstrel.

Fortunately, we were spared the blatant racial mockery when we learned our lyrics. Though if you want to insist on some social subtext, I suppose there was some gender silliness: the hard-boiled-egg-laying chicken’s sex was variable in our singing. Sometimes we poured hot water up and down his leg.

For years I felt bad about that horse.

Outside of Olema. Point Reyes, CA. October 2005.

The first time I heard “Take Five,” it wasn’t “Take Five.” Wasn’t the slick Dave Brubeck original that sends fingers thrumming on tables. What I heard first was Val Bennett’s version.

It’s messy, and the timing is a bit more ragged. It doesn’t make me think of coasting in a car through a dusky blue city, like Brubeck’s. Instead, it’s like sitting in a hot, empty restaurant on a neglected Caribbean island, where drops of water run down the sides of Coke bottles. A place that might look like this:

Bar in Grenada by Alex Webb, 1979.

(Apologies to Alex Webb)

Funny to remember that I first heard this because it was the theme to a show about how dishwashers and toasters work. A terrific show. The song is called, “The Russians Are Coming.”

Postscript, 31 Dec 09: The show that this was the intro theme for was The Secret Life of Machines, which will get its own post here in future. It was created by Tim Hunkin, seen below in a picture from Hunkin’s website.

Jarre died a couple of days ago. I’ve been thinking a lot about the movies of David Lean, especially Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai. Jarre scored those, and many more. They are such big films, and tangible in their scale. In those days, if the script called for an army, you raised an army. Programming a virtual one was many decades away.

We learn about films in large part by watching them, and Lean’s epics, made almost 50 years ago, are not a bad place to start. You can watch one and say, “Now there is a movie.” Part of that experience is also hearing the film, and that includes its score. Jarre’s scores are not a bad place to start, either.

Many films today opt out of the traditional orchestral score. It’s probably cheaper. Instead, they tend to have soundtracks curated by KCRW DJs, which is not such a bad way to find new artists. But I think there’s something to leaning on the symphony, with its wind section and strings and full complement of percussion instruments, to effect a mood. True, the music is never really meant to be noticed, so much as absorbed. But still, there are film scores and composers worth noticing: the clever machinations of Danny Elfman, the hypnotic patterns of Phillip Glass, or the thrilling swells of John Barry, whose work, of these three, is most reminiscent of Jarre’s.

Big Movies. Here, a bit from Lawrence of Arabia
:

Go to the Youtube site for a high-res version.

I like the album, Oracular Spectacular. Funny how lots of groups I like seem to have shades of lots of other groups I like. You listen and hear various elements rise to the fore and slip away as quickly. It’s like those people who sample a wine, gargle, roll it around, then pronounce, “Hints of chocolate and raspberries and fricaseed rabbit and oak and tobacco and an old baseball glove.” Depending on the MGMT song, there are hints of Bowie and the Stones and Ratatat and old video games, to start.

Used to be that I would hear something new from a show called “Take Me Live.” Where’d that go?

Mr. Foster, Mr. Simons, this one’s for you.

Vocalise. Sergei Rachmaninoff.

[Photo: Wookie-like cow on the outskirts of Colby, KS]

So sign up and you can request free non-commercial licenses for whichever ambient-electro-synth songs you need for your project.

“Mad World” seems to have become popular with the YouTube set. Maybe that has something to do with its use in the “trailer” for the Gears of War video game a little while back, the one that is supposed to have been directed by David Fincher, who directed Fight Club and Se7en.In any case, it’s been adapted to accompany a Japanese street dancer and several cuts of the Naruto anime series.

Although the song was part of the soundtrack to the 2001 movie Donnie Darko, it became popular in its own right, according to the Wikipedia article devoted to it. Further, it’s actually a remake of the poppier and new wavier original by Tears for Fears, who may be better known for their perpetually popular “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”

In comparison, the updated version’s music video is much easier on the eyes and has far less puzzling choreography.

By some coincidence, I also watched a few clips from the old Phil Silvers Show on YouTube. Silvers was part of the cast of the 1963 movie It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, in which a bunch of strangers race to get their hands on a lot of stolen money. The opening credits are online, as well as a few clips.

As for the kiwi, it was awarded “Most Adorable” in the YouTube Awards earlier this year. The New York Times‘s Virginia Heffernan called it “sweet but dull.”

If all you’ve had to go on for the last two years is Gimme Fiction, remember that Spoon has been putting its new tracks online. And if you’re lucky, you’ll have gotten your ten dollar ticket to see them at Café du Nord on Saturday night (I am not so lucky). The new album is officially released. And here’s a surprisingly poppy new song that for some reason is a little reminiscent of Billy Joel, circa 1978?, though why this is the case, I’m not sure. Maybe it’s something to do with the horns.

The Underdog