That’s Stevland Hardaway Morris on the Dick Cavett Show back in 1970, I think. It’s a stone groove, as they say. Made it to #3 on the Billboard charts. Got beat out for the Grammy by the execrable Patches song, sung by Clarence Carter, who is also blind, an interesting footnote.
Both Stevie’s mother and wife are listed as co-songwriters on that track, which makes them eligible for a split of the royalties. One wonders if Stevie knew exactly what he was signing all the time. I’m not sure I can identify everyone on the stage there. The singers might be Lynda Tucker Laurence , Syreeta Wright, and Venetta Fields. They’re listed as the singers on the record. Lynda eventually became a Supreme, and Syreeta eventually became the ex-Mrs. Wonder. But studio people didn’t usually tour. It’s more likely Shirley Brewer, Lani Groves, and Delores Harvin.
I’m a little sketchy on the power trio members. Fo sho that’s Michael Henderson on the bass. He played on the first few Miles Davis fusion records, plus with a bunch of Motown acts. He was terrific. The drummer looks like Ollie Brown. Cool as a cucumber. No idea about the guitar player. Ray Parker Jr. used to play guitar with Stevie, but that ain’t him. Well, whoever they are, they’re tighter than a cow’s tuchus at fly-time.
Way back when, I used to sing and play the bass on this song in a cover band. This is long overdue, but I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to Mr. Wonder. I promise I won’t do it any more.
Well, I sorta put my foot in it on Tuesday. I called the opening bars of I’ll Be Around by the Spinners among the 25 most recognizable riffs in Christendom. This led to an internet argument. This is my favorite kind of argument. Internet arguments are so bitter because the stakes are so small. Someone named Hitler even showed up in the comments. When the brushy mustache guy is mentioned in any capacity, you know you’ve reached peak amusing pixel disagreement.
Now, I’ve mentioned Christendom here, which is a geographic term, really. This makes sense in my disordered mind. I’m really talking about American pop culture. Since American pop culture has entirely taken over what’s left of Christendom, except for the parts of France where it’s drowned out by the muezzins, let’s roll with it.
Now, people are going to mention the most recognizable intros to them. This is a bit of a category error. I’m looking for the opening stanzas of pop hits that would be recognized instantly by the largest slice of lowbrow humanity. I won’t be including Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, or anything numbered and opused and so forth. As a matter of fact, to simplify it, I’m going to specify the years from 1960 to 2000. Everything since 2000 has been churned out of an audio sausage machine, so it’s pointless to argue about it. Everything before 1960 is bound to be Greek to generations that don’t read cursive.
Now some ground rules. They’re mostly for myself. Everyone else can do as they please in the comments, but this is how I played it. First, no artist(s) gets more than one entry. The Beatles and the Stones, for instance, have beaucoup candidates for a list like this, so I chose one each. Secondly, the list is 25 entries. If you want to add something, it’s gotta bump something off. This lends an amusing knife-fight vibe to the proceedings, which I’ve always enjoyed. But remember: no wagering. And thirdly, this is not a list of songs I like. I once played in a band that held a little contest in the middle of our shows. We’d play just the opening bars of songs like these, stop, and ask the audience to identify it. We learned very quickly what songs everyone knew, and which songs had one guy way in the back who yelled Green Eyed Lady! while everyone else scratched their heads.
Also, certain songs are verboten to the list. These include any riff currently banned in musical instrument stores. There is no point in mentioning Stairway to Heaven, Hotel California, Smoke on the Water, Freebird, or something by Kansas. The opening riff should make the largest number of people yell, “Hell, yeah,” not groan. I’m also leaving Layla off the list. The opening riff might qualify, but Martin Scorsese only used the piano outro, and we will too. It’s music to see bodies tumbling out of a trash truck now, not whining about George Harrison’s first wife any longer.
The list is in no particular order, but that absolute winner is listed last:
I Can See Clearly Now — Johnny Nash
I Want You Back — Jackson 5
Long Cool Woman — The Hollies
Brown Eyed Girl — Van Morrison
Go All the Way — The Raspberries
My Girl — The Temptations
Sweet Home Alabama — Lynyrd Skynyrd
Guns N’ Roses – Sweet Child O’ Mine
The Beatles – Day Tripper
Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit
It Don’t Come Easy — Ringo Starr
Stayin’ Alive — Bee Gees
Green Onions – Booker T. & the MG’s
Doobie Brothers – Listen To The Music
Fortunate Son – Creedence Clearwater Revival
Brown Sugar — Rolling Stones
Surfin’ U.S.A. — Beach Boys
La Grange — ZZ Top
Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) — Sly & The Family Stone
Rikki Don’t Lose That Number — Steely Dan
Super Freak — Rick James
Come And Get Your Love — Redbone
That Lady, Pts. 1 & 2 –The Isley Brothers
Blister In The Sun — Violent Femmes
And the absolute Number One slot on our top 25?
Whiter Shade of Pale — Procol Harum
I’ll tell you why you’ll never be able to bump this from the top spot. Opening riffs? There can be only one. The fellow playing the original organ melody, Matthew Fisher, didn’t write the song. Gary Brooker and Keith Reid did. So forty years or so later, Fisher sued, and said the song wasn’t nothing without his organ riff, and he wanted the credit. He wanted 50% of the songwriting royalties. He won the case, but they only gave him 40%. Brooker appealed, and Fisher kinda lost that one. The 40% held, but not retroactively. Then the House of Lords took it up, and said he should have his 40%, and retroactively too.
When your selection for intro riff is adjudicated by the House of Lords, you can bump A Whiter Shade of Pale off the top spot, but not before.
I’d rank the guitar intro in the top 25 most recognizable riffs in Christendom. Maybe higher. That’s the antipodean Hindley Street Country Club taking a crack at it. I guess they’re just a cover band, but up several notches from the usual.
I was tempted to paste the Detroit Spinners original here. It was a million-seller in 1972. All the vids of the Spinners on Soul Train and Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert and similar shows are all lip synched. The band does their steps, and generally look genial, but I’d have preferred something fresh.
It’s understandable. Back then, the audiences just wanted to hear their favorite songs without waiting for the top of the hour over and over on the Top 40 stations. They might revolt if it didn’t sound just like the record. People are more interested in different versions of things these days, I think. It comes from having pretty much all forms of entertainment at your fingertips at all times. Something new sticks out.
The framework of the song lends itself to various permutations of it. This is my favorite bent version of it:
The original song was used to great effect as the outro for the movie Roman J. Israel, Esq., a very underrated movie:
Ginger or Mary Ann comparisons are so over. The Bailey Quarters vs. Jennifer Marlowe contest isn’t much better. C’mon, Wilma Flintstone vs. Betty Rubble is more interesting than those two. You can have your Beatles vs. Stones arguments all day long for all I care. There’s only one, real, true way for me to get judgey about your judgment:
Perez Prado vs. Esquivel!
Perez didn’t write the first tune in that medley, Guaglione. It’s a Neapolitan song with music by someone named Giuseppe Fanciulli. I’ve heard Italian names before, that one about takes the cannoli. The song has words, too, by Nicola Salerno, a name that sounds like a guy with bodies in his trunk. Anyway, it got covered by everyone from Claudio Villa to Dean Martin, but it wasn’t until Perez Prado put some mambo afterburners on it that it really took off.
So there’s contestant Numero Uno. A mambo king. But in this corner, weighing in at 97 pounds (if he has rolls of quarters in his pocket), we have Esquivel!
Cher and Madonna and Elvis think they’re so cool because they only need one name, but Esquivel! puts them all in the shade. Those other pretenders don’t have an exclamation point in their names. Case closed.
So now we’re really getting down to it. Prado’s Mambo King act, vs. Esquivel! and his Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music. Fight!
Of course truly major decisions like this one require careful assessments of the essential differences. So let’s go straight to the heart of the matter. You’re going to have to choose between Prado’s pencil-thin moustache and Esquivel!’s gamma-ray-resistant eyeglasses.
Perez has made this decision even tougher by occasionally sporting both the pencil-thin moustaches and uber-cool sunglasses.
I know, tough choice, huh? Esquivel! was a visionary, of course, and not just for music. He correctly surmised that his taste in eyewear would become so universally accepted as cool that even plagiarizing presidents of Ivy League colleges would be wearing them eventually. So he tried to steal a march on history, and perhaps on Perez, by upping the ante and barging into the seventies with a wispy Van Dyke beard, suitable for a modestly dangerous villain on the old Star Trek.
Ah, the Engelbert Humperdinck “polyester lasagna” shirt, the Vitalis hair, the bow tie suitable for manned flight, the doughy Abba-looking chicks. Esquivel! truly had it going on.
You’re going to have to decide if Mucha Muchacha or Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White (the latter half of the first video) is the happiest song ever recorded. This may be impossible, because they basically both are in some sort of Heisenberg dead cat/live cat in the box situation. They both can’t be Numero Uno, but they are. Maybe you’ll just have to decide if you like The Big Lebowski or Office Space better than the other. But that invites a temptation to settle the challenge by dragging in Henry Mancini from Jackie Treehorn’s house, and “third man in” is considered bad taste in street fights like this one.
The first person that says, “Neither. Xavier Cugat,” I’m coming looking for you. And not with binoculars, either.
Well, I’m informed that they did call George Jones the Rolls-Royce of Country Music, but I’m not sure it fits. A Rolls is posh. A Rolls isn’t for driving, it’s for being driven in. And a Rolls is British, and that’s way out of bounds for George. I understand the sentiment. Pretty much every country singer wanted to sing like George Jones. Calling him a Cadillac might seem like faint praise.
More to the point, George was a serious wildman. He stands stock-still, his lantern jaw moving in Clutch Cargo fashion, his hair laid out with a spirit level, so you might be forgiven for thinking that man in the Nudie suit must be a taciturn sort of fellow. But he was anything but. He was an ex-Marine, a famed hellraiser, a skirt chaser, and occasionally had to be put in a straitjacket and carted off to the hospital to dry out. He, ahem, liked to drink a bit. A bit of a still at a time.
No, his voice was clear and powerful, butter and a headbutt at the same time, so he’s no Rolls-Royce. We can do better than that, nickname-wise. Once, his wife tried to keep him from going out and getting drunk, and she hid all the car keys, and went to bed. When she woke up, George was missing. She drove eight miles on the highway to the next town, to the closest place he could conceivably get drunk at, and found George sitting at the bar. Their riding mower was parked out front.
The John Deere of Country Music. There, I fixed it.
El Ladron is Spanish for The Thief. I could translate the lyrics for you at length, and explain why Sonia seems so glad to see one in her dreams, but it’s easier to just show you how it works:
Remember Tom Brady’s rules for approaching women, kids:
No, I’m not talking about Bernard Purdie, shown here playing the drums with Vulfpeck, although it would be alright with him if I was. Bernard played on the original Kid Charlemagne, a Steely Dan minor masterpiece. I like how Bernard is wearing a Bernard Purdie tee-shirt. I think I’ll wear a Sippican Cottage t-shirt when I pick up my Nobel prize for literature. Or maybe a sweatshirt. I hear it gets cold in Stockholm. On further reflection, maybe they can just mail me the money and the bronze coaster with the dynamiter on it, and save me the trip.
Speaking of trips, in the title, I’m not referring to Bernard, or Becker or Fagen, or even Owlsley, the LSD king that Kid Charlemagne is written about. All that chemistry was in aid of the largest deliberate experiment in subverting the culture ever attempted: The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. Ken Kesey has had a larger influence on the United States than anyone going back to maybe Alexander Hamilton. And while it ultimately led by a very circuitous route to the wonderful agglomeration of Bernard Purdie and Vulfpeck playing Kid Charlemagne, it would be hard to come to any conclusion but one: That influence was all bad.
The Merry Pranksters, as they styled themselves, wouldn’t mind being called bad influences by the L7s, because they were rebelling against the squares. Many people thought the Pranksters were doing a good thing by telling people that drugs would expand their minds, and that these expanded minds would lead to all sorts of wonderful things, like whirled peas, face painting, and luxuriant armpit hair on women.
Well, it didn’t.
All those Day-Glo freaks who used to paint their face They’ve joined the human race Some things will never change
These are the Day-Glo freaks Becker and Fagen were talking about, and Kid Charlemagne was supplying with LSD:
Kesey is largely responsible for the two major problems currently haunting America. First, he wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. That made him a pile of money, and earned him plenty of notoriety. It was the lever that started the big rock of “reform” rolling downhill for US mental hospitals. Of course Chesterton’s Fence wasn’t consulted, and the benighted denizens were simply turned out of doors instead of firing all the prototypical passive aggressive girlbosses like nurse Ratched and starting over. So mentally ill people get to live under bridges and yell at cars, courtesy of Ken Kesey.
Then Kesey started the sixties counterculture, nearly singlehanded, if Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is to be believed. Now that Wolfe is dead, I figured it was safe to read something written by him. My wife found a dogeared paperback copy of it for me in a used bookstore. If I’m still reading the frontispiece correctly, this paperback edition was printed in 1989, but was already the 31st edition of the thing. I’m always amazed at how well bad writing used to pay.
I’m exaggerating some. The book’s not bad, exactly. But the breathless praise for TEKAAT book seems a bit much to me. The author was trying way too hard, and ends up sounding like a stoned, short-bus James Joyce. But that was the spirit of the times. To a normal person, a species which of course has currently been hunted to extinction, hearing the drivel that comes out of their mouths, and the bad rock music, you realize that it only sounds like something if you’re stoned.
But that was the other Kesey shoe that dropped. Giving people LSD, including giving it to them unawares, is just one act in his passion play. The whole idea that it is completely normal for everyone to be stoned on one thing or another, or everything all at once for that matter, was adumbrated by Kesey and his coterie of Day-Glo freaks. I found it interesting that in the book, Wolfe describes what the merry band used when LSD was hard to get. They’d smoke a lot of weed and take a lot of speed, and reported that it gave them almost the same sort of trip. I immediately thought of today’s kids, gobbling ritalin and other ADHD drugs, which are a kind of speed, and smoking now-legal marijuana. Everything old is new again, I guess.
Downstream of all that, Kesey’s idea that any productive behavior is strictly for the squares now reigns triumphant. Riding around, stoned out of your gourd, and annoying the locals while filming it, just like the Merry Pranksters, is the number one career choice for young people these days, at least according to various polls:
86% of young Americans say they’d try being an influencer; 12% already identify as one, according to a Morning Consult poll (ages 13–38)
57% of Gen Z teens (13–26) believe they can easily make a career as an influencer, with the same share saying they’d leave their current job to pursue it
40% of teenagers (13–18) are actively considering becoming social media influencers, per a Citizens Financial/Junior Achievement survey
16% of teens explicitly want to become a “social media influencer/content creator,” ranking just behind entrepreneurship in a Junior Achievement/EY study
It doesn’t matter that there are no more squares to outrage. Grandma’s got an ass-antler tattoo and grandpa is swinging at The Villages hot tub with his current girlfriend. Whatever. Today’s young girls make endless videos of themselves stuffing comped food in their faces at various vacation spots, or take off their tube tops on OnlyFans to make a few bucks. The guys record their video games and publish them on Twitch or suchlike, and mention that they might also acquiesce to being a pro athlete, but pretty much no one wants a real job. Kesey did that.
So Wolfe’s book accidentally shows what happens the day after tomorrow when you take Timothy Leary’s advice to: Turn on, tune in, and drop out. Plenty of those Merry people ended up in mental, and other sorts of hospitals. An assortment ended up dead. Jail was pretty common. Eventually the hippie chicks learned that Merry Pranksters thought Hell’s Angels were just as merry, and invited them over for what sounds to me like a gang rape that Tom Wolfe should have called that. And the whole lovely worldview soldiered on through the decades until it reached its apotheosis in Fentanyldelphia, Pennsylvania:
It’s useful to recall that the original idea for giving Americans LSD was part of a CIA mind-control experiment called MKUltra. I guess you could call it a failed experiment, but then again, you’d have to know what they were really trying to accomplish to know if it was a failure, and almost every record of it was burned by the CIA. But a list of the known and likely participants in the “experiments,” some unwitting, sure is interesting. Ken Kesey, Alan Ginsberg, the Grateful Dead’s lyricist, James Whitey Bulger, Ted Kaczynski, Sirhan Sirhan, and Charles Manson. Nice bunch of people there. Very tuned in, turned on, and dropped out. Jim Jones had his own Kool-Aid test down in Guyana, too, and while no one can positively say the CIA was in on it, it sure sounds fishy, and one is reminded that denying they’re in on it is right on their business cards.
So what did it all add up to, really? Driving around in a garishly decorated bus, dressing in clown motley, taking drugs, and annoying regular people while filming it? Let’s go back to Steely Dan for the answer.
While the poor people sleeping with the shade on the light.
You have to understand, right up front, that I’ve always hated this song.
You’ll have to imagine the various unpleasant bodily excretions I substituted for blood, sweat, and tears when I mentioned the name of the originators of Spinning Wheel. It’s a fat slice of 1968 flower power horsehockey in the lyric department. That was stapled onto jazz/rock/fusion sturm and drang that always gave me the hives.
It was plenty popular when it came out, but Henry Mancini kept Spinning Wheel out of the Number One slot on the charts for a while by the supposedly romantic but mostly depressing Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet. Considering the subject, it wasn’t depressing enough to convince people that Romeo and Juliet isn’t a romance, it’s a tragedy, but Henry tried. That was followed by another musical obstruction, the red-hot knitting needle for earwax removal and instant channel changing In the Year 2525 by Zager and Evans. So Spinning Wheel never made it to the top, but it hung around on the musical Hillary Step for a good long while.
That’s Three Dog Night performing for The Spirit of America Spectacular on July 5th, 1981. I say that’s the real birth of Yacht Rock.
Of course “Yacht Rock” was a web series, a kind of unmoored cable TV show starting in 2005. No one knows who first used the term, but that made it popular. The original musical term for mostly saccharine, overproduced, mellow music was soft rock, or the California Sound, or maybe adult-oriented rock (AOR). Music critics mostly use yacht rock as a pejorative, but that’s falling by the wayside more and more. It might be because people like it more than they like critics, so critics find ways to like it publicly and hate it in private.
This concert was part of The Spirit of America Spectacular, a nationally televised and radio broadcasted patriotic extravaganza. America used to have more than mostly peaceful arsonists roaming the land. Some people used to like it here. George Bush the elder was VP back then, and even sent in a telegram to express his approval. It’s a good format for messages from George. You could never tell what that guy was saying just by listening to him.
Anyway, that’s the permanently docked Queen Mary in Long Beach in the background, and about eleventy-zillion yachts. The lineup was The Beach Boys, Rick Springfield, Three Dog Night, and Pablo Cruise.
Now according to the intertunnel, the key nodule of Yacht Rock is something like Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, Steely Dan, Christopher Cross, Toto, and Ambrosia. I’m at a loss to explain how anyone could think Christopher Cross and Steely Dan have anything in common. When you get caught between the moon and New York City vs. I crawl like a viper through the suburban streets. If you think Don’t Take Me Alive is comparable to the theme from Arthur, there’s no hope for you. But I do get the drift.
Let’s run it down my idea of Yacht Rock’s adumbration. In 1981, the Beach Boys had long since morphed into the Beach Men. They were wandering aimlessly in the soft rock wilderness, until they ran aground with Kokomo, a song that makes Jimmy Buffet look like the Sex Pistols. I say they’re exhibit A in Yacht Rock pantheon.
I’ve got no beef with Three Dog Night. They can all sing and play their instruments. Shambala was a damn fine song. But they eventually hooked up with Paul Williams to write songs for them. He also wrote songs for the Carpenters, Streisand, Helen Reddy, and egad, The Sandpipers. If your yacht was big enough to have an elevator in it, he was your man. They belong.
Next. Rick Springfield is rock music for girls, I guess. I could never tell him and Bryan Adams apart, so I’m not the guy to judge his total Sloop John B-ishness. We don’t need him, anyway, to prove our point. Because the last band on the docket, and the dock, was Pablo Cruise:
Case closed. July 5th, 1981. It’s the real birth of Yacht Rock. Fight me.
Let’s consult the dictionary first. It’s dry as dust, but we’ll go with it for now:
Harmony /här′mə-nē/
noun
An orderly or pleasing combination of elements in a whole.
“color harmony; the order and harmony of the universe.”
True dat. But it’s only a good start. Let’s keep going. It has a more cogent definition in music:
In music, harmony is the concept of combining different sounds in order to create new, distinct musical ideas. Theories of harmony seek to describe or explain the effects created by distinct pitches or tones coinciding with one another; harmonic objects such as chords, textures and tonalities are identified, defined, and categorized in the development of these theories. Harmony is broadly understood to involve both a “vertical” dimension and a “horizontal” dimension, and often overlaps with related musical concepts such as melody, timbre, and form.
Yikes. That’s like Health Class in high school, trying to explain getting jiggy wid it. Doesn’t do justice to the topic.,
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