That’s Toni Lindgren + Northsoul, whoever that is. She (they) seem to have embraced the current aesthetic and assembled a fine little cult on social media and whatnot. Semi-mucho views on YouTube. Got a webpage, too. Girl guitar players still rate some extra man-bites-dog attention if they’re any good. That’s her brother mandolizing nicely with her. The bass player doesn’t get in the way, a rarity in a world where bass players have strapped an extra treble string on their electric planks to play in the wrong register even more. God, I like kids doing things. Especially happy kids doing happy things. Happy young people, while not hunted to extinction yet, are on the endangered species list, surely.
I suppose I could inform the public about original version of this song. That would be bringing coals to Newcastle, though. There’s a reason why random kids would cover it. Everyone knows the words. It’s a karaoke hardy perennial. I gather it’s on the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack, along with an assortment of other songs that don’t have much to do with each other.
If you’re currently old and in the way, you’ll remember the original assault Come and Get Your Love made on the Top 40, and wonder why the kids didn’t do a rain dance before they started playing:
Lolly Vegas made the world incrementally, intergenerationally happier. How many people can claim that?
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.
Tag: music
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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