Dedication
Introduction
1 Elvis Presley by Elvis Presley
2 What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye
3 Straight Outta Compton by N.W.A.
4 Madonna by Madonna
5 Nevermind by Nirvana
6 It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Public Enemy
7 The Velvet Underground & Nico by The Velvet Underground
8 Marquee Moon by Television
9 Almost Killed Me by The Hold Steady
10 Bringing It All Back Home by Bob Dylan
11 Meat Is Murder by The Smiths
12 Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys
13 Ram by Paul McCartney
14 Harvest by Neil Young
15 Setting Sons by The Jam
16 Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City by Kendrick Lamar
17 Slanted and Enchanted by Pavement
18 Murmur by R.E.M.
19 I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One by Yo La Tengo
20 Is This It by The Strokes
21 For Your Pleasure by Roxy Music
22 Violent Femmes by Violent Femmes
23 The Village Green Preservation Society by The Kinks
Acknowledgements
Supporters
Copyright
Martin Fitzgerald has spent most of his life daydreaming about music and has drawn the following conclusions:
• Nico’s pronunciation of the word ‘Clown’ is the worst thing to have happened in the 1960s
• Bryan Ferry’s dad seems like a lovely man
• The only good songs about cars were written by The Beach Boys
• The plot of ‘Down in the Tube Station at Midnight’ by The Jam makes no sense at all
• There’ll never be a musician with a better name than Fab Moretti
Martin Fitzgerald was born in London and currently lives in a convent in Nottingham.
With special thanks to:
Andy McCrorie-Shand
John Moore
Paul Roberts
Harinder Singh
Stephen Wall
Chris York
This book is for my mum, who never once told me to
‘turn that racket off!’
Dear Reader,
The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound. Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and e-book wherever books are sold, in shops and online.
This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. At the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.
Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.
If you’re not yet a subscriber, we hope that you’ll want to join our publishing revolution and have your name listed in one of our books in the future. To get you started, here is a £5 discount on your first pledge. Just visit unbound.com, make your pledge and type RAM5 in the promo code box when you check out.
Thank you for your support,
Dan, Justin and John
Founders, Unbound
Towards the end of 2014, I finally signed up for a Spotify account and suddenly, in my house, I had access to the biggest record collection in the world. I no longer had to make choices and carefully consider which albums I should buy or where I would put them in an alcove of shelving that was already straining under the weight of previous purchases.
I could listen to anything – all via a tiny device that I held in my hand.
So, with the world at my fingertips, I obviously chose to listen to Cassadaga by Bright Eyes.
Bright Eyes had long been a blind spot for me and whenever I thought about rectifying this it seemed I was trying to catch up with something that had long since passed. Loads of my friends loved them, indeed swore by them, and that level of devotion intrigued me. Yet I’d opted out and decided that my life could do without this ultra-cool American band that made at least seven people I knew giddy.
Until I pressed play on an iPad while I was in bed.
Fast forward three weeks and I’m now the most enthusiastic Bright Eyes fan of 2014. So much so that I’m angry at the people, the so-called friends, who have let me wait so long to discover them. I approach Ruth, the most enthusiastic Bright Eyes fan I knew in 2004, and berate her for leaving me in this position:
‘Ruth, why didn’t you just sit me down ten years ago and make me listen to them?!’
And that’s how it started.
Initially Ruth and I were just going to make each other listen to albums that we’d both missed and then have a coffee at work every Wednesday to discuss our findings. Then we thought we’d document it and, about twenty-three minutes later, we had an online blog called Ruth and Martin’s Album Club.
The final piece of the jigsaw was when Ruth said, ‘No one really cares about us, let’s get a guest each week and make them listen to albums instead.’ She then went further and decided that I was going to do all the work while she offered encouragement in between drinking gin and listening to Bruce Springsteen.
What started out as a small project between friends and some journalists we knew then took on a life of its own. Before long we were inundated with emails from a whole bunch of people who had found us online and wanted to be forced to listen to albums. We never actually met any of them, we’d just send a list of albums by email and ask them to pick one. In the case of Ian Rankin, I think I sent him about forty-seven emails because he’s genuinely heard everything – apart from Madonna’s debut.
In the main, the guests were people who were famous for other things but had a passion for music that their writing hadn’t found an outlet for. Without planning it, that became an important factor for us – we were always keen not to be taken over by music journalists or become part of music journalism. We advised all guests to be personal in their writing and provide us with their own specific take on an album and their reasons for having avoided it. We weren’t interested in reviews from a distance for albums that had been previously written about ad nauseam – we were interested in what that guest thought about in the time and place that they were encountering it. I think, looking back, this kept the project fresh and prevented us falling down a variety of nostalgic trapdoors.
The intros I wrote to each album also took on a life of their own.
What began as a 300-word piece written in bed snowballed into 2,000 words that were heavily researched in the five days before the last edition went out and the new one was due. I was reading a book a week and trying to sift through the story to find the little gems that interested me – stuff like The Jam leaving the studio at 6 p.m. every night so Paul Weller could watch Coronation Street. Or the fact that Flavor Flav was originally only in Public Enemy on the strength of his ‘your mum’ jokes.
Again, more than anything, I was conscious not to rehash old ground. I wanted to try to give a freshness to these stories that sometimes focused on the minutiae that interested me, rather than the legacy and context that didn’t. I also wanted to approach them with a sense of wonder and a lack of cynicism, to take the story back to the pre-fame days of the artist and chart their development.
In total, we produced eighty-one weekly editions between January 2015 and July 2016 – from Elvis to Kendrick Lamar and all sorts in between. We’ve included twenty-three of those editions in this volume, a cross-section of music from the last fifty years, and had a special illustration produced for each one.
Some guests loved albums and some guests really hated them, but it was all done in a spirit of ‘it doesn’t really matter’. Because it doesn’t. This isn’t 1,001 albums you should listen to before you die, a sentiment that has always puzzled me. This is more about the reasons why people opt out and what happens when you force them to opt in.
Oh, and it’s about the stories too.
I hope you enjoy them.
Martin Fitzgerald
April 2017
1. Blue Suede Shoes
2. I’m Counting on You
3. I Got a Woman
4. One-Sided Love Affair
5. I Love You Because
6. Just Because
7. Tutti Frutti
8. Trying To Get To You
9. I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry (Over You)
10. I’ll Never Let You Go (Little Darlin’)
11. Blue Moon
12. Money Honey
I’m the assistant editor at the Spectator, and write mostly about politics. When comment editors ask me to write about ‘something else’, they immediately regret it and never make such an offer ever again as the rest of my life is supremely middle-aged. I keep chickens, collect rare berry bushes, and like going for hearty walks or runs through the beautiful Chilterns.
Here are three albums that I’ve thought of that I own in their entirety and will listen to in their entirety. I’m not sure if they are my favourites, but I’ve taken about five days to come up with an answer.
Ceremonials – Florence + The Machine
Listen – David Guetta
Days Are Gone – Haim
Do you want to know the maddest thing about Elvis Presley?
It’s his real name.
Sounds made up doesn’t it? Like an alter ego bestowed upon the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. But it wasn’t. He was always Elvis Presley.
As a ten-year-old who entered a singing competition, a loner kid who played hillbilly music at school and a teenager who sang blues songs in his neighbourhood – the whole time he was walking around called Elvis Presley.
Seems like an odd name for a nobody.
Aged eighteen he walks into Sun Studios, declaring that he’d like to record a song for his mother. It’s a disingenuous statement, there are places all over town where he could record himself, at a cheaper price too. But it’s here at Sun that he wants to be heard, that he wants to be noticed.
The receptionist, Marion Keisker, sees a shy, woebegone kid in front of her cradling a battered child’s guitar. She asks him what kind of singer he is and he replies, ‘I sing all kinds.’ She asks him who he sounds like, and he replies, ‘I don’t sound like nobody.’
He may as well have walked in and said ‘Hi, I’ve been sent from the future.’
Elvis records his first song, ‘My Happiness’, and Keisker listens, agreeing with the kid’s assessment of himself. Yes, she could detect the influences, she knew what he’d been listening to, but he was right – he didn’t sound like anyone else.
Sam Phillips, the producer and head of Sun Studios, feels the same. On hearing Elvis sing for the first time he simply nods and says he’s an ‘interesting singer’. He then tells Elvis to give him a call sometime and instructs Marion Keisker to make a note of his details, which she did – ‘Elvis Presley. Good Ballad Singer.’
Really, that should have been that.
Elvis Presley had walked into a recording studio for the first time in his life and sung his heart out. And we’ll get to this later, but he looked like Elvis too, by which I mean he looked bloody fantastic. It’s hard to know what else they could have been looking for in a potential artist and, in all honesty, everyone at Sun Studios should have stopped what they were doing, recognised the good fortune that had come their way and directed all their efforts into the eighteen-year-old.
But they didn’t. They did nothing. No call came from Sun Studios and Elvis becomes nothing but a cheap flirt – walking past the windows of Sun Studios on a regular basis, deliberately parking his car outside – hoping that he’ll jog their memory and they’ll give him a chance. But nothing. He goes unrecognised and unnoticed.
It’s crazy when you think about it.
In January 1954, he decides to record another song at Sun, but this time he delivers a weak performance, affected by nerves, and nothing comes from it. Desperate, he gives up on the studio as a route to stardom and starts to audition for local bands. First up he tries out for the terribly named Songfellows and they tell him he can’t sing. Next up, he auditions for a band led by a fella called Eddie Bond who tells Elvis to stick to truck driving because ‘you’re never going to make it as a singer’. Not one person, but multiple people, hear Elvis sing and basically say ‘nah, he’s rubbish’. It’s at this point in the story I’ve often thought about inventing a time machine, going back to Memphis in 1954, and shouting ‘WHAT IS WRONG WITH ALL YOU PEOPLE! HE’S ELVIS PRESLEY!’
But fortunately, common sense prevailed and everyone eventually stopped being so stupid.
On a trip to Nashville, Sam Phillips heard a song called ‘Without You’, a plaintive ballad that he thought, with the right voice, he could turn into a hit. He thought about the kid that had been stopping by for the last ten months and considered him a perfect fit for the purity and simplicity of the song. Phillips asked Marion Keisker to remind him of his name (how could he have forgotten?) and to invite him down to the studio.
‘Can you be here by three?’ she asked Elvis over the phone.
Whenever he recounted the story in the future, Elvis would say, ‘I was there by the time she hung up.’
They worked on the song all afternoon, but Elvis couldn’t quite get it right. Despite this, Phillips is now convinced the kid has something, a way of communicating with his voice that would make him a star. He asks Elvis to run through all the other songs that he knew, hoping to hit upon something, while watching through the control booth window. Yet something was still missing. The formula wasn’t complete.
Phillips contacts a guitarist called Scotty Moore and tells him about the kid. He suggests that he hooks up with him to see if they can get something going. Scotty agrees and asks what the kid’s name is. When he hears it’s Elvis Presley, he says it sounds like something out of science fiction. He’s right, it does.
Scotty Moore calls Elvis and arranges for an audition round his house with a bass player called Bill Black. Elvis turns up wearing a black shirt, pink trousers and white shoes. Despite this, they let him in and run through a bunch of songs. Neither Moore nor Black, his future band members, are particularly impressed. Black refers to him as a ‘snotty-nosed kid, coming in here with his wild clothes and everything’. As regards his singing, he says, ‘Well it was all right, nothing out of the ordinary. I mean, the cat can sing...’
Moore agrees – it was all right, nothing special, and he phones Phillips to give him the less-than-enthusiastic verdict. Phillips decides to give Elvis one more chance and suggests that all three of them come into the studio the next day.
And it’s the same story. There’s still something missing.
Until there isn’t. Until they take a break from recording and Elvis picks up his guitar and starts messing around, singing a song from 1946 called ‘That’s All Right Mama’. Moore and Black start filling in, messing around too, completely uninhibited now the pressure is off.
Phillips hears them and sticks his head around the door.
‘What are you doing?’ he asks.
Their reply, which is absolutely brilliant, is, ‘We don’t know.’
It’s the pivotal moment in the development of rock ‘n’ roll and no one knows what they’re doing, it’s happened by accident. Phillips gets them to start at the beginning and hits ‘Record’.
And now there’s nothing missing. It’s full steam ahead.
Sam Phillips calls local DJ Dewey Phillips (no relation) and invites him to his house to hear the song. Both men stay up till 2 a.m. listening to it, over and over again. They’re the only two men in the world who have access to Elvis’s first single, they’ve discovered treasure, and they’re simultaneously puzzled and excited by it. The song wasn’t black, it wasn’t white, it wasn’t pop, it wasn’t country. What could they do with it? Where would they go from here?
Dewey Phillips decides to play it on his radio show the next night and the response was instantaneous. Calls flood into the station and the switchboard lights up with a bunch of kids trying to find out more about Elvis Presley. The genie was out of the bottle. Elvis himself was in a cinema at the time – too nervous to hear his debut single being played on the radio and scared that people might laugh at him. Such was the response, though, that his mum and dad were dispatched to find him. Legend has it that his mum walked up one aisle in the cinema and his dad walked up another, until they finally found him in the dark and whisked him away to the radio station for an impromptu interview. What a scene that must have been:
‘Come on son, don’t worry about this rubbish film, you’re about to become king of this thing called rock ‘n’ roll.’
‘Oh.’
That night Dewey Phillips played ‘That’s All Right Mama’ a total of eleven times on his radio show.
Overnight, Memphis had gone Elvis mad. And the strange thing, possibly the strangest of all, is that they don’t even know what he looks like. All this adulation, all this hysteria, a song played eleven times on one radio show, and they don’t even know what he looks like. Because he could have looked like anyone, but he didn’t, he looked like Elvis fucking Presley. He looked like the most beautiful man ever, a man with skin so smooth he looked like he’d never shaved. For his whole life, in every era, he looked like he’d never shaved.
So imagine those people who were already sold by what they’d heard. Imagine when they saw him for the first time. He could have looked like anyone but he looked exactly like the young Elvis Presley.
The response was entirely predictable – a level of hysteria among teenagers that had never been seen before. I would recommend everyone watch his first national television appearance, on the Dorsey Brothers’ Stage Show, to see why. He enters the stage as if he’s been shot from a cannon and then proceeds to launch into ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’ before improvising into ‘Flip, Flop and Fly’. Is he nervous? Is he supposed to be nervous? He doesn’t look it. He’s only twenty, surrounded by people so much older, yet he’s simultaneously dominant and assured – chewing gum between singing and breaking off to do those weird leg movements that caused so many young girls to go mad.
It wasn’t that he was filling a gap in the market; he was offering a whole new market of his own.
Meanwhile, in the studio, he follows ‘That’s All Right Mama’ with a string of other singles before reaching his turning point – ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. If his previous singles were a consequence of ‘messing around’, this is anything but – it is a peculiarly moody song that his new record company, RCA, are reluctant to release, worried that it might not be a hit. But Elvis champions it and he is insistent. It becomes his first number one, his first of eighteen, and he never looks back.
Elvis Presley, his first album, is released in 1956. It’s a collection of songs recorded between July 1954 and January 1956 that are mostly brilliant, save for a couple of appalling ballads and a truly dreadful version of ‘Blue Moon’. It’s in and out though, coming in at just twenty-eight minutes long.
But the cover. Look at him on that cover. Who’s walking past that in a record shop in 1956 and not buying it?
In one image it says everything about what he has, what people had been missing, and what he would become. Lennon said that before Elvis there was nothing, Dylan said that hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail. He had smashed down the door for everyone to follow, playing a guitar instead of a piano, being a star as well as a singer.
And whatever happened next, through his Lost in Hollywood years to his Stuck in Vegas years, there was always a healthy reverence, a sense that he was the one that started everything.
But more than that it was he, and only he, who could ever get away with simply being called The King.
Because I have a slight aversion to listening to things that people who know about music tell me I should listen to.
I tend to assume that the words ‘critically acclaimed’ mean I won’t like something, and the same goes for films. At university I had a housemate who was obsessed with ‘critically acclaimed’ films and I hated every one of the ones I agreed to watch for being so poncey and boring. Being John Malkovich was a particular low point. I tend to like music and films that are rubbish and popular, whether it be chick flicks or Britney Spears. I watch films when I’m too tired to read, and listen to music when I’m doing something practical or walking to work. Both are crowded into other bits of my life, rather than being important in their own right.
Growing up, I was a weird but quite happy combination of bluestocking and tomboy (both terms that suggest girls should like lipstick not mud or books, but at least they give you a picture of the rather singular outdoorsy child I was). I was either curled up with a book or riding horses, climbing trees and making camps with my brothers in our garden – in a wonderfully isolated hamlet with a bus on Thursdays (it left at 7 a.m. and didn’t come back). Music and films were a bit too buzzy for me. I’ve been to two concerts in my life: Justin Timberlake in homemade glittery T-shirts with a giggly group of girlfriends from sixth form and an Elton John concert with a family member who had free tickets. And I went to the Proms for the first time this year, even though I’ve worked in London since 2009.
I took a holiday job in HMV in my second year at university. They were desperate for more staff during the Christmas period and employed me even though I failed their music knowledge test spectacularly. I walked the shop floor and gave customers terribly bad advice on what albums to buy for their relatives for Christmas, based on things I’d seen while tidying the stock. I imagine a lot of people remember 2006 as the worst haul of musical Christmas presents they ever received as a result.
I do quite like music from the Olden Days, though: I loved the A Hard Day’s Night film as a kid and the Motown classics were almost always on the hi-fi in our home.
I listen to Leonard Cohen when I’m cooking a big family meal as that’s what my mother does and it doesn’t feel right to be fussing over a large joint of meat without ‘So Long, Marianne’ playing in the background. My favourite song in the whole wide world is ‘You Got the Love’ by Candi Staton, which I fell in love with long before Florence got to it because it was at the end of Sex and the City and because it has terrific lyrics. I left my wedding to my best friend singing that song.
But most of the time I listen either to house music (I had to google my favourite artists to find out that the genre was called house, though, and I’m not sure I look or sound like someone who says they’re into house. In fact, I only know David Guetta exists because a middle-aged Tory MP told me about him while doing a little dance to illustrate what sort of music it is) or pop-ish stuff. I could (and often do) listen to Listen by David Guetta all day, and similarly I love Chicane and Calvin Harris. I often play Thousand Mile Stare by Chicane while writing a column as it gets me in an intentional and focused mood. And then I do tend to download a lot of albums by female singers like Florence + The Machine, Lana Del Rey, Ellie Goulding and Haim. Or else I’ll sing loudly and tunelessly along to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat which was my first ever CD and which I know off by heart from start to finish until my husband either leaves the room in great distress or pleads with me to stop.
I struggle to find out about new artists. I only ever hear music on the radio when Desert Island Discs comes on or the Today programme is doing one of its consciously cool slots. I periodically message my younger and cooler brothers asking for recommendations when I realise I’m still listening to stuff from 2012 and telling myself that it’s very current. Or else I like a song that plays during my spinning class and I try to find out what it is once I’ve caught my breath at the end. Even Spotify passes judgement on me: the other day I tried its ‘Discover’ feature which recommends ‘new’ music based on what you’re already listening to. It suggested a song from FutureSex/LoveSounds by Justin Timberlake. That album was released in 2006.
So the short answer to your question is that I haven’t listened to Elvis because I am totally shambolic when it comes to finding music to listen to.
As an example of how shambolic I am, you can’t get much better than the way I listened to this album. I listened to it three times, dutifully wrote up my thoughts and sent it to Martin. He was very kind, but said I’d listened to the wrong Elvis album. At least I now know a lot more about Elvis as a result.
Anyway, now I’ve listened to the right album and I’ve switched from singing tunelessly along to Joseph to dancing around my kitchen to this. ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, ‘I Got a Woman’, and ‘One-Sided Love Affair’ force you out of your seat. In fact, one of my sessions while listening to this album was at my desk while working, and it didn’t work. I kept trying to put Chicane back on. It was a bit too noisy and jumpy. But it’s perfect for cooking and cleaning. It’s definitely not pretentious in the way that ‘critically acclaimed’ things normally are for me.
There were some songs that sound like the kind of crooning songs lots of people would love, but I could take them or leave them, to be honest. I got a bit bored during ‘I’m Counting on You’, for instance, and it reminded me of a less moving version of ‘Valley of Tears’ by Buddy Holly, which I do love. I also grew bored with ‘Tutti Frutti’. I’m sure clever people would tell me that a) it’s supposed to be repetitive and that b) I really don’t have a leg to stand on given the stuff I normally listen to, but it was repetitive.
I found some keepers. ‘I Love You Because’ was really, really lovely. A gentle, slow, sweet song. I was humming ‘Money Honey’ for the rest of the day after I listened to the album for the first time. And my favourite was ‘Blue Moon’ as it was simple and his voice just sounded terrific and deep and gorgeous. But researching Elvis further, I found my favourite song of his on another album. I loved ‘In the Ghetto’. It was more along the lines of the sort of heartfelt songs that I normally like, though they normally tend to be sung by female artists (not sure why).
Listening along, I realised how many of these songs have appeared in the soundtracks of the non-chick-flick films that I have managed to watch. They feel much more familiar than I was expecting. At the end of the first listen, I felt as though I’d heard just two songs: one was the sort of leaping around dancing song, and the other was a slower more thoughtful tune that I tended to get bored of. Of course, the whole point of Ruth and Martin telling me to listen to the album three times was that I was forced to notice the difference between the songs, and I’m glad I did as I would have discarded it too quickly after one listen and never returned. I’ve realised that I like music that slots snugly into my life rather than that I have to make time and effort to listen to. Elvis Presley was the first album I’ve sat down and listened to without doing anything else at the same time. It felt odd.
I did like this album. Being totally unmusical and having never really immersed myself in music reviews or any of that sort of thing that involves actually thinking about music, I don’t really know what to say about it. I feel a bit like the student in On Beauty who tells her art history lecturer that the reason so few students take his class is that no one’s allowed to just say that they like the artworks. I like it, but there wasn’t one song on there that I loved so much I had to play it again, right away. It was more the sort of album I’d very happily listen to while cooking, dancing merrily away as I moved around the kitchen with cheeks flushed from the heat of the oven and wearing my apron with chickens on that I put on when I’m doing Proper Cooking. And that tends to be old music – or Joseph. And for the rest of the time, I’m afraid I’ll stick to meandering through music that MPs who are even sadder than me tell me I should listen to.
I’ve starred a number of songs from it on Spotify. Probably wouldn’t listen to the whole album again. Unless I’ve got a lot of cooking to do.
7.
1. What’s Going On
2. What’s Happening Brother
3. Flyin’ High (In the Friendly Sky)
4. Save the Children
5. God Is Love
6. Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)
7. Right On
8. Wholy Holy
9. Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)
I direct some things, act in some other things, write still other things, and now and then do stand-up for coins and/or accommodation.
I really don’t have a top three, but big moments for me in pop include:
The Smiths – The Queen Is Dead
Sugarcubes – Life’s Too Good
The Leisure Society – Into the Murky Water
When we announced this album on the blog the reception was unlike anything we’ve ever seen.
What typically happens is 50 per cent of people tell us the album is brilliant while the other 50 per cent tell us it’s rubbish and they hope the guest gives it a right good kicking. But this week was different. It was 100 per cent pro-album – the first time that’s ever happened.
And it wasn’t just an expression of lighthearted joy either – it was weightier than that. There I was on Monday afternoon, trying my best to relax with a bag of Wotsits, when I was suddenly confronted with a load of tweets laced with reverence and implicit threat.
Here are just some examples:
@StuartBunby, who has an avatar of a chimpanzee playing baseball, said,
I really hope he likes it. It would be really good if we could all continue to get along.
I’ll admit, the double use of the word ‘really’ scared me a bit and made me think that this Bunby character was a great deal more menacing than his surname suggests – i.e. not menacing at all because he’s called Mr Bunby.
@John_p_d, who describes himself as a ‘jazz lover’, said,
I can’t see how it would be humanly possible not to love this record.
Obviously I resisted the urge to reply with ‘I can’t see how it would be humanly possible to love jazz.’
And finally, @tillyv lived up to her Twitter bio (‘Ambiguity alludes me’) by saying,
Woah. He won’t be able to write with the religious experience he is about to have.
I found this one particularly odd because one of the reasons the world is in such a mess is precisely because of people writing about the religious experiences they’ve had. But never mind. I decided not to pull her up on this because a) she seems nice and b) I’m not Ricky Gervais.
On Tuesday, I dragged myself away from twitter for a routine check-up at the dentist. Brian, the dentist, is a jovial sort and long-term reader of our blog who occasionally chastises me for telling silly jokes about the bands he loves.
Again, Tuesday was different.
He had me upside down in his chair, shone the bright light right in my face and, while prising my mouth open with what seemed like half of B&Q, said,
‘You do know What’s Going On is one of my favourite albums, don’t you?’
It was a bit like that scene in Marathon Man, except Brian isn’t a Nazi trying to escape his past.
Well, he says he isn’t anyway.
So, with all these expectations, I struggled with what approach to take and was conscious that I had to do the album ‘justice’.
With that in mind, here are some potential angles that I considered:
Any piece about Marvin Gaye is usually dominated by accounts of a ruthless father who used to beat him mercilessly as a child. Some people go even further and seek to explain his entire career as an attempt to simultaneously escape his father while also making him proud.
That may be true but it sort of ruins the jaunty opening.
With that in mind, I decided to move on and ignore the ‘terrible dad spawns great artist’ angle.
Sorry, terrible dads.
I considered doing the entire piece on how Motown is easily the best record label ever and, with the possible exception of Chess, no one else even comes close.
In fact, it’s so good that it’s now an adjective in its own right and people quite naturally walk around saying ‘I’m into Motown’ in a way that no one has ever said ‘I’m into Sony’ or ‘I’m into Bella Union’.
No doubt there’s someone shouting ‘I PREFER STAX, ACTUALLY!’ at their computer right now, but surely that’s just one of those weird things that people say – like salt and vinegar crisps belong in green packets.
Everything about Motown, particularly in the early days, makes me happy – they produced entertainers rather than singers; they recorded within hours of writing the song to capture the spontaneity; and they often ripped up their own release schedules because they were so excited about whatever brilliant song they just recorded.
Do you know what the first Motown record was that sold a million copies?
‘Shop Around’ by Smokey Robinson and The Miracles.
Do you know what ‘Shop Around’ is about?
It’s about Smokey Robinson’s mum pulling him to one side and basically saying, ‘Before you get married, son, have as many girlfriends as you possibly can.’
What a woman. I wish my mum had said the same to me.
My love of Motown also explains my suspicion of northern soul. Why is everyone messing about with B-sides and rarities? Just put ‘Needle in a Haystack’ by The Velvelettes on and be done with it.
And why are we in Wigan? And why’s everyone covered in talcum powder?
Sorry, it’s not for me.
Finally, I love the fact that all you needed for a career at Motown was to be in close proximity to the recording studio. That was it. Just hang around and your time will come, like it did for Diana Ross and Martha Reeves – office girls who were put on the production line just because they were within reach.
‘Excuse me Martha, can you stop typing for a second and come in here and sing “Heatwave” please.’
‘Sure, no problem.’
‘Great, and can you bring the Vandellas with you please.’
I’m fairly sure that if I’d been working there as a cleaner then I’d probably have had fifteen top ten hits by now and currently be on tour somewhere with the surviving members of The Four Tops.
That’s how good it was.
Yet when you look at Gaye’s career, it’s complex and goes against the grain of the other artists. He starts out as a drummer, then gets marketed as a Nat King Cole-style crooner, before he decides to rebel against the company ethos. This basically involves smoking a load of weed, snorting a load of coke, and being a terrible pupil at the John Roberts Powers School for Social Grace where he was sent to be groomed.
He’s also not helped by a stop-start discography that never quite takes off in the same way as The Supremes, The Four Tops or The Temptations. For every ‘Can I Get a Witness’ and ‘How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You)’ there’s a string of forgettable songs that aren’t hits. It’s only really when he teams up with Tammi Terrell in 1966 that he has consolidated success for the first time.
Tragically, though, Terrell collapses in his arms on stage one night in 1967 and is later diagnosed with a brain tumour. She dies three years later, at the age of just twenty-four.
So, despite everything that I associate with Motown, the opposite appears to be the case for Marvin Gaye. His success is, at best, sporadic, and his personal life is littered with tragedy and unease.
Come the end of the sixties, with the label starting to fall apart, Marvin Gaye is still hanging on and looking for another move.
And he’s just had his biggest hit so far – ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’.
One of the more interesting aspects of Gaye’s career is how he became overtly politicised towards the end of the sixties in a way that other Motown artists didn’t. Throughout his life he had personal battles with authority (his father, Motown), and as the decade wore on he embraced an emerging subculture that was defiantly anti-war and anti-government.
He tells of a time when he heard one of his own songs on the radio interrupted by a newsflash about the Watts Riots.
He tells of how his brother would come back from Vietnam with stories that would terrify and infuriate him.
Yet, all the while, Motown are still pushing him to ‘entertain’, to meet their expectations of who Marvin Gaye was.
He can’t do it any more.
Instead, he starts wearing hoodies, grows a beard, and refuses to pay his taxes in case the government uses them to bomb Vietnam.
It’s in this frame of mind that he starts work on What’s Going On – an album that turned its back on a career of love songs and focused on the Vietnam war, spirituality, environmentalism and saving babies instead.
So here we are. Having considered the three obvious angles, I still felt dissatisfied. None of them seemed to adequately sum up the album and I felt there was still something missing.
For example, there’s the James Jamerson story.
For those of you that don’t know, Jamerson was the legendary bass player at Motown who played on practically all their hits. Naturally, Gaye wanted him for What’s Going On so he tracked him down to a club and dragged him into the studio to record his part. There was only one problem – Jamerson was so drunk that he could barely stand up.
It didn’t matter though. Jamerson lay on the floor, pissed out of his head, and nailed his part in one take. To this day it’s one of the best bass lines ever and I’ll never know how he did it.
So, yeah, at one point I considered doing 2,000 words on a drunk bass player.
And that was nearly that. I’d given up trying to find something that captured the essence of What’s Going On and, instead, settled for what I had – some biography plotlines and a few daft jokes.
Par for the course, really.
Then I saw it.
In an interview just before he made What’s Going On, Marvin Gaye said the following:
‘I had to be an artist, and artists work in the privacy of their own imaginations.’
It was that final phrase that really struck me.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it and it went round my head for hours. He’d come up with the perfect description for the creative process, one that explained why debut albums are often the best, why you should never cater for your audience, and why you should always ignore other people’s expectations.
But more than that, he explained his own transformation.
He explained that What’s Going On is as much about personal politics as it is about a wider context – the legacy narrative that now gives the album its weight.
He let you in on the secret of what happened and, in the process, reminded me that these stories are always best kept personal. So if you’re asking me what I think of What’s Going On, to do it justice, I would say its magic is in that phrase.
After twelve years and ten albums, Marvin Gaye finally discovered what he’d been looking for the whole time – the privacy of his own imagination.
It takes me a long time to get round to things – the films of Billy Wilder, tax returns, writing this – and Motown was just another one of those foolishly neglected items on my very long list. When I was little most of the music in our house was classical. That came from my dad, the son of an Austrian woman who brought the Viennese love of chamber music with the suitcase of possessions she packed when she fled the Nazis. My childhood was all schnitzel and sauerkraut and septets. There was the occasional burst of pop too but only really through the records my mum had bought, which she seemed to have stopped doing once her children came along. It would be ten years until I’d hear of the existence of David Bowie. My first exposure to any kind of R&B was in the form of Boney M’s 1978 Nightflight to Venus.
Charities have been started for less.
Leaving aside an early flirtation with the works of Queen, my own pop education began quite late under the tutelage of my school bus comrade Bob, who filled the vital role of Slightly Older Kid with Advanced Record Collection. He made me a copy of The Smiths’ Strangeways, Here We Come, and since TDK D90s had two sides, slung in The Pogues’ If I Should Fall from Grace with God too. These were a revelation. The energy of The Pogues, the sly gallows wit of Morrissey, the music from Marr the like of which I’d just never imagined existed, blew out a wall to my left and when the clouds of plaster thinned, there was this whole other world – whole other part of my brain, actually – a valley of possibilities, stretching away. I let slip Queen’s hand and off into that valley I gambolled, writhing around in indie like an extra in a drug scene from a 1960s movie: The House of Love, The Sugarcubes, They Might Be Giants and the fey, pre-Roses la-la pop that Manchester put out (God, I loved The Man from Delmonte like only a weedy nerd could). By the time Madchester came along, I was an old indie hand in the right place at the right time.
For years after that I was pretty tribal about pop, as the gauche often are; I was an indie kid, all fanzines and certainty. That probably lasted about a decade until I met my wife, who is on every level a better person than me. She loves all the things I took pride in disdaining: soul, musicals, celery. And in a war of attrition over the last almost twenty years, she’s got me round to the first two. (I will die before admitting celery is a foodstuff, mind.) Now among the thousands of LPs, CDs and downloads I own there’s stuff in every genre. Except metal, which continues to elude me. But what all those lost years meant was that in spite of listening to (and loving) a great deal more of it in recent times, whole swathes of soul, funk, R&B and related sub-genres that would be bunged in the same grey slots in HMV have passed me by, including all but the title track of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On.
God, the pressure. People love this, don’t they? I mean, really fanatically love it as an album, an artefact, a milestone. God, the pressure.
I’ve been on a bit of an up and down journey with this one. See, that opening track is so strong, such a great piece of music, that I think I was waiting for an album of something similar – something that immediately grabs you, a constantly startling adventure in music, twists and turns and revelations at every corner. This is not that album. That first listen was a surprise. No, I’ll be more honest: it was a disappointment. But that’s the problem with the expectations we build up, isn’t it? That’s why so many critics level that utterly redundant opinion ‘I would have preferred it if it was a bit more like…’, the correct response to which is ‘Well, it isn’t, so suck it up and take it on its own terms, you solipsistic imbecile.’
So, having washed my expectations away, I went back to it and I must say I liked it a good deal better, which was exciting and pleasing and something of a relief because I’m a cultural coward and I’d hate to be seen as a dunce who can’t appreciate A Classic. The third time I put it on, I was truly looking forward to being in its company again, but as the record turned… nothing. It just didn’t take. To be absolutely straight with you, I got a bit bored.
I hope that we can still be friends.
Marvin starts out asking ‘What’s Going On’ and neither having received a satisfactory answer nor being the kind of fellow to let a thing go, he investigates further with a song called ‘What’s Happening, Brother’. Actually, there’s no question mark, so it’s difficult to tell whether he’s just reframed his original question or is now providing the answer to it. My guess is that it’s a supplementary enquiry related to the first one since it starts with exactly the same musical sequence the last song finished with. Because what seems to happen after the belting opener is that Marvin noodles around for fifteen minutes or so asking vague questions over music that doesn’t seem to change pace or go anywhere different to any great degree, making breaks at arbitrary moments when he’s thought of another question. I find the meandering makes it hard to get hold of anything.