Inevitably, I did not lose my virginity to ‘Samba Pa Ti’. Instead, my unfortunate girlfriend and I were listening to the second side of Rod Stewart’s Smiler, my favourite record at the time; side two, I notice now, features ‘Hard Road’, ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed To Her Face’ and ‘Dixie Toot’. In a perfect world, obviously, that wouldn’t have happened.
7 ‘Mama You Been On My Mind’
– Rod Stewart
We were listening to the second side of Smiler because I was, in my mid-to-late teens, a huge Rod Stewart fan. It’s hard to imagine now, but loving Rod Stewart in 1973 was the equivalent of loving Oasis in 1994, or The Stone Roses in 1989 – in other words, although it didn’t make you the coolest kid in your class, it was certainly nothing to be ashamed of. One of the best things about Cameron Crowe’s film Almost Famous is that it recognizes this, gives Rod his due; when the band pulls away in the bus, it’s ‘Every Picture Tells A Story’ they’re all listening to. It’s just about the only evidence for the defence that I have at my disposal now, because within a few years there was plenty to be ashamed of: Britt Ekland, for example. And several other interchangeably blonde women who weren’t Britt Ekland but may as well have been. And ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’. And ‘Ole Ola’, the 1978 Scotland World Cup song (the chorus of which went ‘Ole ole, ole ola / We’re going to bring the World Cup back from over thar’). And his obsession with LA, and the champagne and straw boaters on album sleeves, and the drawing on the cover of Atlantic Crossing, and the Faces’ live album (on which the last thing you hear at the end of side two is Stewart saying, with a nasty leer, ‘Thank you for your time . . . and your money’), and the all-purpose, session-musician, sub-Stones plod-rock that can be found on any of his post-Faces work, ‘Hot Legs’ being the template . . . ‘Now there’s a man who’s never let you down,’ a friend remarked dryly when I once confessed my soft spot, and it’s true that Rod’s record is not without its blemishes.
And yet I owe him a great deal. His first four or five solo albums contained the first ballads that I ever loved – ‘Country Comfort’, ‘Tomorrow Is A Long Time’, ‘Handbags And Gladrags’, ‘Reason To Believe’, ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’, loads of them – and I’d still rather listen to a ballad than anything else. And he was the first singer to teach me that there was an art to interpretation: his best songs were invariably covers, and I had always presumed (I was a music snob even before I knew anything) that covers were inauthentic, somehow, and inevitably inferior – that only the originals really counted. But when I checked out these originals, I discovered to my confusion that quite often he had improved upon them. Obviously he wasn’t a better singer than Sam Cooke, but Stewart’s take on ‘Bring It On Home To Me’ had a raucousness and a swing that I couldn’t hear in Cooke’s version; and Dylan’s ‘Mama You Been On My Mind’ seems to me to be not much more than a strum – an exquisite strum, with one of Dylan’s loveliest and simplest lyrics, but a strum nonetheless. Stewart’s evident love for the song rescues it, or at least spotlights it: where Dylan almost throws it away, with the implication that there’s plenty more where that one came from, Stewart’s reverence seems to dignify it, invest it with an epical quality Dylan denies it. I probably like both versions equally now, but if it hadn’t been for Stewart, I’d never have been able to spot that there was anything there.
These are the records I own because of Rod Stewart: Bobby Bland’s His California Album, from which Stewart borrowed ‘It’s Not The Spotlight’ (and, though the cover is flatter and less piquant, Rod judiciously elected to leave out Bland’s really rather unpleasant phlegm-clearing gargles); my entire Bobby Womack collection (Stewart never, as far as I know, attempted a Womack song, but he ripped a couple of them off, and always talked about Womack in interviews); Chuck Berry’s Golden Decade, the Temptations’ Greatest Hits, Sam Cooke’s Golden Greats. I was introduced to The Isley Brothers (‘This Old Heart Of Mine’), Aretha Franklin (‘(You Make Me Feel) Like a Natural Woman/Man’) and Crazy Horse (‘I Don’t Want To Talk About It’). And once I knew about Aretha and Bobby Bland and the Temptations, I was led on to B.B. King and the Four Tops and Atlantic, and Chess, and . . . This is all pretty good stuff; I would hate not to have discovered it when I did. If I’d been similarly smitten by Elton John or Jethro Tull or Mike Oldfield, all of whom were competing for my attention at around the same time, it’s possible that I might not be listening to music now.
Because the people who stick with pop music the longest, it seems to me, are those who entrust themselves at a tender age to somebody like Stewart, somebody who was clearly a fan himself. Those who fell for The Stones got to hear, if they could be bothered, Arthur Alexander and Solomon Burke and Don Covay (and anyone who likes Jagger and has yet to hear Covay should check him out – you’d be amused, unless you have too much invested in Jagger being a true original). Zeppelin fans might have been moved to seek out Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. The antecedents of Yes and Genesis were Pink Floyd, and before that nobody much, really, and that was, in retrospect, part of the reason I didn’t like them very much. The music felt airless and synthetic, and it seemed even then as if all the prog rockers would rather have been classical musicians, as if pop were beneath them, somehow. They led you up a blind alley; there was nowhere to go.
Recently Elvis Costello, another old Rod Stewart fan, offered to produce him, and thus offer him a route to redemption. I have the same fantasy. I’d like to choose the songs (I’ve got a couple of ideas, but they’re trade secrets, obviously) and a sympathetic band, a group of musicians who could approximate that ramshackle folky stomp on ‘Every Picture Tells A Story’ . . . I reckon I’d get some pretty good work out of him. Maybe Elvis and I could work together, although he’d have to do most of the knob-twiddling. I’m not very good at that. On the other hand, why should Rod bother? He’s done OK without us.
8 ‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?’
– Bob Dylan
9 ‘Rain’
– The Beatles
By expressing no preference between a Rod Stewart version of a Bob Dylan song and the Dylan original, I have, I know, exposed myself: I’m not a big Dylan fan. I’ve got Blonde On Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited, obviously. And Bringing It All Back Home and Blood On the Tracks. Anyone who likes music owns those four. And I’m interested enough to have bought The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3, and that live album we now know wasn’t recorded at the Royal Albert Hall. The reviews of Time Out Of Mind and Love And Theft convinced me to shell out for these two, as well, although I can’t say I listen to them very often. I once asked for Biograph as a birthday present, so with that and The Bootleg Series I’ve got two Dylan boxed sets. I also, now I look, seem to own copies of World Gone Wrong, The Basement Tapes and Good As I Been To You, although this, I suspect, is due more to my respect for Greil Marcus, who has written so persuasively and brilliantly about Dylan’s folk and blues roots, than to my Dylanphilia. And I have somehow picked up along the way Street Legal, Desire, and John Wesley Harding. Oh, and I bought Oh Mercy because it contains the lovely ‘Most of the Time’, which is on the High Fidelity soundtrack. There are, therefore, around twenty separate Bob Dylan CDs on my shelf; in fact I own more recordings by Dylan than by any other artist. Some people – my mother, say, who may not own twenty CDs in total – would say that I am a Dylan fanatic, but I know Dylan fanatics, and they would not recognize me as one of them. (I have a friend who stays logged on to the Dylan website Expecting Rain most of the day at work – as if the website were CNN and Dylan’s career were the Middle East – and who owns 130 Dylan albums, including a fourteen-CD box of every single thing Dylan recorded during 1965 apart from – get this – Highway 61 Revisited, the only thing he recorded during 1965 that sane people would want to own. He’s pretty keen.) I can’t quote whole songs – just the odd line here and there. I do not regard Dylan as any more important, or any more talented, than Elvis Presley, or Marvin Gaye, or Bob Marley, or several other major artists. I have no op
inion as to whether he was a poet, and especially not as to whether he was a better poet than another poet, I don’t own any bootlegs, I have no desire to see him play live again (I saw him twice, and that was more than enough), I have no theories about any single song . . . I just like some of the tunes, and that, I have been led to believe, is Not Good Enough.
There is a very clever English artist called Emma Kay who has done a series of artworks which consist entirely of her (verbal) memories of Shakespeare plays. If I were to do the same for the life of Bob Dylan, it would consist of the following list:
Zimmerman
Hibbing, Minnesota
New York coffee houses
Joan Baez (But what about her? I’m not sure.)
The Band, formerly The Hawks. Electricity. ‘Judas!’
Motorbike crash. Never as good afterwards. (Is that true? I fear I may be getting the crash confused with Elvis’s spell in the army.)
Sarah (Sarah who? Don’t know). Divorce.
Eye-liner
Christianity
Farm Aid
Lots of tours
This, it seems to me, is way too much knowledge. (Why on earth am I able to name his home town? And why should I recall that he fell off his bloody motorbike?) I will not attempt a similar list pertaining to the life of William Shakespeare, because it would be far too shaming, but suffice to say that it would not extend much beyond Stratford-upon-Avon, Anne Hathaway and her cottage, the Globe and the Dark Lady. Jane Austen: Bath; unmarried; once went to my sister’s house, apparently, although some time before my sister moved there. (That must be right, mustn’t it, dates-wise?) Obviously I have no one but myself to blame for my ignorance of our major literary figures. I’m not responsible for my intimacy with the Life of Bob, however. That’s the fault of all sorts of other people: friends, music writers, university professors, editors at my publishing house. He’s hard to avoid – mostly because his status as a major poet allows one to like him without inducing the feelings of intellectual insecurity that usually accompany devotion to a pop star. I suppose I resent that. In my book, you’re either in or you’re out, and if you’re in, then get in properly, and find as big a place in your heart for the stupid stuff – ‘Mmmm Bop’ and ‘Judy Is a Punk’ – as for the stuff that you can pass off as poetry. Obviously I wouldn’t ask you to find as big a place in your head for ‘Mmmm Bop’, but then, that’s partly the trouble: the best music connects to the soul, not the brain, and I worry that all this Dylan-devotion is somehow anti-music – that it tells us the heart doesn’t count, and only the head matters.
Elsewhere in this book you will find fanciful comparisons between literature and music, specifically novels and songs, but you sure can exhaust a great song much more quickly than you can clean out a great novel, and – partly, I suspect, because I am not interested in Dylan as poet – I’ve exhausted Bob, or at least the bits of Bob that I’m interested in. I wish I hadn’t; there’s a density and a gravity to a Dylan song that you can’t find anywhere else. But even more than I regret mining the seam for all it’s worth (or all it’s worth to me), I regret never having heard any of the songs at the right age, in the right year. What must it have been like, to listen to ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ in 1966, aged nineteen or twenty? I heard ‘White Riot’ and ‘Anarchy In The UK’ in 1976, aged nineteen, but the enormous power those records had then has mostly been lost now. Much of the shock came from their volume and speed and brevity, and records consequently became louder and faster and shorter; listening to them a quarter of a century later is like watching old film of Jesse Owens running. You can see that he won his races, but all sense of pace has been wiped away by Maurice Greene. ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, however, still sounds perfect. It just doesn’t sound fresh any more. In Victorian London they used to burn phosphorus at seances in an attempt to see ghosts, and I suspect that the pop-music equivalent is our obsession with B-sides and alternate versions and unreleased material. If you can hear Dylan and The Beatles being unmistakably themselves at their peak – but unmistakably themselves in a way we haven’t heard a thousand, a million times before – then suddenly you get a small but thrilling flash of their spirit, and it’s as close as we’ll ever get, those of us born in the wrong time, to knowing what it must have been like to have those great records burst out of the radio at you when you weren’t expecting them, or anything like them. ‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?’ is, I accept, a minor Dylan track, one of his snarly (and less than poetic) put-downs, but it is from my favourite period (electric, with that crisp, clean organ sound), and I haven’t heard it a million times before, so it sneaks its way on to car tapes now. And ‘Rain’ is a great Beatles song from a great year in their career, the year that Oasis have been trying to live in for the last ten years, and it’s wonderful to listen to a Lennon/McCartney song that hasn’t quite had all the pulp sucked from it. I’ll get sick of both these songs in the end, of course – they just don’t last long enough to keep their mystery and magic for ever. But they’ll do for now.
10 ‘You Had Time’
– Ani DiFranco
11 ‘I’ve Had It’
– Aimee Mann
You’d think that self-reflective songs about the music-biz life – about the pain and joy of being a talented but struggling singer-songwriter (‘I’ve Had It’), or about the difficulty of maintaining a relationship and a career in rock ’n’ roll (‘You Had Time’) – would suck. You’d think that these songs would reek of self-indulgence, or betoken a failure of imagination and creativity and empathy; you’d think that DiFranco and Mann are three-quarters of the way down the road that leads to songs about room service, concession stands and the imbecility of local-radio presenters. So how are these two of the most moving and beautiful pieces of music one could hope to come across on pop albums?
‘You Had Time’ sets itself a further handicap: it begins with more than two minutes of apparently hopeful and occasionally discordant piano noodling. I know, I know – neither ‘Baby Let’s Play House’ nor ‘(Hit Me) Baby One More Time’ begins with piano noodling, and they wouldn’t have been much good if they had; that’s not what pop is supposed to be about. But DiFranco’s song is nothing if not ambitious, because what it does – or, at any rate, what it pretends to do – is describe the genesis of its own creation: it shows its workings, in a way that would delight any maths teacher. When it kicks off, the noodling sounds impressionistic, like a snatch of soundtrack for an arty but emotional film – maybe Don’t Look Now, because the piano has a sombre, churchy feel to it, and you can imagine Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie wandering around Venice in the cold, grieving and doomed. But it cheers up a little, when DiFranco makes out that she’s suddenly hit upon the gorgeous little riff that gives the song its spine. She’s not quite there yet, because she hasn’t found anything to do with her left hand, so there’s a little bit more messing about; and then, as if by magic (although of course we know that it’s merely the magic of hard work and talent) she works out a counterpoint, and she’s there. Indeed, she celebrates the birth of the song by shoving the piano out of the way and playing the song proper on acoustic guitar – the two instruments are fused together with a deliberately improbable seamlessness on the recording, as if she wants us to see this as a metaphor for the creative process, rather than as the creative process itself. It’s a sweet idea, a fan’s dream of how music is created; I’d love to be a musician precisely because a part of me believes that this is exactly how songs are born, just as some people who are not writers believe that we are entirely dependent on the appearance of a muse.
And, thankfully, the song proper isn’t anticlimactic: ‘You Had Time’ is perhaps the gentlest and most generous-spirited break-up song I know. (And just as the intro is a talentless fan’s dream of musical creativity, this generous-spiritedness is a liberal heterosexual’s idea of how nice gay women are to each other, even when their relationships fail. While straight men are inwardly plotting revenge while feigning indiff
erence, and straight women are cutting the crotches out of expensive trousers, gay women are hugging and crying and pledging eternal friendship. This is actually offensive nonsense, of course – unhappily, the only intelligent right-on response is to recognize that gays are as violent, unpleasant, pious, judgemental and unreflective as everyone else – but ‘You Had Time’ is so sweet-tempered that it inspires this sort of embarrassing stereotyping.) What gives ‘You Had Time’ some of its power is that, whereas most break-up songs are definitively heartsick, this is a song about indecision and stasis. The narrator has just returned from a tour of some kind; both her fingers and her voice are sore, so we must presume that she is a guitarist and singer (you must forgive us, Ani, if we temporarily confuse fiction and autobiography). It becomes apparent that, while away, the narrator is supposed to have sorted out what she wants to do about her relationship, and so the title of the song, it becomes clear, is her lover’s predictable and legitimate retort to the age-old plea. Anyway, she’s had all this time, and she still hasn’t made up her mind . . . Except, the song manages to imply, she has, really: she knows it’s over. In one lovely, and very sad, couplet, the narrator says, simply: ‘You are a china shop and I am a bull / You are very good food and I am full’ . . . See what I mean about generous-spiritedness? How many of us wouldn’t have felt better about being dumped if someone said that to us? But the song ends dreamily, with nothing resolved, at least externally, and I doubt that DiFranco will ever write another song quite as piercingly pretty, or as moving.