By London Ed.
Possibly vapid music
Bill writes ‘The creativity of the 1960s stood in stark contrast to the vapidity of '50s popular music’, citing as a prime example Perry Como’s Magic Moments (1960).
This is a sentiment I recognise and still identify with. I grew up with what is now called ‘British light music’, supposedly a ‘less serious’ form of Western classical music, a prime example of which would be Puffin' Billy, the theme of the BBC Light Programme's ‘Children's Favourites’, from 1952 to 1966. Note the Light Programme, one of precisely three radio stations in early 1960s Britain, the other two being the Home Service (news and interviews) and the Third Programme (classical music and improving highbrow stuff like interviews with Iris Murdoch). The idea of American style radio with disc jockeys and music other than serious and less serious was not entertained until the advent of pirate radio. When I first heard Burning of the Midnight Lamp (Hendrix, 1967), it was obvious the world had changed, and I joined my peers in a complete rejection of everything that had gone before. I still unconsciously divide all music into what came before 1967, and everything thereafter.
That said, there is music that is not ‘serious’, but which clearly has a merit within its own genre and perhaps beyond, which never conformed to the 60s progressive ethos. Once I grew up in the 1970s, I realised its value, and continue to listen with pleasure. Here is some of it:
1. All The Things You Are (Jerome Kern 1938). In this version by Dorothy Kirsten and Percy Faith (1951) it is close to schlock. Yet it is transcendent, with its complex harmonic structure, and qualities that were recognised by jazz musicians from early on, particularly by the devotees of the bebop genre. This Charlie Parker version is a classic.
2. You Win Again (Hank Williams 1952) is a simple and timeless story ‘of an utterly defeated narrator who cannot bring himself to leave his love despite her infidelities’. Country music like this was utterly despised by thinking people in the 1960s and 70s. I had a girlfriend who refused to let my Williams records in her apartment. Yet country music is really the same music as folk music, absent the left wing rhetoric. The timeless qualities it appeals to (women who cheat, lonely men drinking at bars) sadly cannot be politicised.
3. Old Cape Cod (Rothrock/Yakus/Jeffrey 1957) Best known in the version by Patti Page. While her earlier Doggie In The Window (1953) is without any redeeming properties, ‘Old Cape Cod’ was revived by hipster house music group Groove Armada in 1997, who clearly saw something of value therein.
4. Route 66 (Nelson Riddle 1962) Not the well known Bobby Troup song. It was written by Riddle as the theme for the 1960s American television drama of the same name, after CBS decided to commission a new song rather than pay royalties to Troup. Riddle is best known for his schmaltzy backing arrangments for Nat King Cole, and his music never appealed to thinking people and leftists. Yet he is a master of arrangement, and the number is clever (in my view).
5. Up Up and Away (Jimmy Webb 1967) Recorded by The Fifth Dimension and released in July 1967, barely a month before Woodstock, it is difficult to see how anyone would take this seriously, and it is exactly the sort of music the Woodstock generation loathed. But it was written by Jimmy Webb, who also penned Wichita Lineman, thought to be the first existentialist country song, and MacArthur Park, another existential song recorded by many, including country artist Waylon Jennings in 1969. Listen to these two fine songs first, and then to ‘Up Up and Away’, upon which it becomes clear that they are by the same writer, and that what distinguishes the last two, also makes the first notable, at least in some odd way.
6. September Song (Kurt Weill 1938). At last some material by a bona fide leftist, a people’s songwriter who cut his teeth in the Novembergruppe group of left leaning Berliners that included communist scribbler Bertold Brecht. Its intellectual credentials are solid, yet here it is in a fine version by Frank Sinatra (1965), sounding just like the sort of vapid 1950s muzak the progressives so despised.
7. Dancing Queen (Andersson/Ulvaeus/Anderson 1975) recorded by the Swedish pop group ABBA. I like this version from the1999 film Mamma Mia for its uncompromising fluffiness. Its value is in conveying precisely the sentiment it wishes to convey. Intellectuals now take Abba seriously, but why didn’t they tell us so at the time, instead of making us listen to the Soft Machine?
