Laura Branigan – "Gloria" (1982)

 

Gloria, I think they got your number

I think they got the alias

That you’ve been living under

I regularly compete in trivia contests at local breweries.  The hosts of those competitions play music between questions, and a lot of the records they play are definitely blog-worthy.

Recently, one of the hosts played the late Laura Branigan’s 1982 hit single, “Gloria” – which not only went platinum but also managed to stay on the Billboard “Hot 100” singles chart for an astonishing 36 consecutive weeks.

Umberto Tozzi in 1979

“Gloria” was originally recorded in Italian by Umberto Tozzi in 1979, and was a big hit in Italy.  British singer-songwriter and record producer Jonathan King then wrote English lyrics for the song and recorded it later that year.  

Laura Branigan’s 1982 cover of the song featured lyrics that were written by Canadian musician/producer Trevor Veitch, and which took the song in a completely different direction from both the original Italian lyrics and King’s English translation.  Click here to read Veitch’s lyrics, which are kind of a hot mess.

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Those of you who are d’un certain âge – that is to say, those of you who are very, very old – may remember “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon,” which was a top-20 single for Jonathan King in 1965.  

King, who was a 20-year-old Cambridge University undergraduate when “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon” was released, went on to become a very successful record producer.

King discovered and named the band Genesis in 1967, and produced their first album.  He later produced many UK hit singles – including several hits by 10cc and the Bay City Rollers – and was one of the early backers of the original London production of The Rocky Horror Show.

King later hosted or produced a number of radio and television programs, including the BBC’s Top of the Pops and the annual BRIT Awards shows (which were the equivalent of the American Grammy Awards).

In 2001, King was accused of having sex with several 14- and 15-year-old boys in the mid-eighties, and convicted of indecent assault, buggery, and attempted buggery.  Later that year, he was acquitted of 22 additional counts of sexual assault of teenaged boys.  

Jonathan King in 2007

King, who served several years in prison, always insisted that he was innocent.  In 2008, he produced Vile Pervert: The Musical, a 96-minute film that presents his side of the story.  (King plays all 21 of the movie’s roles himself.)  At one point, dressed as Oscar Wilde, King sings that there is “nothing wrong with buggering boys.”  

One reviewed complimented King on his “fantastically berserk, bravado performance” in the movie.

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The same could be said of what appears to be a television performance of the song by Tozzi that I stumbled across on YouTube, which is notable for the background antics of four undershirt-clad louts who pretend to sit at a outdoor café table and guzzle Chianti while Tozzi sings and plays the piano.  Click here to watch that video.

And click here to watch the scene from the 2013 Martin Scorsese-directed movie, The Wolf of Wall Street, that features a snippet of Tozzi’s “Gloria.”

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In January 2019, the St. Louis Blues – who had a losing record at the time – fired their coach and called up a rookie goalie to take the place of their struggling veteran netminder.  In the rookie’s first start, the Blues beat the Philadelphia Flyers in Philly.  

The night before that game, several of the Blues had gone to a sports bar in South Philly to watch the NFL wild card matchup between the Eagles and the Chicago Bears – which the Eagles won by a single point.  The DJ at the bar played “Gloria” during every commercial break, driving the crowd into a frenzy.  

  

After their win over the Flyers the next night, some of the Blues who had been at the bar to watch the Eagles-Bears game played “Gloria” in their locker room.  After that, the team got hot, going 30-10-5 in the remainder of the season.  Professional athletes are notoriously superstitious, so “Gloria” was played in the Blues’ home arena and in their locker room after every victory.

The Blues advanced to the playoffs, and their fans chanted “Play ‘Gloria’!” throughout every home playoff game.  After the team won its first Stanley Cup after a hard-fought seven-game series with the Boston Bruins, a local radio station played “Gloria” continuously for 24 hours.

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Laura Branigan wasn’t around to enjoy the 2019 mania over her recording of “Gloria.”  She had died from a brain aneurysm in 2004, when she was only 52.

(Branigan had been experiencing severe headaches for several weeks before her death, but hadn’t gone to a doctor.  If you ever have severe headaches, or serious chest pains, or anything else out of the ordinary, for God’s sake GO SEE A DOCTOR!)

Laura Branigan in 1982

Click here to watch the official music video for Branigan’s recording of “Gloria.”  

I love that video.  Laura gives it her all, and I’m buying her performance 100% despite the fact that it’s a bit amateurish.  I get the feeling from what I’ve read online that she was a hard-working and down-to-earth person, and it makes me a little sad to watch that video knowing that she died so young.  

I’m glad that “Gloria” was a big hit for her, and I hope she enjoyed the fame and fortune that the success of that record brought her.

Click on the link below to buy “Gloria” from Amazon:

10cc – "Life Is a Minestrone" (1975)

Minnie Mouse has got it all sewn up

She gets more fan mail than the Pope 

Before covid-19 reared its ugly head, my Thursday nights were devoted to the weekly trivia competitions at a nearby brewery. 

I was at that brewery with my trivia teammates the evening of Thursday, March 12, 2020.  (We finished first that night, as usual.)  Everyone there that night was talking about covid, but none of us was taking it all that seriously.  After all, there had only been twelve confirmed coronavirus cases (and only two hospitalizations) in my home state of Maryland as of that date.

Minnie and Daisy – BFFs!

But the sh*t really hit the fan over the next few days.  State and county officials shut down schools, libraries, movie theaters, gyms, and casinos.  (Initially, schools were closed for only two weeks.  Little did we know . . .)

More importantly, all eating and drinking establishments were ordered to close their doors.  

As a result, there were no weekly trivia nights at that brewery for the next eighteen months.

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Fortunately, the county just west of the county where I live had a less draconian attitude when it came to bar trivia.

One of my daughters (and two of my grandchildren) live in that county, and I visit them once or twice a week.  

About six months ago, I found out that several of the breweries in that area were once again hosting trivia nights.  So I started playing at one of them every Thursday.  Pretty soon I was playing every Tuesday night as well. 

Some people think I’ve become obsessed with trivia.  I prefer to say that I am an enthusiastic trivia player.  So enthusiastic, in fact, that’s it hard for me to imagine anything short of a heart attack that would keep me away from my two usual trivia haunts on those nights.  (I’m talking about a serious heart attack.  A minor one probably wouldn’t be enough to stop me.)

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When I started doing trivia on Tuesdays, I decided to play at Smoketown Brewing – which is one of about a dozen different local venues offering trivia on that night of the week.

The first time I went, I played solo.  You occasionally see couples playing trivia, but most teams have several players.  (Solo players have almost no chance of winning.  Also, they look like losers who have no friends.) 

I had a respectable score for a solo contestant – I didn’t win one of the prizes that are awarded to the top three finishers, but I wasn’t at the bottom either.  The host – the guy who is hired to ask the questions and keep score – gave me a free pint glass as a consolation prize.

I noticed that the bartenders on duty that night were competing as well.  So when I returned the next Tuesday, I sat at the bar and asked them if they would like to combine forces with me.  They graciously accepted the invitation, and I’ve been playing with them ever since.

The more diverse your trivia teammates are, the better the chances are that you will win.  I know a lot of stuff about history, geography, literature, sports and sixties and seventies music, TV shows, and movies.  But there are some yuuuge black holes in my trivia database.  

For example, I know next to nothing about superhero movies or video games.  And my knowledge of recent TV shows and pop music is very spotty.

Fortunately, one of my bartender teammates is a Gen X’er, and the other is a Gen Y’er.  So when it comes to pop culture questions – there are usually a lot of pop culture questions at trivia – the three of us have the last half-century or so reasonably well covered.  

There are usually at least a dozen teams competing at Smoketown.  (Last week, there were 18.)  Most of the teams have six or seven players – which gives them a big  advantage over teams with just three members, like mine.  

But we’ve done very well, if I do say so myself.  We win about half the time, and rarely finish out of the top three.

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One of the relatively easy trivia questions from several weeks ago was “What cartoon character has three nephews named Huey, Dewey, and Louie?”

I immediately started to write down “Donald Duck” on my answer blank, but then stopped and thought for a moment.  I sometimes mishear a question, or jump to conclusions about where a question is going instead of waiting until the entire question is read.  This question seemed pretty easy, so I wondered if I had missed something – was the question actually harder than I thought it was?

So I asked my teammates if Donald Duck and Daisy Duck were married.  If they were, then Huey, Dewey, and Louie would have been her nephews as well.  But if was she just his main squeeze – or even just a FWB – then the answer to the question had to be Donald.

We decided to go with Donald, which was the right decision – I was overthinking it a bit to worry about Daisy.  (From what I can tell, Donald never made an honest woman of her.)  

Fun fact about Daisy Duck: Donald had three nephews, but Daisy had three nieces – named April, May, or June.  

You best believe I filed that little tidbit away in my mind in case it comes up at a future trivia event!

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Today’s featured song mentions Minnie Mouse, not Daisy Duck.  But Minnie and Daisy were BFFs, and I couldn’t find a worthwhile song that referred to Daisy.  

“Life Is a Minestrone” is on 10cc’s 1975 album, The Original Soundtrack, which I bought when I was in law school and damn near played to death.

I had a real weakness in those days for art rock with witty, tongue-in-cheek lyrics – think 10cc, or Sparks, or City Boy.  “Life Is a Minestrone” is chock full of such lyrics.

For example, the song begins with these lines:

I'm dancing on the White House lawn

Sipping tea by the Taj Mahal at dawn

Hanging ’round the gardens of Babylon

The second verse takes off from there:

I'm leaning on the Tower of Pisa

Had an eyeful of the tower in France

I'm hanging ’round the gardens of Madison

(The eyeful/Eiffel Tower pun in the second line is pretty good, but the next line is even better – it plays of the reference to the legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon in the first verse with a reference to hanging around a very different kind of garden: Madison Square Garden.)

I’m not sure quite what to make of the next two lines:

The seat of learning and the flush of success

Relieves a constipated mind

The chorus says it all:

Life is a minestrone

Served up with parmesan cheese

Death is a cold lasagna

Suspended in deep freeze

AllMusic’s Dave Thompson said that “Life Is a Minestrone” was a “truly joyous piece of pop nonsense,” and went on to describe it quite accurately as “utterly daft [and] wholly compulsive.”  About the only thing wrong with the song is that it’s at most a three-minute song that’s been stretched to 4:42 with several unnecessary repetitions of the chorus and an endless outro.  (There’s a 4:08 single edit that’s better, but it’s still too long.)

Click here to listen to “Life Is a Minestrone.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Rolling Stones – "Brown Sugar" (1971)

Scarred old slaver knows he’s doing alright

Hear him whip the women 

Just around midnight

[NOTE: I announced recently that the records that will be featured on 2 or 3 lines in the upcoming year will be taken from a 474-item list of unfamiliar but blog-worthy records whose titles I’ve jotted down after hearing them on Sirius/XM radio.  “Brown Sugar” is not on that list, so it looks like that plan lasted exactly three posts.  But as I’ve said many times before, “My blog, my rules.”]  

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The lyrics to “Brown Sugar” have been called “gross,” “sexist,” “stunningly crude,”

 and “stunningly offensive,” among other things.

Well, those critics don’t have the Rolling Stones’ second-most-performed song to kick around any more.  Since releasing “Brown Sugar” on the Sticky Fingers album 50 years ago, the “World’s Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band” has played the song live some 1136 times.  Mick and Keith and the boys have performed only one song – “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” – more often.

But it’s apparently no mas for “Brown Sugar” – at least temporarily.  Keith Richards recently confirmed that the song has been dropped from the setlist for the Stones’ current American tour.  “You picked up on that, huh?” the 77-year-old wonder told a Los Angeles Times reporter when asked if the Stones had cut the song.

His subsequent comments to that reporter seemed to acknowledge that “Brown Sugar” was a victim of the current climate of heightened cultural sensitivity:

I’m trying to figure out with the sisters quite where the beef is.  Didn’t they understand this was a song about the horrors of slavery?  But they’re trying to bury it. At the moment I don’t want to get into conflicts with all of this sh*t.  But I’m hoping that we’ll be able to resurrect the babe in her glory somewhere along the track.

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Mick Jagger – a man who always keeps his cards close to his chest – offered a somewhat different explanation.  “We’ve played ‘Brown Sugar’ every night since 1970, so sometimes you think, ‘We’ll take that one out for now and see how it goes,’ he told the Times, adding “We might put it back in.” 

Jagger admitted in 1995 – long before today’s “cancel culture” movement existed – that the song was problematic:  “God knows what I’m on about in that song.  It’s such a mishmash.  All the nasty subjects in one go.”

“I would probably censor myself [today],” he added.  “I’d think, ‘Oh God, I can’t. I’ve got to stop. I can’t just write raw like that.’”

Jagger did, in fact, censor himself when he wrote the song.  Originally, the song was going to be titled “Black P*ssy.”  But he realized that was too much even by 1971’s much more loosey-goosey standards.

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The first two verses to “Brown Sugar” talk about slavery and the mistreatment of slaves.  It would be quite a stretch to condemn them as somehow condoning that mistreatment – it’s more reasonable to read those verses as condemning the very bad behavior of the past.  

So what’s the beef with the song?

One problem seems to be the juxtaposition of those verses with a chorus – “Brown sugar, how come you taste so good?” – in which Jagger celebrates sex with black women.  (Presumably Mick’s carnal encounters with black women were completely consensual, while the sexual exploitation of female slaves by slave traders and owners was anything but.) 

Ronnie, Mick, and Keith

I suspect the bigger problem is that the music that accompanies its questionable lyrics is so damn exhilarating.  There’s no Stones song that’s more musically euphoric than “Brown Sugar” – and given the subject of the lyrics, that seems very wrong to a lot of people.

Pair up the words of “Brown Sugar” with more somber music – something closer to “Paint It, Black,” perhaps – and it might be a very different story.

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I don’t think that much about the meaning of a song’s lyrics when I’m listening to it – and singing along with it, which is usually the case.

That’s partly because I don’t pick up on a lot of the words in a song.  I doubt that I could write down the lyrics of a single rock song – even those that I’ve been listening to since the sixties – without getting some of the words wrong.  Of course, my accuracy would go way up if I could listen to the song while I was jotting down the lyrics – but even then I would get things wrong.

Take the lyrics to today’s featured song that are quoted at the beginning of this post.  I always thought that Mick was singing “Hear him WITH the women,” not “Hear him WHIP the women.”

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I’m not sure what is accomplished by the Stones’ not performing “Brown Sugar” any more.  There are certainly many songs that advocate socially unacceptable behavior – think of all the gangsta rap songs that celebrate violent actions against law enforcement and are misogynistic in the extreme – but it’s insane to view “Brown Sugar” as pro-slavery or pro-rape. 

And if “Brown Sugar” is deleted from the Stones’ setlist. what about “Stupid Girl,” and “Some Girls,” and “Under My Thumb” (to name just a few Stones song that are not exactly paragons of wokeness)?  Do we treat them like the musical equivalents of Robert E. Lee statues and consign all of them to Trotsky’s “dustbin of history” – never to be played in concert or on the radio again?

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I could go on and on about my belief that we need to stop applying today’s moral standards to people and works of art from the distant past – after all, a hundred years from now, people are going to be laughing their asses off at our hypocrisy and utter cluelessness –  but I suddenly got very tired of this whole topic.

If the Stones wants to keep playing “Brown Sugar,” that’s just fine with me.  But if they want to drop it rather than be faced with a constant stream of criticism from holier-than-thou cultural provocateurs who have nothing better to do, you can hardly blame them.  Life is far too short – especially at their advanced ages – to deal with such nonsense.

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Now that I think about it, isn’t the “Brown Sugar” tempest in a teapot really just the mirror image of what happened after John Lennon said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus?  (In case you’ve forgotten or weren’t around in 1966, what happened then is that a number of American radio stations – including the only top-40 station in my hometown of Joplin, Missouri – stopped playing Beatles records.)

If you boycotted the Beatles because you thought Lennon’s comment was blasphemous, or if you think “Brown Sugar” is misogynistic and racist, knock yourself out.  After all, it’s a free country.  (Sort of.)

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The late Charlie Watts’s playing on “Brown Sugar” is a good illustration of his philosophy that less is often more when it comes to being a drummer in a rock ’n’ roll band.

The late Charlie Watts

“I was brought up on the theory that the drummer is an accompanist,” Watts told an interviewer in 2008.   “I don’t like drum solos.  I admire some people that do them, but generally I prefer drummers playing with the band.  The challenge with rock and roll is the regularity of it.  My thing is to make it a dance sound.  It should swing and bounce.”

Watts used a very simple drum kit – a bass drum, one floor tom, one mounted tom, and a snare drum.  By contrast, Keith Moon started with a similar kit but ended up with a setup that included two bass drums, two floor toms, nine mounted toms, and a snare drum – not to mention timbales, one timpani, and a gong.

Click here to hear “Brown Sugar” – assuming that you’re man (or woman) enough to handle it.

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Tommy James and the Shondells – "Ball of Fire" (1969)

 

And the ball of fire in the sky

Keeps watching over you and I

Note to Tommy James: it should be “over you and ME,” not “over you and I.”

You don’t believe me?  “I” is the first-person singular subject pronoun.  “Me” is the first-person singular object pronoun.  Here, “I” is being used as the object of the preposition “over,” so it should be “me.”

You still don’t believe me?  Leave out the “you” for a moment.  Would you say “keeps watching over ME” or “keeps watching over I”?

I rest my case.

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Speaking of grammar, I recently came across a reference to Joan Didion’s 1970 novel, Play It as It Lays – which was later made into a movie with the same title.

It never hit me before that the name of the book and the movie should be Play It as It Lies.  

“Play it as it lies” is also a golf expression – the golfers got it right, while the fancy-pants Ms. Didion got it wrong.

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So did Bob Dylan – “Lay, Lady, Lay” should be “Lie, Lady, Lie.”  (And “Lay across my big brass bed” should be “Lie across my big brass bed.”)  

Grammatical niceties aside, “Lay, Lady, Lay” is a better choice, of course, because “Lie, Lady, Lie” could be understand as meaning that the singer wanted the lady to tell untruths.

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“Ball of Fire” is the opening track on the 1969 album, The Best of Tommy James and the Shondells.

But the song had never been released previously – so it really shouldn’t have been on a “Best Of” album, right?

However, it subsequently became a top twenty hit – which makes it sort of an ex post facto “Best Of” song.

Click here to listen to “Ball of Fire.”

Click on the link below to buy “Ball of Fire” from Amazon:

Andy Pratt – "Avenging Annie" (1973)

They call me “Avenging Annie”

I’m the avenger of womanhood

I spend my whole life telling lies

There’s an old English proverb that sums up the fundamental principle of gender equality very nicely: “What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”  (And vicey-versey, of course.)

But there’s one place where many people don’t want to see men and women treated equally – and most of those people are female.

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The National Defense Authorization Act (“NDAA”) of 2022 – which specifies how much money the Department of Defense may spend to maintain our country’s armed forces next year – easily passed the House of Representatives in September.  

The bill has yet to be voted on by the Senate, but the Senate Armed Services Committee approved the legislation by a 23-3 vote, and you would think that the full Senate will vote to enact it by a similarly comfortable margin.  (For some reason, the Senate’s leadership hasn’t gotten off its ass yet and scheduled a vote on the NDAA, but most Washington types expect that to happen soon.)

The United States hasn’t drafted anyone into military service since 1973, but men are still required to register with the Selective Service soon after their 18th birthday.  The proposed NDAA would require women to register for the draft as well. 

What does the public think about drafting women if the draft were reinstated?

In 2016, 63% of Americans supported drafting females as well as males.  But in a 2021 poll, only 45% said they favored drafting both women and men.

If you break that latest poll down, you find that 55% of men favor drafting women.  (Now that my daughters are beyond draft age, I’m down with that.)

But only 36% of women support subjecting both genders to the draft.

In other words, only 36% of American women really believe in gender equality.

Hypocrisy, thy name is you if you believe in treating men and women equally except when it comes to the military draft.

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To celebrate the 12th anniversary of 2 or 3 lines earlier this month, 2 or 3 lines interviewed 2 or 3 lines.

As I explained in that interview, I hear a lot of 2 or 3 lines-worthy records on Sirius/XM when I’m driving in my car.  When that happens, I take a photo of my car’s multimedia screen – which gives the name of the record that’s playing, as well as the artist who recorded it – whenever something I like comes on “Underground Garage” or some other Sirius/XM channel.  

As of today, there are 474 records on that list.  Except for posts that feature new inductees into the various 2 or 3 lines halls of fame, all the records that will be featured on my wildly popular little blog over the next 12 months will come from that list – except for those that aren’t.  (My blog, my rules.)

Today’s featured record doesn’t have anything to do with the subject matter of today’s post.  That’s going to be the rule, not the exception, in the upcoming months.  So don’t drive yourself crazy trying to find a connection.

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I remember hearing Andy Pratt’s “Avenging Annie” a number of times when it was new.  (It was released in 1973, when I was a junior in college and had plenty of time to listen to the radio.)  But it was way off my musical radar until earlier this year, when I heard it on the Sirius/XM “Underground Garage” channel.

Andy Pratt

Pratt wrote about the genesis of the song – his only record that charted – in a 2006 article:

I wrote “Avenging Annie” in the summer of 1972 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at my mother’s 1926 Steinway B Baby Grand piano.  I had broken up with my first wife, and I was stoned on marijuana.  On my turntable was the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, particularly the Woody Guthrie song “Pretty Boy Floyd.”

You can clearly hear that the first part of “Avenging Annie” is an altered version of “Pretty Boy Floyd.”  I was going into a creative trance, and I altered Woody’s words.  Then out came a Bach-like piano riff which I liked, so I began singing to it in falsetto, taking the part of a woman I called “Avenging Annie.”   A whole story came out, which was a fantasy version of my relationship with my ex-wife, combined with the outlaw theme of the American West. 

The record is even crazier than you’d expect from reading what Pratt wrote.  I’ve never heard anything that sounds remotely like it, and I doubt that I ever will.  

I love it to death, but YMMV.

Click here to listen to “Avenging Annie.”

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

John Lennon – "How Do You Sleep?" (1971)

The only thing you done was “Yesterday”

You probably pinched that b*tch anyway

[NOTE: This is the third and final part of our 12th anniversary 2 or 3 lines interview with 2 or 3 lines.  If you missed parts one and two, scroll down – the three parts appear in reverse order.]

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2 or 3 lines: Did you read the recent New Yorker interview of Paul McCartney?  The one where he dismissed the Rolling Stones are “a blues cover band,” and went on to say that he thought the Beatles’ “net was cast a bit wider than theirs”?

2 or 3 lines: Saying that is such a d*ck move on McCartney’s part.  He’s out pimping his new book and the new The Beatles: Get Back documentary, and I guess he figured that ripping the Stones – who had just started their “No Filter” tour – would get him some attention.  

Q: The new McCartney book you’re referring to is titled The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present.  Have you had a chance to peruse it yet?

A: No, I haven’t.  It was only published about a week ago, and it will be some time before it makes its way into my local public library.  I’m sure as hell not going to spend my own money on that b*tch, so I’ll have to wait until then.

Q: Here’s how the publisher has described the book, which is 960 pages long:

“A work of unparalleled candor and splendorous beauty, The Lyrics celebrates the creative life and the musical genius of Paul McCartney through 154 of his most meaningful songs. . . . The Lyrics pairs the definitive texts of 154 Paul McCartney songs with first-person commentaries on his life and music. Spanning two alphabetically arranged volumes, these commentaries reveal how the songs came to be and the people who inspired them . . . Here are the origins of “Let It Be,” “Lovely Rita,” “Yesterday,” and “Mull of Kintyre,” as well as McCartney’s literary influences, including Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, and Alan Durband, his high-school English teacher.

What do you think?

A: Shakespeare was one of McCartney’s literary influences?  Spare me.  But I’m curious to see the book because it is inconceivable to me that anyone could fill up 960 pages talking about Paul McCartney’s song lyrics – even McCartney himself.  That would be true even if he stuck to his Beatles songs – with a few exceptions, his post-Beatles body of work is a total waste of time.

Q:  So you’re not a fan of “Mull of Kintyre”?

A.  I’ve never heard it.  But give me a second and I’ll take a quick look at the lyrics.  [Silence.]  OK, I just pulled up the lyrics to that song online.  It seems that the Mull of Kintyre is a place in Scotland where McCartney has owned a farm for some time, and the song is about how much he loves being there.  The song’s lyrics are all about “sunsets on fire” and “deer in the glen” and “mist rolling in from the sea.”  It is utterly forgettable – it reads like something an 80-year-old widow living in a Scottish village might have written and submitted to her local weekly newspaper.

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Q: Let’s go back to what Sir Paul said about the Stones.  The Stones certainly started out as a blues cover band.  I’m looking at one of their early Crawdaddy Club setlists, which includes covers of songs by Bo Diddly, Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, and Jimmy Reed.

A: They also covered a lot of Chuck Berry songs, and songs like “Poison Ivy” and “Love Potion No. 9,” which aren’t really blues songs – but if you’re defining “blues” to include “rhythm and blues,” I won’t argue with that description.  

Q: If the Stones started out as a blues cover band, what did the Beatles start out as?

A: Before they became the world’s most successful boy band, the Beatles were a band that mostly played covers of songs suitable for drunken sailors and prostitutes to dance to.

(Stop blaming Yoko!  It was PAUL!)

Q: I assume you’re referring to the Hamburg-era Beatles?

A: Yes.  When they were in Hamburg, the Beatles covered everything from fifties toe-tappers (like “Sweet Little Sixteen” and “Hippy Hippy Shake”) to show tunes (“A Taste of Honey” and “Till There Was You” from The Music Man) to ancient pop standards (“Bésame Mucho” and “Red Sails in the Sunset”) that were perfect for slow dancing, which allowed the drunken sailors to feel up the prostitutes and allowed the prostitutes to pick the pockets of the drunken sailors.

Q: I suppose the real question isn’t whether the Stones were a blues cover band at the beginning of their career, but whether it’s fair to characterize the Stones of the late sixties and early seventies – when they were at their peak – as a blues cover band.

A: The question answers itself, doesn’t it?  Songs like “Satisfaction” and “Paint It, Black” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Gimme Shelter” aren’t blues songs, or even R&B songs – although they were influenced by blues music and R&B.  

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Q: What about McCartney’s other comment – that the Beatles’ “net was cast a bit wider” than that of the Rolling Stones?

A: The Beatles’ net was not cast very wide at all at first – the original songs on the first few albums are stylistically and thematically very similar.  As I’ve said before, Lennon and especially McCartney were very good at coming up with catchy little musical “songlets” – their usual modus operandi was to turn one songlet into the verse or verse/refrain, take another songlet and use it as the bridge (despite the fact that the second songlet might be musically quite different from the fist songlet), and repeat everything until the song was long enough to be released as a single or used as filler on an album.  As for the lyrics to those songs, the less said the better.

Q: Now, you don’t really mean that – I’m sure you have a lot you want to say about Lennon and McCartney’s lyrics.

A: Actually, I do.  Starting with quoting what many people would agree is the best book ever written about the Beatles’ music – the late Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head, which discusses each and every song the Beatles ever recorded.  MacDonald was a fan of the Beatles, but even he acknowledged that the Beatles’ lyrics were “casual” and “slipshod” compared to those of many other songwriters.  The Beatles weren’t writing songs for adults, so they didn’t need to worry much about the lyrics – after all, their early records were pitched at 13-year-old girls, so there was no point in writing sophisticated lyrics. 

Q: MacDonald wrote, “As verse, little of the Beatles’ word-output coheres, except by way of mood and style.  Is this a serious criticism of their work?  Yes.” 

A: Even Lennon and McCartney admitted that they put very little thought into the lyrics of the songs on the first several Beatles records.  Those songs are very easy to sing along to, but when it comes to the lyrics, there’s not much there.  The boys and girls who populate those songs are indistinguishable – they’re utterly generic.  They don’t have names, and they don’t have backstories – we don’t even know if the girls are blondes, brunettes, or redheads.  Look at the lyrics to “I Want to Hold Your Hold Hand” and “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “Please Please Me” and “P.S. I Love You” and “I Saw Her Standing There.”  There’s nothing real about them – they’re assemblages of trite expressions and romantic clichés pitched to middle-school-aged girls.  I’m talking about middle-school-aged girls in the sixties, of course – middle-school girls today are infinitely more mature and sophisticated, and would likely laugh at these songs as hopelessly out of it.

Q: To be fair, didn’t most of the hit pop singles of that era have very simple lyrics?

A: Many of them did.  But look at some of the Beatles’ contemporaries.  Look at “I Get Around” by the Beach Boys, which was released at about the same time as the Beatles’ records I just mentioned.  “I Get Around” is not only much more musically sophisticated than those Beatles records, it also features lyrics that tell a real story about real characters.  I’m not saying those lyrics are especially profound – it’s a song written for teenagers, after all – but it’s not as generic and two-dimensional as the typical Lennon-McCartney song of that era.  

Q: What you are saying may be true of the lyrics for the songs on the early Beatles albums – the “Beatlemania” era.  Wouldn’t you admit that the lyrical sophistication of the Beatles records increased significantly over the years?

A: John Lennon’s lyrics certainly grew in sophistication – think “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “I Am the Walrus” and especially the parts of “A Day in the Life” that he was responsible for.  Those are songs for grown-ups – as were the songs that Bob Dylan and the Who and the Kinks and the Stones were writing in that era.  Look at Stones songs like “Satisfaction’ and “Paint It Black” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Gimme Shelter” and “Monkey Man” and “Dead Flowers” and so many others – compare the lyrics of those songs with McCartney’s lyrics for not only childish twaddle like “When I’m Sixty-Four” and “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” but also his more serious songs – which were mostly sentimental, pseudo-profound crap.  Think “Yesterday” and “Let It Be” and “Hey Jude.”  The guy had an incredibly fertile mind when it came to musical ideas, but he was just hopeless as a lyricist – either because he didn’t think lyrics were important, or because he simply didn’t have the brains or the heart to write better ones.

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Q: You’ve identified a number of what you consider McCartney’s worst songs with the Beatles.  What were McCartney’s best songs?

A: He made important contributions to “A Day in the Life” and the Abbey Road side-two medley – but those were really more songlets rather than fully-developed songs.  I have a lot of affection for “Get Back,” but it’s not much more than a songlet as well.  The one truly great, fully-realized Beatles song that McCartney is apparently wholly responsible for is “Helter Skelter.”  I find it mind-blowing that “Helter Skelter” is a McCartney song – it would make perfect sense as a John Lennon song, but has absolutely nothing in common with any of Sir Paul’s other creations.  I can’t overstate how awesome a record I think “Helter Skelter” is, and it’s all McCartney.  Go figure . . .

Q: Circling back to the subject of the Rolling Stones, and McCartney’s comment that the Beatles “net was cast a bit wider” than the Stones, isn’t it true that the later Beatles albums incorporate a much more diverse palette of musical styles than what the Stones were recording at the same time?  

A: Maybe.  But that certainly doesn’t say anything about the relative quality of their music.  That “diverse palette” was due in large part to the fact that the Beatles had three very different songwriters who were operating quite independently at the end.  Lennon and McCartney worked together closely in the early days but by the time of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper and especially The White Album and Abbey Road, John and Paul and George were on their own – there was little no collaboration between them, and little or no consistency as a result.

Q: By contrast, Jagger and Richards had their ups and downs, but they never stopped collaborating – they never went their own separate ways.

A: That’s right.  Generally speaking, it was Keith who came up with the riffs and Mick who came up with the lyrics.  That doesn’t mean all their songs sounded alike – if we look at Beggars Banquet, for example, “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Street Fighting Man” are very different from “No Expectations” and “Factory Girl.”  But there’s much more of a family resemblance between Jagger-Richards songs than they are between Lennon and McCartney and Harrison songs.

Q: So you would admit that McCartney was right when he said that the Beatles cast their net wider when it came to diversity of musical styles – but you wouldn’t admit that was necessarily a good thing.  

A: That’s right.  Just because your net covers a larger surface area doesn’t mean you catch more fish.  The Stones clearly caught a lot more fish – their musical net went a lot deeper instead of just skimming the surface. 

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Q: David Remnick, who interviewed McCartney for the New Yorker, wrote in that piece that “[s]ongs are emotionally charged and brief, so we remember them whole: the melody, the hook, the lyrics, where we were, what we felt. And they are emotionally adhesive, especially when they’re encountered in our youth.”

A: The Beatles were such an overpowering pop-culture phenomenon when my friends and I were impressionable young teenagers that it’s no surprise that their music left an indelible mark on our psyches.  I rarely change stations when a Beatles song comes on the radio.  But when I look at their songs objectively – when I break down their musical structure and read the lyrics with a critical eye – there’s no there there.  That’s especially true of McCartney’s songs.  

Q:  Do you think of McCartney’s songs as sort of the musical equivalent of fast food?  Fast food can be very satisfying while you’re eating the stuff, but intellectually you know it’s not good for you.  

A: Mark Twain had this to say about Richard Wagner’s music: “I understand it is much better than it sounds.”  Paul McCartney’s music is just the opposite – it’s not as good as it sounds.  I would compare the experience of listening to his songs to the experience I often have when I go to the movies.  The overall experience of watching a movie in a theatre can be pretty intense, especially if there’s a lot happening – a lot of action and a complicated plot.  I often walk out of the theater thinking “Wow!” and feeling pretty pumped up.  But if I actually think about the movie on the drive home, or discuss it with someone else, I start to see the flaws I didn’t pick up while I was in the theatre.

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Q: Your press person is giving me dirty looks because I’ve kept you so long – I know you have other interviews to do, so I’ll wrap things up.  

A: Don’t sweat it – it’s been a good conversation.  But my people get a lot of interview requests each time another 2 or 3 lines anniversary rolls around, and I do need to hit the road.

Q: One final thing.  Why have you felt the need to devote so many 2 or 3 lines posts to analyzing and critiquing the Beatles.  You seem more than a little obsessed with the Beatles – specifically, you seem obsessed with cutting the Beatles down to size.  Why do you think that is?

A: The Beatles were the pre-eminent pop music group for my generation – no one compared to them.   There were people who loved Dylan, or the Stones, or Motown, or the Grateful Dead, but almost everyone acknowledged the supremacy of the Beatles – they were numero uno. 

Q: Were you one of the “almost everyone” group?

A: Absolutely.

Q: But you don’t feel that way any more?

A: Well . . . it’s complicated.  For years, I simply accepted as a given that the Beatles were the best.  But I didn’t know why – I didn’t know how to explain the unique phenomenon that was the Beatles.  On the surface, Lennon and McCartney were nothing special – they were typical teenaged boys who showed no particular musical or intellectual gifts growing up.  It was very difficult for me to wrap my head around the scenario that not only were both of them songwriting geniuses, but that they found each other at a very young age and formed a partnership that somehow transcended their considerable individual gifts – their whole was so much greater than the sum of their parts that it seemed too good to be true.  Not only that, but there’s George Harrison to boot – another unremarkable teenager from the same unremarkable locality who may not have the equal of Lennon or McCartney as a songwriter, but who was extraordinary in his own right.  I thought about the whole thing a lot, and tried to come up with a rational explanation for the whole Lennon-McCartney-Harrison phenomenon.  But I couldn’t . . . which made me start to wonder whether they were really that special.

Q: I can’t explain quantum physics.  But that doesn’t mean I question its existence.

A: I’m not sure that’s a good analogy.  In any event, it seems to me that when it comes to the Beatles recorded output – in particular, the portion of their recorded output that Paul McCartney was responsible for – the emperor has no clothes.  Actually, that’s an exaggeration – McCartney has some clothes, but when you get up close and take a really close look at his clothes, they’re just not that impressive.   But I know I’m beating a dead horse here.  

Q: That’s never stopped you before!

A: Mea culpa.

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As noted above, 2 or 3 lines has devoted a number of posts that attempt to shed light on the phenomenon that is the Beatles.

Click here to read why he considers Paul McCartney to be one of the most overrated recording artists of all time.

Click here to read the post that introduced the “songlet” concept.

Click here to read about the song that proves once and for all just have lazy and unimaginative a songwriter Paul McCartney can be.  To be fair, McCartney wrote that song when he was only 16, and the abilities of 16-year-olds are limited.  But why did McCartney feel the need for the Beatles to record the damn thing a few years later?

If you’re in the mood for still more dead-horse-beating on the subject of the Beatles, scroll to the top of this page.  Look for the “blog archive” header on the right side of the page.  Click on the “2021” link, and then click on the “February” link.  Under the name of the month, you’ll find a number of links to posts about early Beatles records.  (Click on the “March” link and you’ll find two more such posts.)

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A “diss” track – “diss” is short for “disrespect – is a track that sh*ts on a rival artist.  “Diss” tracks often inspire replies, which may themselves inspire rebuttals – and so on and so forth.

Rappers have been belittling each other in “diss” tracks since at least 1986, when “The Bridge Wars” broke out between a group of rappers from the Bronx and a rival group from Queens.  (Both sides claimed that their borough was the true birthplace of hip-hop.) 

The most famous hip-hop rivalry was the East Coast-West Coast feud of the nineties, which reached its zenith in the ne plus ultra of “diss” tracks, Tupac Shakur’s infamous “Hit ‘Em Up,” which insults Notorious B.I.G. up one side and down the other.  (Tupac pulls no punches in that track, not only threatening to use his AK-47 and Glock 15-shot pistol on Biggie and his pals, but also claiming to have slept with his rival’s wife: “That's why I f*cked yo' b*tch, you fat motherf*cker!”)

But there were “diss” tracks long before there was hip-hop – most notably, Paul McCartney’s 1971 anti-John Lennon song, “Too Many People,” and Lennon’s very pointed anti-McCartney reply, “How Do You Sleep?”

The lyrics quoted at the beginning of today’s post are what Lennon originally wrote, but manager Allan Klein was worried by the “You probably pinched that b*tch anyway” line – a reference to McCartney’s concern that he might have unintentionally plagiarized the melody of “Yesterday.”  (After that tune came to him in a dream, McCartney asked his fellow Beatles, producer George Martin, and others if they recognized it.  No one did, so after a few weeks he stopped worrying.)

Klein came up with “And since you're gone you’re just another day,” which alludes to McCartney’s 1971 hit single, “Another Day.” (One reviewer said “Another Day” sounded like an advertising jingle for underarm deodorant, while another dismissed it as “Paulie picking his nose”).

In addition to the line about “Yesterday,” Lennon’s diss track also states that Paul was creatively if not literally dead (“Those freaks was right when they said you was dead”) and characterizes his post-Beatles recordings as elevator music (“The sound you make is Muzak to my ears”).

To add insult to injury, George Harrison – who may have loathed McCartney as much as Lennon did – also played on the record.  (Listen at about 2:40 of the song for Harrison’s guitar solo, which some believe is his best ever.)

Click here to listen to “How Do You Sleep?”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: