Life of a Song

by Jan Dalley

  Others saying ‘Grace’ include Elvis Presley (in 1971), Willie Nelson (1976), and even alt-rock band The Lemonheads (1987). There are thousands of versions of ‘Amazing Grace’; it is a one-size-fits-all spiritual. When she first performed it, Joan Baez did not know it was a hymn, and surely few of those who enjoy it are aware of the appalling sins its lyric was intended to atone for.

  Ian McCann

  22

  THE LONG BLACK VEIL

  The haunting charms of ‘The Long Black Veil’ have proved irresistible to many of the world’s leading musicians for more than 50 years. They include Johnny Cash, Joan Baez, The Band, Nick Cave, Mick Jagger and the Dave Matthews Band, while many others, such as Bruce Springsteen, have included it in their concert repertoire. That such fine songwriters chose to record this American murder ballad speaks of its calibre, as does its longevity.

  The appeal of ‘The Long Black Veil’ lies in its memorable melody and chorus, and lyrics that tell a compelling story from an unusual perspective. It is related from the grave by a man who was hanged for a murder he did not commit. He could have saved himself but chose not to because his alibi carried a terrible price: ‘I’d been in the arms of my best friend’s wife.’ Death, rather than dishonour for his lover and himself, was his choice. The chorus tells how, ten years on, his grieving lover, wearing a long black veil, still visits his grave ‘where the night winds wail’.

  The lyrics are masterfully economic yet vivid, the tale unfolding like a film in a mere three verses and chorus. The song was composed in the late 1950s, but evokes an America long past. Its lyricist Danny Dill said he wanted to produce ‘an instant folk song’, somewhat in the style of Burl Ives, who later recorded it. One of Dill’s inspirations was a newspaper story about a mysterious woman who, wearing a black veil, repeatedly visited the grave of film star Rudolph Valentino.

  Dill’s co-writer was, like him, a southern singer-songwriter, Marijohn Wilkin, whose life was itself the stuff of a country song. Her first husband was killed in the Second World War, and two broken marriages and alcoholism followed, only for her eventually to find redemption in religion. This latter phase of Wilkin’s life inspired her to compose the hit song ‘One Day at a Time’ with Kris Kristofferson.

  ‘The Long Black Veil’ was first recorded in 1959, by the honky-tonk singer Lefty Frizzell, who applied his rich baritone drawl to a standard, hopalong country tempo. It proved an immediate hit in the country charts.

  The song’s greatest champion, however, was Johnny Cash, who recorded it on his 1965 Orange Blossom Special album and his At Folsom Prison live record three years later. He also included it on a list of what he called ‘100 Essential Country Songs’ that he compiled for his teenage daughter Rosanne in 1973, when she was embarking on life as a professional musician. ‘This is your education,’ he told her. When Rosanne decided to make her 2009 album, called The List, for which she selected 12 songs from her father’s favoured 100, she included ‘The Long Black Veil’.

  It is no surprise that the song’s darker qualities attracted the Man in Black, and it was also a predictable choice for The Band on their 1968 debut album, Music from the Big Pink. Their own compositions often conjured up a mythic American past, and this song slotted perfectly into the genre.

  Perhaps the most radical rendition came from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in 1986. They gave it a bluesy, eerie feel and Cave’s voice wails and moans like the cold night winds in Dill’s lyrics. Nine years later came one of the most atmospheric versions when the Irish folk band The Chieftains made it the title track of a collection of collaborations with rock stars. They asked Mick Jagger to perform the vocal, and the result is a majestic, slower interpretation, with Jagger delivering a fine blend of country and Celtic vocal styles. Dave Matthews gave it a rockier stamp in 1999, and versions have kept coming since. This ballad of a man who decides to pay the ultimate price for his sin of betrayal seems destined to captivate for years to come.

  Charles Morris

  23

  I HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE

  Motown boss Berry Gordy had a quality control department for deciding whether a song should be released. ‘If you had only enough money for this record or a sandwich,’ he would ask staff, producers and writers at the hit factory, ‘which would you buy?’ Or he would play a song through a rigged-up car stereo system to test how it might sound going down the highway. It worked, producing hit after hit.

  Sometimes, however, the department missed the best. In 1966 singer-songwriter Barrett Strong came up with an idea for a song based on the expression ‘through the grapevine’ that he kept hearing on the streets of Chicago. The phrase had its roots in the days of the slave trade. The ‘grapevine telegraph’ had been the system of communication used by slaves during the American Civil War. Prohibited from learning to read, they passed on news by word of mouth.

  Strong took his song to Motown producer Norman Whitfield. Together they worked it up into ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’, a dramatic tale of romantic betrayal. Whitfield recorded a version with The Miracles in 1966 but the Motown committee decided they’d rather buy a sandwich. The following year Marvin Gaye recorded it, but it was Gordy himself who vetoed it as a single.

  Eventually ‘Grapevine’ was released by Gladys Knight & The Pips in 1967 in a new, more up-tempo arrangement. It was a hit, reaching Number 2 in the charts. Meanwhile, Gaye’s version was awaiting its moment. He had recorded the song over five sessions with a backing ensemble that included the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, with Whitfield pushing him to sing in a higher key than his normal range. The song made its way on to Gaye’s 1968 album In the Groove. When the album was released, ‘Grapevine’ was picked up by E Rodney Jones, a DJ at Chicago’s black community radio station WVON. After the song aired for the first time, Jones told Motown marketing man Phil Jones that ‘the phones lit up’. No wonder: listeners were gripped by the ominous intro, the bassline, the brass, the jittery piano, the restrained first-person narrative, the controlled anguish of Gaye’s voice. Motown, swayed by public opinion, released it as a single, and it became the label’s biggest-selling hit to date.

  A couple of years later Creedence Clearwater Revival covered the song in an overblown 11-minute version for their album Cosmo’s Factory. But it was an English-based female punk band, The Slits, who gave the song its most radical reinterpretation. In tune with the spirit of the times, The Slits happily admitted that they could neither write songs nor play their instruments; nevertheless, they supported The Clash on tour and, in 1979, they were signed by Island Records. Reggae star Dennis Brown had been sent in to produce their first studio session but it became apparent that he did not know his way around the mixing desk.

  The Slits gave Brown the boot, and found themselves in the studio with a woman called Rema who had come along with Brown’s entourage to help out and make the tea. Rema said she had a bit of studio experience and took over at the controls; together the women worked out how they wanted the song to sound, giving it a strong reggae vibe. They couldn’t afford a brass section, so they sang the horn parts. Then, behind 17-year-old German lead singer Ari Up’s vocals, they chanted ‘Grapevine, grapevine’ over and over – using, as Slits guitarist Viv Albertine later said, ‘our real voices, not little-girl voices the way so many girls sing’. This DIY production yielded a recording that’s wild, patched-together, ferocious, raw – a total contrast to Motown’s pop-factory classic.

  Hilary Kirby

  24

  BY THE TIME I GET TO PHOENIX

  Frank Sinatra called composer Jimmy Webb’s subtle, mournful ballad ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ the ‘greatest torch song ever written’. Yet when Webb, then a young writer for Motown, presented the tune’s three narrative verses to his bosses, they were puzzled: ‘Where’s the chorus?’

  There was no chorus, although not for lack of Motown trying to wrestle one on to it. The song follows the narrator on a road trip to Oklahoma, as he marks out the miles imagining what
‘she’ is doing as he drives far away from her, for good this time.

  After kicking around fruitlessly at Motown, Webb’s song ended up with the singer/producer Johnny Rivers, who recorded it in 1966 on the album Changes, for his own label. Rivers, who still tours today, considered releasing ‘Phoenix’ as a single but instead suggested it to a fellow producer who was working with a young singer/guitarist: Glen Campbell. Campbell had had a couple of minor solo hits (although one of them, ‘Gentle on My Mind’, went on to win a Grammy), and had stepped in on tour with the Beach Boys after Brian Wilson’s breakdown.

  Campbell was part of the legendary Wrecking Crew, top LA session players working on such 1960s-defining hits as ‘He’s a Rebel’ and ‘California Dreamin’’. He also possessed a faultless five-octave range. Giving the song to Campbell was an inspired suggestion. Within a month of Campbell recording ‘Phoenix’ in 1967, the tune reached Number 2 in the country charts and Number 26 in the pop charts. It became one of the most-covered songs of the twentieth century, attracting artists from the Four Tops to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

  The song opened a partnership between Webb and Campbell that was to produce, among many, the pop country classics ‘Galveston’ and ‘Wichita Lineman’. (Webb has been touring with a show called The Glen Campbell Years, a tribute to the singer who is now suffering from advanced dementia.)

  Meanwhile some listeners cavilled at the timings ascribed to the ‘Phoenix’ route, even producing maps to show how improbable they were. ‘Sometimes as a writer you come to a decision like that and you just flip a coin,’ the composer responded in the 2011 book Chicken Soup for the Soul: Country Music. ‘You could try “By the Time I get to Flagstaff”, but does it work as well?’

  Campbell’s sweet-tenored account of ‘Phoenix’ came in at a radio-friendly less-than-three minutes. But just two years later, a monumental 19-minute version emerged on an album from soul singer Isaac Hayes, then a house musician and writer at Memphis label Stax. Hot Buttered Soul became the first album to hit high in four charts: R&B, jazz, pop and easy listening, restoring Stax’s fortunes after the loss of its artist Otis Redding in a plane crash.

  Hayes audaciously opens with a then unheard-of ten-minute rap, inventing an intense back-story for the ‘Phoenix’ couple. His sensual baritone delivers a cautionary tale for the uxorious: a husband working triple time to please a faithless woman who brags about his stupidity.

  As his wronged protagonist packs his car, it’s 3:30 in the morning and Hayes is yet to go anywhere near the song’s melody. By the time he does, the length of the recording – there are only four tracks on the album – had overturned the formula of hit-singles-plus-filler that governed the industry’s treatment of black albums. Hayes’s million-selling refashioning of a country pop hit opened a radical space into which Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield and others soon stepped.

  Yet Hayes said that his rapped intro only came about when he found himself performing a first attempt at ‘Phoenix’ in front of a chattering club audience. ‘I figured I’d better do something,’ he told the writer Gerri Hirshey. ‘I knew they were going to think I was crazy to be doing a song by a white pop singer, so I figured I’d explain. And I started talking …’

  Sue Norris

  25

  TOXIC

  In 2003 Britney Spears was suffering a bit of a career slump. She had yet to reach her excruciating, head-shaving nadir of 2007, but she needed a hit. The English songwriter Cathy Dennis had penned a new tune, ‘Toxic’, that she had offered to Kylie Minogue (who had conquered the globe with Dennis’s ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’ in 2001). Kylie, inexplicably, turned the song down, so it was offered to Britney; this jerkily insistent Bond-meets-Bollywood electro-dance-pop tune became a worldwide hit and an instant dance-floor filler.

  ‘Toxic’, in fact, has four songwriting credits, the other three being Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg (of the production team Bloodshy & Avant) and Henrik Jonback: all Swedes, another example of Sweden’s success in the pop industry. A snippet of the song, the propulsive strings, comes from a Bollywood song in Hindi, ‘Tere Mere Beech Mein’. (Dennis’s demo for ‘Toxic’, on YouTube, shows how elements such as the twangy James Bond-ish guitar were added later.) So, an American singer had a hit with a song written by an Englishwoman and three Swedes, with help from a tune used in an Indian film; the song was recorded in Stockholm and Hollywood, then mixed in Stockholm. This is the way the pop world now works. In the days of Tin Pan Alley and the Brill Building, jobbing songwriters would sit around a piano bashing out hits but many of today’s most popular songs are not so much written as constructed, by multinational teams.

  But once a song has been constructed, what’s to stop someone from deconstructing it? Here’s where the story of ‘Toxic’ becomes interesting. In 2011 the American singer-songwriter Jayme Dee stripped ‘Toxic’ down to its essentials in a radical rereading; she can be seen on YouTube with an acoustic guitar and a sultry pout, moaning the song in a slowed-down 3/4 arrangement.

  This was not the first time a Britney song had been given the acoustic treatment: for his album 1000 Years of Popular Music, the folk-rock singer Richard Thompson did something similar to ‘Oops! … I Did it Again’ (another Swedish-written Britney hit, by Max Martin and Rami Yacoub). What Dee and Thompson achieved was almost archaeological, digging through the accreted layers of production to discover that, underneath it all, there is an actual song.

  A radically deconstructed ‘Toxic’ has also been heard in the distant future. In 2014, London’s Almeida Theatre staged Mr Burns: A Post-Electric Play, a production first performed in Washington DC which imagines a post-apocalyptic future world in which roving troupes of players perform episodes of The Simpsons and sing pop songs from the old days. In such a purely oral/aural world, the play’s author Anne Washburn suggests, without access to electricity, TV or the internet, survivors would depend on (and also trade) snippets of script or music for their physical, emotional and spiritual sustenance.

  The show’s score cleverly imagines how popular music might survive in such a future: in fragments. One of the songs that weaves its way through Mr Burns (and it’s an apt one, given the poisoned state of this blasted world) is ‘Toxic’, its Bollywood strings transmogrified into an eerie ‘Ooh-ee-ooh’ vocal refrain. It’s pleasing that this curious and vaguely disturbing song found a new life, as a remnant of a half-remembered relic of a half-forgotten past, drifting in a brilliantly imagined future.

  David Cheal

  26

  SMOKE ON THE WATER

  It’s the song forever being butchered in the bedrooms of novice guitarists. Famed for its iconic riff, Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the Water’ is among the most instantly recognizable songs in rock, a fact that has led to its outlawing in scores of guitar shops lest it send the staff into a fit of rage.

  ‘Smoke on the Water’ was written on a whim, a reaction to an incident that very nearly ended in tragedy, though it would provide Deep Purple with their biggest hit. It was December 1971 and the band had arrived in Montreux, Switzerland, to make an album in the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio. The studio was stationed next door to the Casino, an entertainment complex on the edge of Lake Geneva. While they were there a concert by Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention was held in the casino’s theatre. Midway through the show a fan fired a flare gun into the wooden rafters, which swiftly caught fire. Zappa stopped the music and directed fans to the exits. Within hours, the building had burnt to the ground. Miraculously, no one was killed.

  The members of Deep Purple watched the fire from their hotel across the lake and quickly set about writing a song. It was bassist Roger Glover who came up with the name ‘Smoke on the Water’ – the working title had been ‘Durh Durh Durh’ on account of guitarist Ritchie Blackmore’s riff. Singer Ian Gillan took charge of the lyrics, writing a scene-by-scene account of what had taken place, from ‘some stupid’ shooting the flare gun into the air to ‘Funky Claude’, aka Claude Nobs
, the Casino’s owner (and founder of the Montreux Jazz Festival), ‘running in and out pulling kids out of the ground’.

  It’s thanks to ‘Funky Claude’ that the song saw the light of day. Initially, the band had no plans to include ‘Smoke on the Water’ on their as-yet-unrecorded album, not least because Gillan was worried the title made it sound like a drug song. But when Nobs heard it he said: ‘You’re crazy. It’s going to be a huge hit.’

  He wasn’t wrong. Appearing on their sixth album Machine Head in 1972, ‘Smoke on the Water’ was released as a single a year later and, thanks in part to the infectious simplicity of Blackmore’s riff, is now held up as a classic rock anthem. The guitarist would have to defend the riff against sniffy interviewers who suggested his use of just four notes made it too basic to be any good. His response was that they should listen to the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

  Over the years ‘Smoke on the Water’ has yielded cover versions ranging from the decent to the inexplicable. In the former category was a charity recording to help victims of the 1988 Armenian earthquake that featured an all-male roll-call of top rockers including Bruce Dickinson, Bryan Adams, Tony Iommi, Brian May and Keith Emerson, and dialled up the rock histrionics to seismic effect.