by Bob Stanley
The sound, the cruise function, was always more important than the song, but when the melodic muse hit these guys – Abbey Road fans one and all – it elevated it one notch above. Foreigner’s ‘Waiting for a Girl Like You’ had a synth sensuality both warm and cold, and blended – like Dollar’s ‘Give Me Back My Heart’ – with the ghostly multi-layered harmonies of ‘I’m Not in Love’; it chimed with new pop in Britain, and was a UK Top 10 hit as well as a US number two. That the song itself barely existed didn’t matter; its twilit icy calm and supplicant eroticism made it one of 1981’s definitive singles. Toto’s ‘Hold the Line’ (US no. 5 ’78) and Jefferson Starship’s ‘Jane’ (US no. 14 ’79) both made it on minor chords, stuttering staccato piano and air-punching. Air Supply4 broke the rules by releasing three classic American-rock hits (‘Lost in Love’, ‘All out of Love’, ‘Even the Nights Are Better’), and their weightless name was apt. John Cougar Mellencamp’s ‘Jack and Diane’ (US no. 1 ’82), meanwhile, had short sharp power chords and synth jabs but also touched on dreamscape heartland imagery; with lines like ‘sucking on a chili dog outside the Tastee Freez’, ‘Jack and Diane’ sounded as roundly and profoundly American to outsiders as Gidget, mid-terms and Twizzlers.
‘Ooh yeah, life goes on,’ sang Mellencamp, ‘long after the thrill of living is gone.’ It wasn’t pretty, but it was almost as evocative of gasoline, torn jeans and the endless road as the opening couplet from a 1980 US number-five hit called ‘Hungry Heart’: ‘Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack. I went out for a ride and I never went back.’ Maybe you’ll think it’s harsh to bunch Bruce Springsteen in with Boston, but the Boss was no stranger to the power of an electronically processed drum kit (‘Born in the USA’) or a dreamy synth wash (‘I’m on Fire’). Besides, if you’re talking about creating a cinematic, hyper-real Americana, Springsteen was the king. His songs rolled and kicked and swaggered. They were men’s songs and they were rank with small-town heroism. Sometimes they were all beaten up and empty like a rusting pickup – ‘The River’, ‘Downbound Train’ – and you fell hard for his loneliness. And sometimes they were selfish – people got abandoned and abused.
Back in 1973 Bruce Springsteen had been all about poetry and, like Loudon Wainwright III a couple of years earlier, he was touted as the new Dylan. It looked like it was going to happen for him as early as 1974, when pop’s king magpie David Bowie covered ‘It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City’. Critically lauded (NME, 1973: ‘Was Bob Dylan the previous Bruce Springsteen?’) but less than a commercial sensation after two albums, he wrote elliptical songs about the boardwalk life in his native New Jersey: ‘with a boulder on my shoulder, feeling kinda older, I tripped the merry-go-round; with this very unpleasing sneezing and wheezing, the calliope crashed to the ground.’ Though it got full marks for assonance, ‘Blinded by the Light’ found Springsteen trying a little too hard.5 His lyrics had a weight problem. So for his next trick he returned to his youth, syphoned off the explosive bagpipe intro of Little Eva’s ‘The Locomotion’ (US no. 1 ’62), glued it to the sax-party feel of Gary U. S. Bonds’s ‘Quarter to Three’ (US no. 1 ’61), and wrapped the whole thing up with Spector-like bells and lines like ‘the highway’s jammed with broken heroes’. It wasn’t just small-town New Jersey any more; ‘Born to Run’ was as big and as busted as America in 1975.
With ‘Born to Run’ he created something which sounded bigger than anything else around. This is not a surefire way to win credibility but it generally wins fans, and that is the sonic link between Springsteen and the class of ’81. ‘We were constantly chasing something that was un attainable,’ he said. ‘We just assumed everything could sound huge.’ He wasn’t about long hair and satin jackets (he seemed oblivious to style, good or bad) but every time he got introverted his sales dipped. This was a shame because his best moments were frequently his quietest. Songs like ‘State Trooper’ and ‘Racing in the Street’ were like classic American short stories, while others like ‘The River’ were more like Joyce Carol Oates’s generation-spanning novels: ‘Then I got Mary pregnant and man that was all she wrote. And for my nineteenth birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat … but I remember us riding in my brother’s car, her body tan and wet down at the reservoir.’
Raised on Top 40 radio, Springsteen was as much of a fan-boy rock star as Roy Wood and, in the same way as his unlikely Anglo cousin, he used pop history like a movie set. He’d soaked up ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and ‘Up on the Roof’ both, and understood their power; for him ‘pop promised the never-ending now … for those three minutes you were lifted up into a higher place of living’. He didn’t feel compromised going for either Brill Building urban or heartland rural. He could be the teen rebel (‘Your daddy won’t let me in’) on ‘Talk to Me’ or the guilty and lust-soaked older lover on ‘I’m on Fire’. If you have a certain Americana itch, Bruce Springsteen is the cure. As a result, internationally, he outsold everyone in this chapter (with one exception).
Springsteen is to American rock as Bowie is to new pop. Nebraska is his Berlin (America is big enough for Nebraska’s distance from New Jersey to be more than enough continental divide). As Bowie made a move on commercial salvation with Let’s Dance in ’83, so Springsteen came crashing back in ’84 with Born in the USA. With its army of Fairlights that squished Little Stevie’s familiar guitar and Clarence Clemons’s rollicking
sax breaks, he scored his biggest American hit ever. The bleakness of the album’s lyrics (the title track, ‘Glory Days’, ‘Downbound Train’) was largely missed in the uncarpeted clatter of the feel-good production. ‘I think what’s happening now is people want to forget,’ he told Rolling Stone in 1984. ‘There was Vietnam, there was Watergate, there was Iran – we were beaten, we were hustled, and then we were humiliated. And I think people got a need to feel good about the country they live in.’ The result was American rock’s answer to Thriller, the desperate pill sweetened with beyond-friendly synths. Born in the USA may well be Springsteen’s best collection of songs, but you yearn to hear demos with a lighter touch, without those ‘we won the world series’ keyboard sounds, without Oliver North on drums. To most patriots the lyric may as well have run, as they did in an Achewood comic strip, ‘Born in the USA! I ate a hamburger and said “hooray”!’ But the album punched in, did its job, made Americans feel good about themselves, and went fifteen times platinum before it punched out.
Meat Loaf’s Bat out of Hell sold more, though. Lank-haired greaser Marvin Lee Aday had worked in theatre (Hair, The Rocky Horror Show), and sung on Ted Nugent’s platinum-selling rock blowout Free-for-All, before he hooked up with songwriter Jim Steinman when they were touring together on the National Lampoon Road Show. On stage, Meat Loaf would encore with ‘River Deep – Mountain High’, and he sang it like Springsteen meets Mario Lanza, a vast and destructive noise that bulldozed every nuance in its path. It isn’t entirely necessary to say much more about Meat Loaf’s Bat out of Hell other than, released in 1978, it was Springsteen’s unwitting progeny and it sold fourteen million copies in the US alone.
Born to Run and Bat out of Hell could be seen as the same deal – all revved up with no place to go, small-town teen dreams set to arrangements that rivalled Wagner, let alone Spector. But Bat out of Hell was Springsteen’s ’57 Chevy pimped up and painted luminous pink, The Phil Spector Story directed by Richard Curtis. Springsteen’s bombast was there because he was angry or excited; it meant he could follow ‘The River’ with ‘Nebraska’. Meat’s bombast was inflationary – he was nothing without it. On Bat out of Hell the sirens were screaming and the fires were howling. It was passionate, tight, professional, the band worked hard. You got your money’s worth. It was also a real-life rocky horror, a musical theme park dreamt up by American rock’s own Andrew Lloyd Webber, but that was all irrelevant if you were young, cruising at a steady fifty, a six-pack of Bud on the back seat. All that mattered in the early eighties was that it was American, and it rocked.
1 One of the very best ga
rage-punk 45s – part snotty Stones, part psych-out – was the Third Bardo’s ‘I’m Five Years Ahead of My Time’; it was an exact time capsule of 1966. But ‘More than a Feeling’ is a rare record that can genuinely claim that title as fact.
2 Granted, Greg X. Volz’s name is quite intriguing. Xavier? Xanthum?
3 ‘Keep on Loving You’ ended up on Time–Life’s Ultimate Rock Ballads, for which Cronin did the TV commercial.
4 Air Supply were actually Australian, though they recorded in the US, which explains their sound and huge US success. They were once described by Record Mirror, in a positive light, as ‘wimp rock’.
5 ‘Blinded by the Light’ may have sounded stodgy when recorded by Springsteen, but it became a 1976 Top 10 hit in the US and UK when it was pumped full of light disco beats, laser beams and airy harmonies by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band.
51
JUST A KING IN MIRRORS: MICHAEL JACKSON
On the same day the Altamont disaster had signalled the death of the sixties, a single entered the American Top 30 that represented rebirth, that pointed to a then unimaginable future for black pop, the triumph of disco, the rise of machine soul, and one of the great Hollywood stories. Its cascading, super-confident piano intro was followed by a choppy, slightly out-of-kilter rhythm section playing as if they knew that just round the corner, any second now, a voice was going to come in that you just wouldn’t believe. The strings edge up, further up, the drummer nods and we’re off: ‘Ahhh – haaaaa, ohh woah-a-hoooooo, uh lemme tell you now, ahhh ha …’
The miracle of the Jackson 5’s ‘I Want You Back’ (US no. 1 ’69, UK no. 2 ’70) became more apparent when David Ruffin’s version was eventually released, more than thirty years after it was recorded. As the lead singer in the Temptations, Ruffin was Motown’s soul man number one, a force of nature, his bad reputation borne out by a ferocious, lived-in voice. You can imagine him hearing the pre-pubescent Michael Jackson’s take on ‘I Want You Back’ – with its strong-man-on-his-knees lyric – and thinking, ‘Not bad … but I’ll show the kid how it’s done.’ Ruffin strains, sweats, laughs, pleads, ‘OHHHHHHH baby give me one more chance!’ and it’s a tour de force, your feet can’t keep still. And yet he doesn’t come close to Michael Jackson’s joyous, uninhibited take. At the dawn of the seventies here was a boy wonder, a ten-year-old genius throwing down a challenge for the next generation. Here was a star as charismatic and undeniable as Elvis had been.
The Jackson 5 were Berry Gordy’s last major success – Motown faltered in the seventies, its sales and creativity outstripped by streetwise funk and sophisticated Philly. But with the Jackson 5, Gordy had his Colonel Parker moment. He spied a new affluent black market, young teenagers, and realised the only idols they had for their bedroom walls were sportsmen. The Jackson 5 became the first black pop idols, and Gordy provided an eager market with posters, fan magazines, T-shirts, lunchboxes, even their own cartoon series. On top of this, within two years of ‘I Want You Back’ coming out, the Jackson 5 had already sold more singles than any other Motown act.
In the following decades Michael Jackson’s career was often painful to watch. He flew higher than anyone, he made terrible mistakes – maybe his biggest pop crime was that he made a lot of uninteresting records. But he was always a star, an inspiration to fans to whom it didn’t matter if he was black or white or something else entirely. And in this department he trounced Prince, Madonna, Johnny Rotten, Bowie and everyone else since the Beatles.
If you make a chronological list of all Michael Jackson’s singles, ‘Billie Jean’ sits plum in the middle. Up to this point, in early 1983, he had remained the same Michael Jackson – the symbol of hope and irrepressible energy – that we had first encountered in the week that the Hell’s Angels took Meredith Hunter’s life in a rundown speedway stadium. ‘Billie Jean’ was possibly his greatest achievement, too, its panther bassline and sense of impending dread mirrored in a lyric of shame and humiliation at the hands of a fan. Sobbing, and using the tics that would become a cliché long before his death, Jackson was a man on the edge; here was something quite adult that we had never heard in his music before, and from this point on nothing would be the same.
From the very start, he had been pawed and possessed. After winning a contest with his brothers at the Harlem Apollo in 1967, aged eight, he was instant hot property. Motown second-stringer Gladys Knight and third-stringer Bobby Taylor pointed Berry Gordy towards the Jackson 5, and he was so impressed that he gift-wrapped them for his girlfriend; their first album was called Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5. Even as a child, the youngest of the five brothers, Michael was thoughtful; in a Disc & Music Echo interview in 1972 he revealed that he got an allowance of five dollars a week, and spent most of that on ‘art supplies; paint and stuff like that’. Early on, he decided he would be his own boss and make sure no one, not even his demanding parents, could control him. The dancing sensation, the boy who sang the spring-fresh ballad ‘Got to Be There’ (US no. 4, UK no. 5 ’72) with a voice of joyous emotion well beyond his years, was kept for the public eye; he developed a second Michael, furrowed, thicker-skinned and quite private, one that no one could ever reach, deceive or own. Who could blame him?
In the mid-seventies he turned sixteen and his voice broke. The Jacksons recorded an underrated, gently persuasive Gamble and Huff-produced single called ‘Show You the Way to Go’ (UK no. 1 ’77) that lightly stepped forward, with Michael beckoning to you from his shining path to disco redemption. Here was a route out of childhood and into adult life that sounded flower-scented and carefree: put on your bonnet, your cape and your glove, whispered Michael – ‘Let me show you, I’ll never let you down. Put your hand in mine, we can do it, we can work it out, work it out.’ You’d trust him with your life. With the Quincy Jones-produced Off the Wall in 1979, his first solo album as an adult, just about to leave his teenage years behind, it really felt like he had the key, he had the secret. ‘Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough’ (US no. 1, UK no. 3) is the most dizzying, joyous disco 45 of all, with a vertiginous intro of whirlwind strings and Jackson’s whoops. The rest of the record is no slouch either, with his falsetto lead countered by a worn-out Michael in the background, head down, mumbling, beaten by the beat. It’s really quite sinister. He sounds as if he could dance until he melted.
With Off the Wall, Michael Jackson became a new kind of alpha male, striding out of his school years with the sharpest clothes, the sharpest dance moves in the world, and a voice that could charm the cutest girls. His dates included Brooke Shields and Tatum O’Neal. He gave off an air of super-confidence, like pre-army Elvis. Cooling down after Off the Wall’s multi-million sales he cut another album with his brothers (Triumph, including ‘Walk Right Now’ and ‘Can You Feel It’, both UK Top 10 in ’81) and watched on, amused, as a sweet, forgotten Motown ballad from ’75, ‘One Day in Your Life’, went all the way to number one in Britain the same summer. People waited on his next move, certainly, but everything seemed relaxed. He had a nose job. No one minded.
But when Thriller finally emerged, almost unheralded, at the tail end of 1982,1 it expressed a fear of pretty much everything – bullying (‘Beat It’), gold diggers (‘Billie Jean’), violence (‘Wanna Be Startin’ Something’), the supernatural (the title track). Suddenly he was back-pedalling. He isn’t smiling on the cover. He looks deep in thought, a little glassy-eyed. Maybe he was having bad dreams, premonitions.
After Thriller made him the biggest star in the world, Jackson also became the strangest, the most spaced-out. With plastic surgery (that he denied almost to the end) he started to look less like a human being than the animatronic lovechild of Ronald McDonald and An American Werewolf in London. Thriller sold in quantities that are hard to comprehend – you’d expect to see a copy in the corner of any room, in any town, in any country in the world. Somehow he had to follow up the biggest-selling album of all time. Could he ever go back to being the free spirit of 1979’s peerless Off the Wall? He couldn’t, an
d while his music would become ever more nervous, screwed up tight, his private life began to go in completely the opposite direction.
1987’s Bad didn’t give us any sense of the singer, of why he was bothering. Clearly he didn’t need to bother at all after Thriller’s stratospheric sales. It felt like another push for global domination, this time just for the sake of it. But he was surely reacting to claims that he had turned his back on his roots, working with Paul McCartney, selling out to whitey. Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan called him ‘cissified’. Jackson worked hard to shake that insult, to reassert his masculinity. He chose to wear a leather jacket; he rarely smiled in photos again.2