Proving that great songs are open to more than one interpretation, “Sweet Dreams” was given an alternative treatment by Marilyn Manson in 1995. His was a bleak rendering that exposed the vulnerable underbelly of sexual tension only implied in the original.
Jump
Van Halen
Inspirations for songs occasionally appear out of thin air; sometimes they appear over the airwaves. A live news broadcast gave David Lee Roth the idea for “Jump,” the Number One single that established Van Halen as the tallest of Top Forty’s heavy-metal poppies.
David Lee Roth was under pressure to write songs for Van Halen’s upcoming album. Titled 1984, Warner Brothers planned a publicity blitz based on a January 1, 1984 release date. Moving away from their tried-and-true formula of including cover songs on every album, Van Halen resolved to flex their songwriting muscles and produce an album of originals. But their deadline was looming.
Roth came up with a novel way of writing lyrics. Cruising through the Hollywood Hills in a 1951 Mercury Lowrider with Larry the roadie as chauffeur, Roth would recline in the back seat and wait for inspiration to hit. One afternoon after lunch, the duo was driving around listening to a synthesizer track on cassette. Guitarist Eddie Van Halen had written the track two years previously only to have it spurned by the band. “We don’t need this shit,” was reportedly the reaction of one band member. At the goading of producer Ted Templeton and Warner Brothers, the heavy-metal band was persuaded to resurrect the lilting synthesizer riff.
Sprawled in the tufted leather backseat of the vintage car, Roth let his mind drift to a television newscast he’d seen the night before. Live coverage showed a man perched on the ledge of a skyscraper, threatening to jump. Imagining himself in the crowd outside the skyscraper, Roth wondered what their reaction would be. “There’s always somebody who yells, ‘Go ahead and jump!’ ” he thought. Playing on this idea, he changed the circumstances somewhat. In his scenario, Roth is a man interested in a woman at his local bar, but he is plagued by self-doubt. “Might as well jump,” he says, convincing himself to approach the woman. Using Larry as a sounding board, Roth leaned over the front seat, asking the roadie what he thought of the lyrics. “He’s probably the most responsible for how it came out,” Roth told Musician.
With its brash mix of synthesizers and screaming guitars, many critics cited “Jump” as a latter-day Who single, like “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” only more tuneful. Dave Marsh, dean of American rock critics, called “Jump” “heavy metal in excelsis” and rated it Number Twenty-Eight out of the greatest 1001 rock-and-roll singles of all time.
“Jump” became Van Halen’s fastest-selling single ever. Released in January 1984, it was fueled by a video which reportedly cost only $600 to produce. In heavy rotation on MTV, “Jump” debuted in the middle of Billboard’s Hot One Hundred. Six weeks later, it had climbed to Number One, a position it held for five weeks.
With visions of a solo career dancing in his head, David Lee Roth left Van Halen in 1985. Little has been heard from him since.
Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler wrote their only Number One hit after shopping for home appliances. In the television department, he overheard two guys talking, making fun of a video they were watching on MTV. One guy commented to the other that musicians don’t work very hard for their money. His friend shot back sarcastically, “Yeah, maybe they get a blister on their little finger.” Knopfler was amused by the exchange, writing it down in the store. It became the basis for “Money for Nothing.”
Blasphemous Rumours
Depeche Mode
Tunesmith Martin Gore courted controversy in 1984 by publicly questioning his commitment to Christianity. “Blasphemous Rumours,” a single from Depeche Mode’s long player Some Great Reward, wowed them in the clubs but saw little chart action in North America because of its contentious content.
As the seventies became the eighties, many young English musicians rejected the guitars and drums of their punk peers, opting instead for synthesizers and drum machines. The resulting wave of electro-pop bands swept Europe. The music was mellifluous and danceable (if somewhat robotic and chilly), played by self-described “new romantics” with rocococoiffed hair and futuristically cut clothes. At the forefront of the techno bands were four lads from Basildon, Essex, England who took their name from a French fashion magazine — Depeche Mode (translation: “fast fashion”).
After a series of sold-out shows at the Bridge House Tavern in London’s Canning Town, the band signed a deal with Mute Records, beginning a relationship that would take both parties to the top of the charts. They were instant critical darlings. One early write-up in the New Musical Express called their music, “danceable, electric, earnest and endearing, with more poise than pose and proud to appeal to all.” In 1981, shortly after inking the deal with Mute, songwriter Vince Clarke left Depeche Mode to form Yazoo with Alison Moyet. Synth player Martin Gore took over the creative reigns, becoming the group’s main songwriter and composing twenty-six hit singles in the next decade.
Gore expanded on the band’s early sound. The poppy electro-beat sound of Clarke’s “I Just Can’t Get Enough” was displaced by a darker, more intricately layered texture. Gore wrote about profound topics, frequently blending strong sexual overtones into the mix. In “Master and Servant,” for instance, Gore makes allusions to the submissive-dominatrix relationship. “Blasphemous Rumours” pushed the boundaries even further. This time, Gore took on the church.
The song stems from two separate incidents. Gore read a tabloid account of a boy who tried, unsuccessfully, to take his life. His reason? The sixteen-year-old lad declared himself “bored with life.” Gore was shaken by the story. How could a teenager, with his whole life ahead of him, try to take his own life? Next, Gore heard a story of a troubled eighteen-year-old who had recently reaffirmed his faith in God in an attempt to turn his life around. Forty-eight hours later, he was tragically killed in a car crash.
Both events affected Gore deeply. His faith in the church was rocked. If there was a God, how could he allow such terrible things to happen? For the first time in his life, he felt cut adrift from the church. Seeking the comfort of his friends, he told them of his feeling that Christianity had failed him. Describing the incidents that led him to this epiphany, someone quipped, “God must have a sick sense of humor.” The line stuck with Gore, becoming the lyrical hook of the “Blasphemous Rumours’ ” chorus.
The iconoclastic “Blasphemous Rumours” didn’t reach the Top Forty in the United States, but it hit the Top Ten in Europe where Depeche Mode were superstars or, as Rolling Stone dubbed them, “the kings of arena techno-pop.”
In the early eighties, two bands had hits with songs inspired by Vladimir Nobokov’s novel Lolita – the story of an older man who falls head over heels for a young girl. Sting wrote “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” for the Police in 1981, perhaps remembering his experiences as a teacher at the Northern Counties Teacher Training College in Newcastle. Three years later, Wang Chung had a Top Twenty hit with “Dance Hall Days,” a clever takeoff on the name of the book’s central character Delores Hayes.
Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go
Wham!
Yorgos Kyriako Panayiotou was inspired to write a hit song after seeing a note his friend Andrew left his mother. Under the name George Michael, Yorgos penned “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” a Number One hit in 1984 for Wham!.
As teenagers, Andrew Ridgeley and George Michael were tight friends. Meeting at school in Bushey, England, the two often cut class to discuss their love of music and aspirations of pop stardom. After graduation, they took the first tentative steps toward realizing their dream. Forming the Executive, a ska band, the duo tried to write hit tunes. That band was short lived but did produce several demos of original music. Under the new name Wham!, the tapes fell into the hands of Mark Dean, label head of Innervision Records. Impressed, Dean signed the teenagers on the strength of “Wham! Rap,” an autobiographical tale about b
eing on the dole and rising above the shame of unemployment.
“Wham! Rap” underwhelmed the record-buying public in its initial release. The follow-up single, however, bolted the dynamic duo (who still lived at home with their parents) to the top of the British charts. “Young Guns (Go For It)” was just the first of a string of hits (including a rerelease of “Wham!Rap”) for Innervision that turned Wham! into one of the biggest acts in the United Kingdom. They were so hot, Michael once remarked, that “[Wham!] would be on the front page whenever Princess Di wasn’t having her hair done.”
Unfortunately, what the two young singers didn’t know about the music business could fill the London Library. They signed a bad deal, and after finding huge success, they had to go to court to nullify their relationship with Dean and Innervision. Michael and Ridgeley, both now barely twenty years old, weren’t without a deal for long. Epic Records anted up, scooping the popular pair, preparing to break them into the United States.
They needed a surefire hit to launch the debut record on Epic. “Careless Whispers,” a leftover from the Executive days, was a good song but not upbeat enough. Did they have anything else? Michael thought back to their school days, to one night in particular when he stopped by at Ridgeley’s house to pick him up for an evening of nightclubbing. While he waited for his friend to get ready, he noticed a scrap of paper in his friend’s bedroom. It was a note Ridgeley left taped to his door for his mother to wake him up for school. It read, cryptically, “Wake me up up before you go go.” Apparently, when he wrote the note, the young Ridgeley had just come back from several hours of dancing at a local disco. Tired and drowsy, he mistakenly scribbled “up” twice, so as a joke, he completed the note with “before you go go.”
Michael thought the line would make a great title for a song. It had a sense of nonsense that appealed to his sense of humor and brought back images of the Motown music the pair loved. One of their favorites was Smokey Robinson’s “Going to A-Go-Go,” a 1966 classic that took the French slang for discotheque (a go-go) to the Top Twenty.
Michael incorporated the line into what British writer Paul Du Noyer called “a big bouncy bastard” of a song that broke the band into the United States. Entering the chart at Number Eighty in early September 1984, “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” hit the apex ten weeks later, staying at Number One for three weeks.
Panic
Smiths
At the time of its release, “Panic,” the Smiths’ 1986 single, was thought to be a denunciation of disco. The band’s bard Morrissey had made some disapproving remarks to the press on certain aspects of black music, which seemed to explain the song’s sentiment. Actually, the contentious “hang the DJ” chorus of the song was a little more specific and had nothing to do with disco music.
In the mid-eighties, the Smiths inspired many column inches in the press. In British pop circles, the band appeared to be the lone boat against the current. While most bands played up the carnality of their music, Morrissey promoted celibacy. Other groups hit the charts with good-time dance songs. The Smiths wrote a requiem for the child victims of the sixties’ moors murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. Acts like Wham! took advantage of their boyish good looks. Morrissey wore national health spectacles. Poised as a modern-day Oscar Wilde, the singer, with his eloquent miserabilism, was always quotable and great fodder for the front pages.
After a successful early run at the charts and considerable acclaim in the media, the Smiths hit a mid-eighties’ dry spell on the singles’ charts. Five consecutive singles failed to break into the Top Twenty despite a sweep of the 1985 New Musical Express reader’s poll. (They won Top Group, Johnny Marr took honors as Best Instrumentalist and Morrissey and Marr shared an award as Best Songwriter.) The long-winded titles of the tunes — “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” or “Please Please Please, Let Me Get What I Want” — might have had something to do with the dearth of hits, but whatever the reason, the Smiths needed a place on the charts.
Never one to bite his tongue, Morrissey penned a tune pointing the finger at those he felt were impeding his band’s success — Britain’s DJs. He was upset that lightweight acts like Wham! were commanding the airwaves instead of the Smiths. The main target of Morrissey’s ire was most likely BBC Radio1 disc jockey Steven Wright, a very vocal critic of the Smiths. Morrissey was fiercely protective of his band and didn’t appreciate Wright’s anti-Smiths diatribes. Ignoble as it may look, the singer sought revenge on Wright in the song.
Another incident provided the tune’s sing-along chorus. In April 1986, Morrissey was listening to the radio, anxiously awaiting news on the nuclear accident at Chernobyl. A grimvoiced announcer broke into the programming, describing the catastrophic events in Ukraine. Immediately following the newscast, the DJ spun the fluffy, high-gloss “I’m Your Man” by Wham!. “That DJ should be killed,” thought Morrissey, enraged by the announcer’s insensitivity to the great tragedy.
With anger building inside him, he sat down and wrote “Panic” with a lyric encouraging the death of all DJs. In a shimmering display of their songwriting chemistry, guitarist Johnny Marr provided an assertive musical attack for Morrissey’s lyrical wrath. Recorded too late to be included on the Smiths’ next long player The Queen Is Dead, “Panic,” with its crowd-pleasing “hang the DJ” chant, was offered only as a single. The rarity of the record doubtlessly had something to do with its success, becoming a collector’s item immediately on release. Ironically, radio jumped on the song, pushing it to the brink of the Top Ten in 1986 and breaking the Smiths’ run of bad chart luck.
The song remains a jewel in the Smiths’ crown. In 1992, Labatt sponsored a vote to determine Britain’s Top Five Hundred all-time favorite tracks. Polling readers of diverse magazines, from The Daily Mirror to the New Musical Express, a list was compiled and published in book form. The Smiths placed seven songs on the honor roll, with “Panic” clocking in at Number 135.
When Mick Jones was writing the Clash’s classic London Calling album, the über punk was sharing a London council flat with his grandmother. Tunes written in the flat include “Lost in the Supermarket,” “Clampdown” and “The Guns of Brixton.”
Public Enemy Number One
Public Enemy
When Carlton Ridenhour was an arts student at Long Island’s Adelphi University in the early eighties, he discovered graphic design wasn’t his only forte. Frustrated by the bad sound quality on most early rap records, he decided to become a rapper even though he didn’t have any musical background. “[I] can’t even play Lotto,” he told Rolling Stone in 1989. Using the stage name Chuck D., he formed Public Enemy, one of the biggest-selling and most controversial rap groups of the 1980s.
Ridenhour met Hank Shocklee at university where Shocklee was supporting himself by running weekend rap parties and managing DJs. Schocklee was impressed with Ridenhour’s promotional ideas, bringing him on board to publicize his concerts. Ridenhour excelled at his part-time job. Due to his aggressive marketing tactics, the weekend parties were always packed. He enjoyed the promotions business and was becoming more involved with the music, immersing himself in hip-hop culture.
A driven man with definite ideas about how things should be done, Ridenhour was offended by the shoddy quality of the rap records of the day. Rap was still in its infancy, and more often than not, production values on the records were low-fi. Muted voices and echo chambers obscured the lyrics, while ungainly mixing de-emphasized the beat. One night, riding around in a car with some friends, listening to the latest hip-hop tapes, Ridenhour griped loudly to his friends. “Shit, I can’t hear a motherfucking word he’s saying.” That night, he vowed he would do a better job.
Around the same time, a trained guitarist named Bill Stephney had taken over the campus radio station. Stephney had recently jumped on the hip-hop bandwagon, realizing that the DJ’s turntable work was creative — a valid musical form. He quickly instituted a three-hour rap show on Adelphi’s radio station. Shocklee and Ridenhour were
invited as guests and subsequently offered their own show. It was a move that would help transport rap from the underground to the Billboard charts.
The pair initially saw the show as a marketing opportunity, a cheap way to advertise their upcoming rap parties. But there was another advantage. Determined not to play the same record twice on the show, they had to come up with creative ways to fill up 180 minutes of airtime. As there was a severe shortage of rap records, to flesh out the show, they programmed their own beats, rapping over them. With no musical instruments at their disposal, they used a turntable to crib beats from existing records as a background for their raps. Using the technology offered by the radio station, Ridenhour strove to offer the high production value he found so lacking on most rap records. The show, and their raps, became very popular.
During this time, Ridenhour wrote a groundbreaking rap as an answer to a challenge issued by a friend. Flavor Flav (rapper William Drayton) taunted Ridenhour, saying that he was an amateur rapper. The radio host replied to the charges with a blistering rap called “Public Enemy Number One,” a boastful rant layered over a noisy, aggressive beat. “Known as the poetic lyrical son,” he rapped, “I’m public enemy number one.”
The tune proved that Ridenhour was a credible rapper. The small campus station was overrun with requests for “Public Enemy Number One.” This brought the rapper to the attention of Rick Rubin, founder of Def Jam Records, who had just inked a distribution deal with CBS. Rubin offered a deal to Ridenhour and Shocklee who promptly turned him down, feeling they would be treated like “indentured servants” if they signed to a major label.
Who Wrote the Book of Love? Page 16