When Mick Jagger was writing “Anybody Seen My Baby?,” he was working toward an R & B groove. Rhythm and blues was Jagger’s first love. In middle school, he and Richards had become fast friends because of their mutual admiration of the American beat music of Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley. A few years later, the Rolling Stones came together as a band to play the music they loved. “When we started, we were just playing blues and rhythm and blues because that’s what we liked,” Jagger once told a reporter. “We were playing it well, and nobody else was doing it. We were blues purists who liked ever-so commercial things but never did them onstage because we were … so wary of being blues purists, you know what I mean?”
Years later, the Rolling Stones could hardly be described as blues purists. Three decades in, the Stones have appropriated virtually every American music genre — rock and roll, jazz, soul, disco and country. Adept at many styles, Jagger was working toward an updated, less-raw R & B sound for “Anybody Seen My Baby?” — a Gamble and Huff soul feel for the nineties. Starting with a slow, chunky bass line, he built the tune around a melodic chorus of lost love.
Mick Jagger (right) and Keith Richards perform on-stage during the Rolling Stones’ 1997 world tour. “Anybody Seen My Baby” was the lead-off single from the Stones’ twenty-third studio album — Bridges to Babylon.
An interview given during his early songwriting days explains Jagger’s composing modus operandi, thoughts that may explain his state of mind when writing the lyrics for “Anybody Seen My Baby?” “I was very emotional as a teenager, but then most adolescents are, like overdramatizing situations, and that’s why there’s always been a very big market for adolescent love songs,” revealed Jagger. “You know, those songs that are based on the frustrations of an adolescent. Anyone who understands that, consciously or unconsciously, and writes fantasies based on that premise, gets hits. A song like “Young Love,” which was very popular when I was around fourteen, was a heart-tugging song when you were that age.”
“Anybody Seen My Baby?” is the Stones’ strongest new song in years. “It’s kind of lightish,” Jagger told Access Magazine in November 1997. “It’s not heavy heavy, but it’s definitely R & B.” Propelled by Jagger’s powerful vocal, he sells the melancholy chorus, establishing the hook of the song. It was the chorus, however, that caused some contention in the Rolling Stones’ camp.
Guitarist Keith Richards says while they were recording the track in the studio, there was a familiar ring to the tune, “but nobody put their finger on it until we’d finished it.” Richards’s daughter was the keen-eared listener who caught the problem.
“I was in England a few weeks ago, and I was playing it in the front room, and my daughter arrived with her friend in the kitchen,” Richards told Toronto Sun reporter Jane Stevenson. “And they don’t know what’s playing, and it’s wafting through the house, and they started to sing “Constant Craving” over the top, and it was, ‘Oh — time to make a phone call.’ ”
A call was placed to the Stones’ lawyer. He advised offering a cowriting credit to k.d. lang and Ben Mink, the Canadian composers of the 1992 hit “Constant Craving,” lest the Stones be tarred with the ugly brush of plagiarism. A nondeliberate plagiarism lawsuit was not unprecedented. Songwriters have been on guard since the publishers representing songwriter Ronnie Mack successfully sued George Harrison for copyright infringement in 1971. They claimed his Number One “My Sweet Lord” bore an unreasonable resemblance to the 1963 hit “He’s So Fine.” United States District Court Judge Richard Owen ruled in favor of the publishers, although he conceded that Harrison did not deliberately plagiarize the song. That case dragged through court for five years. The Rolling Stones wanted to avoid a similar situation and found a compromise with the Canadian composers.
Lang and Mink were satisfied with the arrangement although Jagger was less so. He admitted to respecting lang although he didn’t own any of her records. “I don’t think it really sounds like it myself,” he told Stevenson. “It’s just a lot of nervous lawyers.”
“Anybody Seen My Baby?” reached the Top Ten on the Billboard charts in the fall of 1997.
Oasis songwriter Noel Gallagher openly admitted that he borrowed liberally from other people’s songs in his works. “No composer is ever a virgin,” he said. “You never start from scratch,” This attitude got him in a little bit of trouble from the members of Monty Python. The comedians sued Oasis for plagiarism. In contention was the album track “Whatever” that seemed to borrow a little too heavily from the 1973 Python tune “How Sweet to Be an Idiot.”
I’ll Be Missing You
Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs with Faith Evans
The year 1997 may be remembered for posthumous tribute songs ruling the charts. Elton John’s warmed-over “Candle in the Wind” raised millions for charity in memory of Diana, Princess of Wales, while another song eulogizing a slain rapper was part of a very different campaign, ensuring his memory would not die. “I’ll Be Missing You” kept Notorious B.I.G./ Biggie Small’s flame alive on the charts.
“You’re nobody until somebody kills you,” are the closing lines on Notorious B.I.G.’s posthumously released CD Life After Death. The disc’s cover shows the rapper posing next to a hearse, his name emblazoned on the vanity license plate. Violent death is a common theme in hip-hop culture, but these references are particularly telling given the events of Sunday March 9, 1997.
A night of party hopping with his friend/producer/mentor Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs brought Notorious B.I.G. (whose real name was Christopher Wallace) to the Soul Train Awards, hosted by Vibe in Hollywood. Biggie was a star on the rise, with a hit album under his belt — 1994’s Ready to Die — and another soon to be released. Hype spun all around the former drug dealer from Brooklyn’s Fort Greene. Newspapers ran running ads urging people to “Think B.I.G.,” keeping Biggie’s three hundred pounds of rapping wrath front and center. After a few drinks and a bit of glad-handing, he headed out to his Chevy Suburban for the drive home. As party goers and two of Biggie’s best friends watched, a dark sedan pulled up alongside his vehicle. Several shots were fired, and seconds later, Biggie was dead, slumped over the dash of the Chevy. He was just twenty-four years old. Police report it was the one hundredth drive-by shooting in Los Angeles that year.
In the following weeks, LAPD searched for a motive in the shooting. One theory held that Biggie was murdered as the result of a personal financial quarrel involving a Compton Southside Crip gang member who had briefly worked for the rapper. Police also investigated the possibility that Biggie was killed as a result of an East-West feud between New York’s Bad Boy Records and Los Angeles’ Death Row Records. At the time of this writing, Biggie’s murder case remains unsolved.
It is an unwritten rule in the music business that nothing sells records like an unexpected death. Otis Redding, Buddy Holly, Jim Croce, Tupac Shakur and Kurt Cobain all had posthumous records snapped up by bereaved fans in a outburst of public mourning. Biggie’s sophomore effort, the double CD Life After Death released one week after his demise, debuted at Number One, hanging around the Top Ten for a full fifteen weeks.
The success of the disc was in part due to the marketing efforts of the record’s producer Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs. Combs, best known as the brains behind multiplatinum discs by Boyz II Men, R. Kelley, Mariah Carey and Lil’ Kim, spearheaded a “Remember” campaign to keep Biggie’s name in the headlines. Among the events he organized were a New Orlean’s-style funeral cortege in the streets of Brooklyn in March 1997 and an unprecedented thirty-seconds of silence on two hundred radio stations across the United States. The jewel in the crown of Puffy’s “Remember” campaign was a musical tribute, a triple-platinum single called “I’ll Be Missing You.”
The tear-jerking single featuring Biggie’s widow Faith Evans was recorded to raise money for Biggie’s two children — all profits from the song to be put in trust for the kids. As the leadoff track on Combs’s solo debut No Way Out, “I’ll Be
Missing You” was also seen by some critics as a fail-safe way to kick off his singing career. Writing in Spin Magazine, Sia Michel cynically called the release “marketable mourning,” suggesting that Combs was cashing in on the death of his friend. Combs answered his critics in the documentary Born Again: “I’m a Biggie fanatic,” he said. “I have his name tattooed on my body. Remembering Biggie is never going to stop.”
Heartfelt tribute or clever marketing ploy? Either way, “I’ll Be Missing You” is a strikingly effective single. Combs cribbed the melody from the 1983 Police hit “Every Breath You Take,” changing the sampled song’s minor-chord melancholy into what Rolling Stone’s David Fricke called “a radiant hymn of brotherly love and community’s loss.” The use of a recycled melody lent “I’ll Be Missing You” a built-in sense of familiarity, but according to Combs, that didn’t guarantee it would be a hit. “It’s not easy to use a hit record and make it become a hit that sells two million copies,” Combs told Anthony Bozza in Rolling Stone. “Try it, be my guest, go sample.… I mean, I may do it, but it’s an art form.”
“I’ll Be Missing You” shot to the top of the charts, earning another platinum record for the twenty-seven-year-old rap mogul. Statistically, 1997 will go down in Combs’s personal history as a very successful year. His solo record and offshoot productions dominated the rap, pop and R & B charts, but at the end of the year, his thoughts turned to his departed friend. “I would do anything,” he told Bozza, “I would turn the hits into negative hits if I could just be with Biggie again.”
Tubthumping
Chumbawamba
A casual listen to Chumbawamba’s break-through hit suggests that it’s just another addition to the long-held tradition of drinking songs in English pop music. The band had a different idea when they wrote the tune. Devout anarchists, Chumbawamba would like nothing more than for their music to be the rallying cry for those feeling government oppression. In 1997, “Tubthumping” went to Number One in most major North American markets.
Chumbawamba are not an overnight sensation. The five men and three women from Leeds, England have been struggling since 1982 when they banded together, taking their name from a dream one of the band members had. In the dream, he saw two public washrooms — one labeled “Chumba,” the other labeled “Wamba.” Neither word made sense to him, and he didn’t know which loo to use. The dream resonated with the band, and they adopted the nonsense word as their moniker.
Politically charged songs have rarely done well on the charts, particularly when they seemed to take the piss out of conventional thought. A case in point was their 1986 debut on their independent label Agit-Prop. After watching Live Aid, the anarchists were disgusted by the sentiment of the concert. In their estimation, the benefit exploited the underprivileged and only served to boost the egos of the performers. Their response was an album called Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records. Not surprisingly, in the era of Sir Bob Geldof and the feelgood mania surrounding Live Aid, the album failed to chart.
More controversial records followed on their next indie label One Little Indian. A collection of tunes called Jesus H. Christ deliberately plagiarized Top Forty songs and was deemed unsuitable for release. Anarchy almost made it to the record stores, but it was banned because of a graphic depiction of a baby being born on its cover.
Oasis fans have long wondered about the mysterious Elsa mentioned in the lyrics of “Supersonic.” She was not a groupie although she did hang around the studio while the boys were recording. Elsa was a stray dog befriended by the band that had, to put it delicately, a gastrointestinal problem. One night, she compounded her problem by gobbling a whole box of Alka Seltzer. Noel Gallagher was so amused by the flatulent dog that he paid her his highest compliment by exalting her in song.
Other records actually saw the light of day. English Rebel Songs was an album of a cappella folk music, while their next release, Slap, was a tribute to techno. In total, Chumbawamba recorded eight records for One Little Indian before entering the studio to work on the as-yet-untitled Tubthumper.
The sessions began, as all the others had, with a collection of tunes worked up by the band during their live shows. A few weeks into recording, One Little Indian expressed concern over the content of the album. They suggested scrapping the whole project, telling the band to take some time off to write new material. The band rankled at this, opting instead to dissolve their association with the label. With the record in the can but no label to release it, all looked lost. But several tense months later, VH1 programmer Lee Chestnut heard the single “Tubthumping” on a compilation disc. He loved the catchy tune and after doing some homework, found out that Chumbawamba was a free agent. He alerted Republic Records’ honcho Monte Freeman who requested a copy of the record from the band’s English management. After only one listen, he was prepared to deal.
An offer from major label Republic/Universal in America seemed like an unlikely choice for a band of fiercely independent British anarchists. But as vocalist Dunstan Bruce explained to Los Angeles Times scribe Jerry Crowe, “Anarchy isn’t about being in your own little exclusive club.… We want as many people as possible to hear what we’ve got to say because we think what we’ve got to say is of much more value than what, say, the Spice Girls or Oasis have to say.” The deal was signed, and the album was given worldwide release. Their message would soon reach an audience far larger than they ever would have imagined.
Naming the album Tubthumper — according to their Web site, British slang for “an orator, ranter, a soapbox preacher” — they released the first single, “Tubthumping,” in October 1997. A mix of dance beats and catchy call-and-response vocals, the band describes “Tubthumping” as much more than an ode to the pleasures of drinking. “It’s a song for those people who don’t really have a voice,” said Bruce, whose working-class vocal provides the song’s insanely appealing hook. “It’s a song for all those people who only get a chance to express their opinion when they stand up in a pub drunk and start mouthing off about something, or when they’re singing on the way home from the pub.”
Band member Danbert “the Cat” Nobacon expanded on those sentiments in an interview with Paul Freeman. “The idea for ‘Tubthumping’ is in the lines ‘I get knocked down; I get back up again.’ It’s about someone who works in a crap job. He goes off to the pub and still has the life inside him to rise above it. That’s a universal theme.”
“We were writing about things in our community and our lives,” he continued. “But it does cross over. Despite the details, people in Venezuela or Canada, in a lot of cases, can see something in their lives that is parallel.”
When “Tubthumping” became an international hit, Chumbawamba had to face critics who charged that they had sold out, that they weren’t real anarchists, that they had become part of the capitalist machine. Nobacon denied that major success had dulled their subversive edge. “We accept the contradiction of being anarchists and working for a major corporation,” he said. “But life is full of contradictions. If we’d stayed doing pamphlets, then we’d still be reaching only two hundred people. Just because we’re suddenly popular, why should we lose our credibility?”
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