A vs B Part 5: Be My Baby Vs River Deep - Mountain High

Two great songs. I’ve heard both described several times as The Greatest Pop Song Ever.

Both were written by the same three people, Ellie Greenwich, Jeff Barry and Phil Spector. Both were produced by Spector and arranged by Jack Nitzsche. One is by The Ronettes (lead vocal Ronnie Spector), the other Ike and Tina Turner (lead vocal Tina Turner, forget Ike).

They are probably the most renowned, definitive Spector productions, the greatest testaments to his talent. They are only three years apart, but feel like more, as so many “early 60s/late 60s” things do.

Ronnie Spector and Tina Turner are both phenomenal singers, unique in their abilities, amongst the most iconic in the history of rock’n’roll. Both had their careers wrecked by abusive, controlling husbands (Turner less than Spector, who was literally not allowed to sing or perform for many years). How many more great Roni Spector vocals there could have been!

I prefer ‘Be My Baby’ now, though I have veered both ways down the years.  It is just … more perfect.

When I listen to ‘River Deep’, I can’t help thinking it is both a bit messier and not quite as overpowering as Spector would have hoped. I think you can hear that he’d lost a bit of control. Sometimes it seems a little bitty and disconnected. I kind of feel it’s almost one of the greatest songs ever but doesn’t quite get there.

Perhaps working with an absolute powerhouse like Tina Turner didn’t work for Spector. Perhaps he felt he had to outmatch her with the music – there is sometimes too much going on with ‘River Deep’ … or maybe it was the other way round … stories abound about the producer making the singer do take after take … maybe he asked for too big a performance from her …

Ronnie Spector was a different kind of vocalist … more girl-like but also streetwise – Phil Spector worked with a lot of somewhat similar vocalists (eg on the Christmas album) – clear, poppy vocalists rather than guttural rock/soul singers like Tina Turner.

‘Be My Baby’ was a song I grew up with – in the opening sequence of two films I’ve watched a lot (in, let’s say, different stages of my growth) – ‘Dirty Dancing’ and ‘Mean Streets’ – that it fits so perfectly in two such different films is testament to its power. Of course, the opening drum sound (played by Hal Blaine) is just about the most iconic thing in the history of popular music, constantly borrowed, and if you’d left the song there, that would be enough.

Lyrically, it is slight, of course, but tries to do no more than encapsulate the rapture of a night’s romance. Ronnie Spector’s voice is incredible – particularly for how modern it sounds. In fact, the whole record sounds modern, it fills the ears, while ‘River Deep’ can sound a bit dated.

I guess it’s obvious which one I’m going for. 63 vs 66, I’m going for 63, though I think ‘River Deep’ had the potential to be the greater. I just think the producer had had too much cocaine by that point or something.

There is more to be said. More about precision and innocence, about the Beach Boys and Vietnam and Motown and mistreatment of women. I can’t get there, can’t get anywhere near it, but that’s probably for the best.

A vs B Part 4: Madonna (my long-standing perception of her) vs Madonna (actually)

I was going to write about Madonna anyway, funnily enough, though now everyone’s writing about her because it’s her 60^th birthday.

I’ve gradually, over the last few years, stopped being a dick about Madonna. Though, annoyingly now, as I did with Joni Mitchell, I’m going to use Bob Dylan as a reference point in explaining why I’m now a Madonna fan.

I think I always start with this quote from Canadian intellectual Michael Ignatieff when I think about Madonna;

“I don’t mind that I see her face on every magazine cover. I don’t mind that she is obscene. I don’t even mind that she can’t sing, can’t dance, can’t act and is none the less the most famous person on the planet. What I can’t stand is that she thinks she’s an artist.”

So persuasively dismissive, I think I allowed myself to think for years that Madonna was always reaching above her station.

But really, if you changed it ever so slightly, it’s exactly what some reactionary snobby prick would have said about Dylan in the 60s (and even now). And it’s no more true for either of them.

I remember Clive James did a show in the early 90s about “Fame” and he really focused on Dylan in the 60s and Madonna in the 80s. I was too young to understand much about what he was getting at, and I don’t remember all that much of what he said.

But there are more than superficial similarities between the two – college dropouts from the north country who came to New York at the start of a decade, had it tough for a few years while they found their voice, pissed off the purists, created a new form, influenced everything that came after them (and acted quite badly and had far too many extra-curricular activities for most people’s liking).

What else links them? Weight of songs … simple. The essence of why I still think of Dylan is streets ahead of all his contemporaries is just the number of great songs over the span of time. And the same is true, in a pop sense, of Madonna. Now, I don’t know if there are great Madonna deep cuts, but there hardly need to be. Over 60 Top 40 singles (nearly all Top 10), and sure, there are some rubbish ones (I think part of the reason I solidified my anti-Madonna sentiment was how dreadful I found her turn-of-the-century run) but there really are so many good ones.

So many songs that, when they came on the radio, I couldn’t resist – I’d find myself asking “do I really think Madonna’s rubbish, I mean, I like ‘Like a Prayer’ … and Live to Tell, and Hung Up, and Borderline, and Crazy for You, and Cherish, and Dear Jessie, and Take a Bow, and Rain, and Into the Groove, and La Isla Bonita, and Ray of Light, I guess … oh and Papa Don’t Preach, oh and This Used to be My Playground …” etc etc

And, you know, she’s a great and varied writer. Many of her songs, as well as the hooks and the ability to draw on the sounds of the day, are interesting, mysterious, have a sense of sadness, a sense of a story not wholly told. I think the idea of Madonna as great singer-songwriter is the one I most egregiously underestimated.

I think there’s a reason I underestimated her. I’ve been more susceptible and easily-influenced than I’d admit, and there’s always been a lot of that Ignatieff-type stuff about her, a serious male contempt for her as famehound which failed to see that, dodgy films, publicity stunts, aside, she really could dance, sing and write. The notion that Madonna is not a great pop singer is pretty ludicrous. It’s an opinion really only reserved for people who don’t think any pop singer is a good singer. People who don’t understand what being a pop singer is.

I also suspect there was a bit of identity at stake – I grew up with sisters, and there were friends of sisters around, and there was a lot of Madonna around, and it was for them, not me. And I suspect her persona was pretty confronting for a fairly prudish teenage boy in the early 90s.

Madonna, as many people say, invented the modern solo pop star (alongside Michael Jackson, though I think even more so), in the sense that it’s barely connected to what came before and so much that came after her is in her image. Michael Jackson, I’d say, is more connected to soul and disco, and Thriller was a continuation of that , while Debbie Harry (who I’d often compare Madonna unfavourably to) was a singer in a punk band who didn’t quite make it a solo star.

So, yeah, this is a bit of a mea culpa, an acknowledgement of a certain dull misogynist prudery that undoubtedly lies behind a lot of the sniffiness at Madonna. At the end of the day, take it all away, and the songs remain.

Broadstairs and Chapel Down: July 2018

This is called 'Broadstairs and Chapel Down: July 2018'. It's quite long.

It's about how the high quality of English wine is a portent of the apocalypse.

(there are certain bits I need to work on. I meant to put it up for my 40th birthday but pretty close ... ps the 4th line is meant to be longer ...)

BROADSTAIRS and CHAPEL DOWN: July 2018

A beach on an isle off an island soon-beached;

Bleak House proud to left, Dunkirk dead ahead.

We, holding out hands for a deal not yet reached

Both switching in a moment between delight and dread,

Pick shells, poke at crabs - she reckless then tearful,

Me patient then tense -, stare out at the sea,

both Britain’s guardian and ever its curse.

She walks, now prescient, sensible, fearful

Looks at the lapping waves then up at me,

Scenting the peril I know’s ten times worse.

“It’s moving” – she suddenly, leg clamp and clam,

Attached by alarm, grasps quickly that tide

Is far more formidable than I ever am.

I said, “Nothing can harm you if you’re with me.”. I lied.

“It’s moving daddy”. She won’t dip her feet

In the gentle siren threat of sea off Kent

Though we do both know we’re safer together,

Half-baking in the broken July heat –

And, lonely voices of confused dissent

Reserve our joy at this un-British weather.

We revel, a little, of course, bewitched

By glistening yachts beyond the crowded sand,

Admire our land which now seems so enriched -

This grand illusion, golden dawn, unearned, unplanned,

Half-drunk among full-drunks, dogs and outliers

Untouched as yet by the baptist suicide,

A statement that, freed from a withering planet,

we’ll starve alone after each deadline expires –

And I, so glumly overwhelmed with pride,

Pick all the scars off this jewel of Thanet.

The first point of fear, invasion, defence,

mission, belief, communion, immersion,

defiantly English in every sense

long past undergoing any further conversion,

its status, its glory perennially won.

We build her first castle – the centre just holds.

The yelp of triumph echoes round the bay,

it firms, served by the same prodigious sun

as roses blooming, wine divine! I fold …

to the wonder of this one summer’s day.

That thirty-odd miles so close and so far,

I make out the ghosts of the rescue flotilla

And swell with the spirit which now serves as our

Priapic, myopic, patriot pilot-slash-killer.

Boats crewed by good-time old boys born again

As military heroes that perilous May day

Set out under siege from Stella Maris

Return with their prize, bullish supermen

Only half-joking as they proudly say they

Should straightway be sent to liberate Paris.

And while the flags of St George still held proud,

Any identity mine for taking,

I’d have sung that dreary anthem wild and loud

If it kept that rarefied summer spell from breaking.

That England - I loved, that wise man’s mixture,

A cute culmination of all they did wrong

When voting for some England they think they knew

Washing the rest of us out of their picture.

And now, in loss, they can take their dull song

Back to the parched land that history outgrew.

And if we sing the Marsellaise, at least

Our child will know she’s European – not

Held down, but scion of the west and the east,

Of unity her birth month so brutally forgot.

She’s joined to two cities, two counties, three

countries, French, Irish, British as she feels.

We’ll sing “Allez les bleus” if the mood takes,

I’ll sell Celtic soul just as surely as she

Will beat the savage hand this era deals

Will storm the Bastille before the storm breaks.

Celebratory spitfires scatter our sky -

She shouts with glee “see you later, airplane,

Love you!”. Our peacetime idyll serves to defy

Despair, all logic and all data scanned in vain

When faced with her joy in our summer garden.

But history recalls, amidst all the spoilers

The sparkling dawn b’fore the darkest hour.

once more, my mind and my heart’s hopes harden

Recalling we’re subject to wasteful, joyless

Demagogue traders’ unquenched lust for power.

Sunburnt, exhausted, defiant, yet still

Clear enough-headed to want to be lost

In the splendour of Kent’s blooming hills

We break from the dismal rigour of counting cost

As the heat dial hits thirty-three, we spy,

In Tenterden, en route to the winery

A gathering of mayors of various places

Gloriously flaunting their small piece of pie

Roasting their lunch off in sweet sozzled finery,

Their bumbling airs enhanced by Three Graces.

The sun’s full force slams the Weald’s rowed slopes,

Once barren, now primed with vines of the south –

The yield and range beyond all wildest hopes,

A weight on the pocket and a gift to the mouth.

I’m sold – the history, the science, the taste.

This is our time, we people of the Downs,

We blessed Cantiaci, we converts-by-line

These grapes have produced, these bottles have graced

The tables and tastebuds of sceptical towns

Who’d have sworn by the Mediterranean wine.

A county reborn as holiday hotspot

Claims champagne chalk from the first (free) degree,

Barely looks back at the home grape’s gut rot

Proclaims itself centralised, unleashed, wholly free.

A country consumed by former glories

Plans the big projects, blocks out the midwives,

Lets in the suckers, the slavers and frackers,

Telling themselves unearthed empire stories

Dizzied, determined on living their best lives

Lost to all gods barring Eris and Bacchus.

The waves are rising to the darkening cliffs.

The shore is moving, we’re a smaller land

Shrinking with each feckless tectonic shift

As the wrecker extends his tiny, oily hand

And we watch in horror as it’s accepted.

I look across one more time to Dunkirk

Where the French army was left to fight and die -

No wonder our grudging requests are rejected

Now, still expecting the old tropes to work

On a union sneered at and slowly bled dry.

This sweet spot, right now, ripe, tanned and ready

For harvest, strawberry red to be picked

Suffering a summer goldrush so heady

That most have forgotten (or stopped caring) they’re tricked

By the knot at the bottom of the flourishing vine

Into thinking we’ve seen the last of the weevil

Who’ll reduce all this beauty to a savage grey season.

Then, if we’ve time, we’ll record the decline

As “The Age Anthropocene Ultaeval” –

That’ll give the last lie to the Age of Reason.

A foolish country now can’t be protected

By any sharp wits or carping voices,

It hardly yet matters which path’s selected –

choices were made long before, we live by those choices.

You’re wise to be wary, my little beauty -

This sea, here, divides and rules as it wills –

There’s so much, I worry, I can’t hold at bay,

Such weight in this one defining duty.

The tide comes in and our feeble moat fills,

But we’re long gone this time, this one summer’s day.