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Every track has a story. Classic songs from the rock music, pop, reggae & soul archive and the stories behind them with Simon Tesler, founder and former editor of 1980s music, media and pop culture magazine BLITZ.
Hello, this is Simon Tesler with more great Sounds from the Rock and Soul Archive and a few of the stories behind the songs. This week my theme is FAMILY, with songs about mums and dads, brothers, sisters and all the rest. I'll be playing tracks Lou Reed, Scissor Sisters, Level 42, Steel Pulse, Madness and many more. But who better to start us off than Sly & The Family Stone. Yep, It's a Family Affair.
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The classic Family Affair from Sly & The Family Stone's landmark 1971 album There's A Riot Goin On, which was one of several soul or funk records that sought to reflect the upheaval taking place in US society as the American dream turned sour in the wake of Vietnam, the decline of the civil rights movement, the rise of militant political movements like the Black Panthers and the increasingly widespread use of hard drugs. These were dark times.
Nor was all well within the Family Stone, Sly Stone's extended musical collective who had enjoyed spectacular success two years earlier with their album Stand! and an explosive performance at the Woodstock festival. But over the following months, Stone himself grew increasingly unreliable and moody. He failed to turn up for a series of live dates and recording sessions, and the band fell way behind schedule on delivering new tracks to record company Epic. This led to considerable tension between him and the rest of the Family Stone group, especially the four members who were not in fact his actual siblings, guitarist Freddie Stone and keyboardist Rose Stone.
Almost two years passed without any new material. However, without telling the rest of the band, Stone was in fact in the studio, mostly by himself, working on new tracks that were fed by his general unease and sense of disillusionment. He played most of the instruments himself, or invited mates such as Bobby Womack, Billy Preston and Ike Turner to contribute instrumental parts. It was among the first albums to feature one of the early automated drum machines. The only member of the Family Stone group to feature on Family Affair, arguably the standout track on the resulting album, was his sister Rose who contributed the backing vocals. That's Billy Preston on organ and Bobby Womack playing guitar.
Lyrically, Family Affair seems to reflect the turmoil going on within the band. "You can’t leave ’cause your heart is there/ But, sure, you can’t stay ’cause you been somewhere else,” sings Stone. “You can’t cry ’cause you’ll look broke down/ But you’re cryin’ anyway ’cause you’re all broke down.”. But actually Stone claimed many years later in his autobiography that it wasn't the band or even his real family he was writing about, but the relationship between his wife-to-be Kathleen Silva and her own sister.
Families, eh? You can't live with them and you can't live without them. It's a theme we will return to repeatedly in the tracks I'm playing. But for now, let's lighten the mood a little for our next two tracks. Here are two more bands who, a bit like most of the Family Stone, were virtual rather than literal families. In a few minutes, Dexys Midnight Runners with Celtic Soul Brothers from the Too-Rye-Ay album. Kevin Rowland's main collaborators in the band were the trombonist Jim Paterson and keyboard player Micky Billingham, and their Irish and Scottish roots and love of classic soul made them indeed Celtic Soul Brothers.
But for that particular track, they found the inspiration somewhere else entirely: in Burt Bacharach and Hal David's song There's Always Something There To Remind Me. Rowland told the website Songfacts "That's a great song. We wanted a good rhythm, so we got that. We often do that. We put a song on and we say, 'We want to write something as good as this.' We might use one phrase, but it's not really nicked because the chords are different, so the harmony's different. The harmony of the melody over the chord."
Before that another virtual family, the Scissor Sisters. Their song Take Your Mama was written by singer Jake Shears about the evening he told his devout Southern Baptist parents that he was gay. He was 17 and was visiting Las Vegas on a spring break with his mum and dad to see Michael Crawford in the stage show Barnum. “I was just irritated. There was nothing really for me to do there as a 17-year-old, and I just wanted to stir the pot a little bit. So I basically came out to my mom while we were doing our hair in the bathroom, getting ready to go see Michael Crawford.”
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A trio of tracks now all from the British isles, and from a disparate group of likely lads. In a few minutes, The Undertones from Northern Ireland, followed by Ian Dury, but we're going to start with North London's finest, Madness, and one of their best-loved and most enduring songs. Cathal or Carl Smyth -- also known as Chas Smash -- was the last of the original seven members of Madness to join the band, and his main role in their early rise to fame was as backing vocalist, dancer and general onstage cheerleader.
As a result, his contribution to their musical output is often under-estimated compared to frontman Suggs, keyboard player and musical director Mike Barson and guitarist Chris Foreman, who between them penned most of the band's best-known songs. However, Smyth gradually proved to be a fine lyricist and songwriter, and when Barson left the band in 1982, he also took over as de facto musical director. Michael Caine, Wings Of A Dove and Cardiac Arrest were all co-written by him and so was the track I'm going to play now: Our House.
The album from which it came, The Rise & Fall, was said Suggs, "the first album that we made that was an album not just a collection of songs." Guitarist Foreman said "It's known by the band as our Sgt Pepper. It’s an incredibly complex album, breaking new ground with every song.”
The concept for the album also came from Smyth, who had suggested that all seven band members write songs about their families and about growing up in London. The idea came to him, he said, when the band were flying back exhausted from an American tour. "I was thinking about the house where we lived in North Finchley when I was 14. I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, but I’m sure two years of solid touring ... influenced me. It came out of a certain isolation you feel; you’re away from family and friends, thinking fondly about home. Your house is your reality anchor, where you go to rest. You’ve got to recuperate and have a shoulder to cry on, and that’s where you can be yourself. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s Deja Vu album and their song Our House had been seminal for me when I was younger and had suited my melancholic nature. So the title was always in my mind. I got the kernel of the idea and wrote it on a napkin."
The basic rhythm track for the song was composed by Foreman. He had a boom-box device with a built-in drum machine, and would often use it to sketch the musical bones of a new song. But Our House actually started as a much slower track -- "dirge-y" is how Foreman described it, but he took it in to rehearsals with the band anyway, and Smyth adapted those lyrics he'd already jotted down on a napkin about his own childhood. Gradually the tempo of the song began to speed up, but it still took days before they managed to get the track right, with all the band members adding musical cues or suggestions for tweaking the lyrics. It was producer Clive Langer who suggested giving it a Motown or Stax-style horn and strings arrangement.
The result is a real classic, probably the finest song Madness ever recorded, and whatever your actual family background, everyone can relate to the song's sentiment. As Suggs said later "I’d never had a house in the middle of anyone’s street or a sense of community. I don’t think Carl did either. Maybe that’s why we were all so fond of the idea of it. It’s strange now to think we were so philosophical about such everyday things." Here it is: Our House.
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After Our House, two more songs with which we can all identify. My Perfect Cousin is one of the two finest achievements of The Undertones; the other of course being their debut single Teenage Kicks. Like Our House, both those songs managed to package the everyday experience of growing up; in the case of My Perfect Cousin that nightmare of always being compared to some goody two shoes relative. It was written by guitarist Damian O'Neill and bassist Michael Bradley and inspired by O'Neill's real-life cousin Kevin Downey. In fact the song and its considerable commercial success apparently caused a row within the O'Neill family. Cousin Kevin's parents were not amused and Damian was subsequently forced to apologise. Kevin himself wasn't too bothered though, and later got novelty cards printed saying he was the original perfect cousin.
And then, Ian Dury's touching and heart-felt tribute to his father Billy, whose life was almost exactly as described in the song. A former bus driver for London Transport, he was taken on in 1945 by luxury carmaker Rolls-Royce as a trainee chauffeur and he spent the next 20 or so years driving businessmen and politicians around Britain and across Europe. As a result of the long absences from home, he and Dury's mother Peggy separated, and Billy ended up in a small flat where he died in 1968 from lung disease. As Dury says in the song: "he smoked too many cigs".
Next up, two more views on the changing social and political landscape of the United States during the 1970s. In a few minutes a fine track released by Billy Paul in 1979 that called for an end to the cracks developing within the traditional American family structure. "Haven't you noticed a breakdown in the family tie," he sings, "just not as strong as it once was... another home's falling apart... another group of broken hearts."
But before that, a lesser-known classic from Frank Zappa, from his 1974 album Apostrophe. It's Zappa so it's dripping with irony and social satire. Uncle Remus was of course originally the fictional character created in a series of novels by the white author Joel Chandler Harris in the 1880s. Remus is a kindly elderly Black man, a former slave, who recounts traditional moral folktales about Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox and other animal characters to the small white son of the plantation owner.
By the 1970s of course, this rose-tinted romantic stereotype of the supposedly happy freed slave had become hugely controversial, and the track Uncle Remus was Zappa's slant on the challenges facing the African-American community as it tried to claim its rightful equality in society, even as stylishly dressed civil rights protestors were being sprayed by the police with firehoses. The song was co-written by Zappa's then-keyboard player George Duke, subsequently a jazz funk superstar in his own right. This is Uncle Remus.
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Two more songs now that originated in the US. In a few minutes, Dusty Springfield with the last big hit of her original career in the 1960s. The growing popularity of rock music towards the end of that decade was beginning to put an end to the more traditional pop singers who had dominated the charts up to that point. Dusty Springfield had enjoyed considerable success in her home country, but slightly less in the US despite a multi-year partnership with the gifted songwriters Burt Bacharach & Hal David.
In a bid to boost her appeal stateside she signed a new contract for that country with Atlantic Records, the home of the soul singers she idolised such as Aretha Franklin. They sent her into the legendary American Sound Studio in Memphis Tennessee with a starry lineup of supporting musicians. The resulting album, Dusty In Memphis, is now regarded as her finest album, though it was not a commercial success at the time. It also gave her what has come to be regarded as her signature song, Son Of A Preacher Man. That's in a few minutes.
But first, the splendidly named US rock band Three Dog Night with their version of a song originally written by songwriter Randy Newman for Eric Burdon & The Animals, and subsequently covered by many others, including Tom Jones with The Stereophonics. Randy Newman is probably best known now for the songs he has written for Pixar movies like Toy Story and Monsters Inc, but in fact I could fill a whole show with sometimes light-hearted sometimes poignant songs he wrote over the course of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and beyond that were made famous by other people. Mama Told Me Not To Come was written about an innocent middle class guy getting invited to his first hipster party, and he's more than a little scared. "This is the craziest party there could ever be / don't turn on the lights cos I don't want to see."
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I snuck another one in there. That was of course Elvis Presley with Kissin' Cousins, the title track from his 1964 comedy musical of the same name. Ever seen Elvis with blond hair? Well, that's the place to look, because he plays dual roles as dark-haired military officer Josh as well as his blond-haired distant cousin Jodie, a hillbilly from rural Tennessee. Let me hurry to reassure you (or perhaps disappoint you) that there is no kissing between Josh Elvis and Jodie Elvis. The Kissin' Cousins in question are of course Jodie's two sisters who compete for Josh's affections. Totally corny plot, but the song is catchy as hell.
We're just coming up to the break now. I will be back with you after the news for another hour of great music on the theme of FAMILY. But to take us there, a genuine classic from four real-life sisters from Philadelphia. Debbie, Joni, Kim and Kathi Sledge had been working in the music business since the early 1970s but they just didn't seem to be getting anywhere. They'd had a couple of minor hits mid-decade, but they were still working all hours as a live act opening the show for other bigger performers, and by 1979 they were getting fed up. "Maybe we should give up music," they were saying to each other, "maybe go to college and just become lawyers or something".
Meanwhile, over in New York, a new group led by guitarist Nile Rogers and bassplayer Bernard Edwards had just scored a mammoth hit with a track from their second album. The track was called Le Freak and the duo performed with two female vocalists under the name Chic. Jerry Greenberg who was president of their label Atlantic Records started encouraging Rogers and Edwards to consider sprinkling some of the same magic dust on other artists whose careers were beginning to fade. Like maybe Diana Ross for example.
But Rogers and Edwards didn't feel confident about working with star names just yet, and also worried that they wouldn't get fair credit for the work they did. Give us an act who aren't especially successful, they said, and let's see how we get on. If we can make a hit with them, maybe we can try working with someone more established. Greenberg told them about these four sisters on the label whose careers didn't seem to be going anywhere.
I don't need to tell you how that turned out. Here's the first song that Nile Rogers and Bernard Edwards wrote for Sister Sledge; in fact the first song they'd written for any other artist apart for themselves and their female vocalists. This is We Are Family.