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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. Each week I select tracks with a specific theme, and this week the theme is BODIES. I have more than 20 fabulous tracks for you from Alanis Morissette, Billy Idol, Herbie Hancock, Bob Dylan, The Jacksons, Groove Armada and many more. But first up, The Killers and Bones.
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Yes, BODIES is the theme this week, or various different body parts. I promise you I will not be playing you anyone's version of heads shoulders knees and toes, but we do have tracks about heads, eyes, hands and feet as well as bodies in general, fat and thin and inbetween. We kicked off, though, with Bones from The Killers.
In fact, that song, from their second album Sam's Town, started life with a different title altogether. It was originally called It's Only Natural, and singer Brandon Flowers and his bandmates had been tinkering with it for a couple of years before it all finally came together. The breakthrough moment arrived when bassplayer Mark Stoermer, who had played the trumpet as a kid, suggested bringing in a brass horn section to give the song extra punch.
The cherry on top was that fabulous music video by Beetlejuice and Alice In Wonderland director Tim Burton, complete with stop-motion skeletons and clips from classic fantasy movies like Jason & The Argonauts and The Creature From The Black Lagoon. Soooo Tim Burton!
Next up two more rockers. In a few minutes, Billy Idol with a gorgeous track inspired by an obscure French horror film from the 1960s. But first, the inimitable ZZ Top and Legs.
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Legs from ZZ Top and then Eyes Without A Face from Billy Idol. OK, in the name of political correctness, I have to warn you that there's a fair bit of objectification in a couple of the songs I'm playing on this week's show. It is bodies we're talking about after all. I don't need to tell you that Legs, from their 1984 album Eliminator, is one such song.
“People have been coming up with all these crazy interpretations for 30 years," main vocalist Billy Gibbons told Spin magazine in 2015, "so we’ve finally decided to just come out and say that, yes, the song’s about a woman’s sexy legs and how much they make us want her... If the song means something else to you, that’s still cool, but there were lots of people who wanted to know what we were driving at. So there it is.”
"The idea came about from when I was driving in Los Angeles one day, and there was this unusual downpour. And there was a real pretty girl on the side of the road. I passed her, and then I thought, 'Well, I'd better pull over' or at least turn around and offer her a ride, and by the time I got back she was gone. Her legs were the first thing I noticed. Then I noticed that she had a Brooke Shields hairdo that was in danger of falling apart. She was not going to get wet. She had legs and she knew how to use them."
You could probably bet that, even in a downpour, there's a strong chance that this particular pretty girl would have turned down a ride from the lavishly bearded ZZ Top guitarist, but we will never know, will we. We're going to return to ZZ Top next week in my regular quarterly In Memoriam show, to recognise the passing last month of ZZ Top drummer Frank Beard. Despite his name, he was of course the only member of ZZ Top who didn't have a beard.
And then Billy Idol, the former punk rocker from the English suburb of Bromley who went to America after his band Generation X broke up, and reinvented himself as an MTV superstar. Despite his tough guy image and permanent lip-curled sneer, Billy is and has always been a sweet guy in real life, and many of his songs have a touching and unexpectedly sensitive back story. Several were inspired by the relationship with his one-time girlfriend, the dancer and actress Perri Lister, who also sings this song's chorus, Les Yeux Sans Visage, which is of course the French for Eyes Without A Face.
Les Yeux Sans Visage is a surreal and very dark French horror movie about a crazed plastic surgeon who abducts young women in order to graft their features onto the face of his once-beautiful daughter who has been horribly disfigured in a car accident. She wears a featureless mask rather like the one later adopted by Halloween's Michael Myers, through which only her eyes are visible. In his autobiography, Idol said that he saw some parallels with the wild life he was living in New York in the early 1980s
"I began to write words that, in some disguised form, spoke about my life in New York and a relationship gone wrong, on the edge of disintegrating into madness. Perhaps I was reflecting on my own touring infidelities. In a way, those [types of relationships] can leave you feeling soulless, especially if you're already in a relationship that you value but are degrading by looking elsewhere for additional sexual kicks. .... I wonder if I was aware that it was my hijinks and gradual infidelity that were killing Perri’s and my love story… It’s possible I was predicting our eventual dissolution.”
Oh, Billy....
Let's let the girls have a go at a bit of objectification now. In a few minutes, Goldfrapp with a fabulous song from her first album. But first, since we're talking Eyes Without A Face, here's Lady Gaga with my own personal favourite track from her debut album, the tale of a real-life romantic breakup, and also one of the first songs she wrote. "I had never had my heart broken like I had when I wrote that song. It was one of 3am songs, crying in my apartment sitting at the piano, one foot on the bed and one foot on the floor. This is Brown Eyes.
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Lady Gaga's Brown Eyes followed by Lovely Head, the opening track from Goldfrapp's first album. Both songs are of course about doomed love affairs. In Gaga's case, it's over because the guy at the centre of the song, ol' Brown Eyes, can't get over his ex. "It's time to say goodbye so get your last fix and your last hit. Grab your old girl with her new tricks." And then Alison Goldfrapp sounds like she's singing about a lover who's no longer there : "Nobody's here, no one but me / So cool, you're hardly there"
Though that song was not specifically about her music partner Will Gregory, it does reflect some of the loneliness she felt during the difficult six months that the duo spent recording their debut album. They had rented a rundown one-storey cottage on a hillside in rural Wiltshire, and Alison was often there alone.
"It was mad and I wouldn't do it again," she told The Guardian in 2001. "My social and private life collapsed. It felt really vulnerable. Big windows. Mice in the roof. I like extremes but, at the end of that six months, I really did feel I was going bonkers. I remember spending three days in a raincoat, scrubbing the side of the bungalow because there were all these spiders hatching. I became obsessive about the wildlife I thought was taking over the bungalow. You could hear the mice scuttling across the roof."
Two aspects of the track make it one of the most memorable of the early 2000s. One is that forlorn whistled melody, loosely based on The Beatles' Strawberry Fields Forever. The other is the haunting other-worldly theremin solo. In case you don't know what that is, a theremin is an electronic instrument invented in 1928 by Leon Theremin that you play without touching it. The sound is created by waving your hands around two electrical antenna, and the distance of each hand from its respective antenna determines the musical pitch or volume of the sound the device produces. If you ever saw Goldfrapp perform live you'll recall Alison playing a theremin during this song, but in fact the original track features a fake theremin -- it's actually just her voice distorted through a vintage analog synthesizer so that it sounds like a theremin.
Time for another love song now, the first of two about physical dimensions. We'll tackle fat and thin in Part Two, but these two about height. In a few minutes, Little Richard with Long Tall Sally, but first here's XTC with a track from their third album Drums & Wires. This is Ten Feet Tall.
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XTC with the lovely Ten Feet Tall, which demonstrated the continuing emergence of bassplayer Colin Moulding as a fine songwriter in his own right, but with a distinctly different and more melodic style compared to the much spikier compositions of guitarist Andy Partridge. It's quite an outlier in the XTC discography, also, as a rare acoustic-led song. “Now and again one should be able to throw a spanner in the works for a bit of devilment," said Moulding later. "This song was my spanner in 1979. I suppose it was my reaction to the ‘Quirk, Jerk, Spiky, Crikey, Start, Stop’ of our previous form."
Typically, XTC's record label Virgin had their own ideas about how the song should be played. "Virgin said they really liked the song, and they thought it was going to be a great single," recalled Andy Partridge, "except they wanted us to record it electric and faster and that we had to change the structure of it." XTC did in fact agree and recorded a new and quite different electric version, which became their first single to be released in the US.
And then Long Tall Sally, the follow-up to Little Richard's breakthrough hit Tutti Frutti. In fact, there was a nefarious purpose behind the song. Tutti Frutti had been a big hit in 1956 on the American R&B charts, which represented mostly singles from black artists, but it was totally overshadowed financially later the same year by a cover version recorded by the family-friendly white crooner Pat Boone, which was an even bigger hit on the higher-selling pop charts. For their follow-up, Richard and his producer Robert Bumps Blackwell decided to come up with a song that was so uptempo and was sung so fast that Boone couldn't possibly match it. In fact their ploy failed, because Boone did later manage to cut his own slowed down version.
There are various different stories about the inspiration for the song, but Richard later claimed it was about a friend of his family. She was tall and ugly, he said, with just two teeth and cockeyed, but she was having an affair with another family acquaintance John, who was already married to Mary, known as "Short Fat Fanny." John and Mary would get in fights on the weekends, and when he saw her coming, he would duck back into the alley to avoid her.
For our next two tracks, head and feet and arms. Alanis Morrissette's debut album Jagged Little Pill is packed full of fabulous songs, but several have an undercurrent of anger or frustration, especially in connection with romantic relationships. You Oughta Know is of course the most outspoken of these, one of the angriest and most savage post-break-up songs ever written. Yet the same album also contains the lovely Head Over Feet, a song about the happy banality of a normal romantic relationship.
“When relationships get healthier and healthier," she said later, "we somehow equate that with not being as passionate or as sexy. I’ve kind of realised that it’s actually sexier when there’s less drama. I never thought that that would be the case because of the whole clingy, overly dependent roller coaster that oftentimes seemed very passionate and very sexy. But when I wrote ‘Head Over Feet’ about this particular person it was the first time that I actually had a glimpse of what it would be like to be in love and have it be something that was inducing of the heart palpitations, yet at the same time I could spend a couple minutes and actually not think about that person. It was very new to me.”
In a few minutes, the former New York Doll and Heartbreaker Johnny Thunders with You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory, but this is Alanis Morissette and Head Over Feet.
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Head Over Feet from Alanis Morissette, and then You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory, written and recorded by the outlaw guitarist Johnny Thunders for his only solo album So Alone. In the mid 1970s, Thunders had been one of the originators of New York's glam punk scene as one of the New York Dolls, and then as the drugs took hold came to London with some of the remnants of the Dolls under the new name The Heartbreakers.
Unfortunately, they brought with them a seedy entourage of dropouts -- including Sid Vicious's briefly notorious girlfriend Nancy Spungen -- and several hardcore drug dealers. The Heartbreakers and their entourage are often blamed for the sharp increase in heroin use in the UK in the later 70s, especially in the music industry, and when it came to the recording of Thunders solo album he was aided and abetted by a line-up of fellow musicians including Peter Perrett of The Only Ones, Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy and Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols all of whom were also wrestling with the same monkeys on their backs.
Yet according to one Thunders biographer, the poignant and wistful You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory, was written long before Thunders got involved with heroin, or even with the New York Dolls. Another biographer dates it to the early days of the Dolls and his fiery romantic relationship with French model and singer Fabienne Shine. We'll never know the real story, but it's become Johnny Thunders' personal anthem; the standout track on So Alone and probably the best song Thunders ever wrote. His former New York Dolls bandmate Syl Sylvain claims Bob Dylan once told him he wished he'd written that song. True or not it's still a great song.
And speaking of Bob Dylan... well we're just coming up to the break now. I'll be back with you for another hour of great music after the news, but to take us there, let's hear from the great Robert Allen Zimmerman himself.
Ballad Of A Thin Man comes from Dylan's first all-electric album, Highway 61 Revisited, and like several of the songs on that album it reflects his disenchantment with the folk movement in which he had previously been hailed as a hero and also with the media circus that now seemed to follow his every move.
Ballad Of A Thin Man is especially bitter and angry. Critic Andy Gill described it as "one of Dylan's most unrelenting inquisitions, a furious, sneering, dressing-down of a hapless bourgeois intruder into the hipster world of freaks and weirdoes which Dylan now inhabited."
So who is Mr Jones? Those questions began as soon as the record was released. At a press conference in 1965, Dylan answered. "I'm not going to tell you his first name. I'd get sued." What does he do for a living asked the same reporter. "He's a pinboy. He also wears suspenders". A year later, at another press conference, Dylan was again besieged by asinine and irrelevant questions about Mr Jones. Is he a newspaper reporter asked one journalist. "No, it's just about a fella that came into a truckstop once." Dylan flippantly replied.
The interpretation that Mr Jones must be a reporter came from the opening line of the song in which Dylan sings "You walk into the room with your pencil in your hand" but actually an early draft of the lyrics shows the original line was "You walk into the room with a hatchet in your hand". Which could just have easily referred to a newspaper reporter planning a "hatchet job" interview.
Many years later, at a concert in Japan in 1986, Dylan gave out a little more information. He introduced a live performance of the song by saying, "This is a song I wrote a while back in response to people who ask me questions all the time. You just get tired of that every once in a while. You just don't want to answer no more questions. I figure a person’s life speaks for itself, right?"
"So, every once in a while you got to do this kind of thing, you got to put somebody in their place… It’s not a bad thing now to be put in your place, it’s actually a good thing. It’s been done to me every once in a while and I’ve always appreciated it. So this is my response to something that happened over in England. I think it was about ’63 or ’64.
A few years later, another interviewer asked if there was one particular Mr Jones he had in mind when he wrote the song, Dylan replied "There were a lot of Mister Joneses at that time. Obviously there must have been a tremendous amount of them for me to write that particular song. It was like, 'Oh man, here's the thousandth Mister Jones'."
This is Ballad Of A Thin Man.