Great Songs from My Favorite Year in Music: 1985, Part 51

Hall & Oates - "Method of Modern Love"



(Single Release: February 1985)
Let's just try to forget that really disconcertingly dated video and the accompanying, horribly written summary of it on Wikipedia. They don't exist, okay? Rather, let's just concentrate on the song. They proved it once again, thirteen years into their professional careers, after eleven previous studio albums and over 25 charting singles, six of them #1s, Daryl Hall and John Oates produced another mesmerizing track. I've always been an unabashed Hall & Oates fan. I once owned Private Eyes on vinyl, and hopefully will again. These two are songwriting masters, there's just no getting around it. "Sara Smile," "Rich Girl," "Kiss on My List," "You Make My Dreams," "I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)," "Maneater," ... need I go on? Their sound is described as blue-eyed soul, a term coined to describe the white artists who were starting to make Rhythm & Blues and soul music in the 60s. There's an apocryphal story, mainly questionable because I half-remember it from either a Behind the Music episode or some similar program, that many people in the Philadelphia music scene, including established artists, at first merely assumed, upon hearing "She's Gone," that Hall & Oates were African American. There were no music videos back then; there was just the radio. The story goes to show how adept the duo is at writing and performing songs in a particular style that they grew up with and loved. "Method of Modern Love" carries on with that tradition, though with an 80s sheen and production gloss that seemed requisite at the time. Once that gloss is stripped off, we are left with a traditional R&B song in all its glory. Hall's vocals are once again superb. His falsettos are second to none. And, despite the 80s stigma, one cannot deny the magnetism of the spelling portion of the song. It is certainly one of the track's biggest hooks and it reels me in every time. I cannot express how much I love Hall & Oates, without any hint of irony. In fact, it even bothers me that I have to qualify it in such a way considering the last few years of disdain for certain popular 80s acts. But, thanks to some love from the band Phoenix and soundtrack appearances, such as in (500) Days of Summer, there has been a much deserved resurgence. For the past four years, Hall has been presenting an online performance show called Live from Daryl's House, in which he performs impromptu music with his guest for the month. He even got Smokey Robinson to sing "Ooo Baby Baby" (a song he notoriously refuses to perform), by merely transitioning into it from "Sara Smile." Hall & Oates are performing at Bumbershoot this year. I may have to find my way there.

Great Songs from My Favorite Year in Music: 1985, Part 50

Bruce Springsteen - "I'm on Fire"



(Single Release: February 1985)
"I'm on Fire" is two minutes and thirty-seven seconds of perfection. Back before I was a Bruce convert, this song was a light in the darkness. It was the first Springsteen track I truly loved. There have been many since, especially in poring over the catalog, but "I'm on Fire" led the way. It's not just because it was first. It is quite possibly the most perfectly written, compact song. The music sounds and feels like motion, mimicking the freight train in the last verse. It is a style similar to many of the songs by Johnny Cash, which is probably why it sounded so great as a cover by the Man in Black on the Sub Pop issued Nebraska tribute. (I, for one, did not quibble about the song being from the Born in the U.S.A. sessions and not Nebraska, though it could have been, if it were just a little darker). That sense of motion propels us through the song, hearing Bruce describe his longing for someone who, while perhaps not unattainable, after all this is Bruce we're talking about, is at least attached to someone else. This is perhaps why it resonated with me. As a lovesick teen, this kind of yearning from afar was requisite. The structure of the song is also intriguing. The first two verses have the same form, with two descriptive rhyming lines (i.e., "Hey little girl is your daddy home / Did he go and leave you all alone?", then two rhyming expressions of his love, (i.e., "I got a bad desire / Oh, I'm on fire." The third verse is a bridge, in which Bruce more poetically and dramatically describes his pain. This is where it gets interesting. The fourth and final verse is a hybrid of the two, combining the three line bridge format with the two line ending of the first two verses to round out the song as it fades into the distance. As I said for Treblezine's Top 200 Songs of the 80s, where it really should have broken the top 50, "I'm on Fire" is the most haunting, passionate, subversive, erotic love song ever written. It is only kismet that it is 50th in my list, as this is not in any order of preference or rank. But again, it is two minutes and thirty-seven short seconds of perfection.

Great Songs from My Favorite Year in Music: 1985, Part 49

Pat Benatar - "Invincible (Theme from The Legend of Billie Jean)"



(Single Release: November 1985)
We will always associate Ray Parker, Jr. with Ghostbusters, Simple Minds with The Breakfast Club, and Huey Lewis with Back to the Future, but does anyone even remember The Legend of Billie Jean? Yeah, I didn't think so. The film tanked at the box office. It has apparently found a cult audience, but I have yet to meet that cult. But, every 80s movie had to have a powerful theme song, and for this tale of teenage rebellion, they got the great Pat Benatar. She was already a concretely established artist with over six albums and thirteen top 100 singles. While the movie may have bombed, the song did gangbusters, becoming her fourth biggest hit at the time, after "Hit Me With Your Best Shot," "Love is a Battlefield," and "We Belong." That's pretty damn good company. I'm not sure if I would place it fourth in my top ten list of Benatar tracks, as most of Crimes of Passion and Precious Time would make that list, but it is still a kick-ass song with a great chorus.

Films of the 60s, Part 10: Talking of Michelangelo

“In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.” – T.S. Eliot



At first, I wanted to call this 60s film entry, “Trilogie a la Ennui.” Michelangelo Antonioni’s loosely connected trilogy, at least thematically, deals with man’s (and more specifically, woman's) alienation from a rapidly changing, post-war world in which social mores are shifting and relationships are not the traditional lifelong pairings that were once the norm. There are long takes, extended periods in which nothing really happens (or does it?), and relationships that inevitably fall apart. Antonioni is also known as a fiction writer, and these films are truly literature in visual form. These three films are amazingly put together, replete with meaningful yet spare dialogue, symbols, and existential drama. I can’t claim to understand everything that Antonioni is trying to express, but I feel as if these films are so packed, that even a portion of them being understood is enough. In this way, these films might not be for everyone. They are art films in every sense of those words, and deserve undivided attention and exploratory discussion.



L’Avventura (1960, Michelangelo Antonioni)

I first heard of Antonioni, not with his most popular, Blow-Up (which will be written about at a later date), but when a coworker at the Laemmle’s Royal Theater started gushing profusely about L’Avventura when it was booked to play a local art house theater (possibly the Aero? I don’t remember). I didn’t go see it then, and it’s probably a good thing. I don’t think I could have appreciated the film in my early twenties, but now, nearing forty, this film, and the other two in the trilogy, are more palatable due to my experience. L’Avventura is the type of film that starts out as one type of film, and then ends as a completely different one. At first, we are introduced to a strong female character, Anna, who doesn’t get along with her father, a diplomat. There are hints in the dialogue between them that Anna’s father lies to her and to others, but these secrets are never revealed. She admits that she is not really in love with her fiancée, Sandro, but is going to marry him anyway. This, too, turns out to be fairly unimportant, at least as it relates to popular narrative film, and this certainly isn’t that. In this type of film, the above issues are all crucial, meaningful, and interpretable.

Anna, Sandro, and friend Claudia take a boat trip to a remote volcanic island, Lisba Bianca, for a vacation. They are accompanied by other sets of couples, each of which have peculiar quirks and bits of revealing dialogue. But, the pivotal point of the film comes when Anna mysteriously disappears. The rest of the travelers are all lazily napping or paying attention to other things before anyone notices. After exhaustive searches, and the arrival of Anna’s father, not much else can be done. Anna’s friends all go back to their regular lives. Eventually, Sandro and Claudia strike up a relationship, though not as “eventually” as some might think. They end up together fairly quickly. The shift from the first act of the film to the second act, following the formation of Claudia and Sandro’s relationship, is deliberately flouts the rules of the mystery trope. All vestiges of the Anna storyline and her mysterious disappearance, as dramatic as they are, are dropped. It is more of a reflection of life’s odd events. Things happen, and we move on, and sometimes we don’t get any answers, nor do we adamantly seek them as some of our filmic heroes so valiantly do.

Claudio and Sandro’s relationship is put into stark relief with not only other relationships around them, such as their traveling companions, with their infighting and nastiness, but also with the original relationship of loss with Anna. One of the women has an affair with a 17-year-old painter. All of them search for meaning in their own individual ways. As Sandro and Claudia take their own trip together, we see a group of men recognizing her beauty, perched in sheer leering attentiveness. I’d say it was a fairly good homage to The Birds (another one I'll post at a later date), except that the Hitchcock film arrived three years later. This scene is just one example of how to dissect this film. Cinematography, dialogue, (or lack thereof), and the emoted feelings of the actors are everything in this film, along with others in the trilogy. Sandro convinces the beautiful Claudia, played masterfully by Monica Vitti, Antonioni’s girlfriend at the time, to marry him. Shortly after, she catches him with a young prostitute. Both irreparably damaged, the film ends with the indelible image of Claudia standing alongside a sitting Sandro, with Mt. Etna in the background. And immediately, we know that this dormant volcano is somehow related to the volcanic island where Anna disappeared, and that everyone will eventually disappear in their own way, and in their own time.



La Notte (1961, Michelangelo Antonioni)

Once again, Monica Vitti plays the other woman, though not as early on as in L’Avventura. In La Notte, we again start with a character who will soon disappear, in this case, the dying Tommaso, a friend of the couple, Giovanni and Lidia, played respectively by the magnificent Marcello Mastroianni and the radiant Jeanne Moreau. Rather than newlyweds, Giovanni and Lidia are a middle-aged, married couple, fairly successful and in the upper crust. Giovanni is a famous writer, with people generally praising his abilities while he undercuts their laudatory decrees with self-deprecation. The couple, having to face the imminent death of their friend, start to react in particular ways. Giovanni accepts the advances of a young, beautiful, disturbed, nymphomaniac patient, while Lidia wanders off to walk the streets of Milan, experiencing all sorts of odd bits of the flotsam and jetsam of life, such as a crying child, rotting buildings, people shooting off Roman Candles, and a street fight. Eventually, Lidia ends up at the couple’s old apartment building, representing a happier time in their relationship, where Giovanni finds her.

However, once separated from this happy place, Lidia is once again despondent and restless. She suggests that they go out for the evening, first to a nightclub, and then to a party with friends. Again, characteristic of Antonioni, there is a lot to see, but not really a lot going on, at least in the narrative sense. The two watch an amazing nightclub act that we could easily stretch to represent the acrobatic nature of relationships, but that might not be necessary. The party is where most of the film takes place, and where most of the issues are set into motion. Lidia wanders around, alone though surrounded by people, not having much fun. Giovanni, in the meantime, becomes the focus of the party, being offered jobs and getting a lot of female attention. A simple game of flirtation, Giovanni and Valentina sliding her compact along a checkered floor in an imitation of shuffleboard or curling, turns into a spectator sport and a gambling affair. Everything seems to go Giovanni’s way. Lidia and Valentina end up connecting in their own awkward, yet straightforward and unpretentious manner. It forms a strange sort of love triangle.

Lidia eventually admits, as they leave the party as dawn breaks over the surrounding golf course, that she doesn’t love Giovanni anymore. They sit, and she reads a love letter to him that she has secreted in her purse. It is poetic and beautiful, speaking of a love that we have not seen displayed anywhere in this film. He asks her, “Who wrote that?” It is a double insult as this insinuates that she has a secret lover that he doesn’t know about, meaning that he is unattending and absent, and even more insulting in that it was he who wrote it in the early days of their courtship, proving himself more of a cad. It is no wonder that Don Draper, a character from AMC’s Mad Men, says that he enjoyed La Notte. Giovanni and Lidia are prototypes and molds for Don and Betty Draper. The elite circles, loveless relationship, and complete façade are near replicated in the hit show that takes place at the same time as Antonioni’s films. It is yet another heartbreaking ending, yet more real than most other films.



L’Eclisse (1962, Michelangelo Antonioni)

I saw these three films out of order and I wish I hadn’t. Ending with L’Eclisse would have been tragically magical. I’ll explain what I mean. Just as the other two films the “Trilogie a la Ennui,” L’Eclisse is rife with sadness, existential angst, strong, yet troubled female characters as central figures, and long takes, scenes, and shots without a lot going on but what is in the viewer’s mind. This pretty much sums up these films of Michelangelo Antonioni. So, T.S. Eliot’s poetic refrain ends up being fairly prophetic. Once again, we also have Monica Vitti, this time not playing a tertiary character, but as the focus. She is Vittoria, a literary translator who falls for a young stockbroker, Riccardo, played by the awesome Alain Delon, and begins a summer fling with him.

The movie opens with playful pop music, somewhat a staple of the French New Wave movement at the time, reminiscent certainly of Godard. But, the music shifts to eerie, ominous music. It is overpowering foreshadowing of what is to come. Everything that comes before, her breakup with her original boyfriend, her fascination with a neighbor and her African art and music collection, and visits to the stock exchange are merely prelude to one unifying event. Oddly, though the event unifies the segments of the film, it does the opposite with our characters. The relationship between Vittoria and Riccardo is fraught with problems. She seemingly tries to give herself over to her passions but cannot commit fully. He grows frustrated, torn between his passions of work and of a love that seems like it would be hard work that would conflict with his profession.

The two make a date to meet on “their corner,” a special place they have designated their own. It has a rain barrel that is somewhat their touchstone. As the hour draws near for their rendezvous, we are graced with a series of evocative shots. Time passes, day turns into dusk and then into night. We see people getting off busses. We see the sprinkler the couple played in on a previous date being ceremoniously shut off, acting as another symbol. The rain barrel on the corner begins to leak, draining its contents as if signifying the love that escaped their relationship. We see a blonde woman and wonder if she has made the date, both getting our hopes up and letting us know that this kind of situation would be devastatingly one-sided. But no, it is not her. Neither appears, but does this mean something? Is this just reality, that people eventually abandon each other? Possibly, but is it inevitable? I don’t know.

Regardless, L’Eclisse is a wonderful and tragic film. The last thirty minutes are spellbinding. They brought me to tears. Martin Scorsese called L’Eclisse the boldest film in Antonioni’s trilogy and I am not inclined to disagree with him. This trilogy, being made in a three-year span, is truly remarkable. I don’t know how he did it. Now, some fifteen plus years after the fact, I finally understand my coworker’s passionate pleas to see these films. If only more people would come and go, talking of Michelangelo.

Highlights from My Vinyl Collection, Part 13

This is the thirteenth installment of "Highlights from My Vinyl Collection," an appreciation of great music, not necessarily rare finds or expensive imports. This is not about "deleted Smiths singles and original, not rereleased - underlined - Frank Zappa albums," as Rob Gordon so eloquently put it, though a small few select gems might appear every now and again.



The Smithereens - "Only a Memory b/w The Seeker"

The Smithereens have unfortunately become one of those bands that is forgotten by many who lived through their time and unheard of by later generations. It is a travesty. The Smithereens gave arena rock / metal amplification to Byrds or Beatlesesque music. "Blood and Roses," the band's first big hit, was a bass heavy, moody, and rocking track that brought straightforward rock and roll back to the radio airwaves in a time dominated by new wave and synth tracks. But, it was the Smithereens' (named after a Yosemite Sam neologism) sophomore album, Green Thoughts, that vaulted them into popularity. "Only a Memory" was the first single from that album, and a prized 45rpm 7-inch record in my collection. It's not that it's valuable, merely a personal favorite. One of the reasons I prize this record is for the album track, but in this case, the b-side almost eclipses the a-side. This cover of The Who's 1970 classic, "The Seeker," is astounding. Knowing the Smithereens' reverence for their heroes, it is especially meaningful when Pat DiNizio sings, in his inimitable voice, "I asked Bobby Dylan / I asked the Beatles / I asked Timothy Leary / But he couldn't help me either...". Though 7-inch singles have resurfaced, they haven't quite reached the prominence they had, even in their decline when I was collecting them. Unfortunately, trying to find singles is like searching the internet without good SEO, you have to flip through them one by one. While I don't mind doing this while I am by myself, whenever I am with others in a record store, time is not a luxury. I'll keep looking for great records, which again reminds me of "The Seeker." I'll be searching low and high, too.

Great Songs from My Favorite Year in Music: 1985, Part 48

New Edition - "Count Me Out"



(Single Release: October 1985)
Before the Backstreet Boys, N*Sync, and even before the New Kids on the Block, there was New Edition. Who doesn't like New Edition? Before the term "boy band" became ubiquitous and somewhat slimy, New Edition was simply thought of as reviving the young vocal group tradition of the Jackson 5. In fact, the name "New Edition," was suposed to insinuate that they actually were the new edition of the Jackson 5. However, in 1985, the group was in trouble. Gone were the early teen days of "Candy Girl," "Cool It Now," and "Mr. Telephone Man." They were reaching the later teen stage, already rife with angst, and it caused the splintering of one band mate. As you can see from the video above, Bobby Brown, the singer of the "Mr. Telephone Man" chorus, is noticeably absent. This album would be the last with Brown as part of the group. Later, the band would go on to record one of my favorite songs of theirs, "If It Isn't Love," and would splinter off into the solo acts of Bobby Brown, Johnny Gill, Ralph Tresvant, and the trio of Bell Biv Devoe. As if I have to tell all of you that information, right? Anyway, "Count Me Out" is definitely in the tradition of the group's earliest hits, with the doo-wop harmonized backing vocals and a narrative conversation with the fellas. It is in essence a sequel to "Cool It Now," after the guys had ribbed Ralph for his lovesick pining, he gets the girl, and now in this song, he would rather hang out with his girl than with his guy friends. The video posted above even shows that there is a visual link to the video for "Cool It Now." Very meta. Because a lot of my junior high and high school friends were into alternative rock, as was I, my New Edition fandom was somewhat hidden away. Luckily, my freshman year of college found me in a dorm with one guy who liked metal and another who shared my appreciation for Ronnie, Bobby, Ricky, Mike, Ralph, and Johnny. It was a musical smorgasbord. I can tend to poke fun at R&B, slow jams, and New Jack Swing, and even did so for a certain humorous Treblezine article, but in reality, I can't help but like everything New Edition related. Whether it's Ralph's "Sensitivity," Bobby's "Every Little Step," BBD's "Poison," or any smash hit from New Edition, these songs tend to make my world a little brighter.

Great Songs from My Favorite Year in Music: 1985, Part 47

Level 42 - "Something About You"



(Single Release: September 1985)
There is just something incredibly nerdy about my love of Level 42, and in particular "Lessons in Love" and this 1985 single, "Something About You." But, looking back, it doesn't seem very likely that it was inevitable. This was likely about the time that my father started listening to modern jazz fusion. We, his kids, hated it. No, we don't want to listen to Spyro Gyra, the Yellowjackets, Rippingtons, or Fattburger, thank you very much. Granted, now I could possibly greatly appreciate those bands and actually do, but back then, they were square, pure L7, which is ironic considering that "square" was a term for people like me, who didn't appreciate jazz. Oh well. But, somehow the mainstream pop version of jazz fusion, embodied in Level 42, broke through. It wasn't necessarily because their name was derived from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, though that was certainly cool. After all, if the name had anything to do with it, I would have been way into another of my dad's bands, Shadowfax. No, it just had to do with great songwriting, Mark King's slap-bass stylings that provided a heavy groove, and the juxtaposition of King's lower register voice with keyboard player Mike Lindup's falsetto. All of these are evident in "Something About You," the band's second biggest single, behind the aforementioned "Lessons in Love." A new world of sophisticated, adult-alternative pop had opened up to me. I did not, however, dive in headlong to discover more. I was merely happy enough to enjoy Level 42's songs for the next two and a half decades.