Album Year: 1982
Age: 0
Track Number: 2
Note: The above contains the first two movements, as well as "Smiling Phases", which I did not include on the mixtape. However, I could not find any other version on Youtube with just the two movements.
It’s possibly apocryphal, but allegedly Brian Eno’s Discreet Music was used in hospitals as a maternity tool, a sort of Lamaze-lite exercise in controlling one's breathing and body via a very conditionally regimented environment. The first album of Eno’s ambient period, Discreet Music was primarily influenced by Erik Satie’s “furniture music” pieces, the most famous of which being “Gymnopédies”, the basis for this second track on my zero year documentary mixtape.
The three movements of “Gymnopédies” are each variations on a single theme, one that nearly any one could recognize, and they too lend themselves neatly to the labor of delivery. Preceding electronic music, “Gymnopédies” works on a series of looped rhythms, with a kind of respiratory alternation between two chords while simple gradations in melody occur throughout the piece. It’s not beyond reason to think that mothers looking to cool out under the stress of childbirth were administered Satie as a kind of non-narcotic anti-anxiety medication in the early 1980s when I was born.
I can’t say I know for a fact that this was the case with my mother, but she did have the second eponymous album by Blood, Sweat & Tears. It’s one of the few albums I remember seeing in their house when I was young. At this point, my parents had switched from vinyl records to cassettes (with a few 8 tracks left in their collection). Though cassettes first become massively popular in the 1980s with the rise of the portable walkman, my folks were actually ahead of the game in terms of tapes. When I began to transfer their music from tape to CD-R in the early 2000s, some of their cassettes, which preceded my lifeline, were warbled and unspoolable, the effects of age having taken their toll.
Released in 1969, one year before Eno’s band Roxy Music formed, the music of Blood, Sweat & Tears couldn’t be further from any of Eno’s output. Whereas Roxy Music and Eno’s solo work only now sounds as if the future has just now caught up with it, Blood, Sweat & Tears are a relic. What was once an adventurous fusion of jazz, classical, R&B/soul, big band, and rock now bears the bloated weight of the prog inclinations that historically followed. All of this makes a take on Satie a curious choice to bookend their aforementioned self-titled album. A garage band may want to cover Satie simply because of its simplicity and someone like Eno may admire the song for its functional elegance, but Blood, Sweat & Tears were an implicitly tight outfit, comprised mostly of a series of session musicians who mastered jazz and rock simultaneously, and often spontaneously. The band was formed by Al Kooper and Steve Katz, both formerly of the improvisational act The Blues Project, a band whose jams were the envy of The Grateful Dead and whose style was eventually appropriately classified as some of the first strains of blues-based psychedelic rock.
Written in ¾ as if part of some Benzedrine-fueled waltz, Satie’s ”Gymnopédies” has a pretty revolutionary approach to structure, one that essentially radicalized John Cage when he first became familiar with the composer’s work. Satie was largely unsuccessful in his lifetime, only gaining eventual acclaim after being championed by his friend and follower Claude Debussy. Blood, Sweat & Tears, on the other hand were somewhat defiant of traditional rock structure, avoiding conventional time signatures and harmonic infrastructures for the interpretive coordinates of jazz. On an album packed with covers- Laura Nyro, Brenda Holloway, Cream, Billie Holiday, Traffic-the choice of Satie may be the band’s most adventurous.
Played on strummed guitars and flute with twinkling chimes in the backdrop, the take on the first movement is a bit too new age and fairydust for its own good. The shiny brass at the end, with its cartoon Mephistopheles apocalyptic gesturing, is not only horribly dated and overwrought, it also completely realigns the song. One year post Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, everybody was trying their hand at the concept album and Blood, Sweat & Tears here seemed to be turning to classical theater for its instructions here, using Satie as a motif without any causal logic. Nevertheless, the album sold ridiculously well, and even beat out The Beatles at the Grammys (more on that in a future entry).
Nevertheless, even if the version of the song that gave me comfort in the womb and in the ensuing years is a bit inapproachable now, something about the tune itself stuck with me, as “Gymnopédies” easily remains one of the most sublime pieces of music amongst the hundreds of thousands I’ve ever heard. Its lack of flux makes it seem as though every time you put it on is a continuation of the last time you heard it, forever looping in ebb and flow, which must be an existential comfort when you bring something into the world that you know will one day die.
Monday, June 13, 2011
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Bing Crosby- Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral (That's An Irish Lullaby)
Album Year: 1982
Age: 0
Track Number: 1
“Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral (That’s an Irish Lullaby)” is an obvious first selection for a mixtape revolving around my first year of life as it’s probably the first song I ever remembered. As a series of melodic ascents and descents, the song properly fits the qualifications for a lullaby. It’s simple, easy to remember, and easy to sing along to.
“Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” is a tune that, like the song itself says, my mother used to sing to me many years ago in a voice so sweet and low. Since she was still singing this to me by the time I could remember her doing it, my educated guess is that she was singing it to me when I was even younger, even at zero years old. In turn, I have sang the song to my daughter to get her to sleep and hope to continue this tradition in our household until she can remember music too.
Bing Crosby though belongs more to my grandparent’s generation than my parents. By the time my parents had their music (60s and early 70s rock n’ roll), Crosby was a fogie, an establishment figure. Yet, a cassette of a Christmas album with a bunch of crooners, as well as some Crosby songs still linger in my parent’s personal music collection. Still, I associate Crosby more with my maternal grandparents’ music collection, whose tastes (Crosby, Andy Williams, Pat Boone) were distinct from my paternal grandfather’s (Nat King Cole, Al Martino), which bore the imprint of jazz, even if it was safe, somewhat wholesome jazz.*
This is perhaps because Crosby was not only a national treasure in his heyday, but something of an Irish folk icon for his popularization of traditional and modern Irish music. My family’s not quite as Irish as my grandmother and mother always made us out to be, but there dwelled within the Irish part of my family0 an old country pride, the kind specifically evoked in “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” (more on that in a minute). I never got a chance to ask, but I’m guessing this sentiment was instilled so deeply within my grandmother (a second generation American) because her generation was not far off from the anti-immigrant/anti-Irish/anti-Catholic antagonism that was prevalent around the turn of the century.
“Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” has roots around this era. It was written in 1914 by James Royce Shannon, a songwriter and actor who, like my grandmother, was likely more English than Irish. Shannon was born James Royce and adopted the last name “Shannon” after moving to New York, possibly to sound more Irish. The song played a minor role in an even more minor Broadway play called Shameen Dhu, a product of the final in a series of collaborations between the prolific stage writer Rida Johnson Young and composer Chauncey Olcott (with additional music by Ernest R. Ball and Shannon). A love story set in the 18th century amidst the backdrop of Irish-British struggle, the play ran for 3 weeks and was never performed again. Though Olcott received the main credit for the play’s music and sang the song in the cast as lead mean Dare O’Donnell, “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” is solely attributed to Shannon. According to the comprehensive Broadway International Database, Shameen Dhu was the only Broadway play Shannon would ever compose for.
The song was used as a theatrical cue to rouse the spirits of the expatriate Irish audience using the nostalgia of a homeland in Killarney, a place associated with a mother’s warmth, as its ammunition. Whether the mother of the song is now departed or simply miles away (and the song doesn’t reveal this), the song, an Irish lullaby, bridges the distance.
Somehow the song survived as a parlor tune, leading to the myth that it actually was a traditional Irish ditty. After some 30 years out of the public, “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” eventually made its way to Hollywood and into the hands of Bing Crosby under the musical direction of former Broadway director Robert Emmett Dolan. Though Crosby was already a super-duper star of radio, film, and popular song at the time, the film Going My Way, the film which spawned the return of “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral”, catapulted what was already a practically unstoppable rise, one which culminated with the 1954 film White Christmas, whose title track is the best selling single of all time.
The story of two rival priests and their differing approaches towards troubled youth, Going My Way was a commercial and critical blockbuster, earning seven Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Actor for Bing Crosby. It was the highest grossing film of 1944. It’s hard to understand the film’s appeal nowadays, even if it was packed with a number of memorable songs. Going My Way was released during the last years of WWII in the throes of a period of extreme censorship under the Hays Code. Perhaps it’s this that made folks move in droves to a film about a crisis of archaic clergy practice. The film’s trailer proclaims that it is “For a world that needs the lift of its wonderful story, which I buy, given the nature of the atrocities going on at the time. Yet, the film is rarely recognized as a classic and seems a bit dry by today’s critical standards. Likewise, the titles in Crosby’s filmography give little indication to younger film buffs that he was actually one of the top grossing actors of all time.
Crosby’s music survives better, but only slightly. His fanbase is slowly dying off and becoming the stuff of records by The Caretaker (more on him late in the mixtape series). Yet, in nursing homes and veterans hospitals across America, Bing Crosby is being pumped through the air like Oxygen in Vegas, keeping elderly folks alive several years longer thanks to the help of an old undead friend. The Going My Way Soundtrack was issued by Decca nearly a year after its release because Paramount had re-released the film to theaters with enormous success. The soundtrack was a Billboard number one hit for six weeks, but it has never been reissued to cassette or CD.
In a scene from Going My Way where the older, stricter priest played by Barry Fitzgerald lays down to sleep, Fitzgerald mawkishly asks Crosby “Do you know ‘Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo’?” (further suggestion that the song ran deep throughout Irish tradition), to which Crosby proceeds to sing and mostly hum to the elderly priest. As the verses do not feature in this scene, they were likely popularized from the ensuing soundtrack LP (which also features the first version of “Swinging on a Star”, now largely known as a children’s song), as well as Crosby’s ensuing albums and greatest hits collections.
The Crosby recording chosen here is drippy with sentimental gloop strings, twinkling crescendos, and fluttering woodwinds, as close to a Disney Orchestra as Crosby could muster. The lightness of the arrangements, they way they seem to sometimes defy gravity in cute, playful ways emphasizes the utopian nature of the longing, while the final refrain of the chorus is far more sturdy, almost signaling a return to reality from the Oedipal fantasy. This simple tonal emotional tear-jerk appears so often in Disney films (and far too many Hays Code era musicals) because it offers a psychic environment which is uncluttered and uncomplicated. Children need this kind of narrative for psychological development. Their thinking is not abstract enough to grasp the tenuous nature of emotion as it actually exists, so music in children’s films can provide an elementary guide to the “rules” of human cognition (which leaves a wide open space for ideology). This arrangement of “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” chooses the form of the lullaby to provide the listener with their most safe and most vulnerable position, cradled next to his or her mother (Ireland) where he or she is safest from the poisons and pitfalls that surround him or her.
One day, “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” will be too hard to listen to, because it will never cease to be a substitute for my mother. The song has become the very fantasy it evokes. The mother of my “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” is not my real mother as she is, but the religious figure the song exalts her to be. Such is the power of music as an energy. “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” is a permanent establishment in my mind, an institution of fantasy and memory, itself a safe place, a Killarney. I can go there at will, lull myself into dream by simply listening to the song. It will never prevent the decay of mortal flesh or protect me in the ways that my mother could when she sang it to me, but “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” is far more affixed to me than any organ in my body. It is part of my genetic code. It is written into me.
*Crosby got his start in jazz too, fronting The Rhythm Boys at the behest of Paul Whiteman, whose unfortunate name proves an apt indicator to what type of jazz he was involved in. During the Harlem Renaissance, a period characterized by a kind Jazz continuum of Dixieland, Ragtime, Swing, and Big Band, Paul Whiteman was making these musicks safe for White America and being dubbed “The King of Jazz” for it. Crosby came out of this school.
Age: 0
Track Number: 1
“Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral (That’s an Irish Lullaby)” is an obvious first selection for a mixtape revolving around my first year of life as it’s probably the first song I ever remembered. As a series of melodic ascents and descents, the song properly fits the qualifications for a lullaby. It’s simple, easy to remember, and easy to sing along to.
“Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” is a tune that, like the song itself says, my mother used to sing to me many years ago in a voice so sweet and low. Since she was still singing this to me by the time I could remember her doing it, my educated guess is that she was singing it to me when I was even younger, even at zero years old. In turn, I have sang the song to my daughter to get her to sleep and hope to continue this tradition in our household until she can remember music too.
Bing Crosby though belongs more to my grandparent’s generation than my parents. By the time my parents had their music (60s and early 70s rock n’ roll), Crosby was a fogie, an establishment figure. Yet, a cassette of a Christmas album with a bunch of crooners, as well as some Crosby songs still linger in my parent’s personal music collection. Still, I associate Crosby more with my maternal grandparents’ music collection, whose tastes (Crosby, Andy Williams, Pat Boone) were distinct from my paternal grandfather’s (Nat King Cole, Al Martino), which bore the imprint of jazz, even if it was safe, somewhat wholesome jazz.*
This is perhaps because Crosby was not only a national treasure in his heyday, but something of an Irish folk icon for his popularization of traditional and modern Irish music. My family’s not quite as Irish as my grandmother and mother always made us out to be, but there dwelled within the Irish part of my family0 an old country pride, the kind specifically evoked in “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” (more on that in a minute). I never got a chance to ask, but I’m guessing this sentiment was instilled so deeply within my grandmother (a second generation American) because her generation was not far off from the anti-immigrant/anti-Irish/anti-Catholic antagonism that was prevalent around the turn of the century.
“Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” has roots around this era. It was written in 1914 by James Royce Shannon, a songwriter and actor who, like my grandmother, was likely more English than Irish. Shannon was born James Royce and adopted the last name “Shannon” after moving to New York, possibly to sound more Irish. The song played a minor role in an even more minor Broadway play called Shameen Dhu, a product of the final in a series of collaborations between the prolific stage writer Rida Johnson Young and composer Chauncey Olcott (with additional music by Ernest R. Ball and Shannon). A love story set in the 18th century amidst the backdrop of Irish-British struggle, the play ran for 3 weeks and was never performed again. Though Olcott received the main credit for the play’s music and sang the song in the cast as lead mean Dare O’Donnell, “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” is solely attributed to Shannon. According to the comprehensive Broadway International Database, Shameen Dhu was the only Broadway play Shannon would ever compose for.
The song was used as a theatrical cue to rouse the spirits of the expatriate Irish audience using the nostalgia of a homeland in Killarney, a place associated with a mother’s warmth, as its ammunition. Whether the mother of the song is now departed or simply miles away (and the song doesn’t reveal this), the song, an Irish lullaby, bridges the distance.
Somehow the song survived as a parlor tune, leading to the myth that it actually was a traditional Irish ditty. After some 30 years out of the public, “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” eventually made its way to Hollywood and into the hands of Bing Crosby under the musical direction of former Broadway director Robert Emmett Dolan. Though Crosby was already a super-duper star of radio, film, and popular song at the time, the film Going My Way, the film which spawned the return of “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral”, catapulted what was already a practically unstoppable rise, one which culminated with the 1954 film White Christmas, whose title track is the best selling single of all time.
The story of two rival priests and their differing approaches towards troubled youth, Going My Way was a commercial and critical blockbuster, earning seven Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Actor for Bing Crosby. It was the highest grossing film of 1944. It’s hard to understand the film’s appeal nowadays, even if it was packed with a number of memorable songs. Going My Way was released during the last years of WWII in the throes of a period of extreme censorship under the Hays Code. Perhaps it’s this that made folks move in droves to a film about a crisis of archaic clergy practice. The film’s trailer proclaims that it is “For a world that needs the lift of its wonderful story, which I buy, given the nature of the atrocities going on at the time. Yet, the film is rarely recognized as a classic and seems a bit dry by today’s critical standards. Likewise, the titles in Crosby’s filmography give little indication to younger film buffs that he was actually one of the top grossing actors of all time.
Crosby’s music survives better, but only slightly. His fanbase is slowly dying off and becoming the stuff of records by The Caretaker (more on him late in the mixtape series). Yet, in nursing homes and veterans hospitals across America, Bing Crosby is being pumped through the air like Oxygen in Vegas, keeping elderly folks alive several years longer thanks to the help of an old undead friend. The Going My Way Soundtrack was issued by Decca nearly a year after its release because Paramount had re-released the film to theaters with enormous success. The soundtrack was a Billboard number one hit for six weeks, but it has never been reissued to cassette or CD.
In a scene from Going My Way where the older, stricter priest played by Barry Fitzgerald lays down to sleep, Fitzgerald mawkishly asks Crosby “Do you know ‘Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo’?” (further suggestion that the song ran deep throughout Irish tradition), to which Crosby proceeds to sing and mostly hum to the elderly priest. As the verses do not feature in this scene, they were likely popularized from the ensuing soundtrack LP (which also features the first version of “Swinging on a Star”, now largely known as a children’s song), as well as Crosby’s ensuing albums and greatest hits collections.
The Crosby recording chosen here is drippy with sentimental gloop strings, twinkling crescendos, and fluttering woodwinds, as close to a Disney Orchestra as Crosby could muster. The lightness of the arrangements, they way they seem to sometimes defy gravity in cute, playful ways emphasizes the utopian nature of the longing, while the final refrain of the chorus is far more sturdy, almost signaling a return to reality from the Oedipal fantasy. This simple tonal emotional tear-jerk appears so often in Disney films (and far too many Hays Code era musicals) because it offers a psychic environment which is uncluttered and uncomplicated. Children need this kind of narrative for psychological development. Their thinking is not abstract enough to grasp the tenuous nature of emotion as it actually exists, so music in children’s films can provide an elementary guide to the “rules” of human cognition (which leaves a wide open space for ideology). This arrangement of “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” chooses the form of the lullaby to provide the listener with their most safe and most vulnerable position, cradled next to his or her mother (Ireland) where he or she is safest from the poisons and pitfalls that surround him or her.
One day, “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” will be too hard to listen to, because it will never cease to be a substitute for my mother. The song has become the very fantasy it evokes. The mother of my “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” is not my real mother as she is, but the religious figure the song exalts her to be. Such is the power of music as an energy. “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” is a permanent establishment in my mind, an institution of fantasy and memory, itself a safe place, a Killarney. I can go there at will, lull myself into dream by simply listening to the song. It will never prevent the decay of mortal flesh or protect me in the ways that my mother could when she sang it to me, but “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” is far more affixed to me than any organ in my body. It is part of my genetic code. It is written into me.
*Crosby got his start in jazz too, fronting The Rhythm Boys at the behest of Paul Whiteman, whose unfortunate name proves an apt indicator to what type of jazz he was involved in. During the Harlem Renaissance, a period characterized by a kind Jazz continuum of Dixieland, Ragtime, Swing, and Big Band, Paul Whiteman was making these musicks safe for White America and being dubbed “The King of Jazz” for it. Crosby came out of this school.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
To Here Knows When
A year or so ago, I found myself thinking about music I had listened to as a kid, but had long since sold, thrown out, taped over, lost, or otherwise scrubbed out of consciousness. The initial plan was to download the songs and create a Mix CD that functioned as a haunted semi-nostalgic tour through my own memories, one which could be sonically evocative through neural frequencies in the temporal lobe long after I had the capacity to psycho-navigate the time-space of my own lived experience. In shorts, tracks which would trigger an emotional response on impulse, however locked and guarded the memories surrounding them were.
But when considering what would go on an 80 minute CD-R, I realized that certain songs recalled precise moments in time (such as a car ride, a date, a school year, a finite relationship) and space (the apartment I lived in, the club I first heard it in). Others spanned years and encompassed different meanings throughout the disparate time periods, but were each attached to either a moment of discovery or a time period through which a song graduated from being an arbitrary node on an endless setlist to a canonical factor in the development of a sonic self, a time when a known song became either new or common. Contrary to the current predilection for a time that is out of joint, time for me on these recordings was set, inescapable.
Back when mixtapes were an actual thing, I took delicate care to thoughtfully assemble them. This is something that the digital age doesn’t easily accommodate, particularly with the breadth of music available at any given point. I still try to direct a narrative when creating Mix CDs, but now their major purpose seems to be storage- a way to contain all this new data.
In effort to reclaim the old spirit of the mixtape, I decided to invest in a Documentary Mixtape process. There would be a total of 29 CD-Rs in all, one for each year. Compiling this series would involved a great deal of investment and research, but my initial aim was completely personal- a gift and scrapbook for myself. It was only recently, after stumbling upon journalistic blogs like Pushing Ahead of the Dame, Freaky Trigger, and the Between the Grooves series at PopMatters that I considered doing write-ups for each and every tune on the mix CDs. In general, I abhor music criticism which incorporates a writer’s personal experience with music, an unnecessary crutch used by writers insecure about their (inter)subjectivity, but I was greatly entertained by Steven Hyden’s Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? series at the A.V. Club and was taken by the possibilities of applying this kind of intersubjectivity to my own project.
The discs are not completed just yet. I’m into the 20s now, but now’s as good a time as ever to start. I’ve tried to be as accurate as possible, though I am relying in large part on the unscientific apparatus of memory. Being that I don’t possess a great deal of recollections of what transpired in my life before the age of five, the first couple of mixtapes are a mosaic of songs popular on the radio during the year in question, songs that became important later than the year of their release, songs I associate with my parents and older siblings, and songs tied to other media (particularly films). I will attempt to parse personal anecdotes with genuine criticism, historical context, and interpretation. Not all songs will be related to the year in question, but each will have some kind of significance to the year in question. Since I was only alive for 16 days in 1981, year zero will be 1982. And since this project will likely not be completed for another year or so, we might as well make an even 30.
I hope someone besides me finds value in these entries. My aim is for accuracy, to record what I actually was listening to, rather than what I wish I was listening to. The only music I've excluded is music that I've created myself (all of which can be found at Timhtunes) to avoid turning this into even more of a vanity project and to save space for other music. Thereby, I will laying bear all my unhip tendencies, my regretful periods, and my general fickleness. No part of me will be spared.
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