The Greatest Chord: XTC, “Another Satellite” (1985)

What makes for a great chord?  It depends on context and mood and purpose, obviously, but some generalizations can be made.  In jazz, Tin Pan Alley, and Broadway music there’s a well-trodden trail of chord enrichment.  You add the seventh note of the scale (as in blues) and then go on to add the ninth, perhaps the eleventh, conceivably even the thirteenth to color the base chord more and more with implied chords in neighboring keys.  It’s like blending ingredients into an amazing French sauce.  Here is the simplest version of the menu for enriching a C major chord:

BASIC CHORD NOTES
C (the 1^st)
E (the 3^rd)
G (the 5^th)

PLUS……………………. IMPLYING ALSO THE CHORD OR KEY OF
Bb (the 7^th)……………G minor
D (the 9^th)………………………and Bb
F (the 11^th)………………………………and D minor
A (the 13th)………………………………………and F

Popular music can accommodate complexity along these lines.  It’s how the luxurious opening chord in “A Hard Day’s Night” is built up, for example.  In art music, things can get weirder.  For a chord that’s all suspense, impossible to assign to any home key yet mysteriously longing to belong somewhere, try the “Tristan chord” from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde:  F – B – D-sharp – G-sharp.

Tristan chord

For a superchallenging chord with the strongest sweet-and-sour effect, try the “Petrushka chord” from Stravinsky’s ballet.  All the notes of a C chord are combined with all the notes of the maximally dissonant F-sharp chord, like a demented C 15^th.

Petrushka chord

If you long for just the sweetest and purest chord, I understand that, but an innocent C chord couldn’t be very impressive all by itself.  It needs to be tied to something else so that when you hear it, you are stretched or caught in the collision between different positions in the music-world.  Perhaps many would prefer to avoid Wagnerian or Stravinskian torture, but I think most of us enjoy a bit of a stretch, say between a C chord and an F chord nobly introducing it.  Here you not only experience a nicely consonant layering of the remembered F onto the new C, you get a bit of a thrill in being suspended between two ways of construing the F-C relationship, either F as the fourth in the key of C or C as the fifth in the key of F.  (If C dominates enough that you’re clear the F is meant to be the fourth of the C, the other possibility remains pleasantly on the edge of your awareness.)

Now let’s consider a song that starts in precisely this way, XTC’s “Another Satellite,” but then takes us on a journey to a much less common site of arrival.[1]

[Spacing is correct on the main Hooks page]

F…..C…………………………………………………………..F
…………..My heart is taken, it’s not lost in space

C………………………………………………………………………F
And I don’t want to see your moony moony face, I say

Eb……….Ab……………………Gb
Why on earth do you revolve around me?

“Another Satellite” 1

The E-flat chord sounds sweet-tartly good—tastes like cherries, I’d say—because it shifts us from C to the closely related key of E-flat, a key that uses the notes C minor would use, except it=s major.  Keywise, it’s as though we’ve mounted up a level in a split-level house.  True, we also dropped down to the E-flat chord from F, as though going to the seventh in the key of F, which involves the feeling of a spring pushed down that will come back up.  And for yet another effect, the melody went from E-natural on “say” to E-flat on “why,” just a half step down, and changing keys while moving just slightly in pitch in the melody makes for a queasy feeling.  But in any case the melody of “Why on,” E-flat B-flat, is squarely in the key of E-flat, just as the earlier notes had reinforced the key of C.

Next, going down to A-flat (“earth”) from E-flat feels logical, as A-flat is the fourth in the key of E-flat.  But since we only moved to E-flat a moment ago, we’re not all that firmly planted, and A-flat sounds so solid, so well supported by the melody, that we have to consider the possibility that it is our new key.  Maybe yes, maybe no:  we directly descend from A-flat to G-flat, which could be a move in the key of A-flat but could also simply be a routine whole-step chord change in some other key.  The next change after that is another whole-step descent, from G-flat to F-flat:

Fb
Aren’t you aware of the . . .

At this point we don’t know what’s going on, keywise; we seem to be in a free-fall of descending chords.  I wrote the chord as an F-flat because of the whole-step descent pattern we’ve been in.  But we’ll have to construe the F-flat in retrospect as an E chord (the notes are the same) because the next change is to an A, most naturally heard as either the fourth of E or else the first for which E is the fifth:

A
gravity . . .

“Another Satellite” 2

We’ve already taken some adventurous steps to get to this A chord, which hangs in the air of our quite possibly now being in the key of A.  But the A is not (yet) our destination.  Abruptly we are modulated back to the original home key of C:

………..G……………………C
Don’t need another satellite

—and that should be the end.  Yes, the return of C should mean the verse is over.  And the melody here sounds like it did at the beginning.  Uh-oh, the beginning . . . Now there’s a launch from C toward the strange true ending of the verse, a wild hair flying up over the last syllable of “satellite”:

C………………….G….A4aug!
satellite_______________.

“Another Satellite” 3

We’ve pivoted on G again to go to A, which we once thought might be our destined home, and now maybe is after all.  But it’s not the pure A we heard before.  It’s got a fourth note added emphatically by the melody, not just as accompanying texture, and it’s not just a fourth but a sharped (“augmented”) fourth, a D-sharp, which implies a B-major chord layered on top of the A-major chord for a very tangy polytonal effect—the auditory equivalent of double vision—and an exotic, dislocated sense of being “home” in the A.  (Imagine going home one day and seeing palm trees sprouting out of your windows.)  This is a possibility that you would find only on a much larger version of the jazz chord menu.

This A4aug wins my award for the greatest chord.  We’ve approached it in an invigorating sequence of harmonic reorientations, and when we round the last corner we come upon it as a darkly radiant thing, a light beaming from deep space in the extended last syllable of “satellite.”  Its unexpected D-sharp challenges us simultaneously as

(1) a flatted fifth in the A chord,
(2) a flatted third in our alternate home key of C major,
(3) the brash major third of the implied B chord on top of the A, and
(4) the first note of the E-flat that we took seriously as a home key possibility a few measures ago (for D-sharp is also E-flat).

In the event, this deftly prepared compound sounds like a cry of frustration and compassion:  the one who is urgently pushing the satellite away knows that the satellite needs even more urgently not to be lost in the void.

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[1] “Another Satellite” is actually a whole step lower than this, starting with an E-flat to B-flat change; but I wanted to stick with our friend C as the starting point.

 

Truth as an Allusion: Jefferson Airplane, “White Rabbit” (1967)

A ban on literary allusion in rock lyrics strikes me as a good idea.  Wouldn’t it be great if Led Zeppelin’s “Ramble On” didn’t have those Tolkienisms?  Isn’t Grace Slick’s “rejoyce” more enjoyable as pure piano-driven dada than as a farrago of Ulysses references?  Isn’t “Killing An Arab,” Camus via the Cure, a major drag?  Is there anything in rock we really value that we’d lose with the ban?

Well—we might lose great songs that were inspired by literary sources.  Without the Tolkien connection we might not get “Ramble On” at all (or “Sympathy for the Devil” without The Master and Margarita, or “Kid Charlemagne” without The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test—or the neat band name Steely Dan without Naked Lunch—or—).

All right, it would be madness to forbid literary inspiration, but wouldn’t it often be better to disguise the debt?  Do I have to hear (every time) about Mordor and Gollum in the calm verse before the perfect storm chorus of “Ramble On”?  —Worse, must we take seriously the kind of commentary that thinks literary allusions make rock songs more seriously interesting?[1]

Allusion has a notable power to turbo-boost the action of thought in a purely literary context, but does any of this power carry over to rock songs, which are designed to appeal immediately and viscerally to a youthful audience (I mean all of us as youthful) for whom fresh experience must matter far more than either cultural reminiscence or artistic cleverness?

To the point, then:  Is there any such thing as a great rock allusion hook, an exception that proves (or, if not so exceptional, wrecks) my rule?

Probably there are many contenders.[2]  One I admit I like is the Lolita reference, “just like the old man in that book by Nabokov,” in “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” by the Police.  The allusion is charmingly external, simple and naked, and actually adds meaning, too, since the sexual deviance of the schoolgirl hitting on the teacher in “Don’t Stand” is complementary to Humbert Humbert’s famous perversion in Lolita, and we glimpse with the teacher the horrid possibility of being turned involuntarily into something like a Humbert.   Plus it’s cute to rhyme “that book by Nabokov” with “he starts to shake and cough” in the preceding line (which sets the scene for his horrid transformation, as though into Mr. Hyde).

But the cuteness of the rhyme and the connection begins to undermine the whole experience.  Is it a one-trick song after all, a gag?  Without the allusion, this doubt wouldn’t have been sown.

I do know one allusion that impressively hits a rock nail on the head.  It’s the reference to Lewis Carroll’s Alice books in Grace Slick’s “White Rabbit,” bridging two worlds of mind-expansion, the Victorian fantastic and the 60’s psychedelic, drilling to just the right depth of cultural memory and perfectly leveraging the implicit claim of all allusion that the mind can make a greater truth.  Someone might object that my example isn’t a specific reference within a song but rather a whole song made of references to Carroll, like an Alice mini-opera.  I contend, however, that (a) with its sharp thematic focus (in glaring contrast to “rejoyce”) the song really works as an extended allusion, for we never forget that its primary subject matter is not Alice, who remains relatively in the distance, but our own possibilities of out-of-bounds experience; and (b) the allusion is so effective because it is so dominant, forcing everything else in the song to agree:  the bass line becomes a scuttling march over thresholds of wonder, the slightly dirty lead guitar becomes the sizzling forward edge of the exploring mind, the eventual big beat becomes the discovery of the hungry center—the head that must be fed.

Unlike “Sympathy for the Devil,” which alludes interestingly to a Russian novel that few of the Rolling Stones’ listeners have even heard of, “White Rabbit” makes a crackling connection with a book everyone knows well, a book that has already injected us with subversive joy.[3]  Never mind Slick’s boring claim that she wrote the song merely to make a point about how the flower children’s parents had set them up for drug use by reading them drug-allusive texts like Alice and The Wizard of Oz.[4]  “White Rabbit” reminds us that our original trip through the looking glass was an unsettling, exhilarating initiation into mental freedom, a revelation of the volatile truth that consciousness is—and can launch us again, whenever we want to continue the adventure.

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1.  See e.g. Michael Dunne, “‘Tore Down À La Rimbaud’:  Van Morrison’s References and Allusions,”  Popular Music and Society, 24 (Winter 2000), pp. 15-29, which is redeemed by showing that Morrison himself takes no high view of this.

2.  Almost any of them will raise interesting questions about the nature of allusion.  For instance, does Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear The Reaper” allude to Romeo and Juliet as elements in Shakespeare’s play, or as the source idea that Shakespeare worked with, or as post-Shakespeare cultural icons? Consider also Dire Straits’ beautiful “Romeo and Juliet,” which uses R & J as a general archetype for star-separated lovers but specifically alludes to the balcony scene in the play (and also to West Side Story’s take on R & J:  “‘There’s a place for us,’ you know the movie song”).

3.  Much of what I’ve claimed for “White Rabbit” could be claimed also for Cream’s “Tales of Brave Ulysses” in relation to the Odyssey, but “Tales” has to work too hard to make the Odyssey material vivid for us, so that Homer’s world becomes more like a contemporary Western tourist’s plunge into Aegean waters.  But this migration among worlds could be seen as a strength.

4.  Interviewed in Jeff Tamarkin, Got a Revolution!  The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane (New York:  Atria, 2003), p. 110.

Perfect? A. C. Newman, “Miracle Drug” (2004)

It may have happened again as recently as 2004:  the release of a perfect track, “Miracle Drug” by A. C. Newman.[1]  (I am trying to make this sound like “The last perfect game was pitched by Mark Buehrle in July 2009.”)

Do you know what I mean by perfect?  Don’t you agree that, even though “Gimme Shelter” is greater than “Honky Tonk Women,” “Honky Tonk Women” is perfect?  Am I right that even though “Strawberry Fields Forever” is greater than “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” it’s “I Want To Hold Your Hand” that’s perfect?  What would be on your perfect list?  (It should be a fairly short list.)  “Feel a Whole Lot Better”?  “Pinball Wizard”?  “Middle of the Road”?

Whatever the songs may be, what I want to know is what makes the bell ring, the aura shine, the definitive judgment of “perfect” clunk into place.  Criteria might include:

1) Strong hooks working together, reinforcing each other.  (Best of all, slightly surprisingly:  the Rolling Stones that country?  The Pretenders that retro?)

2) Clarity, tact, efficiency:  nary a false move.

3) Strong physiognomy:  whether in verse or chorus or instrumental break, it always sounds a lot like itself.

4) Exemplifies one of the strongest underlying forms of the rock single. Is paradigmatic without being predictable.  We recognize the paradigm, are intimate with the song in a more perceptive way than merely by following the beat, the words, or the guitar licks.  It becomes a Platonic experience.

I think the four criteria are each necessary, and jointly sufficient:  no track satisfying them all would not seem perfect.  (But have I left something out?) “Miracle Drug” has all these attributes in spades, especially #3.  There is a kind of spasmodic vigor in the delivery of the verse that is not forgotten in the relatively more constant chorus.  Then you hear the kinetic signature of the song more intensely than ever in the guitar solo.

As for #4, the experience of a paradigm, “Miracle Drug” clearly marks off the major parts of a pop song—it’s like looking at a giant model of an ant, with head, thorax, and abdomen superdistinct.  I particularly enjoy the elegant drum part that takes me over the boundary between the end of the verse and the beginning of the chorus.

The trouble with deciding that a song is perfect is that then you start listening for flaws.  Right now I’m a little concerned about “Miracle Drug’s” ending:   is it wonderfully to the point, or is it almost perfunctory?  But I shouldn’t have said that!

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[1] Newman was involved in an earlier perfect track as well, “Mass Romantic” by The New Pornographers.  This is a distinguished track record.

The Greatest “Yeah, Yeah”: The Clash, “Clash City Rockers” (1978)

For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.
—Walter Pater[1]

The point of concentrating on hooks in music is to glory in the self-sufficiency of radiant moments.  But that self-sufficiency is illusory.  No hook is an island.  Every highlight has a setting and a history.

All right, says pop music, but I will push against that necessity.  I will effloresce, erupt, slash free of the cobwebs of time.  I will choose sounds so compelling you will forget they were chosen for reasons.  Even when I take up the tools of language, I will speak words of raw presence and affirmation, summative words that say it all.  I will say—quoting here the Isley Brothers in “Shout”—“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.”  When I say yeah, I’m saying it all in the best way possible.  When I unroll a chain of yeahs, I’m saying it endlessly.

But words, so far from being purely present, always come with arrows attached.  They have about-ness—even the self-absorbed “ooh” points (barely) to something going on in the world—and they have to-ness as well, pointing to someone.  The affirmation “yeah” gives something and someone a green light.  True, the something and someone are sucked into a blast of presence, but we still have to be mindful of a certain distribution of things to get the sense of a given yeah.   This means that I, alone, cannot ever be saying it all by saying yeah; but you and I together could come much closer to a completeness if we make a call and response, yeah/yeah, and better still on and on, yeah/yeah / yeah/yeah.  It’s nicely done this way in Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home To Me” (1961).

In “Shout” (1959), however, the Isley Brothers short-circuit the call and response structure.  There is plenty of convivial back and forth between voices in the track, but the main “yeah yeah” line is taken by just one voice, both arrogating and sharing the power of achieving this effect by oneself.  Unlike the alternation yeah/yeah, the line yeah-yeah becomes a unit of utterance, a button of excitement to push, a phrase of romantic enthusiasm—which is how the Beatles use it in their epochal “She Loves You” (1963).  (Lennon and McCartney originally intended to throw in some “yeahs” as a response to the thesis statement “She loves you,” but they ended up putting in a yeah-yeah-yeah to complete the statement line.)[2]

So the meaning of yeah, yeah has a history.  We shouldn’t have to date and sequence songs to explain their hooks, but for this hook we do.  It sounds like a revivalist stunt when Tommy James and the Shondells use the old back-and-forth yeah/yeah in “Mony, Mony” (1968).  When the Clash confronts the “phoney Beatlemania” heritage of rock’n’roll in the punk revolution of the 1970’s, one of the choicest gibes they shoot in that direction is Joe Strummer’s mocking “yeah, yeah” in the middle of  “Clash City Rockers” (1978).[3] Once the acute punk phase passes, it’s fine to use any rock value any way one likes, post-ironically.  In 1995, yeah, yeah becomes a massively popular stairway to God (Joan Osborne, “One of Us”).  Still cool in the 21^st century, yeah, yeah is now high concept for a band, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (listen in particular to “Bang,” 2001).  But there can never again be the ingenuous surge of “She Loves You” or the pointed criticism of “Clash City Rockers.”

We have to hold all this in mind to appreciate the greatest yeah, yeah, which, I contend, is Strummer’s.  What we have heard through the years has made us realize that one of the supreme verbal gestures of immediacy cannot be as free as it wants to be.  It has to drag historical baggage with it.  Strummer’s is the yeah, yeah that does this lucidly.  He makes a peak moment of a burden of awareness.  In a song suffused with anger and scorn, following a chorus that tells us “Don’t complain” and “Shut your mouth and pretend you enjoy it” (your life prospects in Thatcher Britain, that is),[4] he underlines the message by twirling us about an axis of joy—we are rocking, this is fun, no pretending about it—with a wickedly buoyant delivery of yeah, yeah that doesn’t kill it or even dampen it, but lets its feathers flutter in the sarcastic gale; and then, like a smirking MC, the yeah, yeah bounces us right over to the next battered institution of joy, the lead guitar solo.

“Clash City Rockers” Yeah, yeah

It’s over! —a quick thing that you’re lucky to hear, the very opposite of the million-dollar hook in “She Loves You” that you can’t escape.  But it’s the pivotal midpoint of the whole history of yeah, yeah.

If you don’t like the freighted yeah, yeah of the Clash, you can go back to the exuberant “Shout” (or, earlier still, the swing band jive of Louis Prima’s “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah” circa 1950) or forward to the overheated “Bang”—yeah, your choice.

See the Yeah, Yeah mix

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[1] Walter Pater, Conclusion, “Renaissance.”

[2] “She Loves You,” The Beatles Ultimate Experience:  Songwriting and Recording Database.

[3] “Phoney Beatlemania” is a phrase from “London Calling” (1979).

[4] But see Comment 1—Thatcher came to power in 1979 (thanks, Tim).

Slamming History: Jawbox, “Mirrorful” (1996)

The thrill of getting slammed is more sought after than one might expect, given the danger to life and limb.  It’s not just the guys playing football; it’s all those kids cannonballing into the pool; it was me, one summer, jumping out of trees.

You can feel very safe, kinesthetically, stepping down on the 1, 2, 3, and 4 beats of a rock 4/4 time, or on the 1 and 3.   But there’s a nice unsettled feeling, like being jerked upward, when the big beats come on 2 and 4.  (Compare accents in spoken language:  usually the effect of accenting syllables is to roll speech smoothly along, but when you shift the accents to alternate “wrong” places speech becomes a series of turnstiles.)  A typical boom-tap-boom-tap rock beat gives you a pleasing blend of 1-3 assurance and 2-4 chain-pulling.  But a big accent in between two of these beats—as with three of the five notes of the “You Really Got Me” riff, especially the fifth one—is really slamming.

[Spacing is correct on the main Hooks page]

Beats:                                                                                                                                       and……1……and……2…… and……3……and……4…… and
You……..real….ly….. got……me…………………………………..You
Chords:
VII……I……..I…...VII…….I……………………………VII
(Here the VII chord is a G-flat and the I is an A-flat)

The slamming effect can be achieved also, or intensified, by changing chords against-the-scheme, as happens in “You Really Got Me” back and forth between the tonic and the flatted-seven chord.  (Imagine a Frank Sinatra version—not only would we not have a fast-jerking rhythm, the chord certainly would not change on “got” and again on “me,” not unless we slowed everything way down.)

Getting slammed on off beats by non-subtle chord changes gives a giddy jolt much better than jumping out of trees:  flexible, multiple, renewable, unstoppable.

What if there were a hot topic to go with the kinesthetic thrill?  What if something in the world were to get slammed semantically at the same time that our bodies seem to get knocked over?

Jawbox’s “Mirrorful” is a slam on History as taught in school.  In verses full of off-beat rhythmic accents, we’re told that history is “less a lesson than an alibi,” a story illustrated to “advertise [someone’s] dignity.”  The refrain is “Histories—I don’t believe.”  Look where the big-statement chords come:

Beats:
and…3… and…4…and…1…and…2…and…3…and…4…and…
His…………..to……….. ries
Chords:………………………..I……………….IV….…………………VI
(Here the I chord is a B minor, the IV is an E, and the VI is a G)

1…and…2…and…3… and…4…and
……..I………….don’t……….be…lieve

1…and…2…and…3… and…4…and
I………………..IV……………………..VI

“Mirrorful” end of verse, refrain

After the antic accents of the verse have us spinning like a piñata, the big chords of the refrain slam us like a boxer’s big punches left, right, left.  This leaves us fully as dislocated and hurting (the flatted sixth the most hurting of all possible rock chords) as we should feel at the point of renouncing what they told us was our heritage.

Killer Changes of Time Signature, Syncopation, Pulse & Tempo in Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” (1971)

By Andrew Goodwin

Well we can’t count from where you stopped because your vocals might be different. Your voice might go on half a beat and we‘re gonna be fucked.
– John Bonham to Robert Plant [1]

Progressive rock was famous for its traffic-light stops & starts, but Led Zeppelin generally eschewed that approach, deploying shifts of time-signature and tempo, along with a movement of the placement of rhythmic emphasis (pulses) and varying degrees of syncopation within the same song without drawing too much attention to these elements, none of which is easy to pull off, not when there are four of you and you are mostly recording live and in real time.  And “Black Dog” exemplifies Zeppelin at their peak in this regard.

In fact, the beginning of the end of the musical logics that propelled Zeppelin were foreshadowed by an unfortunate development:  “Stairway To Heaven” with its daft lyrics and its blatant signalling of unmotived timefucks that neither meld successfully (as in “Gallows Pole”) nor create a delightful sudden change of gear (as in “Heartbreaker”).  One gets the feeling, I do anyway, that this is the first track in their career when they are in fact killing time [2].

But generally, they were innovators, albeit with a strong desire to imitate, learn from, compete ambitiously with the best.  Zeppelin were also of course nostalgically (nostalgia:  an illness that Led Zep combined with modernism, never more so than on “Black Dog”) drawn back to places and times that preceded their births – the blues. But anyone who thinks that this is merely standardized routine 12/32-bar repetition has rather missed the dropped beats, the odd meters, the changes in tempo, the vocal/guitar inflection, cadences and intonations that can make subtle or shocking transformations of feel:  those elastic moveable pulses.

So notice how on “Black Dog” the gaps between the end of the last vocal line in each verse gets shorter each time, before the band crashes the silence, as the song progresses.  And this is progressive rock, if that term means anything.  Recorded by Genesis or Gentle Giant, no one would even consider to doubt the fact.  It is progressive for three reasons:  (i) it aggressively refuses the norm of the pop/rock song by obsessive messing with one’s sense of time; (ii) this means you have to listen to it (i.e. regressive listening is not an option); (iii) the song itself progresses, getting more complex and also more emotional as it takes flight and then – of course – crashes.

So if we now look at “Black Dog”, composed and recorded (mostly live – the overdubs are largely Page’s synthetic-sounding hyper-treated guitar parts) when Zep were at the height of their powers, we hear a group that can perform a track with 98 times changes, absent sheet music or a conductor. Not only that but amongst these strict changes in time signature (including the tense and extremely funky simultaneous use of two different ones) the song hides syncopation on a grand scale.  Listen to the “oh baby pretty baby” sections and focus on the pick-up on the snare drum before the main backbeat, and how Bonham is always following Page – not Jones, his bassist, which would be the norm – Jones had to watch Bonzo’s kick drum, to keep up, or rather to keep just behind.

“Black Dog” “oh baby”

“Black Dog,” so brilliantly analyzed by Erik Davis [3], changes time-signatures, tempo, syncopation and pulsing, throughout the song:  from the verse/vocal part stolen from Fleetwood Mac’s “Oh Well” to the twisting riff [4].  But of course the most striking surprise, surely one of the most shocking moments in rock history, occurs when Page and Jones go into a riff in 5:4 time and Bonham play across them in 4:4 time.  Thus reaching a point of connection every 20 beats.

“Black Dog” 5 over 4

The story goes that originally John Bonham tried playing 8th notes, in keeping with the 5:4 time, but that he either lacked the technical ability to do this or that the effect sounded too much like The Mahavishnu Orchestra!  In any case they toyed, they experimented, they played (that’s what musicians do – we are children) and they were willing to play this game:  ignore la langue (the rules of rock) and make a new utterance (parole) – 4s over 5s until it resolves, then repeat the joke.

For this accidental joke, one of the funkiest musical japes I have heard, did apparently reduce the four of them to laughter, the first time they played it, in rehearsal [5].  But these kid’s giggles, you can hear them stifling the raucous laughter that is to follow, is surely not ironic or pomo or a poking of fun at the audience:  it was that of highly skilled musicians who just pulled off a new trick, barely having to the time to think of the intention behind it (if such there was), collective or otherwise.

The thing is, they kept playing, through the tension of the 5/4 toe-curling and the mind-scrunching concentration it takes at first to play the drums and not listen to the guitars too much, and the same goes of course for the bass/guitar.  And then someone, or all of them, saw the brilliance of what they had done (progressive rock in all but name but it sounds like a straight blues rock throwaway) and they did this intentionally.  They intended to play with the mistake and then they intended to keep it.

Because it was good.

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NOTES

1. Quoted in Dave Lewis, Led Zeppelin: The “Tight But Loose” Files, Celebration II (London: Omnibus, 2003).

2. Page has said that the one failing of the previous record (Led Zeppelin III) was that it lacked a long track. (He was wrong – “Since I’ve Been Loving You” is that epic track.)  “Stairway” was pieced together over years with a view to writing something epic (too much intentionality and therefore a surplus of self-awareness?) and in doing so it inevitably established a new Zeppelin’s star-text. They went from macho blues Brit dudes to spaced-out mystics from the dark side in one awful cinematic fiasco (The Song Remains The Same) and this development was based in part (watch the movie closely) on the dual discourses of the stairway to heaven and the stairway to rockgodom (which the lyrics cannot of course resolve).  See my article, “Stairway To Stardom.”

3. Erik Davis, Led Zeppelin IV (Continuum, 2006)

4. Written by John-Paul Jones, who claims he stole it from Muddy Water’s LP Electric Mud but I can only hear the (hardly new) idea of twisting riffs that cross bar structures, no actual nick of a tune.

5. John-Paul Jones tells this story on the soundtrack (I do not presently recall its original source) on the DVD/booklet Led Zeppelin: Up Close And Personal (self-author: Matters Furniss; Edgehill/Komet 1998); I think the same story may also be present somewhere on/in the Alan Clayson DVD/book Led Zeppelin: Origins Of The (sic) Species (Sexy Intellectual Productions, 2006).

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Andrew Goodwin is writing a book about the career and work of Led Zeppelin.  He blogs at www.professorofpop.blogspot.com.

Squeeze Me, Drag Me: Al Green, “Here I Am (Come and Take Me)” (1973)

Rhythmic compulsion in rock most often feels like a resonance effect.  Boom BOP Boom BOP Boom BOP, I can’t stop hopping with the boom bop, my limbs chiming in.   The nuances of timing and dynamics can greatly affect how I feel I’m being moved; the resonance experience can engulf me like a pitfall (so that I’m dropping with the bop, another good rhyme) or jerk me violently like a puppet on strings.   Utopia’s “Hammer In My Heart” is a great puppet-master track, for example, cleverly layering its resonance cues.

But there’s another way of being rocked that is more like going through a wringer.  The chorus of Al Green’s “Here I Am (Come and Take Me)” squeezes me like I’m toothpaste yet somehow regathers me every measure for a new spurt and makes this threatening process feel delightful.

How do they do that?

The high, faint wail of Green’s vocal style, winding back and forth across the falsetto line and the audibility horizon, has much to do with this.   Making us feel just able to do what we’re barely able to do, it’s the perfect vocal specification of the squeezed sensation.  But the groove does something else crucial too.   The band’s rhythmic insistence is felt more as a horizontal shifting than a vertical striking.  Instead of the repeated stimulus of a bopping beat, there is the repeated discovery of having being dragged a little ways across the floor.

The divine Al Jackson on drums is at the center of this effect.  He maintains throughout a chugging, slightly-surprisingly-slow tempo (a killer tempo, I’d say).  The heavy third-beat in his basic 4/4 pattern—that is, the third beat of every four in a pulse, four pulses in a measure—gives as much a feeling of a stopping point as a sign to continue.[1] His elegant fills and hi-hat variations just squeeze the groove along with subtle lagging and thickening.  Then in the chorus, where we’re boosted into a major key and a peppier horn part so that we feel it’s a new ball game, Jackson’s open hi-hat emerges as the MVP.  More conspicuous than before, it generally bursts out (X) near the end of a four-measure unit, but not with mechanical predictability:

……………………X
Aaah, here… I

…………………………………………………………..X
1…….2…….3…….4………1………2……..3……..4……..
am…baby……come & take me…..here I am,

…………………X
1……2……3……4……….1………..2………..3………..4………..
ba.-.by……..come & take me…………take me by the

………………………..X
1……2……3……4……1………2………3………4………
hand…………………show me……..here I am,

…………………X
1……2……3……4……
ba.-.by

“Here I Am” chorus

If you want to put your finger on when exactly they dragged you across the floor, those are the places and that’s what the dragging sounds like:  a buzzing cymbal that rakes everything over but comes to a definite term in half a beat, holding everything firm.

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[1] Emphasis on the third beat of four makes for a feeling of final arrival much more than emphasis on the fourth beat would, apparently because the third and fourth beats together make up the second of two major units in the measure (a sense of major units that is of course created by emphasizing the third) and emphasizing the third allows that whole last unit to register, whereas an emphasized fourth, at the tail-end no matter how you look at it, is bound to feel like a propulsive uptake for the following measure rather than the conclusion of anything.  I would argue this even for the huge fourth-beat event in the main riff of “Gimme Some Lovin’,” which I admit comes close to being a counterexample.

The Best Word: Eva Cassidy, “People Get Ready” (1996)

“What is the best word one could put in a song?” is a stupid question from almost every angle, but consider this:  psychologists at the University of Florida have developed a list of Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) by crunching questionnaire responses to “How does this word make you feel?” for hundreds of words.   There are best words, it turns out, in the sense that certain words score highest for making people feel good:   on a 1 to 9 scale, “triumphant” is a top word at 8.82; “love” is 8.72.[1] (The results raise all sorts of questions.  How could “hell” be 2.24?  Maybe a few people misread it as “hello”?)

Of course the meaning of your peak experiences in songs has to do with combinations of elements, never with one element alone, but still you can think about which words you tend to warm to.   Aw, admit it:  one of them is “love.”  There’s no way “love” won’t be one of the ultimate buttons to push in a human being.[2] Precisely for that reason, though, it will often be used lamely and lazily, so let’s set it aside (though I can’t refrain from asking:   When has the word “love” sounded most powerfully in a rock context?  Is it when Reg Presley says “I love you” in “Wild Thing”?  Probably not).

For me, another top contender is “people” (7.33).[3] Not as in the famous Barbara Streisand song (people, people who need people, are the luckiest people in the world)—but my strong negative reaction in that case is a pointer to something big that deserves better treatment.  “People” gets to me whenever it’s set on a political horizon, somehow rallying people together.  Apparently I really want to feel rallied.

But don’t rally me shallowly.  Don’t just push the button.  I’m afraid The Rascals’ “People Got To Be Free” doesn’t specify a cause well enough, and there’s too much pop sunshine there for a sense of urgency.  John Lennon’s “Power To The People” is unfortunately just a slogan.  But when I hear of “all the lonely people” in “Eleanor Rigby”; when The Doors assert, with eerie coolness, “People Are Strange”; when Joni Mitchell sings desperately of the trap of “People’s Parties”; when Steely Dan sees “the poor people sleeping with the shade on the light” while “all the stars come out at night” in “Show Biz Kids”—these are definite causes, and serious, and the problem of collective life rushes into me through the gateway word.

“People Get Ready,” the much-covered Curtis Mayfield song said to be inspired by the 1963 civil rights march on Washington, is preeminent among the “people” appeals.

People get ready
There’s a train a-coming
You don’t need no baggage
You just get on board
All you need is faith
To hear diesels humming
You don’t need no ticket
You just thank the Lord

Here “people” really works as the gateway to everything since it’s always the already-went-by first word, a summons word, not a sentimental button to be pushed repeatedly.  In Eva Cassidy’s version, the singer’s flexing of the melody marvelously combines a dreamy meditative openness (who are we? what is going on?) with a surging eagerness to get on that train to Jordan, to finally see the point of being “people.”[4]

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[1] Measurements were made in three dimensions:  pleasant to unpleasant (“valence”), excited to calm (“arousal”), and in-control to not-in-control (“dominance”).   For simplicity’s sake I’m only citing the valence scores here.   Bradley, M.M., & Lang, P.J. (1999). Affective norms for English words (ANEW): Stimuli, instruction manual and affective ratings.  Technical Report C-1, Gainesville, FL.  The Center for Research in Psychophysiology, University of Florida.

[2] Speaking of buttons, “orgasm” scores a whopping 8.32; but who has used it effectively in a song besides the Buzzcocks in “Orgasm Addict” (1977)?

[3] Remarkably, according to the Corpus of Contemporary American Language list of frequency in general use of English from 1990 to 2009, the most frequently used word that isn’t a little hard-working article, demonstrative, pronoun, or auxiliary verb is “people.”

[4] Joss Stone’s version in Jeff Beck’s 2007 show at Ronnie Scott’s is great in much the same way, but a bit harder-edged.

Killer Tempo Shift: The Beatles, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (1967)

The audience wants a groove.  You can add interest to a song by changing the rhythmic figures in it, but if you mess with the very bottom of the groove, the tempo, in midstream, you ask your audience to make a difficult adjustment.  Why would you want to do that?  Well, for experiment’s sake, or for variety’s sake, or maybe to make an expressive point.  But tempo is more fundamental than anything else in determining what feels right in a piece of music.  How, then, could you shift tempo in a way that felt exactly right?  And—to make the challenge even harder—how could it be done without a transitional acceleration or deceleration?[1]

The tempo shifts in “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” (Crosby, Stills & Nash) are nice, and by now we can all easily follow them, but the point is, it’s a suite.  It’s like listening to several different songs in a row.  In fact, many of the songs I can think of with nice tempo shifts are like suite experiences.  I’m looking for an example of a tempo shift that unarguably makes a single-song experience great.

If there is a cogent tempo shift, do you suppose it follows some implicit mathematical law, some Golden Proportion?  Halving or doubling the tempo would feel smooth, but those changes are pseudo-changes—they just make different selections from the ticks that were ticking all along.  How about two-thirdsing or 150-percenting the tempo?  Does anyone know how that would that feel?  (I’ll tell you:  it feels like slowing way down and speeding way up.)

Mathematics is out the window with the clearest example I know of a tempo shift that we consciously expect and enjoy, the verse-to-chorus shift in The Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”  It’s also a shift between a circling 3/4 and a loudly marked, linear 2/4 or 4/8, so the faster tempo of the chorus feels like a well-organized blast-off.  The increase in speed here conforms to no elegant proportion that I can detect.  It’s just . . . faster, not gauchely too much faster or indecisively too little faster; it’s a let’s-get-going faster that we can handle just fine.

“Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” tempo shift

For students of time structure, “Lucy” makes a great exhibit of the interdependence of beat, pulse, and measure.  Beats are the elementary units of rhythm, the ticks you can keep track of.  Pulses are the primary emphases, the whoomps.  (Often people call pulses “beats” and measure them in “beats per minute,” as I did myself in the “Killer Tempo” post, but never mind that now.)  Measures are the basic units of wholeness in rhythmic structure; a measure is your trip to a place where you feel you’re starting over.  In “Lucy’s” tempo shift, the beat count goes roughly from 134 per minute to 188, about a 40% change.  But that doesn’t mean the tempo is 40% faster, because the pulse rate and the measure structure change at the same time.  The new measure that most closely corresponds to the old 3/4 measure is four eighth-notes in two pulses, so we’re talking about measures of 4/8 or 2/4 (corresponding to “Lucy in the” and “sky with”).  The length of this four-beat, two-pulse measure is about 1.28 seconds; that’s just a little quicker than the 1.34 seconds of the previous three-beat, one-pulse measure.  The pulses of the new 2/4 are close to double-timing the pulse of the 3/4.

THIS JUST IN: Lucy Vodden, the Lucy that John Lennon heard about, died in London on September 28.  Meanwhile, a newly announced East African fossil ancestor of humanity, “Ardi,” is more than a million years older than the great Beatles namesake “Lucy” the Australopithecus.  Do you feel an evolutionary tempo shift?

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[1]. An elegant acceleration can be a hook in itself, as in King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man.”  There’s a nice deceleration of an ultra-pop-rock drum beat right at the beginning of Joe Jackon’s “Hit Single,” as though to say, We’re slowing down for a moment to examine this hit single thing.  Another interesting tempo shift hook, but bewildering, is Z Z Top’s sudden change after the chorus of “I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide” to a fast 6/8 for one measure followed by a rapid deceleration in the next measure back to the original slogging pace.  It seems to mimic a clutch problem.

Stealth Hooks: Prince, “Little Red Corvette” (1982)

Some of the greatest hooks don’t show themselves, which seems almost a paradox. They are stealth hooks. You know one is in the neighborhood when you’re moved and can’t readily say what’s doing it.

I’ve long wondered what moves me in the first line of the chorus of “Little Red Corvette.” I think everyone will agree there’s a hook there; but what is it? On paper there’s just a banal IV-V-I chord progression. IV-V-I means, for example, F-G-C with C as home. Prince uses F#, G#, and C#, the key of C# providing a somewhat fruitier, more Princely-purple sound. The melody goes

Lit-tle red Cor-vette
C# C# D# D# E#

“Little Red Corvette” chorus

—that is, two whole-step ascents (from C-sharp to D-sharp and from D-sharp to E-sharp) that happen to involve the fifth note of the F-sharp chord (that is, C-sharp) and the fifth note of the G-sharp chord (D-sharp) but then the major third note of the C-sharp chord (E-sharp). Ending on that major third is a mild surprise and gives the figure a chirpy finish. Still more important to the chirpy effect is the tripping-forward syncopation. See where the notes come in relation to the beats:

Lit..-..tle..red….Cor.-..vette
1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and

This juxtaposition of the on-the-beat duple of “Lit – tle” with the shifted-forward notes of “red Cor – vette” is a good example of Prince’s knack for finding a simple complexity that endlessly intrigues. “When Doves Cry” and “Sign o’ the Times” are famously built around cunning little riffs like this, too, but the stealthily embedded riff of “Little Red Corvette” has a unique power because it’s delayed till the chorus and we’ve been made to feel a need that it sneaks in to satisfy.

The need is this: we’ve been confused and at least temporarily bummed by an oblique description of a tawdry Saturday night sex scene. The guy is singing to a girl like a girl to a guy. The girl seems to be bullying and using the guy who’s singing. What can we get from such a scenario?

How about a rock ‘n’ roll nostalgia trip to early-60s American Graffiti territory where kids dream of driving ‘Vettes and a girl would want a little red one, or would even, in poetic Mustang Sally fashion, be one? But how about we take the trip in an edgy 80s way, with loud electronic percussion claps and worldly-wise R&B-style commentary in each measure following the sweet refrain? 60s/80s, 80s/60s, the boy in the vulnerable girl position, the girl in the aggressive boy position, the red ‘Vette epitomizing them both?

That’s how the chorus of “Little Red Corvette” comes to the rescue, its opening three-chord ascent a ladder on which we climb up out of sexual bewilderment and waste toward the dream image of the thing we want to be. Sad ladder to nowhere, maybe, borrowed from a girl who’s “much too fast,” but a ladder nonetheless. Musically it doesn’t stick out at all, yet we cling to it and it holds us up. We can repeat it forever while disillusion surrounds us.