You make me dizzy, Miss Lizzie

 I was driving around on Saturday, and found myself listening to arguably the best song from Led Zeppelin's fourth album.

No, not that one.

This one. 

In some respects, "When the Levee Breaks" hearkens back to the songs that first made Led Zeppelin famous, including blues wailing, blues playing, and tricky recording techniques. Unlike "Stairway to Heaven," which is clearly rooted in the British Isles, "When the Levee Breaks" is painfully American. 

Which raises the question - how could these denizens of London studios and Birmingham (UK, not AL) pubs pull off this American tune? (No, not that one.)

It turns out that despite the differences in tradition, there are enough commonalities in the British and American experiences that expressions in one culture can transfer to the other culture. 

By Queensland State Archives - http://www.archivessearch.qld.gov.au/Image/DigitalImageDetails.aspx?ImageId=9759, CC BY 3.0 au, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75977871

Take fox hunting. If there's anything that on the surface appears peculiarly British, it is fox hunting. So when an English band named Manfred Mann recorded and released "Fox on the Run" in 1968, it seemed like something of no interest on this side of the pond. However, as I have noted previously, an American bluegrass performed named Bill Emerson somehow happened to hear the song. Now American may not wear tartans and drink tea when they proceed on a fox hunt, but people in bluegrass country have been known to hunt foxes now and then. So Emerson first recorded the song with Cliff Waldren, then re-recorded it when he rejoined his old band the Country Gentlemen, firmly entrenching it in the American tradition so that Tom T. Hall could growl his way through a country version.

And now many people consider "Fox on the Run" to be a bluegrass standard. (No, not that one.)

But one of my other favorite stories about the British and American traditions concerns one particular Englishman. If I tell you that this Englishman was from Liverpool, you can probably narrow the candidates down a bit. (Hint: it's not Andy McCluskey.) Anyway, Liverpool is a dock town, and this particular Englishman developed a love for country music - so much so that he considered emigrating to the United States and living and working in Houston, Texas. He chose Houston because that was where Lightnin' Hopkins lived. However, even in those days it took a lot of paperwork to emigrate to the United States, and this Englishman had missed a lot of school due to illness and decided not to fill out the forms. 

Anyway, Ringo - whoops, I gave it away! - ended up getting another job a couple of years later and didn't think about living in Houston any more. But he retained his love of country, recording Buck Owens' "Act Naturally" co-writing "What Goes On," and playing on other country songs by George and his other bandmates. 

By June 1970, that band had broken up - perhaps you heard the news about this - and Ringo's friend George was recording "All Things Must Pass." During those recordings, Ringo met Nashville steel guitar player Pete Drake, and by June Starr found himself in Nashville, surrounded by Pete Drake and Nashville's finest, recording the country album "Beaucoups of Blues."

Now most country singers have southern accents, and Ringo does not. Yet his Northern accent worked magnificently with the material.

There's an innate sadness in Starr's voice which seems perfectly suited to this kind of music, and he completely inhabits the songs...

So we've seen that British people can perform American songs, and vice versa. 

After all, Slim Whitman was a star in the United Kingdom. 

Bittersweet...something

Since I recently wrote about the fact that I blog here, I guess I should actually blog here. 

And I have a lot to blog about. 

As I’ve noted elsewhere, I am now a free agent – because it sounds better to say “I am now a free agent” than to say “I was laid off in the middle a pandemic because fewer people are buying my (former) company’s services.”

My last official day was Wednesday, so I had to go to the office to turn in my computer equipment and pick up my personal things. Because of the pandemic, this was only my second time at the office since mid-March. I met the HR person, took care of business, and (with her help) hauled my stuff down to my car. 

As I got ready to leave, I paused for a moment and took a picture of the office.

Before I left, I thought that I'd create an Instagram story - you know, those things that appear on the service but (unless you highlight them) disappear after 24 hours. Instagram has all sorts of tools that you can use to add stuff to your stories, so I used its "Music" tool to add the chorus from an old Rolling Stones song. The chorus that I chose came from this song:

Well this could be the last time

This could be the last time

Maybe the last time

I don't know.

Perhaps you remember how this particular song sounded.

YouTube video of "The Last Time"

Whoops, I seem to have selected the wrong version of "The Last Time."

The evolution will not be televised - Bryan Adams and AllMusic

If you poke around on the Internet, you can find this odd FAQ:

Why can't I find Bryan Adams on AllMusic?

Due to the request of Mr. Adams, we are no longer permitted to display his information on AllMusic.

Not that musicians haven't requested removal of Internet information before. They obviously have, especially when money is involved. And musicians can take legal action when something is defamatory or libelous.

But, to be honest, we really don't know why Adams made his request to AllMusic. Everything2 even looked at cached versions of the deleted AllMusic pages and couldn't find anything out of the ordinary.

What becomes obvious quickly is that AMG did not slag off Bryan Adam's entire catalog (see appendix) - the first few albums actually received positive reviews. His mid-80's releases, with 4.5 out of 5 stars each, even get close to the top rating.....Further AMG reviews generally claim that Adams did nothing new after the 1980s and that his more recent albums sounded simply like rehashes of his old style. But, again, this is not an unusual claim at all if a music journalist tries to look at a longer career, it's one of the most common criticisms in the field.

Oddly enough, in a 2018 interview Adams claimed indifference to his image:

Q. Many recording artists today are more conscious of their image that their music. You’ve always placed your music before your public image. It’s kind of take it or leave it.

A. To be honest, I’m not really conscious of even that much. I am that way, but only because I don’t know any better (laughs). It’s what pleases me the most and it’s the easiest thing to do. It stems from the early days when I tried different things clothing wise and I just felt like a total pratt. I felt uncomfortable so I just decided that I’d go out with what I’d wear everyday onstage and it just made much more sense.

The so-called "worst songs" are actually pretty good - it's just the context that makes them bad

I encountered the results of a 2011 Rolling Stone readers' poll of the worst songs of the 1980s. In a sense the songs that made the list aren't that surprising; some of them include "Never Gonna Give You Up," "The Final Countdown," and "We Built This City."

Some of you are turning up your noses already.

A common denominator among these songs is that they were extremely popular at the time. This makes sense; since this was a reader poll, more popular songs are of necessity going to get more votes.

But what if you had just awoken from a 40-year nap and, absent any context, were played a little ditty by Rick Astley? In that case, you would be forced to admit that the song is actually pretty good. Constructed well, performed well, and actually pretty catchy.

The reason that these songs are considered to be the worst songs has nothing to do with the songs themselves, but of the context in which the songs were played - and, in many cases, replayed and replayed and replayed.

The Astley song, of course, is a prime example of this. During its initial chart run, it was played a lot, and all of us tend to get sick of a song after too many plays. And of course, once rickrolling became a thing, the song was literally played ad nauseum.

Now take another song on the list. Let's say that you received a particular song without a label identifying the performing artist (or the lyricist). That "we built this city on rock and roll" chorus is pretty catchy, right? OK, perhaps you'll get tired of the song after a while, but you won't detest it...

...until someone drops the fact that the lyricist is Bernie Taupin. Far removed from creating classics with Elton John, now he's contributing lyrics to schlock rock. And that schlock rock is performed by...

...Starship, the third incantation of a band that was originally featured to Rolling Stone readers as the San Francisco counter-culture band Jefferson Airplane (feed your head), then moved into a second phase as Jefferson Starship. (Tangent: "Miracles" is one of the best moody songs ever.) And then...this. Rolling Stone's audience, including at least a few in 2011 who remembered the original days of the magazine, probably griped "sellout" many, many times.

OK, eliminate the "probably" qualifier:

This could be the biggest blow-out victory in the history of the Rolling Stone Readers Poll. You really, really, really hate "We Built This City" by Starship. It crushed the competition.

Rolling Stone went on to note the band's aforementioned history, and then said:

They came back in the 1980s as this sleek, corporate band named Starship with some guy named Mickey Thomas as one of their singers....To the Woodstock generation, their success in the 1980s just seemed like the final nail in the coffin of their youth.

And somehow this "betrayal" stung more than the related betrayals when the lead singer of the New York Dolls, the (first) lead singer of Van Halen, and the lead singer of the Faces all started crooning standards.

BECAUSE THOSE GUYS WEREN'T FROM SAN FRANCISCO, MAN.

P.S. Happy birthday Elvis.