CHAPTER 11

 

 

 

#90: QUANTUM JUMP

"The Lone Ranger"

From the remixed single: "The Lone Ranger"

 

Released: May 1979

 

 

Politely hyperactive jazz-funk to conceal the smoothest of lounges, with the guitarist and drummer in particular knowing what they're doing. That's coming from one direction. Feom the other comes a bass pulse which resembles the breathing of a miked-up salamander. Curiously rootless, it indicates another path for dance music in which the bass acts as the song's cynosure, rather than its foundation.

The vocal is authoratitively breathy, resigned yet committed. If it didn't remind you so much of Ian Anderson - who is a Scot - the way in which the voice here wraps its flexors around the Estuary English hard "a" leaping out of the word "masked" in the choruses, you'd think of it as irrefutably English, eveen though its subject matter is American, created and originally broadcast in Detroit (so it is one stop away from being Canadian, another in laying the path for May, Atkins and Saunderson to tread the following decade).

But it's the hook which gets you. Whatever the hell he's chanting, like a Kingsley Amis variant on the introduction to "Tutti Frutti," it evades proper meaning sufficiently to echo with mindful mindlessness across school playgrounds. You don't really listen to the words beyond the dim awareness that this is a shaggy dog story about Tonto and kemosabe, complete with deliberate corn ("back to front-o").

Because it's a hook you know from The Kenny Everett Video Show, which you watch every Monday early evening at 6:45 pm and which is infinitely hipper than the Opportunity Knocks which preceded it. Top Of The Pops was a craggy pastel tent compared with Everett, and apart from the humour (more Jack Jackson than Milligan) it quietly demonstrated an astute pop-reading mind. Cerrone's "Supernature" was the theme tune, and the "Lone Ranger" hook was one intermittent heck of a leitmotif. "Ride into tomorrow today" suggested forgetting The Seventies and hurtling ourselves away from them as fast and eagerly as possible.

I remembered the song from being played briefly on daytime radio, and less briefly on Luxembourg, back in 1976. Back then it sounded as futuristic as, or more obligingly and Englishly so than, whatever Moroder was doing. The songwriter, singer, keyboard player and producer was Rupert Hine from Wimbledon, future producer of The Fixx.

It wasn't on mainstream radio for long, though; most producers saw through what Tonto's peace pipe could make people do, and there was that derogatory slang word for gay that seemed cruel and pointless even then, even though Hine was clearly performing the song from the perspective of its chief narrator, who, twist in the tale approaching, realises the Ranger is gay and...doesn't mind.

The questions the song raises, and the fact that it was picked up and promoted by a fairly openly gay disc jockey, suggest a more complex beast than the one routinely excluded from today's oldies radio. I don't think anyone at my school disco picked up its lyric at all, and these were the same peers making messy fools of themselves attempting to reproduce the intrinsically naff yet deceptively complex dance routines of the band Racey. It was just a great, imaginative liminal pop dancer.

You could never get away with a song like that in the 21st century. But then it wasn't created in the 21st century, and I think we have to get away with the notion of the whole of history being an imperfect path leading us to an allegedly perfect present. Oldies shows on the radio based around the charts - or indeed our received reaction to anything we perceive as dwelling in and for the past - grant us only that version of the past considered most convenient or comfortable for us. I suspect that the reason somebody like Bowie gets such singeingly heavy ladles of hagiography methodically thrust upon him is that he doesn't really represent glam, but we cannot mention the central figure in UK glampop - for reasons that are entirely the fault of said central figure - hence burden the likes of Bowie and Roxy Music with laurels which exceed their actual reach in the period.

We only seem to want the kind of airbrushed history that is acceptable to us, that nods at us, licks our faces and agrees with us. But if you persist in doing that you end up with a sorely atrophied and smudged photocopy of actuality. Focus your eyes on the approved jewels and try to sweep away the dirt without really looking at it. If nothing else, you lose a lot of fun, and are left with a solemn, stuffed New England classroom lecture. It is as if your history, your life as you have known and lived it, your life as your gut recognises it, is rendered into affable nothingness.

It also makes life as a fan of pop music so awkward and complicated that it might drive you to exchange it for a less hassle-ridden pastime, such as birdwatching. You can't fully understand "American Pie" if you don't know, or aren't exposed to, "Rock And Roll (Part 2)" - as rock dies, it is born again, and in the same year. Given the documented fact, however, that both Messrs McLean and Gadd are convicted offenders against women, you keep whittling the essence of what admittedly may be an essentially rancid thing - I don't know, that argument is for another book - eventually leaves you with nothing except the unlovably worthy. Even then, where do you go? "Well, she was just seventeen, if you know what I mean" go the first and second lines of the first song on the first Beatles album; throw those fellows out as well?

What I'm awkwardly trying to state here is that you can't live history as though it were the cloisters of a monastery, with all the mess scrubbed out. Yes, most pop musicians have done and said impossibly horrible things; name me one who hasn't. So you decide to stick to jazz then remember the stories about Miles and Mingus. Awareness of the vaudevillian primitivism at the heart of "The Lone Ranger," including some deeply ill-advised reactions of other band members in the video, as well as David Toop's recent caution that "[in] so much antique comedy...particularly that which depended for its amusement on making sport with those who lack power or are simply different, the laughs have evaporated into a silence of bewilderment: how was this ever [considered] funny?" doesn't prevent me listening to and enjoying Pansy Division, or Phranc, or Shockheaded Peters, or you can list the rest. In my spare time I like to listen to pop records that were hits when I was still at school, to help recall what kind of boy I was and the sort of life I led or was compelled to lead. It isn't just pop records, either - I loved and still love records by the Louis Moholo-Moholo Octet, Anthony Braxton, Keith Tippett's Ark, the Art Ensemble of Chicago. They remind me of where I came from. It was my world and I revel in it, or at least wink at it, without an element of shame or hypocrisy. If our worlds are to contain multitudes, we must therefore recognise that they are, by definition, awash with ridiculous contradictions. History is not our butler.