#38: GIORGIO MORODER
"From Here To Eternity - Single Version"
If you look at some of the photographs that regularly turn up on social media of various 1960s notables at home listening to records - John Lennon, Julie Christie, Steve McQueen - you'll note that their records are cheerfully scattered across the floor. In some cases, singles are piled atop each other without sleeves to cover them. Many distressed audiophiles of our time throw a minor fit at that spectacle. Didn't they, uh, take care of their records? How much value (now the capitalist crocodile sneaks its way through the mud of memory) got wiped off them? Don't they have any...respect for records?
The short bilateral answer to that last question is: no and yes. No because when pop happens, respect is the last thing on the mind of its truest lovers. And also yes because these people are showing pop their fullest respect. You see, in the sixties, pop records weren't things to be "collected," not like classical, jazz, folk, blues or...you know, those things adults did, like telling young people to shut up. Nobody gave them a third thought; why would they? Pop was disposable by definition - this was the music popular in, at, of and for its time. Nobody at its presumed peak envisaged pop to have a history, to be archiveable. It seemed contrary to its intention. You loved a pile of music for five weeks, then moved on to another one. Names of performers recurred because you became attached to them - you fancied them, you trusted them, you relied on them - but in essence it was all about searching for the next thrilling thing, or things that made you feel thrilled (not quite the same thing).
Certainly no one before Jann Wenner and his Ivy chums decided to chalk divisive rules on their groovy blackboard conceived of pop (or rock) record collections, so that toffs could once again sniff their supremacist noses at what filthy pleb serfs liked. What do you think Artie West from Blackboard Jungle would have made of a concept like Classic Album Sundays - no talking, no going to the toilet - apart from a hall suddenly filled with matchwood?
Most pop lovers, however, whatever their generation, continue to do what John, Julie and Steve did; they appreciate and cherish (not in that order) what they come across and find themselves feeling at this, and no other, point in their lives. Growing up in seventies Lanarkshire, I had no real grasp, or even a mythical one, of collecting records (it turned out that I never did get a grasp. Here, where I live, music accumulates, like read magazines). Buying records was a diverting thing to contemplate every now and again, usually depending upon how much residual pocket money was available to me, but otherwise I tended either to use the local libraries or simply tape songs from the radio, crass disc jockey chatter included.
Listening over and over to pop songs taped from the radio was how I grew to understand how and why pop worked. There was no pattern, no underlying aesthetic stigmata; if it caught my ear and stayed in it, I liked it. In 1977 this involved things as apparently diverse as Rod Argent's synthesised revisit of Satie's "Gymnopédie no 1" and Lou Reed's "Walk On The Wild Side," the latter then a four-year-old oldie (in those days, oldies strictly meant the sixties and, if you occasionally stretched things, the fifties. There was less "history" to negotiate then).
Actually, "Walk On The Wild Side" became something of a totem for me because it just sounded...different from everything else that was going on, and perhaps also helped deliver me from the painful inconvenience of my daily life. When it hit the top ten in 1973 I was much more interested in The Goon Show and All About Science than I was about pop and the record didn't register with me at all. But it eventually found its way through to me.
I liked the record's hectares of space. So little seems to happen yet cumulatively quite a lot of things come to pass. I listened to the relationship between the close-up lead voice, the folk club guitar, the twinned double basses of artful smoke, the siren backing singers drifting into view then immediately slamming into your face, and, in the very far distance, a high string section. And, at the end, to the baritone saxophonist deciding whether he wants to be Gerry Mulligan or John Surman (it was actually stalwart Ronnie Ross) - the record fades before that dilemma can be resolved.
I didn't know what the hell Reed was singing about. I didn't at that time know anything about Warhol's Factory and perhaps I was happier not knowing. All I registered were these funny people with funny things to whom funny (or deeply unfunny) things happened. As a record, a thing in itself, it hooked me.
Late spring was always good because if it was warm and the sun was shining we'd be let out of P.E. class and brought towards the playing fields down behind the school for a game of football. I was in goal and hardly ever troubled by the need to dive and save a ball, hence had an enormous lot of time to crouch down and contemplate...the immense space, and peace, in that field. Everybody else was generally busy down the other end so I was left to myself. I would consider the relationship between the blue in the air and the green on the ground and think of that faint, high string section on "Walk On The Wild Side."
I felt...freed from the horrendous business of my own life, or the one which had been imposed on me. I felt...away from school, from parents, from obligations. That undisturbed ocean permitted me, however briefly, to be myself.
(Four decades later, I'd be painfully lying in a hospital bed, and catching a glimpse of the books and DVDs being sold by whoever was advertising ceaselessly on the above-bed television screen I couldn't afford to use, I recaptured that ineluctable seventies blueness and thought forever how wonderful life was then, before reminding myself with gentle abruptness that it was not.)
There were other songs, like "Roadrunner" by Jonathan Richman. It was supposed to be "punk" but I liked it because it pottered along like a primary school child learning to do a pop song. It sounded made up on the spot, rhythmically contradictory at times, too many words to fit into any rational metre; it sounded as if its singer was happily immersing himself in the processes of creating music, discovering its own dynamics. And it was about celebration, of driving, of walking, of shopping, of BEING ALIVE. Such unexamined joy (always the best sort).
All barriers were down with me because I didn't know that barriers existed. Hence the Stranglers, the Jam and the Sex Pistols (in that order) were of equal importance to my ears as Stomu Yamash'ta, Premiata Forneria Marconi and Kraftwerk (and that isn't even getting into soul, reggae, jazz or disco). Let's not try to rewrite history. In 1977 Trans-Europe Express was marketed and regarded as a progressive rock album. I taped the entire first side as it was broadcast on a Friday early evening specialist prog-rock show on Radio Clyde called Son Of Baroque N' Roll, hosted by a guy called Colin McDonald (although Brian Ford may have been sitting in that particular week). I immediately thought it was somewhere just beyond brilliant, but it was not at the time considered the godfather of electro or techno or hip hop or anything else because these things hadn't been invented or yet come to wider public attention. It was treated no differently to such contemporaries as The Mathematician's Air Display by Pekka Pohjola (which I also liked).
I remember October 1977 being, for whatever reason, a particularly concentrated month for this subtype of activity. "Holidays In The Sun" and "Complete Control" marked the beginning of my real interest in punk; "rock" songs which spend their second half meticulously, if despairing, unravelling their own structures and negating their motives. "Virginia Plain," back after five years to promote a Greatest Hits album, sounded absolutely of the moment in its cheerful disruption. "'Heroes'" needed its quotation marks because it was a passionately impassionate examination of the clinical notion of freedom; suppose you did get gifted sound and vision - what would you hear and see? Its performer imagines escape, love, danger, courage and freedom while being deadly scared of the notion translating into action. He actually needs that wall to stay up; otherwise, how could he justify his work?
(It is possible that the British espied this uncertain duality and stopped the single at #24, despite a personal appearance by Bowie on Top Of The Pops, although it is far more likely that its lack of progress was more attributable to RCA's pressing plants having completely given themselves over to pressing up Elvis' back catalogue - as I recall, the single was always out of stock.)
Then there was the single edit of "From Here To Eternity." I knew that Giorgio (no "Moroder" on the label) was behind the work of Donna Summer. That summer, "I Feel Love" had struck me as a thing of its own wonder, an isolated blossom rather than an alternative pathway towards an ill-defined future (I bought the 12-inch from Listen Records, Renfield Street, on the afternoon of Saturday 2 July, the same afternoon that "Pretty Vacant" came into the shop; I got the fourth single out of that box). As summer hurtled towards autumn, however, "Eternity" sounded perhaps even more radical.
Beyond the Vocoderised prelude, the rhythm and overlying instrumentation sounded more ominous, more autumnal, than "I Feel Love" had done. The singer was a "Mystery Voice" and sounded a bit like Jonathan King (it appears to have been Pete Bellotte). He sings a couple of verses and two choruses which could have swooned their way out of 1968.
But then the song...disappears. There is a break for the synthesised rhythm alone, before the music bubbles up again and quite unexpectedly offers us a new melody and arrangement, with only a wordless female choir (one of whom sounds like Donna Summer herself). The urge to travel, to go forward (long before "going forwards" transmutated into the insufferable mantra soundtracking and undermining every workplace) is as palpable as Kraftwerk's train - but in October 1977 I was startled by the concept of "the song" being steadily dismantled. What was this "pop record"? It was frightening, it was ecstatic, it was avant-garde, it was so patiently elegant. It mimicked the sound of pop being consumed by itself.
There was an album, which came out before the single but with which I didn't catch up until later, and it transpired that the single was a series of edited highlights of a quarter-hour piece as episodic but determined as Trans-Europe Express. That first side of the album remains remarkable in itself but possibly devalues the shock impact of the single by dispersing its dynamics, explicating its imposing compactness. The single of "Eternity," constructed in precise reverse of "Sound And Vision," suggested with neonlit harshness that we probably were alone, if not unobserved. But it was so nice and polite in its fetid precision. I wouldn't have gleaned that if Paul Burnett hadn't spoken over the fadeout on my Certron (3 for £1 - they weren't brilliant, but they were cheap) blank C90. These inelegant things, you see, taught me about catching, listening to and retaining feelings for pop music, much more than any shelves would have managed.
No comments:
Post a Comment