Idle Query: Air Supply

This, from Love and Other Bruises:

As the time slips through your fingers,
Till it’s almost time to go,
And the morning breaks between us,
And the ice melts into snow.

Can someone please explain how ice can melt into snow?

Anyone?

No, I didn’t think so.

Tales of Deryn Du

Way back when this silliness all began, it was the superbly named Marshall Stacks who pointed out that Kookaburra’s melody was the same as a Welsh folk song, Wele ti’n eistedd aderyn du?

Today there are similar reports, although it’s important to get your Welsh right. A lot of songs about blackbirds in Welsh, apparently.
So, to clarify:

The Welsh tune in question is not, as reported here, A Ei Di’r ‘Deryn Du, which is a very, very nice tune, in fact probably superior to Wele ti’n eistedd aderyn du?, but not the same as Kookaburra at all, and you can hear it here.

It’s also not Aderyn du – you know, the one that goes “Aderyn du ai blufyn sidan, ei big aur ai dafod arian / Ei di drosta i i Gydweli …”  Here’s a pretty girl singing that one:

Instead, Wele ti’n eistedd aderyn du? sounds like this:

I now request that one of Australia’s more smart-arse bands (I’m looking at you, TISM) record a patriotic song with lots of flute quotations in the background, from all the Welsh blackbird songs. 

Meanwhile, is there nothing but our wretched national anthem that we can claim as our own?

“Obviously, the more the better.”

Here’s the first time I wrote about Larrikin’s lawsuit against Colin Hay and Ron Strykert, and their claim that Down Under had unfairly used Kookaburra Sits In the Old Gum Tree.  Then, Larrikin’s managing director Norm Lurie invoked the spirit of Marion Sinclair, Kookaburra’s composer, but she didn’t rate a mention yesterday when Justice Peter Jacobsen found in Larrikin’s favour.  Instead, it was a mysterious 40 to 60 (not, not millions, but percent) who starred, and Larrikin’s lawyer, Adam Simpson, who gave this post its title.  I’m guessing he’s on a commission.

Jacobsen said some odd things.  For starters, he took Men At Work’s flautist Greg Ham to task for plagiarising Kookaburra’s melody, when Ham is not one of the listed writers of Down Under.  That makes no sense.  He also made the point that Down Under replicates “a substantial part” of Kookaburra, which is not hard to do with a tune that’s four bars long.  The issue, surely, is the other way around: whether those two bars of Kookaburra constitute “a substantial part” of Down Under.  So here’s an experiment:

Sing Down Under to yourself, same words, same tune, and leave out the two bars in the flute riff.  Everything else remains.  Is it still recognisably Down Under?

Now lose everything except the two bars.  You can still have half the flute riff, but no vocals, no “do you come from a”, no vegemite sandwich, no plunder or chunder, and how Down Underish is what remains?  No backing behind it, just the Kookaburra bit.  Is it less Down Underish?  What fraction would you call it?  I’d say about a fiftieth.

Taking the six year statute of limitations into account, I therefore propose the following formula:

(Whatever Greg Ham has been paid, specifically for Down Under, in the applicable six years)/about 50 = what Larrikin should get.

By the way, if Jacobsen’s logic holds for other songs, here’s the situation that prevails:

If you quote a copyrighted work in your arrangement, you’re liable.  Not in your melody and lyrics, where a song lives, but in your arrangement.

So here’s one:  John Lennon’s cover of Lieber and Stoller’s Stand By Me has a guitar instrumental break that quotes Alex North and Hy Zaret’s Unchained Melody.  This is what musos do: we know the two chord progressions are the same, so we play a little raffish quote, and hope John likes it.  I know John recognised the quote, because in the live video version he sings most of Unchained’s opening line “Oh, my love, my darling”.  It’s not Lieber or Stoller’s words and music, but it’s a copyrighted work quoted in the arrangement, and there’s evidence Lennon knew about it.

By Jacobsen’s logic, Lieber and Stoller should now be sued by North and Zaret’s publishers.  After all, Lieber and Stoller are the listed writers, and the Lennon version’s arrangement makes blatant use of North and Zaret’s copyrighted work.

Makes sense to me.

The Oscars, in 2020.

It’s ten years since we shook things up by nominating ten films for Best Picture!  And didn’t that start things rolling! 

So, let’s have a look at this year’s winners in all the Music categories:

The Peter Weir Award For Manipulative Use Of Classical Music

Awarded to the director who shuns the film’s composer and plumps for some pre-written music at a crucial juncture.  Ideal pieces include any Bach cello suite, Gorecki’s 3rd, or something by Shostakovich.  This year the Peter Weir award goes, for the eighth time, to Peter Weir.

The Hall & Oates Comeback Award

For use of an almost forgotten pop song, during a montage sequence.  The judges had great difficulty choosing between Meredith Brooks’s “Bitch“, in The Devil Still Wears Prada, and Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida“, in fourteen different films.  But the outright winner is Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face“, in Tom Cruise’s stunning directorial debut, Straight For Pay.

The Charlie Kaufman Having-it-Both-Ways Statue

A perpetual trophy given to the film maker who has the characters sing to one another at the film’s emotional climax.  Can be interpreted ironically, or enjoyed as pure schmaltz.  The judges are proud this year to acknowledge Dakota Fanning’s spectacular portrayal of Courtney Love, in Sofia Coppola’s Kurt Cobain biopic Rape Me.  The statue is awarded to both actor and director.

Awards retired this year

Best Original Score, Best Original Song

The Continuing Saga of Early Peter Allen Albums

I wrote earlier about the surprising difficulty of finding a copy of Tenterfield Saddler, Allen’s second solo album as a singer-songwriter, and then I reviewed the album.  But now that I’ve read a few bits of Stephen MacLean’s The Boy From Oz, permit me one minor boast:  I can pick a cabaret ballad.  I thought the song Harbour was asking for it, and it turns out Liza (Minnelli, that is) paid Allen the compliment of recording it, and More Than I Like You as well.  Moreover, the passages on the album that seem to be about their time together are, in fact, about their time together.  But any fool could have spotted that.

MacLean describes Allen’s penning of the album’s title song on the roof of the Shangri-La apartments, in the winter of 1971, on Campbell Parade, across the road from Bondi Beach.  Courtesy of Google Maps, here’s that building:

I don’t know if the landlords have put up a plaque, but they should.

MacLean also writes:

Peter chose minor, almost maudlin chords for this melody, and made mention of kangaroos, jackaroos and emus.  Australian songs had done this before, usually descending to the level of kitsch.  Peter’s song, in its honesty, side-stepped vulgarity.

This is, apart from the business about the chords, spot on.  Here is Tenterfield Saddler’s chord progression, simplified for clarity:

Verse:  F               C/E         Dm

Bb             F            C7

Bb             C/Bb       Am7          Dm7

C7sus4    C7           C7sus4   C7    F

Chorus:  F       F/E     Dm7   Dm7/C    Gm7   C7   Gm7  C7

Gm7   C7   Gm7   C7   F

As you can see, there aren’t that many minor chords (those Gm7s in the chorus really function as a C7sus), and the song’s in a major key. 

If it makes you feel almost maudlin (because a person can be maudlin, but a chord can’t), I reckon it’s because of two things: the waltz time and that descending bass line, one of those step-at-a-time bass lines that falls and falls, and falls, until it ends up exactly where it started.  That’s the sound of a merry-go-round, that chord progression is, whirling around and around, ever moving, ever coming back to where it started.  It fits the lyric’s theme of time’s ever-meddling presence beautifully. 

It’s a very, very good song; I’d be proud to have written it.

January 18, 2003.

It was an odd sort of joy, on the seventh anniversary of Canberra’s 2003 bushfires, to listen for the first time to a recording of a song I wrote about that event, back in 2008. 

The singer is Louise Page, the clarinettist Nicole Canham, and the pianist Susanne Powell.  All of them are wildly overqualified for the music I gave them to play, and I am more than a little honoured to have my song open a new CD entitled ‘Beautiful – Art Song Canberra Favourites’.

The entire CD, featuring other little-known composers such as Brahms, Barber and Fauré can be bought for $25 plus $3 p&h.  Email pagejl@nospampcug.org.au (remove that nospam bit, naturally)

I expect to see the magpie
and the mynah,
but the falcons, the two brown falcons
wheeling in the sky
and their distant cry -
so strange
and so beautiful.

The Black Cockatoo,
the streak of yellow tail,
and there, on the head,
the Gang-Gang’s shock of red -
so unexpected -
and so beautiful.

I hear the Lyre Birds are gone,
but the tiny sparrows,
red-capped, flame-chested, scarlet-bibbed,
flirting with disaster as they dive,
how on earth did they survive?
How on earth did they survive?
So beautiful …

And to think, that awful day
has brought a strange, sad beauty:
the Nankeen Kestrel,
the bright King Parrot.

If only Alison, Peter, Douglas and Dorothy …
Alison, Peter, Douglas and Dorothy
were here to see them.

The Saga of Early Peter Allen Albums (Part Two)

Tenterfield Saddler, released 1972, although the album I listened to (a re-print?) has an audio copyright date of 1978. How is it?

Side One
1. Tenterfield Saddler (Allen)
No two ways about it: this is a bloody great song, the more so because its writer was not yet thirty.  It’s also in precisely the wrong spot for this album; no later song will come close to matching it.

I’ve always appreciated Allen’s songwriter’s touch in the later choruses, where time becomes a ”tale-teller” and a “meddler”, and the Tenterfield saddler makes his bed instead of turning his head, plus the cockatoos and the emus appear on the ground up ahead. Allen didn’t need to change the words; he could have faded away in a nice, purely repetitive, singalong chorus. But it’s the kind of thing a professional does, and I’m glad he did it.

2. More Than I Like You (Allen/Bayer Sager)
One of those glad-to-be-rid-of-you numbers that opens with the line “Standing in the rain, waiting for a train”, and goes on to observe that, while the singer doesn’t like trains, he likes them more than he likes you. Some handy jazzy piano, especially towards the end, but otherwise a pretty generic piece of ’70s I-like-me self-assertion.

3. The Same Way I Came In (Allen/Bayer Sager)
More ’70s rooting and rootlessness: “travelling’s just a fact of life”, “love is for leaving so that life can begin”. Songwriters always get like this when they’re enduring break-ups and touring, which is usually at the same time.

4. Good to See You Up There (Allen)
Is this a proud-of-my-ex-wife number?

Guess the thing for me to do – is simply say so long
But babe it’s been good to see you up there
And that’s the truth I swear
It’s good to see you where you belong.

Double-tracked vocals, brass section, but all of it a little flat.

5. I Can Tell a Lie (Landis/Meltzer)
One for the stage act, I suspect. A country flavoured number, complete with guest country fiddle: “Just sit me in front of an unbroken spinet … I’ll make you heartbreakin’ rhymes …” goes the chorus, and it’s designed to be repeated and repeated and repeated until the audience believes that the whole night was for them. I wonder if Allen made a meal of it live.
 

Side 2

1. Just Ask Me I Been There (Allen)
Apart from the unforgivably hackneyed rhyme of “charms” and “arms”, quite nice. An assertion of having “been through it all”, so “If there’s something you want to know …” [title follows]. More Liza references?

I watched a girl become a woman one day
She was a queen but she had to go ‘way
And though that kind of leaves me all alone
It’s good to see her make it on her own

2. Cocoon (Allen)
A funkier effort, closer to the Billy Joel of Piano Man (which wouldn’t exist for another year): “Before you get to be a butterfly, you gotta spend time in a cocoon”. Nice false ending, after which the sax solo kicks in.

3. Harbour (Allen)
Good cabaret ballad, this one, for anyone who’s looking for underexposed repertoire. You probably shouldn’t be twenty-one, though, because of the lines “Maybe it’s just growing older” and “Maybe it’s knowing a bit too much”. Incidentally, on this copy I had to hold down the record needle to get through the scratches, to the point where the key dropped about a tone.  So maybe the song’s not as slow as I think it is.

4. Somebody Beautiful Just Undid Me (Allen)
Good title. Very good title. Only a pretty good song. The opening reads like something by Flight of the Conchords:

I like to say that I much prefer
Character to beauty in the ones I chooose to love
Cause the physical thing never lasts as long
As intelligent people do when they get together

More country-flavoured gospel-ish stuff, including the line “maybe I’ll get a couple of songs from you” - watch out for songwriters, girls and boys. Nice shout-out to Joni MItchell mid-way through.

5. The Other Side (Allen/Bayer Sager)
A sort of Depression-era honky-tonk to finish up, complete with tuba bass line, in which the lyric seems to allude to the river Styx and the walls of Jericho. Not sure what exactly is being proposed in the line “If we all sing together we might get a song.”  This one is trying to be a rousing finale, and I want to like it more than I do.

Incidentally, for modern decriers of youngster illiteracy, twice in the printed lyrics does “it’s” appear for the possessive pronoun.  This is for an album pressed and printed when Boomers were firmly in charge.

I’m now off to read the appropriate parts of Stephen MacLean’s The Boy From Oz, and enjoy how far off the mark my first impressions are.

The Saga of Early Peter Allen Albums (Part One)

It began simply. I wanted to write a post about how under-appreciated Peter Allen is as a songwriter, with particular emphasis on his early balladeer stuff, but I hadn’t heard much of it.  So, I thought, I’d better check out the albums he made in the early 1970s, just in case they’re lousy.  Should be easy to find them, right?  Peter Allen is a pretty significant artist in Australian annals, and he had a couple of major hits in the USA as both performer and songwriter.  Plus there’s that musical.  So I ought to have little trouble hunting down his early albums.

Nothing on itunes except compilations and that musical.  Ooh, a karaoke version!

Not much on amazon either.  A lot of compilations, and that musical.  Oh, there’s I Could Have Been a Sailor.  And his first self-titled effort.  But where’s Tenterfield Saddler?  I really want to hear that album Tenterfield Saddler.

I could find some blogger who’s posted it for download, or go to some Russian website of dubious legality, but I want to hold it in my hands.  eBay?

Wait, I work casually at 666 ABC, and there’s a huge record library there!  Into the car, kids!

What do you mean the online catalogue is undergoing scheduled maintenance?  That’s unAustralian!  I’ll never find a specific album in that huge bloody collection.

Hmm-hm-hum-hm, shush kids, I won’t be much longer, hm-hm-not-the-boy-next-door.  Ah …

Now, in a perfect world, there would be an inner sleeve with rustic artwork depicting the actual Tenterfield saddlery …

But wait, there’s no LP in this sleeve!  The LP is in this other sleeve!

What the hell?  Jeff Porcaro?  Bi-Coastal?  I Still Call Australia Home?  Where is Tenterfield Saddler, dammit?  Let’s look at the actual LP …

At last.  I had read on the wikipedia entry that Allen’s original albums are hard to find.  Wikipedia wasn’t kidding.

A review will follow.

A Fact-Checker? Why? And What’s a Sub-Editor?

Jimmy Webb’s Tunesmith is one of those songwriting books that gets better as it goes along.  It’s scrupulous about crediting songwriters whenever they’re quoted, and the Publishing Credits at the end are commendably anal.  Nevertheless, this, on page 133 of my 1998 paperback edition, where Webb is recommending that songwriters study unconventional structures:

If you are uncertain as to the labeling of a particular section, make up your own name for it.  As John Lennon wrote: “There’s nothing you can hear that can’t be heard” (“All You Need Is Love”, © 1967 Lennon and McCartney)

Now Webb wrote All I Know, and has probably survived more drugs than I ever will.  So I doff my hat, I do, but is that line even in “All You Need Is Love”?  Where?  Even if you didn’t know the song by heart, think about it:  what would Lennon have rhymed it with?

Nothing you can blur that isn’t blurred
Nothing you can fur that isn’t furred
Nothing you can poo that isn’t turd

Or the square root of two is a surd, a blooger’s a nerd, flip you the bird, Duchamp is absurd, Grease is the word. You can see why Lennon chose a different path.

The rest of the book, by the way, is very good.

A Bit Like Removing My Shirt (Part Two)

These are some cabaret songs in progress.  I don’t know which one to finish first, so I leave it up to you, Gentle Reader.  If no-one responds I shall pretend that dozens of you did, and choose a song for myself.

1. An old man, on his deathbed, imparts this wisdom to his loved ones:

When I look back on my life,
I spent seventeen years of it
Looking for socks,
On my knees, under couches
Under couches, in boxes

If I had to do it over,
I’d spend more time on a beach in Ulladulla.
I’d buy more socks in one damn colour,
If I had to do it over …

(Sydneysiders may substitue Cronulla for the beach if they wish. International visitors should reflect on the fact that we’ve been adapting to your locales for decades, and deal with it.)

2. A song recounting a common male experience. Not me, of course, but others…

Stop apologising for your hair – it looks great
Stop saying you’re fat – in fifteen years,
we’ve all put on some weight
something something something
something something something ow
You were do-able then
And you’re do-able now

…

something something something ow
You remember that night
When we stayed out drinking?
And now, you wonder, what were we thinking?
I was thinking of doing you then,
And I’m thinking of doing you now.

3. You know how when you get dumped you discover how popular you were, but you were off limits, so you weren’t aware of it?  Come Back (So You Can Leave Me Again):

blah blah blah and then
My phone rang with invitations
From thirteen single men
Oh, come back
so you can leave me again

…

Doo-bee doo-bee something something ooh
And this time, if you’re lucky,
Maybe I’ll leave you

4. My Fundy Christian Girl

She likes to sing
Yes, she does
She likes to dance
All night long
She knows her mind.
You can tell
When she’s outside Family Planning screaming that you’re going to Hell
A wuh-uh-oh-woah-woah
She’s my fundy Christian girl

…

God says we gotta wait ’til we’re married
We wait and wait all week and then
We do it like bunnies on a Sunday,
Get forgiven and the cycle starts all over again.

My friends say that I must be crazy,
How can I stand to be so good?
Then she does all my cooking and my cleaning
Like her fundy books says a fundy woman should
A wuh-uh-oh-woah-woah etc.

…

And I will love her ’til the end of time
which she promises is coming soon …

5.  Cabaret shows often finish with ballads like Kander and Ebb’s My Own Space, a number that summarises the singer’s life philosophy with wry humour and truly staggering self-regard.  So this ballad is called Make Me Happy:

Everybody hungers for the secret
of love that burns forever, like an eternal first kiss.
And all the time, I think I’ve known the secret.
It’s simple, my darling, it’s this:

Make me happy.
Every time we wake,
let’s devote the day
to finding some new way
to make me happy.

You, you’re always saying you need a purpose,
and you do.
You, you need a purpose
and I need someone to

make me happy;
change your dreams to mine.
Make me happy, my love,
and we’ll be fine.

6.  There are , I believe, no cabaret songs about vasectomies.  So I’m going to write one, about mine.  It’s called An Apology (To My Balls).

Hey, guys
Now that we’re talking again,
Can I apologise?

…

You did one thing really well
You did one thing to perfection
You served your term, and then the firm
moved in a new direction

Hey, guys
Don’t see this as an ending
It’s an unexpected freedom you’ve found
And I’d still love you
to hang around …

 

Let the voting begin!