Steve Harley (1951-2024)

What a loss. Not so well-known in the U.S., Steve Harley was a modest sized rock star in the UK in the early to mid-1970s, principally through a number 1 hit song, "Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)" which I fondly remember from my childhood. A lovely acoustic ditty tinged with a hint of his snarly cockney affectation,with bits of Dylanese sprinkled in, it was everywhere in the 1975 and covered a million times by more contemporary people, including Duran Duran and Erasure. The song was billed under Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel.

But if you dug deeper, you might have stumbled upon a pair of his early '70s albums, billed under Cockney Rebel, The Human Menagerie (1973) and Psychomodo (1974) which were the bastard child of Johnny Rotten (still to burst into the world of pop) and David Bowie. I think Steve Harley had aspirations to make a grand statement of an album like Sgt. Pepper but the ones he did release still stand up as full-on attempts to produce a truly 1970s album, one denuded of any hints that the '60s happened at all. There's the obvious androgyny and glamness of it all, a hat tipoff to decadence and self-gratification, the full-on unapologetic cadence of his working class English accent, and of course, that sneer, half Dylan and half Bowie and half still-to-be-created Johnny Rotten. Yes, three halves is what makes Cockney Rebel slightly off-kilter, not really fitting into anything, a bit off the rails, a true anomaly in the history of '70s pop. Oh, one more thing, at least on his early albums, Harley sought to disavow the guitar completely (too '60s), and so the sound becomes something both baroque pop and almost proggy.

My favorite track off The Human Menagerie is this, "Mirror Freak," a tour de force of sexy imagery and decadent descent into debauchery, the drums cracking like broken elbow bones. I guarantee there was nothing like this in 1973, no, not even Bowie.

The Sundays - Here's Where The Story Ends

 

The sweet spot of my nostalgia is really the '90s, or more to the point, something like 1988 to about 1999. In that period, I aged from 23 to 33, and that sounds about right in terms of how nostalgia fixes itself onto one's twenties. My failing, if I can call it that, was that even as I was experiencing it, I felt a sense of nostalgia about what I was experiencing, something described once by Fredric Jameson as 'nostalgia for the present.' Ever since I was a young boy, I've had an acute sense of the passing of time, that its inexorable, unstoppable, and irreversible qualities gave it a particular bittersweet taste; a kind of big tragedy, perhaps even a farce in the grand vista of life. I'm not sure I had the words to describe this feeling at the time but I remember feeling aware of 'The Past' as an object of lament and loss, even when I was about ten or eleven. I have a memory of reading Neil Young's quote in Decade's liner notes (supposedly from Bob Dylan): "Now that the past is gone," which seemed to distill all those tensions into a pithy quote.

I don't have any particular memory of the Sundays' "Here's Where the Story Ends" but I do definitely remember listening to it in 1990. The music gently evoked the Smiths but not in any kind of gratuitous way but rather more as homage and affectation. That year, especially, was a year of confusion for me. I wouldn't say turmoil (which was 1991) but still not stable. My academic future was in doubt, my girlfriend was interested in others, and I did a lot of drugs. But I did have a very active social life with people whose names I've mostly forgotten. And I absorbed a galaxy worth of new music from every corner of the universe. But even then, the Sundays' track seemed to perfectly soundtrack the feeling that something was ending (as it was) and that "a terrible year" was either just gone, or happening, or around the corner.

I'm sure the fact that the voice was a woman's was an important factor - a waif-like English woman who seemed to inhabit a landscape produced by a Cure-damaged sensibility. In other words, someone, if she was real, I might have had a crush on, or at least been interested to talk to at a party.

The White Stripes - Ball and Biscuit (live in Tokyo, 2003)

Don't know why but am enjoying this. Distinctly remember walking somewhere in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2004 or so, listening to this blasting on my headphones. Sort of a motley combination of Led Zeppelin's version of "Travelin' Riverside Blues" and the Stooges "Down on the Street" or something.

Music like this seems particularly cringe these days. And honestly, I never listen to this kind of shit at all. But sometimes, just sometimes, you want to hear the knockoff, the pastiche, rather than the original. There must be a German word for when you prefer the imitation of the imitation to the original. Also, let no one say that Jack White cannot play guitar. One a good day, he's probably as good as Jack Black. He may not be as good as Meg White is a drummer but he can indeed hold his own.

Donny & Marie Osmond - Living On My Suspicion

This song was a deep cut from the album Make the World Go Away from Donny and Marie Osmond, released some time in 1975 and written by Donny and his older brother Merrill Osmond, who was the lead vocalist (and bassist!) for the Osmonds. The song itself is an example of classic '70s pop craft, somewhere between Burt Bacharach and the theme from M.A.S.H. There's very little about the album that I can find online, especially who played what. The guitar is quite expertly played and suggests some slick session player, perhaps on his off-day from a Steely Dan session for Katy Lied. 

For a very brief period in 1975, my older sister was a fan of the Osmonds, and by osmosis, I absorbed some of their music, including this track.

Interesting story about the producer of this track (and the album as a whole), one Mike Curb who (gulp) later on served as the Republican Party's Lieutenant Governor of the state of California in the early '80s. I guess he would be known as more of a Democrat these days, given how rightward the Republican Party has moved in the past three or four decades, given his early advocacy for gay rights, but in many other respects he was definitely a kind of fiscal conservative.

Curb scored music for A LOT of movies in the sixties and also was a lucrative songwriter of some repute too. More important, he started his own label which merged with MGM Records and Verve Records, and he, Mr. Mike Curb, became President of the new company in 1969. Yes, the company that released records by the Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa.

In the 1970s, his subsidiary label (Curb Records, obviously) put out music by Eric Burdon, War, Ritchie Havens, Gloria Gaynor, etc. Apparently, Curb records is still a thing now (in 2024!), and Mike Curb still heads it at the age of 79. Good for him.

 Other facts about Mike Curb:

- he headed the country and western subsidiary of Motown Records (yes, Motown Records) in the 1970s

- Curb organized the Inaugural Youth Concert to start the second term of Richard Nixon (!) in January 1973. Among the artists who played for Nixon were Jimmy Osmond (kid brother to Donny who sings here), Ray Stevens, and a bunch of other people I've never heard of. I wonder how they felt when in the subsequent months, the Watergate scandal broke.

- Curb, as President of MGM, fired 18 artists from their roster for their supposed promotion of "hard drugs" in their songs. Well, "Heroin" by VU will do that.

Anyway, so Donny & Mary Osmond -- yeah, the vapid duo at the center of probably the worst music made in the seventies, recorded this here song. I like it. What can I say. It captures so perfectly the ennui of a mid-70s TV movie's middle interlude when the two lovers have split up and their independent lives are soundtracked by the mourning sound of Donny and Marie.

Elliott Smith - Waltz #2 (XO)

 

"She shows no emotion at all / Stares into space like a dead china doll"

Joan As Police Woman - Full-Time Heist

"No Title as of 13 February 28,340 Dead"

Crowded House - The Howl

Lovely new song from the new Crowded House album. A bit of a surprise because I honestly have not paid attention to Crowded House in 30 years. A beautiful bit of jangle pop, circa the Sundays who might have driven past Real Estate. But you know, he's an old dude (like me), so it hits harder.

The Stylistics - Sing Baby Sing

On May 22, 1975, I was definitely glued to TV. It was a Thursday night and Top of the Pops was on British TV. I was an impressionable nine-year old, but every single (well, almost every single) act on the show was something that made a deep impression on me. Slade's not-so-well-known but utterly brilliant four-on-the-floor rock "Thanks for the Memory" was followed by "Send in the Clowns," a late period classic from Judy Collins that I am sure perplexed me with its inscrutable lyrics. Then there was Desmond Decker's proto-reggae classic "Israelites" which, originally recorded and released in 1968, was a "re-release," a notion that was just as applicable to the final song on the show that night, Tammy Wynette's beautiful "Stand By Your Man," also originally from 1968, but a hit in 1975 again.

But let's face it, the star of the show was "Sing Baby Sing" by the Stylistics, the Philly soul troupe that went from strength to strength in the seventies with a slew of beautifully crafted falsetto gems. Their zenith in my mind was "Sing Baby Sing" which infused a touch of grandeur to their soul, the cadence of the chorus lifting it to the level of angels harmonizing in some heavenly stage. That feeling always stayed with me.

Stop the Genocide

This song, "There Will Be No Morning Copy" by the long ago band Clann Zú, an Australian-Irish band is one of the few that takes a direct and honest look at Palestinian liberation. The band existed only for a short time, from 1999 to 2005 but were incendiary in the right ways, speaking truth to power. Their second and last album, Black Coats & Bandages (2004) was a broadside against imperialism, war, and organized religion. Turn this up real loud:

Your borders are bloody mirages that expand and contract at the will of the blade drawn across the back of a people in shadow.

We are on the ropes. 

Tasting the blood in our mouths, mixing with what little hope we have left as it slides down our throats constricted by hands of avarice, soft media, oxymorons and military might. 

How long must we live in the shadow of your wall that divides our lives, our loves and our hopes? 

How long must we live in the daily fear of returning home to find it gone? 

We are refugees in our own land, waiting in hope for the day when we can walk our own streets. 

Just because you have the biggest gun doesn't mean your war is won. 

Just because you take our homes doesn't mean our hope is gone. 

Just because you claim your cause as just doesn't mean that you're still not wrong. 

Just because you build a wall doesn't mean it will last that long. 

A bullet flies through the head of another ten-year-old boy who held a rock in his hand against a thirty-ton tank in his people's land.