Life Rotates In 45 Revolutions Per Minute (Carpenters: Ticket To Ride/Your Wonderful Parade)

I have always thought it must have been a nightmare for the A/M employee assigned to market The Carpenters in the early seventies. The early 45's of the Carpenters are some of the most perfect pop songs ever recorded but the subject matter, from obsession to stalking and chemical depression must have caused more than a few headaches in the P/R department. And yet they got away with it, put Richard in the cutest sweater you can find and just make sure Karen is smiling and you've got a recipe for one of the most succesful and subversive groups of the seventies. It was no surprise to me when, starting in the late 80's, they began to get embraced by punk. There was something pure about them that most 'great' bands from the seventies couldn't touch, and by the time that the late eighties rolled around and most of those bands had dissolved into everything they had once preached against so loudly; The Carpenters remained untouched.
One of The Carpenters great moments came early in their career with the release of their first major label single, a cover of The Beatles Ticket To Ride backed by Richard Carpenter's own Your Wonderful Parade. The single would barely chart and their first album, Offering was a commercial failure. Within just a year Richard would transform a dark Bacharach/David song about longing and unrequited love into an almost playful love song and The Carpenters were born as one of the most successful groups in the world.
But what of that failed single? Certainly Your Wonderful Parade isn't much of a b-side, just a typical late sixties slice of fluff (even though it would include the ominous lines, "Your daily masquerade, paper masks that hide the faces you have made,
Crumbled down upon foundations you have laid"). Flip that record over to it's A side for one of the most majestic and haunting debut singles ever recorded.
The Carpenter's version of The Beatles classic does something that every great cover version should do, it manages to uncover and expose parts of the original that perhaps hadn't been heard before. Richard Carpenter's mournful and finally majestic arrangement of Lennon and McCartney's song literally pulls out all of the inherent sadness of the lyric and lays it right on top. Whereas there was something triumphant in The Beatles original, The Carpenters version is all about the heartbreak. You get the feeling that John Lennon was okay with the girl leaving, that perhaps just as the girl didn't care that neither did he. When Karen Carpenter sings, "I think I'm gonna be sad" there is nothing ironic or subtle about it. This woman meant it.
Richard Carpenter's most brilliant move in the rethinking of The Beatles classic was dropping the famous guitar line, that had already been copied by everyone from The Monkees to The Kinks. He replaced it with an extended opening piano solo that was odd even for the sixties. The spare piano soon gives way to a typically lovely A/M string arrangement but the song really starts 36 seconds in when Karen Carpenter starts to sing.
Much has been written about Karen Carpenter's voice. It's affected everyone from Elvis Presley to Sonic Youth's Kim Gordan to Richard Nixon. No other woman in rock history has come close to projecting such sincere desperation and depression as Karen Carpenter. More importantly there is a sweetness to it that makes the listener think that everything might be all right, if not for Karen then at least for them.
Karen Carpenter singing Ticket To Ride sounds like a strange call to arms with the line, "Think I'm gonna be sad" repeated at the end as some sort of mantra. She was just 19 when she recorded these words and it already sounds like she has had the weight of the world on her shoulders for years.
Ticket To Ride would continue to play a part of Karen Carpenter's life until her death, appearing first as the b-side to to the massive Close to You then on a slew of best of albums and live performances. The Carpenters would continue to confound the record company whether it be with slashing guitar solos on some of their most romantic tracks to releasing an 8 minute single about aliens and telepathic powers. The record company would continue to market them as squeaky clean squares until Karen died and then it seemed like they would disappear until a entire generation raised in broken homes and isolation re-discovered them.
They would record greater songs after Ticket To Ride but nothing could be quite as stirring as hearing that voice for the first time. John Lennon and Paul McCartney might have written the words but Karen Carpenter meant them.

Classic Song Chronicles: "Jealous Guy" (John Lennon)

While the title track “Imagine” is undoubtedly the most famous song off Lennon’s masterful 1971 LP, it is the haunting “Jealous Guy” that has become the most covered. Growing up with the legendary album, I must admit that “Jealous Guy” has always been my favorite, and as I have gotten older it has lost none of its hypnotic and powerful pull for me.
Lennon originally wrote the tune for “Jealous Guy” after The Beatles returned from their visit to India as “Child of Nature”, a song that was left off The White Album.



The discarded song stayed in Lennon’s head throughout the next few years and he brought it back to life during the Imagine sessions with new typically ultra-personal lyrics focusing on his relationship with artist, collaborator and muse Yoko Ono.



“Jealous Guy” is one of the ultimate John Lennon songs as it shows so many aspects of his volatile and passionate personality. Beautiful sounding but with a real line of bitterness underneath, the song offers up an apology without a resolution. It’s as though Lennon is explaining a line of behavior he has no plans on changing.
Despite the fact that the song includes Lennon’s own undeniably effective piano playing, the haunting harmonium work by John Barham, Jim Keltner on drums and the ever present Klaus Voorman on bass, the real pull of the track is Lennon’s pleading vocal take and an eerie mid-song whistle that would go on to influence Billy Joel a few years later on his equally mesmerizing "The Stranger" in 1977.

“Jealous Guy” wasn’t released as a single in Lennon’s lifetime (it finally appeared as a 45 under his own name in the mid eighties) but its impact was immediately felt. Of the dozens of cover versions of the song, one of the earliest by late soul legend Donny Hathaway remains the most effective:



Rod Stewart and The Faces began performing the song live in the mid seventies shortly before they split up, and the tune lent itself well to their scrappy but ferociously great playing, and is heard well in this rehearsal version:



The most successful version of the song (and truth be told, perhaps the greatest) was released by the peerless Roxy Music in 1980 shortly after Lennon had been killed outside The Dakota in New York. Armed with one of Bryan Ferry’s most enduring vocals and the band’s typically immaculate playing, Roxy Music’s version would ironically turn out to be their only number one hit in Britain, and it served simultaneously as a lament and tribute to an extraordinary talent taken all to soon.



Everyone from The Black Crows to Kiss have performed the song since. Much missed Elliot Smith was an unabashed fan of the track and his tender version would pop up often in his live shows throughout the nineties:



The most original version of the song came courtesy of Lou Reed at the Come Together tribute concert in 2001. Lou’s pulverizing and passionate version of Lennon’s track instantly became a ‘Lou Reed Song’ in the famed New Yorker’s hands and it’s a shame he hasn’t (to my knowledge) revisited it since.



Vivid, unflinching, and altogether haunting, "Jealous Guy" remains one of John Lennon's most beloved tracks and, along with the raging "Crippled Inside", it is the key song off his most commercially successful album.

The Re-Making Of John Lennon

Growing up, John Lennon was my favorite Beatle. It was always like that, I seemed to gravitate towards his material more than Paul or George's and his was the first of the solo Beatle catalogues that I began to collect.
Sometime within the past couple of years that began to change for me. I found myself listening to Ram more than Plastic Ono Band and All Things Must Pass more that Sometime In New York City. Suddenly I seemed to have more books on my shelf about Paul rather than John. Tastes change I thought and I will always have a deep love for John and his work but around my thirtieth birthday I came to the conclusion that I was now a Paul man.
A friend made a joke to me that it was because I had mellowed, that same old idea that Paul was just the cute one still reverberates. An amazing book published a few years in Britain called The Unknown Paul McCartney shows clearly that Paul, much more than John, was the experimenter. As we get farther away from The Beatles, myths will become much more resonate than fact. This is happening in the worst and most extreme way with the legacy of John Lennon.
I realized that it wasn't me mellowing out in my love for Paul, it is the sad truth that in society's eyes that John is becoming the dreaded 'cute one'.
This isn't going to be a post bashing Yoko Ono. I have a deep respect for her as a woman and artist but one has to wonder who exactly is she marketing John Lennon to and why.
The last few years have seen McCartney make two of his finest albums, I would argue that there are moments on Chaos and Creation that are among his finest works. He has also been dragged across the coals by an incredibly messy divorce and by Beatles fans who seem to blame him for having the gall to keep living. Paul has become harder since Linda McCartney died, I don't mean personally but artistically it's given him a demon to fight. There is nothing cute about the sceaming Run Devil Run or the magnificent Rushes.
Something very different is happening with John Lennon. I was in a Starbucks recently and their cd of the month is a Lennon collection made exclusively for Starbucks. John Lennon's music wasn't made for a gigantic coffee chain, just like his image wasn't made for boxer shorts and fleece blankets. We are losing the main thing that distinguished John Lennon from the majority of his peers and the thing that was his biggest asset, his anger.
There is a moment on the amazing Who box set Maximum R and B where you here Pete Townshend kicking Abbie Hoffman off the stage. It's a raging definitive moment where Townshend is separating himself and The Who from the blossoming hippie movement. Lennon, even perhaps more that he realized shared a lot of Townshend's rage. For all of his activism and talk of peace John Lennon was always that angry young punk rocker who grew up worshiping Elvis and understood that a major element of Rock and Roll was personal exorcism.
One of the things that made Lennon so important was that he took the early energy of Elvis and Little Richard and he combined it with some of the most introspective songwriting that has ever been written. A damaged soul who never, at least in his music and I'm guessing in his life, got over the death of his mother. Listening to John Lennon at his rawest is like listening in on a confessional, an angry loud screaming testimony. This was a man who truly lived for Rock and Roll, if he hadn't had that it's hard to imagine what would have happened to John Lennon.
None of this is to discount the peace loving, humorous and ultimately tender aspect of Lennon and his work but those sides of him are being pushed so much onto people, especially younger people, I can imagine in a few years the nightmare of walking into a Wal-Mat and seeing something like 'John Sings Songs of Peace for Your Youngest' or designer baby cribs with partial lyrics to Imagine scrolled down the side.
I remember I first started to notice this new Lennon being pushed onto the public in the late 90's during the Come Together tribute. A sickening sweet candy coated concert that would have made you think that John Lennon was the most one dimensional cartoon character that ever lived. Only Lou Reed seemed to remember who he was saluting with a pulverising Jealous Guy. The memory of Kevin Spacey breaking out into Mind Games towards the end of that show still causes me nightmares.
Even the legendary lost weekend is becoming glossed over to the point of being erased. This dark period, away from Yoko, which had an at times ferocious child like Lennon getting arrested for assault and making some of the best and worst music of his life is becoming just a 'cute' footnote.
The quick mythologizing of Lennons final album, Double Fantasy, predicted the directions things were going to go. A critical and commercial disappointment upon released, soon after his death these bad reviews and poor sales were forgotten and people now view the album as being a triumphant comeback. Ironically it's that rose colored view that has made one of his most interesting works one of the least discussed. Songs like the brutal I'm Losing You and Milk and Honey's Stepping Out are among the best he ever wrote, but they also call into question the supposed perfect life in the Dakota that his last few years are currently being portrayed as. These songs, among others that question the marital bliss and perfect father, call into question everything that is more and more being accepted about the 'truth' of John Lennon.
In an odd way I am almost grateful for this shameful commercialization and softening of Lennon. It's made me go back and re-acquaint myself with his work and life. I didn't realize how much I missed that power and anger. I had forgotten how much a song like Isolation or I've Found Out could speak to me. Ironically, the forces in power that have attempted to change Lennon have brought his true spirit back to me. I worry about younger fans though and people who aren't intested in the truth that Lennon famously said he wanted. I worry about those people who might get there introduction to one of our greatest angry young men through a Starbuck's exclusive.
I have no idea what the future will hold for John Lennon's legacy. This sugaring might continue fo generations but I can only hope that the music will win out. That's the one thing that can't be sanitized, they can wrap the spirit of Lennon up in an American Flag and send it across the globe but they won't be able to change his words and music. For everyone that chooses the 'edited for content' version I can only hope there will be just as many that fall in love with one of our most primal and necessary screams.

"Until We Meet Again"

Thirty years ago tonight at Indianapolis's Market Square Arena an exhausted, disillusioned and sick Elvis Presley stepped onto a stage for the final time. He would be backed by his James Burton led TCB band, a band often described as one of the greatest live bands ever assembled, and he would perform 21 songs from all parts of his remarkable 23 year career. The reviews of the Indianapolis show were among the best of that emotionally and physically devastating 1977 Summer tour but the reality is that it is like many of the shows from that year, a combination of a tired artist walking through some songs while investing others with explosively spiritual readings that would show the last things to leave Elvis Presley were his voice and heart.
Much has been written about Elvis in that final fateful year of his life. It has always baffled me as to how people can take such glee in cruelly making fun of someone who was in such an obvious state of emotional and physical turmoil, but that is exactly what the last thirty years have brought. Whether it be the ill conceived CBS television special that was aired to pay off Colonel Parker's gambling debts, or the factually and spiritually corrupt Albert Goldman assignation job of a book in 1981 to people who have no conception of how important culturally and devastatingly talented this man was; 1977 and the years since have taken much away from the legacy of Elvis Presley.
The thing that strikes me most about that fateful final year is just how, even at his most vulnerable and damaged, great Elvis Presley remained. For all of the rushed through and lifeless performances that he gave that year, each show would also feature some of the most powerhouse vocals of his career. I'm not an apologist for Elvis in 1977. The man was sick and needed to be in a hospital and not on the stage but there are moments, like when he is singing HURT, HOW GREAT THOU ART, BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATER and especially a exorcising UNCHAINED MELODY, that the most powerful aspects of Elvis come out. Also noteworthy is that this was clearly a man who was remembering something special from his past and the spirited performances of TRYING TO GET TO YOU, LITTLE SISTER and an acoustic driven THAT'S ALL RIGHT all point to the fact that Elvis seemed to be finding solace in much of the rock music of his youth. A planned rock and roll studio album was being discussed for late 1977 and with people like John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and David Bowie clamoring to write and produce for him, the late seventies could have been a most glorious time of renewal for Presley.
But it wasn't meant to be and as tragic as the final year of Elvis Presely's life was, it is hard to imagine things any other way now. The site of Elvis Presley's final show was a sports arena built for the Indiana Pacers in 1974. Elvis had played there before but in that final show it has been reported that the 18,000 people that saw him thirty years ago tonight was the most the arena could hold.
The show was pretty typical for 1977 with the aforementioned THAT'S ALL RIGHT being the opening song after the 2001 theme played. The beguiling and always powerful CAN'T HELP FALLING IN LOVE closed the set which included readings of songs ranging from YOU GAVE ME A MOUNTAIN to LITTLE SISTER to a surprising, for 77, I CAN'T STOP LOVING YOU. The final words Elvis Presley spoke on stage were, "Until we meet again, may God bless you...adios."
The Elvis Presley of 1977 was the same Elvis Presley who had stunned people in his legendary 1968 comeback special, just like he was the same man who had made millions of people happy in his 31 feature films, and the same person who had inspired every major rock artist of the sixties and seventies with his work in the fifties...and finally the Elvis Presley of 1977 was the same little boy who grew up in poverty stricken Mississippi dreaming he could reach something else. The career of Elvis Presley can be split up into parts but it should never be forgotten that this was the same man all the way through and there was still a lot of that young dreamer left in him even at the end. Elvis in 1977 is often described as 'old Elvis' which is a mistake because Elvis Presley never had the chance to grow old, he was just 42 when he died.

Like many landmarks Americans take a weird satisfaction in destroying, Market Square Arena was imploded a few years ago to a crowd of hundreds; a crowd that erupted in a mixture of boos and cheers when the destruction happened. It has always reminded me of a line Lou Reed wrote in 1989, "Americans don't care too much for beauty, they'll shit in a river and dump battery acid in a stream..then complain that they can't swim." There is a strong element in our country that takes a certain sick satisfaction in tearing down our landmarks and idols. Certainly for the last thirty years they have tried to do it to Elvis Presley and yet somehow he remains; like some sort of indestructible reminder that you can't kill a dream that millions of people have ended up sharing.

Elvis Presley was often described, throughout his life, as someone who wanted nothing more than to make the people around him happy, and up to those last moments when he walked off that Indianapolis stage he was still doing just that. His ultimate sacrifice for making people happy was finally his own life, which perhaps says as much about the world we live in as anything else ever could. Ironically, even thirty years after he sang those final notes, Elvis Presley continues to make millions upon millions of people happy...whether you are a fan or not, that is a fact that should be celebrated.