117 posts tagged “70s”

Around 1979 I was a big fan of the Saturday night radio show on WAVA FM 105, one of the DC area's major AOR stations. The intro music was an a capella piece with a bass ostinato keeping the rhythm, and lead vocals singing "Saturday night" and "Saturday night is partyin' time" repeatedly. I never knew what it was, and just today it occurred to me to Google it. The song is "Saturday Night" from the 1972 musical Don't Play Us Cheap by Melvin Van Peebles, adapted from his novel The Party In Harlem. Here it is:

The verses were cut from the WAVA intro spot, so this is the first time I've heard the whole song (it's still little over a minute long). George McCurn's amazing bass remains the centerpiece of the song, though. I wonder how many other DC suburbanites remember this one.

(Which is worse, that I spent Saturday nights listening to the radio as a teenager, or that as an adult I'm spending a Saturday night writing about listening to the radio on Saturday nights as a teenager?)

It's been a year and a half since my last big post on soundtrack music; after gorging on Ghost Box albums last week, it's time for another one. The Ghost Box label purveys music in the style of "modern" 70s library music, a nouveau retro-futurism to succeed the old retro-futurism that looked back to the 1950s, the era of Mid-Century Modern and a zeitgeist of limitless technological possibilities. By the 1970s space travel was a reality (to the moon and back, at least); a greater cultural awareness of both the difficulties of space travel and the incredible reaches of outer space, coupled with advances in electronic music synthesis, lent "futuristic" music a new tone, both physically (synthesizers replacing big bands) and emotionally (an air of we-can-do-it determination replacing the we'll-all-go-zing-zinging-through-space giddiness of the first wave of Space Age Pop). Going back to my categories of soundtrack music as defined in that first post, here is an example of real library music from the 70s by Alan Hawkshaw, one of the giants of library music, from the 1978 Bruton Music library album Terrestrial Journey:

Vangelis' "Pulstar" from his 1976 album Albedo 0.39 was not necessarily written as soundtrack music, but it has been used numerous times as theme music for radio and television programs. Indeed, I first heard it as the intro music to the news segments on my college radio station.

Echoes of "Pulstar"'s melody can be heard in "Wildspot" by Belbury Poly, a.k.a. Ghost Box co-founder Jim Jupp, on the 2004 album The Willows. Ghost Box's interest in 70s futurism extends to their cover art as well: 

Though from 1982 and not technically the 1970s, the St. Elsewhere theme (by soundtrack hack veteran Dave Grusin) contains all the elements of 70s musical futurism and thus belongs in this survey. Would you believe I'd never heard this until my wife played it for me last week? (I wasn't much of a TV watcher in college. Nor am I now, for that matter.)

70s retro-futurism has crept into today's TV programming as well, with two series of the 70s popular-science show spoof Look Around You having been produced for BBC2 in 2002 and 2005. The theme music from the second series could be original to the period:

Interestingly, the program that was the most obvious target of Look Around You's satire, Tomorrow's World, did not use futuristic music in its 1970s opening sequences, but engaged in some retro-futurism of its own, looking back to the sunny, uptempo big band music that accompanied so many "world of tomorrow" featurettes in the 50s:

Welcome back to the future!

I onIy ever bought one hits album that was advertised on TV--it was so good I never had to buy another one! Ronco's 1974 compilation Get It On! boasted "20 ORIGINAL HITS 20 ORIGINAL ARTISTS", and it is a wonderful cross section of the popular music of the day. That was a time when different genres could still coexist on the same radio station, liking one genre did not preclude liking another, and the most negative emotion expressed was the stylized melancholia of the blues in B.B. King's "To Know You Is To Love You". Since mentioning Get It On! in yesterday's post I thought I'd see if I could recreate the album in a Grooveshark playlist; lo and behold, all the songs were available for streaming, so voila! You can listen to the album on Grooveshark here, or just play the convenient widget below. What a great bunch of songs! Just look at that track list! Don't delay, press play!

Spending seven hours in a car with a broken CD player on Wednesday and another seven hours today gave me plenty of time to survey the contemporary radio landscape, and what a dismal scene it is. There were a few bright spots (every one of them a college or public station), but they were emphatically not the stations playing current hits. I can't decide which is worse, Autotuned vocals (can't call it "singing") that sound like robotic mosquitoes, or country music, which has figured out how to mimic every other genre of music until the telltale plaintive twang of the singer comes in and drenches everything in bathos. But what it all has in common is that it's all overdone and overproduced; like our food, it's been overprocessed until most of the nourishment disappears. The song I happened upon that really pointed out all this excess was Free's "All Right Now." That has to be the cleanest, simplest production I've ever heard on a hit single, ample proof that you don't need 48 tracks and Autotune to make a great record:

Who is the Free of today?

Paul DiFilippo's recent post on wordless singing brought Claire Hamill's Voices album to mind, which I wrote a post about two years ago (so for background on my adoration of Claire Hamill, see that post). Poking around on the web for more Claire Hamill information, I was pleasantly surprised to find a wealth of her performances now online as streaming videos, and her audio back catalog available for free download from her website! Here, then, is a selection of those videos.

Claire's 1984 album Touch Paper appears to be an amalgamantion of new tracks and previously-released singles, several in the New Wave mode; "The Moon Is A Powerful Lover" was one of my treasured 45s in the 80s, and I always thought it should have propelled her to Kate Bush levels of popularity:

"Ultraviolet Light" features Gary Numan on synths, and was another favorite of mine:

Here is the song that first brought Claire to my attention, "Look Over Your Shoulder" from The Steve Howe Album:

I just learned yesterday that Claire had a short-lived rock band called Transporter in 1980, releasing just one single, "Kids on the Run":

And she's still at it! Here's a live clip from December 2008, singing "Londonderry Boy":

And another selection from the landmark Voices, because it's there:

Finally, there is a five-part interview with Claire spanning her whole career, called "The Claire Hamill Story", appropriately enough. Here is the first part; subsequent segements should show up as related selections:

Perhaps you remember listening to Styx's Pieces Of Eight album, scratching your head at "Aku-Aku", the mellow instrumental at the end of the album, and writing it off as filler.  But I posit that young Robin Guthrie took it as divine inspiration, forming the basis of his guitar and composition style that would come to fruition in the Cocteau Twins.  Compare "Aku-Aku" with a representative track from Blue Bell Knoll:

UK funk trio the Baker Brothers (Dan Baker, Rich Baker, and non-brother Chris Pedley) are generally a little too close to smooth jazz/disco for me (too much hi-hat, not enough snare), but "Aargh, Aargh-Aargh" would fit right in on my virtual mixtape of Badass Instrumentals:

 

After steeping in New Model Army for the last couple weeks (whose show at The Haunt last Friday was just sensational, BTW), I opted today for something lighter: Spies and Dolls, a 1972 album of spy and crime movie themes by The Chaquito Big Band, led by John Gregory.  The orchestration of these mostly-familiar tunes is quite imaginative; check out the bassoon in "They Call Me Mister Tibbs"--

Somehow it entered my mind this evening that the pre-chorus marimba ostinato in Japan's "Methods of Dance" sounds a lot like the background ostinato in Peter Gabriel's "No Self Control", then I started thinking about tuned percussion (marimba, xylophone, balafon, vibraphone, or their synthesized equivalents) in Japan's music in general, and how they often used tuned percussion for melodic motifs, and how Peter Murphy used nearly identical licks in some of his songs.  So I made a playlist to convey my point, but regardless of my point, they are all great songs to listen to:

One of the funny things about growing up is that you don't always learn things in the right order, which is why I knew Tim Curry as a recording artist before I knew he was an actor.  His song "I Do the Rock" was a minor hit in 1979 (reaching #91 on the Billboard chart) and I enjoyed it whenever it came on the radio.  What I notice about the song now are (1) the variety of first names in the lyrics are not just random first names (a la "Games Without Frontiers" or "88 Lines About 44 Women") (I think those are random, at least), they refer to actual people, most of whom I can guess and all of whom are explained on this helpful page; (2) the soundstage has a lot of "Virginia Plain" in it, and Curry's vocal cadences may be an homage to, or parody of, Bryan Ferry's (or they may not); and (3) he is not actually singing, it's more like rapping.

Back in the 80s, when Sting first started "acting" in films, an interviewer asked him rather bluntly, "What makes you think you can act?"  To which Sting adroitly replied, "What makes Tim Curry think he can make records?"  Touché.