two weeks pass...
one month passes...
two months pass...
Great song choice, I'd say, but honestly if I'd heretofore thought
these songs were that great (I barely thought of them at all) I'd
have sometime in my life obtained the originals, whereas I only ever
bothered to own three, one of which I got by accident ("To Know Him
Is to Love Him," one of the lesser songs on a Phil Spector tape my
brother once made for me). And of the other two, "Space Oddity" gets
an excruciatingly dreadful performance here - really awful, not just
out of tune, but leaden and interminable, the only bad thing on the
record - and the other, "Rhiannon," is great, but then the song is
damn nigh indestructible (and the Langley version is hardly a match
for the original, anyway).
As for many of the rest, and "Know Him" too, somehow the Langley
performances make me hear power and beauty that I hadn't previously
noticed.
I don't know. Maybe in a few cases this has to do with the kids'
youthful energy: kid energy is a good thing, and can be great when it
comes across on record ("Double Dutch Bus," Lil' Romeo's "My Baby"),
but there has to be artistry involved, something that organizes the
energy for effect.
For instance, I'll say flatly that when a friend of mine's daughter
Lia (age seven or eight, at the time) got her neighborhood friends to
dance and sing along to Britney's "Lucky," acting it out and somewhat
drowning it out, this was better than the original. When Lucky is
sad, the kids are making sad faces, and so on. It was a real kick,
and I'd say the kids organized their own energy on that afternoon
(the artistic organization of an afternoon). But a tape of
that out-of-tune version wouldn't be worth hearing; nor a videotape
worth seeing - or if the latter were worth seeing, this would
only be if the video maker himself were an artist and knew how to
manipulate sound and images for effect. The greatness of Lia's
performance was in its moment (though the fact that "Lucky" could be
used for such a performance makes the song better than I'd realized,
better than it had been).
So what about the artistry in the Langley's versions, artistry that
works in my moments not just in its own? Energy is only a small part
of it, since the energy songs here are nice but don't predominate and
are usually not the best. The better songs are slow and mournful, and
their renditions matter-of-fact. What I like in "Desperado" is that
the nine-year-old singing it (accompanied only by piano, which is
less in tune than she is) lets the song hold the stage - this is not
my general aesthetic, by the way (nor my general anaesthetic), that
bare beauty is the best beauty. I often like performers who mess with
the material and who throw as much stuff as they can into their
sound. But it was bare beauty that worked at Langley. In the liner
notes the guy says that he kept the accompaniment spare, since he had
all those kids voices and he needed to give them space. And I'd say
the spareness helped him avoid the worst problem of '70s soft rock,
which was that the soft-rock arrangements balanced things out too
much, filled in too many of the spaces, cushioned and muffled
everything in harmonies and strings and guitar - not that there were
too many harmonies, strings, etc. but that they were used in a way
that knocked them all into neutral. So it isn't so much that '70s
soft rock was too slick, or that slick is worse than rough, and
professional worse than amateur (thousands of hardcore punk bands
prove otherwise), but that the willy nilly application of any
professional technique, whether slick or rough, spare
or full - "it worked on the last record, so this is how we
must do things, forever and ever" - simply smothers the ability to
make good music.
On the Langley record the singing is remarkably in tune, given that
it's a bunch of children, nontrained voices, everybody gets to play.
Still, since the voices are untrained, the sound has a fuzz of
nonmusicality at the edges, the sort of nonmusicality that you get
when a lot of untrained singers sing at once. What's impressive,
though, is that the musical director got the kids to sing softly -
beautifully softly - when necessary. This isn't impressive just
because he got them to do it, though getting kids to sing softly must
be difficult, but that they do it well. It's harder to be soft than
loud, and my guess is that the kids must have felt and trusted the
music enough to let themselves be soft, to let their voices sit back
in the melody. The crucial accompanying instrument was the xylophone
(supposed to be Tibetan bells, I think, but it sounds like a
xylophone to me), which plays single notes or two- or three-note
riffs, not a lot of them but very effective. To compensate for all
this soft perfection, whenever there's percussion it comes crashing
in too loud. Fortunately there's not a lot of it, since it's played
for punctuation, not rhythm.
Best tracks on here: "Sweet Caroline," original by Neil Diamond (why
don't I own any Neil Diamond albums?). "Wildfire," original by I
don't remember who. "Venus and Mars," also can't remember who'd hit
with it. "Rhiannon," indestructible, as I said. A good version
of "Mandy." ("Frank, there's this record you're really going to like;
it's got a bunch of ten-year-olds singing stuff like 'Mandy'
and 'Wildfire'"????) "The Long and Winding Road," a girl singing
solo, totally gripping version of a song that I'd hated up till now,
considered it the worst Beatles song ever. Maybe I'd been so angry at
late-Beatles McCartney for retreating into sap that I wasn't willing
to like anything like this. I'd heard nothing good in it. When the
girl sings "will never disappear," and later when the tune
comes 'round again, "Will always lead me here," I say to
myself "That's gorgeous." I just had no idea this song had so much
beauty. Was my problem that originally McCartney had made it sound
too easy? Normally I'd say that if someone makes the difficult sound
easy - which was one of the glories of the early Beach Boys, that
they weren't sounding glorious but just fun - then he's doing a good
job. But that's another rule that doesn't always apply. Maybe I'm
paying more attention to the beauties here, the song intricacies,
because I'm caught up in the process, the struggle for the beauty.
Sometimes the girl's breath goes short, but she never loses the
rhythm and never gets too loud or too soft; stays right where she
needs to be.
Well, I'm not totally helpless: "Wildfire" is by the immortal Michael Murphey,
and "Venus and Mars" is by the hated McCartney (a fact I'd
repressed), but I had to go to Allmusic.com to find this out.
Maybe the post-Beatles McCartney was a better songwriter than I'd
realized, but lost the ability to sing for effect. Or maybe I need to
go back and re-evaluate him. Maybe the Langley versions of his music
are better than his own. Or maybe they're not better, but they're
simply different enough to make me pay attention to what's
there in the music.
And no, I won't say that the versions on here of "Good Vibrations"
and "In My Room" are better than the Beach Boys' (or nearly as good)
but I will say that maybe these performance show why (and how) the
Beach Boys' versions could be bettered.
― Frank Kogan, Friday, 21 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-one years ago) link
one month passes...
two years pass...
three years pass...
ten months pass...
eight years pass...