"Sugar, Sugar": The One That Started It All?

What's your favorite song? Mine's "Sugar, Sugar." You know that song, right? It's pretty awesome, isn't it? It probably won't surprise you to hear that it topped the charts both in America and in the UK when it was released in 1969--but did you know that Billboard ranked it as the #1 single of the entire year? So, it beat out all singles released in 1969 by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Jackson 5 and Stevie Wonder, for instance. When I was in high school I used to spend a lot of time riding around in my friend Jason's car, listening to 104.3 (which used to be an oldies station) on his disintegrating car stereo. Invariably "Sugar, Sugar" would come on at some point in the day, and we would turn it up and rock out. Back then we used to joke that "Sugar, Sugar" was the first indiepop song because the simple chord progression (C Major--F Major--G Major), the fuzzbox lead guitar, and the amateurish-sounding female vocal interjections reminded us of the songs on the 7 inches I had ordered from Slumberland and the Bus Stop Label. Actually "Sugar, Sugar" was the opposite of amateurish; it was written by Brill Building mainstay Jeff Barry, who also penned "Be My Baby," and (yes the sleeve of my copy of End Of The Century confirms he also wrote) "Baby, I Love You." Ellie Greenwich, Barry's partner in writing "Baby, I Love You" didn't help write "Sugar, Sugar"--but is one of the studio musicians who performed on the record. I could have guessed all of this stuff, but what I had no idea about is that The Archies, who "perform" "Sugar, Sugar" are the characters from Archie Comics, who somehow sang Brill Building pop songs on I guess a TV show. So that's why they didn't tour.

The Return Of Love Rock?

After about eight years of that whole black-on-black, angry, politico-rock horse shit, it's starting to look like we might be able to wear whatever we want and start listening to good music again. I have no idea what caused it, but what I call "the dark age" of rock-as-monolith, bands with dress codes, vegetarianism as a musical movement, and, of course, dire cynicism about love and sex, seems to be, well, no longer hip. How do I know this? What could possibly make me so brash as to hope for this? Witness the title of the forthcoming album by Xiu Xiu, Women As Lovers. Would that have ever flown in 2000? No, ma'am. And just look at the cover art; it's more love rock than anything I've seen since Heather Lewis sang on The Wedding Present's Watusi album. Sell your Stones records, pull out your Cat's Miaow CDs, and keep your fingers crossed.

I Fucking Dare You To Buy Tender Forever's Wider

My prediction that women will start dressing like butch lesbians to attract men has already come true, and, although I knew it was going to be hot (check out the picture), I wasn't ready for this. Yesterday when I dropped by Reckless Records on the way home from the Loop I was thrilled to find a copy of Tender Forever's new LP Wider. K Records has been repping Wider pretty hard on its website recently, and I vowed to buy a copy after visiting the act's myspace page and being confronted with the cover of Justin Timberlake's "My Love" that plays as soon as the page loads. It might cause an involuntary roll of the eyes to see a K act categorize itself as "Soul" on its myspace page, but take my word for it: the tag is appropriate.

Tender Forever is the stage name of multi-instrumentalist Melanie Valera. Valera's music career started in a girl group cover band (ironically, that would be the ideal culmination of the music career of my dreams) in her native Bordeaux, France. So, like The Softies or Black Tambourine, Valera's songwriting is largely informed by Phil Spector-like compositions. But this isn't the late 80's, and Wider isn't that kind of K record. The fact that Valera lists Cody Chestnutt among the brief list of influences on Tender Forever's myspace page and the fact that she would cover a Justin Timberlake song conclusively shows that she is totally dedicated to soul and the institution of the love song and that she is perfectly willing to subvert counterculture expectations to maximize their effect. So she dances, flirts, (reportedly) gets emotional on stage, uses a drum machine--whatever it takes. And she musters up quite an amount of swagger, but the really compelling thing here is the vulnerability. Here is a person with apparently little musical training who is going to walk onto a stage, set up a laptop and start dancing and singing her heart out about love. And in true DIY fashion, all of the fragility, the awkwardness, all of the vulnerability just make the record more sexy.

I believe in the love song as an institution, like, say, Elvis Costello does. If you must know, last night I put on headphones and listened to The Ramones' cover of Phil Spector's "Baby I Love You" six times in a row before going to bed. But Valera's songs are even more about love than your typical love song; they're about finding a secret place in the back yard to kiss, about how fast your heart is beating and about how "like war," broken hearts last forever. They're about how even if you break my heart I'm willing to take all of that pain for the chance to be in love with you for just a little while. You know, I don't think I've ever heard any woman besides maybe Diana Ross talk about her "heart" as much as Valera does. Hearing the word repeatedly as I listen to this record sort of puts me in a trance, and by the fifth time I hear it I just want to fuck.

So, everybody agrees that independent records are a great way to learn things by example, right? The counterculture is overflowing with all kinds of people who learned how to dress or how to play guitar or to run a distro or that they should be anti-colonialists or anarchists or vegetarians or whatever just from listening to records. But here's a record that may actually inspire you to do something that matters in your life. And that's the powerful thing about this record--the thing that might have you on edge when you listen to it--because it might actually change you, or give you an ultimatum. Because Melanie Valera may actually get in your face, dance around and tell you that if you're not taking a big chance, then you're not actually in love right now.

Published December 2007. $10 if ordered directly from K Records.

www.kpunk.com

P.S.: Here's a Spanish language review of Wider from a blog called Fuck Me I'm Twee.

Live Music Review: Calvin Johnson at South Union Arts

Last Friday I took the Blue Line down to the UIC stop and walked down to South Union Arts, a newish music venue/art gallery in an old Baptist church on a frontage road by I-94 and surrounded by almost completed condo developments riding on the coattails of a boom around the UIC campus area. I had trekked to UIC--an area in which I don't exactly hang out--to see Calvin Johnson, that primary icon of the DIY world, the Morrissey of American indie pop, or whatever. As far as I'm concerned, indie rock was born when Beat Happening toured Japan. Anyway, it's a big deal to me, so I made sure I went to this show (even though I couldn't get anyone to come with me) since I hadn't seen a listing for an act I gave a fuck about since Lily Allen played the Metro about a month before the Beamish and Bulmers ruitine foiled her tour.

South Union Arts is an interesting place. It has a (free) parking lot, which is unheard of. The cover charge is on a "donation" basis, so I guess if you're a college kid living on a shoestring, you can actually just be like "uh, I'll get you next time, guys." And it's BYO, but I suggest planning ahead, because the only nearby source of liquor is a 7-11 that has a less than ideal selection. I ended up getting an ass-pocket of Jack Daniels for something like $7.89, a purchase that I will simply characterize as "retarded."

Although the Chicago Reader gave a fawning notice of the opening act--some Lilith Fair "c"-rag from Canada--I spent her set in the venue's designated "smoking section," i.e. the front stoop and parking lot, polishing off the bottle of whiskey while talkative college kids yammered about writing poetry and repeatedly made unexplained literary references, each reference totally lost on everybody except whoever had made it.

When Calvin went on, I dutifully entered the unusual theatre space--the part of the church that would have been used for worshipping--accented by an actual neon crucifix above where the alter would have been. The turn-out was less than I had expected. About 100 people occupied the movie theatre-like seats. Every one in attendance without exception was younger than me--and I was two years old when Beat Happening was formed. The stage was maybe six inches off the floor and about three feet from the audience. Calvin, almost inevitably, casually held a yellow Telecaster and wore a white oxford shirt and gray jeans, his hair cropped exactly as it is in every photograph you've ever seen of him. Calvin strummed the 'Caster with his fingers as if it hadn't occurred to him to play it any other way; he was accompanied only by a dude playing drums. As I told myself I didn't know he could sing with this much strength and subtlety, college girls stared at Calvin, transfixed, with their mouths open. I had come to see some old-fashioned twee-pop with a lot of attitude, but it became clear that Calvin had much more than just swagger; he had written really well-phrased songs and he performed them with real aplomb. As Calvin did a few numbers a cappella, I thought "I'd say he's got amazing range, but I don't really know how to measure that," and "Does he look like Joe Beatty? Like if Joe looked even more like his dad?" As the set continued, my delusions became more absurd: "Did Stephen Merritt build his entire career by mimicking this guy?" "I got it: he's like the blonde Elvis."

South Union Arts, 1352 S. Union, Chicago, www.southunionarts.com

K Records, Olympia, WA, www.kpunk.com

British Sophisto-Crooner Publishes First Solo LP in 25 Years

This month Tracy Thorn, a British songstress best known for her work as vocalist of the 1980's sophisto-pop duo Everything But The Girl, published her second solo LP, Out Of The Woods. The record is receiving mainly positive reviews. I'm not quite so enthusiastic.

Thorn's recording career began with the Marine Girls, an all-female band universally characterized as "amateurish," "spare," or "twee," and inspired by acts like The Raincoats and The Young Marble Giants. Thorn released her first solo record, A Distant Shore, in 1982. It too was "spare," and felt pleasantly homemade. It is probably most notable for its very canny cover of The Velvet Underground's "Femme Fatale."

In Everything But The Girl, Thorn and her partner Ben Watt established themselves as purveyors of sophisticated (but unpretentious) bossa-nova-tinged pop, reminiscent of The Style Council, or even Sade. EGBT's first record, 1984's Eden, is a classic of it's subgenre. Much of the material on Eden was released in America in a self titled record that same year. State-siders such as your author likely were first introduced to Thorn's work through the brief sophisto-pop revival embodied (perhaps exclusively) by The Legendary Jim Ruiz Group, a non-prolific but well-loved 1990's indie act. Thorn's work finally reached American radio when an electronic remix of "Missing" from EBTG's 1994 Amplified Heart LP became a hit.

Thorn's singing is subtle, mature and appropriately characterized as classic. Her music makes just as much sense played over the loudspeaker in a Gap store as it does played in a well-renowned art gallery or in a rat's nest high school kid's bedroom, and I've heard it played in all of those places. But my initial impression is that Out Of The Woods is not among Thorn's best records.

Out Of The Woods is packaged very nicely; the artwork does much to work with Thorn's unfortunately over-obvious title motif. But the few tracks from the album featured on Thorn's myspace profile (I confess that I have not purchased the new LP) do much to confirm my initial apprehensions that Out Of The Woods might pander too much to fans of Thorn's foray into the dance club world. Much has been made of the fact that Out Of The Woods is being published after what has been universally characterized as an extensive maternity leave on Thorn's part, and I have nothing useful to add to such discussions. It is my hope that the release of this new album might garner interest not only in this new LP, but also in Thorn's entire back catalog.