The idiota on the colina

And now for some Sergio Mendes-meets-The Beatles with "The Fool on the Hill."

Again, there are perhaps no deeper meanings in why I love this song and much of Sergio Mendes's early records, at least the ones that were available in the US. Maybe we should just blame it on (or credit it to) the bossa nova, '60s Latin exotica, beautiful voices, expert jazz musicianship, nostalgia, and, sure, my neighbor Suzy sharing her bossa nova records with my family all those years ago.

And perhaps that's the most significant thing this record and this sound represent, the opening of my little American mind (at the ripe age of 3 or 4 or so) to the world around me, a point of view that I've always tried to embrace as much as money, time, and opportunity would allow.

A case in point: At various times so far this year, I had already hoped to visit Mexico City, North Carolina, Montreal, Senegal, and either South Africa or Argentina. I even applied for a job in Egypt earlier in the year and actually had a video conference interview with the search committee. Imagine little ol' me from North Cackalacky swanning about with the Pharoahs!

How dare this little bastard virus disrupt our lives so thoroughly? I'm throwing down the gauntlet and setting a post-COVID 19 goal: To keep traveling, to travel even more, once (and here's hoping it does) life returns to normal.

Yes, I will embrace my role as the fool on the hill, the fool on the veld, the fool on the pampas, the fool on the desert plain, in all its various meanings.

Springtime and Suzy

A fan-made video for "Spring" by the British trio, Saint Etienne, from their debut album, Fox Base Alpha, one of my Top 10 albums. There are too many songs to select from this album and from Saint Etienne's long career (active 30 years now and still going strong).

There's no real deep thoughts or significant moments in my life surrounding this song or this album, although, released in 1990, it did feel as though it heralded a new era in music, at least British pop, after all the years of Stock-Aitken-Waterman and the "Sound of a Bright, Young Britain." To me a SAW production was always a bit like candy: Delicious in and of itself but not necessarily satisfying or soul nourishing. (Author's note: I love candy.) But that may depend on the person and the pop. Who am I to say your pop doesn't fill you up?

Instead, this song and this album are just joyous, lovely music to listen to, "Spring" and another song, "Nothing Can Stop Us Now" (later covered by, but dumbfoundingly released as a B-side, by Kylie Minogue) being particularly good examples of what Saint Etienne did then and still does now to a degree--a melding of Burt Bacharach and '60s pop songwriting with contemporary production. If I were more critical, I'd say that sometimes the results on this album could be too precious and arch, but I think the group figured that out early and moved on to making solid, beautiful, catchy, and even danceable pop songs.

I guess if anything this album prompted me to return to the music of childhood (The Supremes, Dionne Warwick, Dusty Springfield, Petula Clark, even Nancy Sinatra) and appreciate it for its specialness and innocence. And in the midst of a global pandemic, a little more innocence and joy in the world are definitely welcome in my world.

* * *



Oh look! A proper video for Saint Etienne's "Nothing Can Stop Us Now." On Kylie Minogue's version, the vocals are stronger, the enunciation better, but this certainly has the same feel (even if, in this video, the lips don't always match the music).

So, on second thought, maybe there are more memories connected to this song and this album, than I originally realized. I suddenly think of Suzy, the swingin' '60s daughter of one of our next-door neighbors growing up. Susy (or Susie or Suzie, I honestly don't know) seemed exotic: Divorced with a young son, older than me, dating a soldier (I have a vague sense that he was an officer in the US Marines), Susy must have seemed scandalous to some in conservative Eastern North Carolina. She drove a red convertible--a Stingray! And she listened to bossa nova records!

I think we've established that my life has been one long, fitful affair with the exotic, the international. It is perhaps because, deep down, I feel so un-exotic, so un-international. I have tried to remedy that through travel, through choices in music and literature, by dating people of different backgrounds (whether intentionally or not but sometimes quite intentionally I am ashamed to admit), by "living abroad" in totally un-exotic Canada. (It seemed like a bold choice at the time, although Montreal would have likely been a better, if more financially crushing [50%+ income tax rate!] option.) Maybe my fascination, dare I say boyhood crush on Suzy? is one place where that began--along with my Dad's "exotic" travels in the war-obliterated Pacific and post-war China and Japan.

So a big ol' obrigado to Suzy, whose last name I can't remember either, and those wonderful bossa nova records of hers. I remember riding around in her Stingray, I remember those bossa nova horns on the records she gave us (really, Suzy, why were you giving these away?), and I remember her giving us a lot of recordings of musicals, which, surprisingly, had absolutely no effect on me because I have never been that type of gay.

Nice try, Suzy. But I give you credit for knowing your fanbase long before your fanbase knew himself.

L'amour à la plage

More 10s from my Top 10 continued - "L'amour à la plage" ("Love on the beach") by French pop group Niagara (1986).

I've had a thing for French pop for some time, both French pop from Europe but also Québec and other parts of the world. Where and when did this begin for a little North Carolina po' white trash boy born in the 1960s? It could have been all those years ago, listening to Radio Canada International on shortwave radio as long ago as the early 1970s. It could have been the first time I heard "Soldat" by Vanessa Paradis playing in a shop in San Francisco in 1990. It could be after I read a review of Mylene Farmer's songs, "Je t'aime, mélancolie" and "Désenchantée," in the Village Voice in 1991 or so. It could have been when I heard "Marcia baila" by Les Rita Mitsouko, another group I remember hearing in San Francisco in the early '90s--but one that was always a bit too cool for me. I like my pop pure and unaffected--although it's hard not to appreciate "Marcia baila" all these years later).

Or it could be when I lived in Washington, DC, the center of the universe (hardy har har) in the 1980s. There was a radio station, WHFS I think, known for its new wave and "alternative" music but which on Sundays turned the broadcast over to international language and music programming for the expat communities in the DC area. There was a program that played great pop music from France, and because I didn't know a word of French at the time (and some might argue I still don't), I had no idea what was being played and by whom.

Sometime in the early 1990s, the Express clothing store chain released a French pop compilation cassette, which I bought on a whim to play in my Walkman. And funnily enough, it featured some of the songs I remembered from a few years before on WHFS. That was likely the moment when the connection formed between the musical memory and the practicality of titles and artists.

One of my favorites on that cassette--and one that I remembered from years before--was "L'amour à la plage" by Niagara. "C'est l'amour à la plage (aouu cha cha cha), mes yeux dans tes yeux (aou aouuu)."

It's the tail end of winter here in Toronto. As I write this, I'm staring out at Lake Ontario, catching a glimpse of a marina and possibly one of Toronto's beaches in the distance, listening to this song, and trying to imagine that my French pop fantasy-scape is just ahead on the horizon, just out of reach, but only a few sunny days away ....

And that's what I like about French pop: Hope for sunny days ahead tempered by a twist of winter's melancholia and life's disenchantment.

In the rain

Highlights from my 10+ Albums: "In the Rain" by The Dramatics.

I debated whether this was the song or if the theme from Shaft by Isaac Hayes was the song, the song that started an interest/obsession in 1970s soul, particularly the Southern Soul that they used to play on AM radio back in the day. It could be either of them, or it could be another song, like something by Barry White heard on childhood car trips across the Southeastern US ("See Rock City!" "Stuckey's--7 Sticky Miles!"). Or even "Sideshow" ("Let the sideshow begin/step right on in...") by Blue Magic.

But "In the Rain" is pretty, well, dramatic and memorable all on its own. There was an AM station in Jacksonville, North Carolina, aka "Marineland," near where I grew up, that gave this heavy rotation at one point, so it's become one of my favorites over the years, a song that also seems to herald the "Quiet Storm" movement on FM radio a decade later (WHUR, Howard University Radio in Washington, DC, being one of the finer purveyors of the genre in the early 1980s).

Growing up in the South, growing up in the US, we listened to R&B/soul/black music constantly, but we weren't necessarily kind to or respectful of African-American performers. The choreographed dancing, the vibrant-colored suits, the emotional lovey-dovey nature of the songs all seemed "too much," worthy of ridicule, even a little camp, sometimes. And yet I find songs like "In the Rain" engaging, memorable, and poignant on a deep, meaningful level than I do songs by a whole host of rock performers with far more street cred.

I'll also point out that if you listen to early Beatles and early (and even later) Rolling Stones, who are they using for inspiration? Who are they trying to interpret and emulate? African-American performers from the 1950s and 1960s-- Think Chuck Berry, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Isley Brothers, Little Richard, James Brown, Etta James, Aretha Franklin, and many others. Who were about as rock and roll as you can get.

So respect to The Dramatics and all the other '70s soul groups. They earned it just by being on the scene but continue to earn it with their enduring artistry.

In little ways

"In Little Ways" from the Let's Active album Big Plans for Everybody--unlike Björk's Homogenic on the first go 'round, this did make my Top 10 albums list. The choice seems somewhat incongruous alongside my other favorites (ABBA and Althea & Donna, for example). It's the most pop-rock of my choices and definitely an outlier, but an exemplar of that 1980s Chapel Hill/Athens Sound that I listened to from afar in Washington, DC.

"Washington is such a Southern city," people would say to me over and over again when I lived there. I probably see their point slightly more now, but it never ever felt that way to me at the time. It felt quite the opposite in fact--"The charm of the North, the efficiency of the South," as the saying goes--but I didn't necessarily have a good handle on Southern Living at the time either. It took me several years away, a return, and a move to Texas before I became comfortable with the South, or at least stop fighting it as much.

And then I messed it all up by moving away again.

I loved and hated Washington, I loved to hate it, and maybe even hated to love it. It's like almost everywhere I've lived--I'm alternately attracted to, then disappointed and frustrated by most places I've lived, always trying to find "the right one," the place where I feel at peace. (Hey, Siri, play "I Still Haven't Found What I've Looking For" by U2.) I'm not sure I ever will, but I'm becoming more comfortable with that idea, too. Or at least fighting it less.

Although, let's face it, Toronto is the new Washington in my life these days, and because at times it feels as though I've learned so little by living here (earned plenty, however, but worked like a dog to get it), I am not living The Canadian Dream, as many seem to.

If only it were a Canadian Dream Season and I wake up in Texas at some point.

Anyway, why all the talk about North Carolina and the South? Well, Mitch Easter, the lead singer from Let's Active, hails from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. (In the video, you'll catch views of Pilot Mountain, northwest of Winston on the road to Mount Airy, in the background. Andy says hey.) He was one of the big players in the "jangle pop" Chapel Hill/Athens Sound back in the day--he even produced R.E.M.'s early records, including the album Murmur and the hit song "Radio Free Europe," along with producing albums by Game Theory and The Connells (another North Carolina favorite), and has had musical connections with Don Dixon, Chris Stamey (The dBs, yet another North Carolina favorite), Marti Jones, Richard Barone (of The Bongos, early New York post punk/New Wave stars), and a whole host of other, "obscure" jangle pop, mostly Southeastern US musicians.

That scene was not necessarily my scene. In addition to not feeling at home most places (or possibly in relation to not feeling at home), as a young gay man and as a person in my head who always seems neither fish nor fowl but ..., neither salt nor pepper but ..., neither Canada nor the US but ..., neither Chapel Hill nor Raleigh nor even Durham, neither Veronica nor Betty but maybe both (or maybe just Reggie and Moose), I don't think I missed anything by not being in North Carolina or Athens during this '80s jangle pop heyday. I think I wouldn't have fit in. At all. And would have been wondering what my life would have been like if I'd move to Washington rather than staying home.

But that sound, Let's Active, Don Dixon, the dBs, were all a great comfort while living in Washington. They were the North Carolina I wanted to live in and might have lived in if I had stayed. They were the movie Junebug. They were the book Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons. They were "Southern Culture on the Skids," North Carolina pop art with a little 'a.'

I still despise R.E.M. to this day, so there's no accounting for my taste or consistency in my mindset. But I live with the South in me every day.

Makossa

My Top 10 albums memory series continues with an acknowledgement of today's passing of Cameroonian musician, performer, and legend, Manu Dibango and an all-too-short tribute to his music.

There's a rather odd video for this song--"Soul Makossa" by Manu Dibango--on YouTube that features lots of African children dancing, along with some traditional dancers. And that's great. But there's a quite strange scene, too, of an old man trying to, let's say, "dance" with a, let's say, "woman," that may be too much for sensitive viewers.

I don't consider myself that sensitive of a viewer; I want to know what the hell is going on between those two! But, instead, let's just go with the music on this one, which is all you really need.

Believe it or not, this song was a Top 40 hit in the US back in 1973. I remember hearing it on the radio, sometimes the 45 version, sometimes a portion used as a break between programs, even in rural Eastern North Carolina, where I grew up. I don't know how I ever matched the song and the performer given my lack of information back in the day, but somehow I did, and this remains one of my favorite songs of all time.

The instrumentation, the beat, the spoken word, the chorus, the famous mama say mama sah mama kossa--which has been used in other songs, most notably Michael Jackson's "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" and Rihanna's "Don't Stop the Music"--for me, they are sublime.

Some consider this song to be the first disco single. Which is great and nothing to be ashamed of because it's joyous, highly danceable, and a party all on its own. I've read from one source that "makossa" means "I will dance" in one of Cameroon's traditional languages. But it's definitely more than a dance song. If you listen to some of the R&B hits of that era and some of the Afropop music of that era, it's as my good friend FouChat once suggested, it's as if they were listening to each other. They were talking to each other, singing to each other, playing for one another, through records and music, across an ocean and through a forced, brutal diaspora. As if to say, we're still here, we're still together, we see you.

A case in point: Various songs by Isaac Hayes and Barry White are also considered the first disco song. Again, maybe they were all listening to each other's records. Who can say?

So this song for represents a love for dance music but also a love for African music, a love for soul music, a love for Africa and travel and curiosity and adventure and exploration. It reminds me of listening to my shortwave radio in my bedroom at night trying to pull in the faintest "tropical band" radio stations from Cameroon, Gabon, Togo, Guinea, Ghana, Nigeria, and more. It reminds me that I want to see that part of the world at some point in my life.

I was hoping this would be the year. (I had a trip to Senegal all mapped out and was making plans to take yellow fever and malarial medication. But now I might have to take a raincheck (or a plaguecheck as it were). Nonetheless, I feel it will happen. This year, next year, soon.

Aire

To keep myself entertained (and hopefully you, too), I'm starting to post videos/performances/recordings of songs I like from my recent Top 10 albums list, along with other music that has had an impact on me over the years.

Some of it will be marvelous (to me), some of it will be execrable (to you), and some of it will be a bit of both. But, hey, that pretty much sums up my tastes, and at the ripe old age of 58, I'm tired of apologizing for what I like.

Second up: Yuri, "Cuando baja la marea" (rough translation: "When the tide goes out").

This was a song I heard over and over again on my first trip to Mexico in 1987 or so. Somehow in the days before Shazam and the worldwide web, I tracked it down and was able to find a copy of the album (OK, cassette, most likely!) and bring it home with me, along with a tape by Alejandra Guzman (who, like Yuri, has stood the test of time in Mexican popular music) and another group, Viva Voz, who are now lost to the ages (or at least to me).

It's a very straightforward ballad (this video features a different, more rhythmic interpretation than the original), but it is booming, emotional, passionate, and melodic, which is pretty much what you want in a pop song. I still get a "frisson" hearing it 30+ years later.

On that same trip to Mexico, I also went to a gay bar and saw an amazing drag show (and I don't really even like drag) during which one of the performers dressed like Yuri (correction: was Yuri, captured Yuri's essence as it were) and performed (in stilettos no less) another Yuri hit from the era, "Hombres al borde de un ataque de celos" (rough translation: "Men on the verge of a jealousy breakdown"). Another Yuri classic but in a different, very poppy way, with a song and video that launched a thousand drag queens.

I don't know a huge amount about Yuri, but from what I do know, she kind of has this great life story, one that cemented her status as a romantic female diva/gay male and straight female icon of a sort: Child star, successful singer, early marriage and divorce, drug addiction, sex addiction, religious conversion (but still stayed loyal to her gay fans), Christian singer, return to secular music, another marriage and adoption, continued personal and professional success. At least that's what I recall reading several years ago.

Who knows? I may have it completely wrong, but why change my possibly imaginary narrative at this point?

Oh!

To keep myself entertained (and hopefully you, too), I'm going to start posting videos/performances/recordings of songs I like from my recent Top 10 albums list or other music that has had an impact on me over the years.

Some of it will be marvelous (to me), some of it will be execrable (to you), and some of it will be a bit of both. But, hey, that pretty much sums up my tastes, and at the ripe old age of 58, I'm tired of apologizing for what I like.

First up: Althea & Donna, "Uptown Top Ranking," a big hit in Britain in the late 1970s. I used to hear this on the BBC World Service Top 20 when I used to listen to shortwave radio back in the day. This along with vintage Bob Marley & The Wailers were likely some of the first reggae songs I ever heard.

"Uptown Top Ranking" is probably not for reggae purists, but it's incredibly catchy, rich in Jamaican patois, and has its own goofy charm ("Oh!"). The key lyric is "Nah pop, nah style, I strictly roots," meaning (as I heard it described once on BBC World Service), "You can't dismiss me as flashy and inauthentic; despite how I look or dress, I'm the real thing."

Good counsel for all of us. Oh!

Day 10: 10 Albums

All the rest (at least the ones I remember)


Althea and Donna: Uptown Top Ranking
Björk: Homogenic
Carly Simon: Playing Possum
Chic: Risqué
Dissidenten: Sahara Electric
Dr. Buzzard's Original "Savannah" Band: Self-titled album
The Dramatics: What You See Is What You Get 
Fleetwood Mac: Self-titled album and Rumours
Giorgio Moroder: From Here to Eternity
Hooverphonic: A New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular
Kate Bush: Lionheart 
Lene Lovich: Stateless
Let's Active: Big Plans for Everybody
Maxine Nightingale: Right Back Where We Started From
PreFab Sprout: Steve McQueen (aka Two Wheels Good)
Qkumba Zoo: Wake Up & Dream
Saint Etienne: Fox Base Alpha
Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66: Herb Alpert Presents ...
Tom Tom Club: Self-titled album
Yuri: Aire

Updated 22 March 2020. Hello, Björk's Homogenic, how could I have ever forgotten you! Goodbye Mono! Really, Saint Etienne was more influential in inspiring all my '60s pop reveries--coupled with a generous dollop of bossa nova maestro Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66.

Day 9: 10 Albums

ABC: The Lexicon of Love

Day 8: 10 albums

Roxy Music: Manifesto

Day 7: 10 albums

French pop

Various Artists: Musique D'Express (French pop compilation from Express clothing stores, circa 1990)

Vanessa Paradis: M&J (1988)

Mylene Farmer: L'Autre (1991)

Day 6: 10 albums

Manu Dibango: Soul Makossa

Day 5: 10 albums

Isaac Hayes: Shaft--Music from the Soundtrack

Day 4: 10 albums

The Blue Nile: A Walk Across the Rooftops

Day 3: 10 albums

ABBA: ABBA

Day 2: 10 albums

Kraftwerk: Computer World and Electric Café

Day 1: 10 albums

One of my sisters-in-law challenged me to name 10 albums that have influenced my musical taste & upbringing. One record per day over the coming 10 days. No explanation, no reviews, just the cover art.

I'm not sure I can limit myself to just 10, so we'll see where we end up.

Blondie: Parallel Lines and Eat to the Beat

In love with love ... and Debbie Harry

Face It by Debbie Harry
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I confess that I am puzzled by some of the Goodreads reviews I have read of this book. Lackluster? Unemotional? Really?! This is a memoir by *Deborah Harry.* There is nothing lackluster about her! Some of us are more expressive than others, and I've always thought (rightly or wrongly) that Ms. Harry had a sly, ironic, even Cheshire Cat-like quality that perhaps is read as "flat affect." But it's all in the arch of her eyebrows, the curl of her smile. The quip. The wry observation. It's subtle. It's sublime.

And, yes, I am a fan.

But a fan who knew very little about Ms. Harry post-1990. And even pre-1990. For example, I did not know about her time in New York on the Downtown Scene. Sure, I knew she came up through the punk era, was there at CBGB's, was mentioned in the same breath as Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine, but I really had no idea how deeply involved she was with the people and places of that lost era--her memories of which certainly made me emotional at times.

And I didn't know as much about her career after Blondie broke up in the early '80s, despite owning copies of KooKoo and Rockbird, despite watching her in concert at Gay Pride in New York in 1990 (at least that's what I recall--she sang "Sweet and Low," I'm fairly certain), and despite seeing and hearing Blondie in concert at the Palace Theater in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, for one of my birthday celebrations in the early 2010s. (Debbie, the gods bless her, actually smiled for the camera when I tried to take her picture!) There have been movies, plays, and TV shows; recordings with the Jazz Passengers; the showcase at the Carlyle (for which I would have moved heaven, earth, and Delta Airlines to have been in the audience); the activism; the friendships.

And while reading this book, I couldn't believe that it's already been 20+ years since Blondie regrouped in the late 1990s and recorded the album No Exit (an album that now appears to be out of print). Time flies when you're sleepwalking through life in pointless meetings and unsatisfying relationships. (Thankfully, one of those scenarios has changed over the years. Hint: It's not the pointless meetings.)

There is certainly more than I want to know--more details about Parallel Lines and Eat to the Beat, Blondie's two best albums (in my opinion) from the Early Era; more details about the transition from Eat to the Beat to AutoAmerican, which seems drastic even now, although it was probably something completely normal in the evolution of the band; more of her thoughts on the reaction to KooKoo, which even now seems mixed, despite it being something of a quirky, musical milestone in pop history. More, perhaps, about what she likes to read and listen to and whether she still paints. And some pics of her dogs would not be amiss.

It may be the case, as Harry notes, that some of the Early Era was a blur because the band was so busy. It may be the case, as Harry notes, that this would be a better memoir if she'd kept a journal over the years.

Nevertheless, I was enchanted by her girlhood in New Jersey and somehow making the decision after high school to become an artist (of a genre to be determined) in New York in the 1960s--and, despite all odds, actually accomplishing it. I felt moved by her losses over the years and about her coming to terms with childhood trauma. I was entertained by her storytelling and (sorry, Debs!) her inherent nerdiness (comics and the space program, oh my), something you would never think possible in the life of an Icon of Cool like Debbie Harry. I felt pride in her inherent, unapologetic Americanness, a quality as post-modern Americans we dismiss too easily.

So if you found this book "unemotional" or "lackluster," I don't know what to tell you. I rarely give a book 5 stars, and the rational being in me might not award this one with that many. But my emotional self values this book and Debbie Harry's revelations more than 4 stars, maybe even more than 5 stars.

Maybe you had to be there--and I really wasn't, as I was marooned in Mayberry in the '70s and early '80s. Maybe you had to want to be there, which I most certainly did but didn't know how to. So this memoir is one way to get a taste for an era I lived through and yet still somehow don't know very well at all. As a result, I'm grateful to Debbie Harry for sharing her life stories with us.

View all my reviews

Snow way

40 years ago today: 20 inches of snow in eastern NC :: WRAL.com: Meteorological spring is here! But as many of you know, just because it's meteorological spring on the calendar, snow isn't out of the question.

Freshman year at East Carolina University. I remember "borrowing" plastic trays from the cafeteria in Jones Hall to go sledding on College Hill. Hiking to the Stop-n-Go (better known as the Rip-n-Run back in the day) to buy soup and other stuff, like carob bars (which I was oddly into at the time). And the first time I ever witnessed "thunder snow."