Friday, November 22, 2002 #15 U2, "The Electric Co."/"Send in the Clowns" (live) Not a cover. Much less than a cover. During one of the quieter moments in "The Electric Co.," Adam Clayton plays a three-note bass line (ding, ding, ding) and Bono answers back with a few lines sung to the tune: "Shhh... 2-3-4. 2-3-4. Why must I hide from myself...when I need the crowd? Bring on the crowd. I love this crowd." And the band brings everything back up with Bono in full crowd ass-kiss ecstasy: "THIS IS MY HOMETOWN! HELP ME! HELP ME!" Problem was, nobody cleared the copyright, and when Under a Blood Red Sky was released, Sondheim sued. The band ended up paying $50,000 and ensure that all future releases of the album would have the SITC bit edited out. For an up-and-comer band, that must've hurt, though probably not as much as Island Record's lawsuit hurt Negativland. The interpolation doesn't sit well with me: with just a touch of self-mocking camp on this little sugarcube, you can recieve visions of them, ten years later, dressed up as the Village People, parading around their sense of irony like it was a fucking virtue instead of a pain in the ass. But oh, the surging, the chiming...the caring. It doesn't make me swell up, but I recognize how fresh-faced and open-hearted their bombast was, and how effectively they could put it across back then. It makes me miss U2. Or rather, it makes me miss those good ol' days when I liked U2 unequivocally. Which is odd, because I've never ever liked U2 unequivocally at all. MTV played "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and I was put off by their seeming militancy. MTV played a documentary on the making of "Do They Know It's Christmas" and absolutely broke into hysterics at hearing what Bono sounded like unplugged. I thought "Pride" and 'With Or Without You" and "Where The Streets Have No Name" were pretty good, and The Joshua Tree deathly dull. When I went on my European Teen From Hell, I went to discos in Italy, Switzerland, France, England and they ALL played "Sunday Bloody Sunday" for seemingly no reason at all and I began to think it was really good. After that, good highs and deep lows: every once in a while, they'd put out a single that I could admit to myself I loved only years after fumes of Bono's disgusting wrongness cleared away a bit. Their track record in this regard seems to be improving, since I think I actually like "Electrical Storm," right here and now! (link)

Tuesday, November 19, 2002 #14 Ferrante & Teicher, "Send in the Clowns" The first nine seconds and the last eleven of this cover have a gauzy orchestra retreating, retiring for the night. Ferrante & Teicher's thing was two pianos and interlocking dynamically; that hyper-precise plink-plink-plink-PLINK! is here, too, but it doesn't register, not even as irritation. When I was about three, I walked into the family den and found a beautiful sound dying away on TV. It was the very end of a commercial for an airline, I think -- just a plane at dusk and an end title. I bet the musicians in the orchestra didn't remember it five years after the fact. A commercial gig like any other, no doubt. I heard maybe three seconds and I still remember. It stopped me. I wanted it to stay but it left too soon. The memory of that evanescent moan was the key reason why I spent about a year of my life listening to local station KJOY and its easy listening versions of pop history rubble, and that's not a fact I can shrug off like an oversize sweater. I've dipped my toe in the 'serious' musics intellectuals like myself used to consider their birthright only a few decades ago, and I've found that when an orchestra is involved, it takes lots of work to care. Yet the timbrally simple sounds of Muzak and its brethren go down sooo easy. I don't think I can lodge a coherent defense for elevator music (not yet, anyway) but I can't stand to say anything seriously bad about such deeply nice music. There's another amazing thing about this track, and it too has nothing to do with Sondheim. It's amazing that a major-label album track recorded as late as 1973 would completely eschew the upper-half of the sound spectrum. No, no treble at all. It sounds like it's being piped into a wood-paneled doctor's office from circa '61 speakers. I'm completely blue-skying here, but maybe this was to make the music more usuable for a wide variety of acoustic environments. The MUZAK corporation does something similar -- for example, easy-listening-style MUZAK is mono, since stereo seperation is considered too distracting to the ear. But this doesn't appear to be in mono. There is some degree of difference between the left and right channels, as far as I can tell. And hell, they released a quad version. Maybe it had a nasty digital mastering process. Beats me. (link)