Saturday, June 02, 2007 Tony Bennett, "Rags to Riches" (November 21, 1953) "I know I'd go from rags to riches...if you would only say you care." It's Bennett pleading again, but with a swagger: how can you not sing that opening line without a broad smile? He holds onto the bounce of the song; whatever the lyrics say, he's got in his eyes not so much possible rejection but the certainty of reward. And as if to cement this sea change from the abjectness that made "Because of You" and "Cold, Cold Heart" so so goofy, the orchestra abruptly shifts now and then from a holly-jolly up-tempo big-band stylee to a rhumba (or mambo? cha-cha? beguine?) beat. It marks the song as something not quite crooner boilerplate, and as it shifts rhythms too many times, not really dance music. Sometimes I think it's awkward, a desperate attempt at difference...and sometimes it feels like the future, or a future anyway. 7 (link)

Thursday, May 31, 2007 Stan Freberg, "St. George and the Dragonet" (October 10, 1953) I knew of Stan Freberg's reputation as a mocker of rock long before I heard any of his records, and when I finally got wind of "The Old Payola Roll Blues" a few years ago, it was kinda shocking how heavy-handed the hatred was: dude actually evokes the specter of Nazi Germany to get across his horror of rock & roll. In a comedy record! If Freberg hated Dragnet, ostensibly the target of this track's parody, it doesn't show: Freberg uses Dragnet as a springboard for anachronistic humor rather than swing-lovin' pedantry, setting the detective show in legendary times and letting the sillies bleed out. Even the maiden and the dragon speak with dumpy urban accents. I can only imagine this going #1 in that faraway era when a narrative on the radio, whether comedy or drama, was a regular occurrence, and not some potentially confusing interruption in a mad parade of music or talk radio. Yet, as a hit single, "St. George" had to function in a markedly different way from radio shows like Dragnet, not only because its narrative was so brief ("Dragonet"'s three and a half minutes versus Dragnet's half-hour) but it had to have been made with the repetition of airplay in mind. (Suddenly it occurs to me just why the music-lovers of '53 weren't driven mad by the slow-moving charts and their long-lived songs: with so much non-music stuff on the radio, how often could a song get repeated anyway?) It took me about ten plays to realize Daws Butler cracks a laugh at one of his jokes, and about forty to notice that the Jack Webb-manqué, switches "ma'am" and "dragon" at one point in his dialogue. But while it stands up to repetition, it doesn't actually make me laugh. Like at all. But then I have odd tastes in comedy. I mean, I find Will & Grace uproarious and Seinfeld neither funny nor unfunny, and fell asleep watching Duck Soup last year. So this one's a very non-committal 3. (link)

Sunday, May 27, 2007 Les Paul & Mary Ford, "Vaya Con Dios (May God Be With You)" (August 8, 1953 and November 7, 1953) Les Paul gets jazzy and and Mary Ford gets multitracky but "Vaya Con Dios" isn't the daffy technophilia of "How High the Moon". Instead, a fake Mexican slow jam identifiable as such thanks to the title phrase, a superficial (and possibly accidental) resemblance to canción ranchera, and several telling details. As a pop signifier of Mexican-ness, the use of "hacienda" in the first line is only slightly less awkward than, say, "tortilla" might be. Yet as exotica goes, the song's inoffensive as it does most of its work with images -- a journey by night, a sleeping village, a gray tomorrow -- that evoke not "otherness" so much as solitude and loss. This would make the song a remarkable example of pop economy were it not marred by the appearance of "borrow" as a desperate rhyme for "tomorrow," resulting in the completely meaningless line of "...but the memories we share are there to borrow." (How does one borrow a memory?) Still, its slowness and spareness render it conceptually perfect for the dying summer season in which the single first went number one. 6 (link)