Sadly I must announce that I will stop with my radio program Domino. I have been presenting Domino now for a couple of years and it has been good fun. A new job somewhere else makes it impossible to continue. I want to thank you for listening and supporting the program. On Saturday 29 May I do one last program which will feature some of usual suspects, a selection of old and new Domino favourites (check out the playlist). Enjoy and thanks for listening!
Hans
I read an interview with Carly Simon. Remember her? Carly was quite a celebrity in the seventies and was compared to great female singers like Carole King and Joni Mitchell. And she had that classic hit ‘You’re So Vain’ about…was it Mick Jagger, Warren Beatty or ….. ?? But she was equally famous for her relationship with fellow star James Taylor. Both great looking, talented, successful and on the top of their careers. Unfortunately things don’t last and this is now all history. But back to that interview. Carly talked the interviewer through her illustrious career showing plenty of pictures of famous friends and ex-lovers. But …not a single photograph of good old James in the house. When the interviewer cautiously tried ‘where is a picture of James..?’ she just replied ‘James who….?’
Early dementia? Probably not. More likely this had something to do with James’ infidelity and heroin addiction which blew the idyllic love affair to pieces. But for a while Carly and James were truly Rock Royalty.
Who else could claim Rock Royalty status and how many survived the stress of Sex, Drugs & Rock and Roll? I am personally not that interested in gossip and hardly follow the private lives of musicians. But I gave it a go and managed to come up with a respectable list of famous rock and rolling love affairs.
1. Johnny Cash & June Carter
Johnny Cash married himself into the absolute top of American music, the famous Carter Family. He adored the family and Johnny and June would stay together through some hard and challenging times. Everyone who ever saw the movie Walk The Line will remember.
2. Michael Jackson & Lisa Marie Presley
Same idea didn’t work out as well for Michael Jackson. Jackson married himself into true Rock Royalty by his marriage to Elvis’ daughter. Many believe that their marriage was a PR stunt to cast Jackson in a better light after allegations of sexual molestation charges involving a 13-year old boy. Jackson and Presley separated on December 10, 1995.
An interesting comment that I got on my previous post (‘Killer Songs’) came from Rik who suggested some great killer songs for funerals. One was a track from ex-Move man Roy Wood, titled Music to Commit Suicide By. An intriguing title for sure and one that makes you think about songs that are so sad that you can only listen to it with a bottle of scotch and a piece of rope close at hand. Maybe the song is not even that bad, it is just so incredibly, unbelievable bad that it pushes you close to the edge.
It is actually not that easy. In the past I have been accused by friends of playing typical ‘suicide music‘ and with that they usually meant guys like Tom Waits, Randy Newman or Lou Reed (‘Berlin’). Not really cheerful party stuff, true. But you will agree that it has to be much worse to make it fit in that special category of Music to Commit Suicide By....
So which musician has that special quality to push it just that little bit further, who can make you realize, right on the spot, that your life, any life at all really, just doesn’t add up? Mentally I am going through a list of the usual suspects: Joy Division, Leonard Cohen, Marianne Faihful, Tim Hardin.. Sad, but still not bad enough.
Then we have the really sad stories of two great musicians, who couldn’t stand it any longer and killed themselves. I am talking about Nick Drake and Elliott Smith. With hindsight you can hear all that bad stuff in their songs and where that just had to lead to. But their music is so beautiful, melodic and also hopeful that they don’t fit the picture either.
I have to go back a long time when I still lived with my parents in Holland. My dad used to love those sentimental Dutch ’tear jerkers’, sad and unbelievable bad at the same time. His favourite was a female singer from Amsterdam, the Singer Without A Name (‘Zangeres Zonder Naam’) was her name. Not much of a voice either, if you would ask me. She sang these truly awful songs about human misery and tears and abuse. A classic that I specifically remembered was a song about a little child having lost his parents and probably everyone else in the world including the dog and other pets. That song was titled ‘At the Wall of the Old Cemetery’. My father loved it and at parties he would turn the music up to unbearable levels. Upstairs I was trying to protect myself by pressing my hands to my ears and holding a pillow case over my head. In vain and my head was filling up with very unhealthy thoughts.
If you ever want to hear Music to Commit Suicide With…don’t look further. I am not sure if you have anything like that in the English musical world. To really understand this you will probably have to listen to those old Dutch records. Even if you don’t understand a word of it, I am sure you will agree that that stuff is hard to beat.
Just make sure you are not alone when you put the record on!!
If you want to know what’s happening in the real world, nothing beats the internet. Did you know that a recent poll in Britain revealed that Frank Sinatra’s My Way still is the most popular song played at funeral services? I know we have all sorts of charts, but that one was still new to me. But what really shook me in the article was that ACDC’s Highway to Hell has stormed into the funereal charts along with Queen’s Another One Bites The Dust. I know, people do make strange decisions in their lives and it will not get any better when arranging your own funeral. You don’t want to make a mess of that one. But what to choose? ACDC?? Do you really want to do that to those poor bereaved people standing around your grave? I don’t think so. On the other hand The Lord Is My Shepherd never did much for me, Ave Maria is just too dull and I can’t stand Amazing Grace. What then? Maybe Van Morrison or Neil Young (‘the needle and the damage done..?), but I can’t think of an appropriate song. Clapton’s Tears in Heaven which he wrote for his little boy is too sad, even for a funeral. But When I Die is hard to beat, especially in the original version of Laura Nyro. That should definitely be the opener. And Dylan’s ‘Death is not the End’ may cheer up the party just that tiny little bit. Knocking on Heaven’s Door could also fit in nicely. Yes, now we’re getting somewhere…but I still need one great killer song for the dramatic moment supreme. I can suddenly see it..just too easy. No Highway to Hell, no Freddy Mercury…this has to be the Monty Python choir singing Always look at the bright side of life (death). Actually quite amazing that Monty Python did not even get a mention in that internet top 10. But it’s all there, look at it:
You come from nothing..you go to nothing..so what do you lose ….NOTHING’.
how about your favourite funeral songs? Any ideas?
In a recent interview with the Fleet Foxes, those young American musicians mentioned that they had been listening a lot to Duncan Browne and how they wished to sound like him. Duncan Browne….mmm yes, but that is a long time ago and I haven’t heard of him since the brilliant ‘Wild Places’ from 1978. I wondered WHY. Well here is one reason: I read on the internet that Duncan had died in 1993 of cancer. By that time he had already quit the music business. His music was commercially not the right thing at the right time. Duncan Browne, if remembered at all, will be remembered for that one song ‘The Wild Places’. He was what we call a One Hit Wonder, one of the many.
In one of the next Domino programs I will honour some of these almost forgotten guys: bands who hit the target once and hit it right. But they disappeared from the public eye just as spectacularly as they had arrived. We remember them from that one brilliant track, their ultimate claim to fame. What is left is a vague memory from the distant past; maybe a gold plated record or some pictures on the wall.
Sad?? I don’t think so. They had their moment in the sunshine and still have that song. If they were lucky with their manager, they may still have a nice bag of royalties too. If not, you may see them one day in your local club trying to earn a few dollars on the retro tour.
Well, here are a few of my favourite one hit wonders (at least the ones that I can still remember) and you can hear some of them on the next Domino program.
Top 25
Last week I read a review about the new movie Moon. A science fiction movie, highly recommended, must-see, five stars…the whole lot. But what caught my attention was the guy on the photo, the movie’s young director, Duncan Jones. And I understood that Duncan is the son of David Jones, better known to us as David Bowie. Read the rest of this entry »
