yep. this one will be chalked up to the WTF category.

you silly american pig-dogs, thinking i’m talking about a different obsession from the 1980s. this one comes from france, le pay avec des pommes frites de ‘freedom’, mais oui?

who is etienne daho? well, using all the french-reading-powers that i can summon from four years of francais (avec ma professeur madame donovan pour trois des ans! mon dieu!), he’s a soulful guy who writes, produces, and sings. beyond that, i need to consult with my friend, mr. wikipedia. apparently — and like jerry lewis — daho is big in france and england. oui! he has even had marianne faithfull on one of his tracks, reading from her great-uncle’s creepily famous work, venus in furs. (yes, virginia. as in the one sung about by the velvet underground.)

(ou est la salle de bains, s’il-vous plait?)

of course, no one in america seems to know of him. so how did i stumble onto this guy with the hot voice?

simple. one day, while writing, i put on the french cafe station of rhapsody. amidst a sea of songs with accordians and songs that sounded like what the hip starbucks on the seine might play, this song came on. it stuck out. i was captivated. je ne sais quoi.

not feeling particularly wordy today, so just go ahead and give it a listen. extra BONUS points to anyone who feels like translating.

fin.

i didn’t want to like the bangles. blame it on my first copy-editing gig.

yes, virginia. once upon a time, i worshipped before the altar of  AP style, thanks to my short but eventful career at the miami hurricane. (i know, i know. you wouldn’t know it reading my blog now.) i’d spend my freshman year sunday nights and wednesday nights crouched before antediluvian computers, trying desperately to make heads or tails out of other people’s words. this, of course, is how i became good friends with my pals fern, gibbons, and my best pal murph. murph and i (and mr. lexicon himself, john barret) would hurriedly try to get things straightened out before they had to be sent downtown to the miami herald.

we were so MOD-ren then: the words would get typeset. then, editors (like me, eventually) would drive downtown, where we would take razors and splice up the copy for layout (or in my case, try not to bleed all over the equipment after i’d accidentally spliced more than the columns.) then, the good employees of el herald would make our papers. finally, i’d awake monday and thursday mornings to papers all over campus, as some sort of magical fairy picked up the finished copy and distributed them everywhere.

anyway, during that freshman year, there was a young woman who would write our music columns. this young woman had ins everywhere, it seemed, and wrote some compelling articles. however, editing her was often the stuff of legend. i think murph and i would secretly avoid editing her because you knew when you got one of her articles, interesting as they often were, they required an inordinate amount of time and patience to complete, something that is in short supply on a sunday night at 10pm when you know you have an 8 am class on monday morning.

yet i will admit now, after 25 years — i think i was the better avoider, as murph got the lion’s share of these articles. poor murph. this was around the time that this young woman seemed infatuated with the bangles. i should point out that, at least in the 1980s, miami was not a bastion of popular music (unless it was club music or, dog help us, local girl gloria estefan and the miami sound machine.  i often thought that a popular song of the day in miami was actually a remedial aid for the UM football team.) a local radio station, SHE 103 (SHE’s only rock and roll) kindly fed us the stuff that would become classic rock, but nothing alternative hit my dorm room unless my BTD shared it with me (the REM Murmur tape he gave me was worn to shreds; poor poor pitiful me never heard of the smiths until i transferred north to Rutgers in 1985.)

and this writer girl, who had cool ideas but definitely required serious editorial backup, went on a bangles binge. at least, it seemed that way to murph and me. (or maybe just me.) i was thinking to myself, who the hell are these girls and why are they treading on hallowed Go-Gos ground? would she please shutthehellup and write about clapton, or van halen, or SOMEBODY else?

it would take me another year or two to remove the stick up my ass listen to the bangles. when i did, it was love at first listen. susannah hoffs has the smoothest rough voice i’ve heard; and their material often took beatlesque turns in a fresh, new wave way that was purely 80’s. sure, the world was introduced to them with the prince-penned manic monday — or maybe walk like an egyptian. but me? hero takes a fall won me over, hook, line, and sinker.

that girl who had the ins and who wrote amazing, albeit editorially-challenging stuff? she’s now works in country music, managing some major acts. she has even co-penned a kenny chesney hit. she doesn’t know me from adam, as i was just a lowly frosh copy editor. but i will give her some serious props anyway, as someone who led me to a band i may not have otherwise discovered back then.

clearly, AP style was no match for that chick. and thank goodness for that!

in honor of my beloved friend karin, who is stuck inside of casper with the jersey blues again.

i attended a womens college in the mid 1980s. that should be sufficient enough an explanation for why i love kate bush and her glinda the good witch voice.

but for those of you who a) didn’t attend a womens college in the mid 1980s or b) don’t grasp the talent that is kate bush, think of this: she was signed at 16, thanks to the recommendation of pink floyd’s david gilmour. she wrote this song, as well as her single wuthering heights (later made more famous, and perhaps more sonically palatable, by pat benatar) sometime before she was 19.  sure, she sometimes sounds like a bag of cats being tortured. but she writes some of the most moving music and lyrics. i think her to be quite a pioneer, actually.

anyway, back to the man with the child in his eyes. bush wrote this one when she was 13 years old. when i was 13, i was writing songs, but nothing even remotely close to this.  it’s such a beautiful song with compelling lyrics. (my lyrics were far simpler, with romantic images of acid rain. no lie.) of course, it didn’t do much on the US charts in 1979; everyone here was still caught in the throes of crap like roller boogie, i’m sure.

but she persists. she has been lauded many times. and i don’t care if you laugh at me: i lurve her.

(and as for you karin, here’s a kate bush extra. love you.)

you and i must make a pack… a pack?

when i was young, i knew it wasn’t cool to like the osmonds (even though i watched their cartoon series every saturday morning.) however, i had no such fear of being uncool when it came to the jackson 5 (whose saturday morning cartoon i also watched. i often wondered whether the people at rankin/bass just altered the cartoon osmond’s faces and tweaked the storylines a little bit. no matter to me. i watched anyway.) in retrospect, i often wonder whether the older kids in both families felt screwed because their respective little brothers got all the attention. it’s 40 years later, and while i still know the names of the other brothers from both families, i couldn’t tell you who was who. i bet marie. la toya, and janet thank their lucky stars they were born girls.

but back to michael, michael, i LOVE you michael (a phrase i continue to hear in my dreams, decades after a particular concert.) somehow, the song i’ve always connected with, the song i’ve always cherished from their repertoire is i’ll be there. sure, there are moments when the pronunciations of certain words mystified me (as i alluded earlier, i could never figure out what michael meant when he sang  you and i could make a pack — we could bring salvation back. what the hell kind of pack did he mean, i wondered — a bag full of hope? a pack of lies? oh, if only the child could include a t at the end of that word.)

ah well. the song tugs at the heartstrings; and while i know there are many of my friends who think it incredibly uncool of me, i have loved this song for decades. this may change, now that an insurance company has taken it over and made it the center of their latest commercial campaign. i just don’t want to have to associate this song with state farm.

(once again, they’ve paved paradise and put up a parking lot. gah.)

i guess michael needs cash now that he’s gone belly-up. and, true to form, this song is there to help.

i know what you’re thinking, and i’m thinking it too: a sour milk sea? gross.

george harrison wrote this lovely ode to spoiled dairy during the white album time period.  ah, that magical, prolific time when there were so many songs and only two albums to hold them. this, like a number of other lovely songs ended up on the cutting room floor (or ended up on other lps.) however, sour milk sea was recorded by harrison’s friend and apple recording artist jackie lomax.

and what a lineup you get when you’re an apple records artist in 1968: george harrison and eric clapton on guitars, paul mccartney on bass, ringo starr on drums, and nicky hopkins on keyboards (the latter played on an amazing array of works in the 1960s-80s and got screwed out of royalties on just about every single one of the works, thanks to his status as a session man.) not too shabby.

sadly for lomax, a great song and a great lineup does not guarantee fame and fortune, especially when you’re depending on the clunky money hemorrhage that was apple corps  in the late 1960s.  a fascinating (and now sadly out of print) account of the time by the “house hippie” recounts the mismanagement and utter insanity that took place in the house that john, paul, george and ringo built. in short, the single did okay but did not propel him to worldwide renown. (hell, apple floundered james taylor’s early career; if james taylor couldn’t get big while there in the early 1970s with songs like carolina in my mind and something in the way she moves, no one could.)

too bad, too. it’s a great song, and lomax provides a fine delivery, a loopy cross between george and marc bolan meets old musichall. the instrumentation is what sells it to me, especially hopkin’s wild piano.

but considering what happened to his career, i wouldn’t be surprised if lomax had a few moments of sour grapes.