7/27/23
Newsletter #409
The Crack of Dawn
I got a root canal at the dentist yesterday (and I have another one today). Due to this, I spent a couple of hours in the dentist’s chair listening to the music on their PA system. I asked, and it was a playlist on Spotify. “Is it a playlist for dentist’s offices?” I joked. The young female assistant nodded, and said, “Yeah, something like that.” Whatever it is, it’s the same basic selection of music that I hear in CVS and Target. As I sat there between procedures with my mouth filled hardware and tubes, I thought, “How would I categorize this music?” The term that final came to mind was, Pop Muzak. Talkin’ ‘bout, Pop Muzak.
Muzak, for you youngsters out there, was a music service that was pumped into stores. The music was an uninteresting variety of bland orchestral arrangements of contemporary standards and hits. It’s main selling point was that it was “inoffensive.”
Let’s back up, shall we? When I was a kid of let’s say 12, I thought rock & roll music was the brilliant distillation of 500 years of musical composition, leading to the clever idea of combining the blues with electric instruments, and a hard backbeat. Lurking beneath that was the idea of rebellion. Rock & roll had nothing to do with my parents’ music and kicked its ass. In some sense, this was true, too. Pop music of the previous generation was bullshit – Robert Goulet, Rosemary Clooney, Jack Jones, Andy Williams – and my parents listened to that. Thankfully, they both also liked Broadway show tunes, plus my dad had a thin streak of sophisticated musical taste, that included a small, eclectic selection of jazz. My dad had Dave Brubeck’s first three popular albums: Jazz at Storyville (1953), Jazz Goes to College (1954, which I’m listening to right now), and Brubeck Time (1954). This was four years before Brubeck had his one big hit (written by the sax player, Paul Desmond), Take Five. The point being, if you were cool in 1954, you listened to jazz. Cool jazz, bebop, hard bop, big band.
In 1956 rock & roll burst upon the scene. Where and how did it actually begin? There are a variety of theories. I personally believe that it was the collision and intermingling of many previous forms: blues, rhythm & blues, gospel, country, reggae, and pop. Pop being the genre of taking the popular form – jazz or rock & roll – and boiling it into pap, which is literally the mush toothless babies eat. Therefore, pop is pap. And as a young kid, I loved it. For a minute the huge hit in 1964 it was My Boy Lollipop; then for another minute in 1965 it was Liar, Liar Pants on Fire. You couldn’t get the silly lyrics out of your head: My boy lollipop/He makes my heart go giddy up/He sets my heart on fire/He’s my one desire/My boy lollipop. Or, Liar, liar pants on fire/Your nose is longer than a telephone wire. In any case, it was a weird amalgamation of influences.
By 1967 rock and pop were both at a peak interesting place, but it’s not as it’s usually represented, I don’t think. There was, on one hand, the psychedelic day-glow of Sgt. Pepper and Incense and Peppermints (I bought the single, or 45 [and still have it], and singles ruled the market then), but the biggest hit of the year was To Sir, With Love, by Lulu, which was from a British movie starring Sidney Poitier, written, produced and directed by James Clavell, the guy who wrote The Fly (1958), and would write Shogun (1975). The biggest rock hit was Light My Fire by the Doors, from the eponymously named album (I just like using that word), which was one of my first five albums, clearly setting a trend for my thinking for the rest of my life as listened to The End over and over again. “He took a face from the ancient gallery/And then he walked on down the hall.” It's also the year of Aretha Franklin’s Respect and Van Morrison’s Brown-Eyed Girl, both of which have never stopped being played, nor should they, and I heard Brown-Eyed Girl yesterday somewhere — that song is 56 years old.
As I look down the Billboard Top 100 list for 1967, I see that I bought a lot of 45s. The Letter by the Boxtops, which I still think is a great song; Windy, by the Association (which was how I learned that bands didn’t always play their own instruments during recording, as in this case where it’s the Wrecking Crew); I’m a Believer by the Monkees; Happy Together by the Turtles; Sweet Soul Music by Arthur Conley; Ruby Tuesday by the Rolling Stones. I could get the cheapest price on a 45 record at, of all places, the Singer Sewing Machine store for 39-cents. Why there? Why did they have records anyway?
My point, although I suspect that you didn’t think I have one, was that I never suspected that of all the odd amalgamations that went into rock, and rock/pop, that it would end up combining with Muzak. This Spotify channel, Inoffensive Music for Dentist’s offices, was the hits from the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, rerecorded in a mellow, 4/4, autotune, some with whistling, and a steady drum machine, half sung by a young girl, or girls; the other half sung by males who all vaguely sounded like Ed Sheeran. And seemingly every song that was ever a hit has been rerecorded. So why write a new one? Not if it’s being turned into Muzak anyway.
But at least I got my root canal, goddammit.
Yet another summer day, and that’s OK.