One of the first blog posts I wrote was, Music Worth Listening To: Eric & Suzy Thompson. They are a husband and wife duo who are probably best known for their work in bluegrass. But they also do a lot of Cajun music and blues. In fact, it was from their performance of “Skinny Leg Blues” that I discovered Geeshie Wiley.

I also use about five seconds of sound from their version of “Last Kind Word” as the exit music for my videos. That’s also a Geeshie Wiley tune. Unfortunately, there isn’t that much of their music online that is of high quality. It’s mostly all a lot of handheld camera phones, and those really annoy me. So here they are doing two Cajun songs. First is “Balfa Waltz.” And then they immediately go into “Lake Arthur Stomp”:

Thus far, our morning music selections have been very, very America. So I thought I would get very, very French for a day. Perhaps it is too early in the day for it, but this is the Serge Gainsbourg song “Je T’Aime… Moi Non Plus,” which literally means, “I love you… me neither.” The lyrics are thinly disguised sexual references, such as, “Tu vas, tu vas, et tu viens,” which means, “You’re going, you’re going, and you come.” There are also lots of references to water and waves and islands and loins. But you don’t need to speak a word of French to know what the song is all about.

It was written for Brigitte Bardot, and she recorded it with Gainsbourg. But before it was released, he created another version with his English girlfriend, Jane Birkin. It is a far sexier version of the song. And it created a sensation throughout Europe. It was banned in many countries, but was nonetheless hugely successful. In America, it only made it to number 58 on the Hot 100. This is because Americans are boring, and the American ideal of masculinity is based on a deep fear that all American men are actual gay, and that this will become clear if they don’t constantly act like jerks.

This is an amazing song.

I’m not a big fan of Michael Penn. I much prefer Aimee Mann. It’s strange. Penn is the better writer. He is something we don’t see nearly enough in popular music: a craftsman. Still, it is Mann’s passion and anger that moves me. But in terms of pure pop music, there really is no one who better than Michael Penn.

Here is “No Myth.” I know that Andrea likes it — because of the literary references. Or maybe it is just that she thought that I would like it because of the literary references. But really, it only has two, and one of them is the most overused and annoying imaginable: Romeo. The other is Heathcliff, which is rather unusual. But there is the problem that I’m not really a Wuthering Heights fan. I fully admit that it is the best Brontë novel — but that’s mostly due to its great consistency that was never matched by the other sisters’ novels.

As for the character of Heathcliff, well, that’s kind of disturbing. I know women are supposed to swoon when in the presence of such a man, but ultimately, he’s more to the taste of adolescent girls than mature women. Had Catherine decided to marry him, wouldn’t he have just turned into a violent drunk who abused her? That’s pretty much the way he was to Isabella anyway — and she clearly never harmed him. He is not a pleasant character.

None of this is to say that I miss Michael Penn’s meaning. Both Romeo and Heathcliff are the stuff of immature female fantasy. But ultimately, the male complaint in the song is the same one we’ve been hearing from “sensitive” young men for centuries: if only she knew the “real” me. But who is the “real” singer? Edgar Linton?

In 1973, Irwin Levine and L Russell Brown’s “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” was released by a band referred to as “Dawn featuring Tony Orlando” — for contractual reasons that have never been very clear to me. It eventually became Tony Orlando and Dawn, with “Dawn” apparently being Telma Hopkins and Joyce Vincent Wilson, even though that was not originally what the band name had meant.

At this point, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” is kind of a joke song — something for Las Vegas crooners to emit from the silk and amphetamine. As usual with this kind of song, the very things that made people first love it — it stayed at Number 1 for a whole month — is what people now hate about it. Story songs tend not to hold up well over time anyway. And this one is overwrought, regardless. “Bus driver, please look for me; ’cause I couldn’t bear to see what I might see…” And then the final payoff, “A hundred yellow ribbons ’round the ole oak tree!” It doesn’t help that Tony Orlando looks like a guy every woman in America regrets having had a one night stand with.

But I think it is a brave tune. It is about a man coming home from prison after doing hard time — three years inside, which means he was probably given ten years. That’s bank robbery time. Or possession of a joint in 1970. But it shows a laudable act of love on the on the part of the girlfriend. A hundred yellow ribbons seems a bit excessive, but then a simple letter would have destroyed the whole conceit of the song. In “Stand By Your Man,” Tammy Wynette implies that a woman should look past all manner of abuse thrown her way “that you don’t understand.” But in this song, the woman is standing by her man in a mature way. You don’t allow a man to walk all over you, but you also don’t expect him to be perfect. So you get down to the important business of decorating that ole oak tree.

Afterword

The down side of this is that Tony Orlando has been a big booster for “yellow ribbon” campaigns for soldiers. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it does indicate that he wants to distance himself from the actual content of the song. He also hangs out with Christian conservatives on show like Huckabee and The 700 Club.

After my rant about the Academy Awards a couple of days ago, I got to thinking about Bob Fosse. And as I was making my way around YouTube watching dance numbers, I came upon this great one from Damn Yankees, “Who’s Got the Pain.” It is interesting in that it actually features Fosse and his future wife, Gwen Verdon. Verdon was a Broadway legend. During the six years from 1954 through 1959, she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical four times. To me, she looks like Shirley MacLaine, which is interesting because Verdon starred in Sweet Charity on Broadway. Anyway, here she is with Fosse doing Fosse’s choreography:

Yesterday, I posted a live performance of the Meat Loaf classic, “Paradise By The Dashboard Light.” In it, the Ellen Foley part was performed by Karla DeVito. DeVito has been married to Robby Benson since 1982. I had no idea that he was such an accomplished musician and songwriter. Here the two of them are doing his song, “If I Had the Wings…” It is from the album Open Heart, which contains the songs from the musical of the same name that he wrote for her:

I thought I would start something new today — but I don’t know if I’ll keep it up. Each morning, I will try to dredge up some interesting video to start the day. This is not going to be like Ed Kilgore’s stuff where he celebrates things like the Finland release of Queen’s Jazz. (Really, it’s sometimes that bizarre!) I’m just going to do whatever comes to my mind — generally stuff that pleases me a whole lot more than it does you. And I may just stop. As it is, this blog is really getting in the way of the rest of my life where I make a tiny bit more money. So I don’t exactly need to make more work for myself on the blog. But I love pushing music and film on other people.

Today, we have a suggestion from Will: the Meat Loaf classic, “Paradise By The Dashboard Light.” I hate Meat Loaf’s politics, and I haven’t been that fond of his music for the decades since, but Bat Out of Hell is a great album. On it, the great Ellen Foley performs the female part. Here, it is the perhaps greater Karla DeVito. And I have to say, I prefer the way that Meat Loaf looked before he got a personal trainer. This performance, by the way, is pretty much what Jim Steinman always had in mind. He is, above all, a musical theater writer.