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July 19, 2007
Numerology: Enough "Twenty Four Hours" to Fill a Day
by David Klein
Know this to be true: making sense of the breadth of songs titled “Twenty Four Hours” and “24 Hours a Day” is not something to be taken lightly. Athlete, 10cc, Betty Boo, Kiki Dee, Canned Heat, Sundays, Swans, Ace, and Champion Jack Dupree are but a few of the musical masters I had to unceremoniously weed out just so I could narrow it down to a half dozen or so worthy contenders and a few oddballs to kick sand at.
Muddy Waters - "Twenty Four Hours"
I wonder if anyone has ever enunciated the numeral 24 with more conviction than Muddy Waters. His glorious growl on “Twenty Four Hours” is a perfect expression of the blues—three chords, dire lyrics, and a man in pain. And one has to admire the song’s underlying, undeniably mathematical logic:
She been gone twenty four hoursAnd that’s twenty-three hours too long
Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin attempts to channel the spirit of Muddy on “Tea for One,” the nine-minute concluding track from Presence and one of Zep’s most lugubrious jams, when he intones, “Oh twenty-four hours/Baby sometimes seem to slip into days” while Seattle’s own Mudhoney, in their sludgy rave-up entitled “Twenty Four,” have very definite plans for the next 24 hours, and they don’t include pining:
I've been drunk for twenty four hours (drunk)Someone's always trying to change me (stupid heads)
I've been drunk for twenty four hours (really drunk)
I'll stay drunk for twenty four more (yeah)
On “24 Hour Party People,” Happy Mondays advocate a similar level of recklessness, albeit with the unspoken addition of powders and pills. I have to point out that although “24HPP” gave an excellent film its name, Sean Ryder’s ragged vocals keep me from getting swept up in this would-be anthem.
Joy Division - "Twenty Four Hours"
Joy Division’s “Twenty Four Hours” is as dire as a tourniquet. For Ian Curtis, a day was something to endure, and the song captures the tight grip of raw dread. There is no bridge; the music ebbs and flows like an angry ocean with Curtis’s unearthly baritone floating above it, issuing some of the most nakedly honest lines of a brief career marked by naked honesty.
Now that I’ve realized how it’s all gone wrongGotta find some therapy, this treatment takes too long
Deep in the heart of where sympathy held sway
Gotta find my destiny, before it gets too late
Like most of Joy Division’s recorded output, it’s an incredibly powerful, despairing piece of music. And in the tradition of several of the band’s songs (e.g., “Digital,” “The Eternal”) the titular phrase, and in this case, numeral, is never mentioned. So, as much as it pains me to show these guys the door, I am duty-bound to keep looking; there are just too many enunciated 24s in the world of song for me to go this dark route. Where will it end?
If Ian Curtis was an influence on disco chanteuse Barbara Pennington, it isn’t evident on her rump-shaking 1976 ode to daylong lovemaking called “24 Hours a Day.” Tangentially, there isn’t much of a Barbara Pennington sensibility to the Bottle Rockets song of the same name, although, in terms of the kind of activity the St. Louis roots rockers would like to be engaged in for 24 hours in a row, they are firmly in the Pennington camp.
Gene Pitney - "Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa"
While we’re on the subject of Bottle Rockets, much of the action in the movie Bottle Rocket takes place at a pleasant but shabby motel out in Nowheresville, USA. In “Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa” by Gene Pitney, the singer finds his destiny, in the form of a lady, at “a small hotel” that’s just a day’s drive from his baby in Tulsa. Blessed with a mighty voice and major songwriting chops, Gene Pitney is less well known than Roy Orbison and Del Shannon, but he belongs squarely in that tradition, of the emotional balladeer with an almost operatic style, whose best songs tend to involve heartache. The song is vintage Burt Bacharach/Hal David, with mariachi trumpets, hooks galore, and a tasty story to tell. The irony! It was just a matter of mileage that changed his life forever.
Pitney must have had a thing about 24, because he recorded another 24 song—“24 Sycamore”—and what are the odds of that? 
I discovered it on the truly wonderful and bizarre collection of obscure covers and alluringly naïve music from the past four decades “curated” by Jarvis Cocker and Steve Mackey, called The Trip. Teeming with songs, this collection has everyone from OMD (“Waiting for the Man”) to Sonny Bono (his creepily lysergic “Pammies on a Bummer” has to be heard to be believed). Pitney’s “24 Sycamore,” a heart-on-his-sleeve wailer, is the other side of “Twenty-Four Hours From Tulsa.” Now the singer is in a hell of his own making. Having ditched the wrong girl, he now knows he’s doomed to forever pine for the hand he used to hold, at 24 Sycamore Street.
Peering, as is my wont, into the shadowy crevices at the outskirts of rock, I feel the need to recognize, and then quickly run away from, the reclusive sonic pioneer known as Jandek, whose composition called “Twenty Four” can be found on his understandably hard-to-find 13th album, Telegraph Melts. I have it on good authority, though, that it lacks the hook-filled, Brill Building pizzazz of his earlier works, and that’s good enough for me. This isn’t an exact science, after all.
In fact, my choice for greatest 24 song just proves how inexact and subjective this whole thing is, despite all my strenuous attempts at imposing order and a certain judicial rigor to the proceedings. I try not to let personal sentiment rule, but in this case I think the song and band and the sentiment of the song win out. Yes, it’s my favorite, but it could be yours too (if you weren’t such a Gene Pitney fan.)
In 1985 my world was happily teeming with wispy adenoidal vocals and cool-ass power pop riffs. The critics called it jangle-pop, or Paisley Pop or the first generation of R.E.M.-influenced bands. My faves were the dBs—a minor sensation in England but the victim of a very bad distribution deal in the U.S.—who featured Chris Stamey’s twee but cool Southern vocals, and even R.E.M’s producer, Mitch Easter—a limited singer—got into the act, fronting his own outfit and making records with Let’s Active. Today’s winning band, Game Theory added a level of post-graduate sophistication to the power pop enterprise. When I first heard the voice of Scott Miller, I was sure it was the second coming of Big Star’s Alex Chilton— nasal, fey, and pretty, yet bolstered by stingingly Beatles-y guitars. And the man was crazy smart, with song titles composed of Kubrick movie quotes, album covers with crazy typography in enormous fonts, lyrical references to highbrow books and lowbrow culture. There was a lot to digest, but Miller’s brilliance was never in question.
Unlike any other 24 song I’ve found, Game Theory’s “24” is about being 24, and it nails—in oblique terms, naturally—that very particular precipice. 
Twenty-four is the last time you’ll be closer to 20 than 30. It’s the last good look you’ll have of your teenage years, because pretty soon a whole new numerical truth will come into view, as your childhood continues to recede into the distance. There is much to admire about the song: the sweet sound of acoustic guitars, the incisive lyrics, the rainbow-bright sheen of Mitch Easter’s production, the fact that it is 2:49 in length, and that it proudly declares its titular number. And yes, those wispy vocals.
I'm in the sweetest way misled, growing my hair in bedCoffee or beer--These are a year's component thread
And everything is in terms of next time
Twenty-five thousand more miles to the dateline
Is it because I'm 24, not 25?
Numerology is our pal Dave's ill advised quest to find the definitive song for every number from one to a hundred. The plague of self absorbed twenty-something songwriters should see him through for now, but there are rough times ahead.
Previously: No. 1, 2-4, 5-7, 7 (counterpoint), 8, 9, 10/11, 12/13. 13 (counterpoint), 14/15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23
Posted by Jeff Klingman at July 19, 2007 11:25 AM
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Comments
This Heat have a track called "24 Track Loop" but that might as well have been just what was written on the master tape in masking tape.
"Masking Tape on Master Tape" is kind of a good name for a song.
I'll go now.
Posted by: Jeff K at July 19, 2007 12:50 PM
Ever get the feeling it's just you and me thinking about this stuff?
Posted by: david at July 19, 2007 02:55 PM
Great comments on Pitney. He truly was one of the true greats who never seems to get the credit due him. His songs don't play on "oldies" radio, but they still hold up today - unlike many of his peers of the '60's.
Posted by: Dan H. at July 19, 2007 03:21 PM
And from the ether, your question is answered...
Posted by: Jeff K at July 19, 2007 03:24 PM
The dBs and Let's Active weren't REM-influenced bands. It was the other way around. Love to see them get a mention nonetheless.
Posted by: Magister Ludicrous at July 20, 2007 04:04 PM
I don't think any indie band that played in the same era as R.E.M. wasn't influenced by them. They were it, the leading light in American indie music. It would be hard to argue that bands from the same general region like dBs and Let's Active didn't take something from them. Well, at least we can agree they were all great bands.
Posted by: david at July 20, 2007 04:42 PM
I'm not disputing the greatness, just the timing. I'm from the era and the region (born and raised in Georgia, attended UNC-CH from 1979 through 1986. I saw all of them perform in small clubs when they were just starting out. The dBs and Let's Active came first. There is plenty of rock snob literature out there that backs me up on this.
Posted by: Magister Ludicrous at July 20, 2007 05:18 PM
I do acknowledge that the dB's and Let's Active formed a couple of years before REM, and that the way I phrased it was not ideal, but my main point was about the time (say, 1983 onward) when they were all contemporaries. and at that point it was REM who was influential in terms of sound. As much as I dig the other two bands, I don't know who you could point to and say 'that band was influenced by Let's Active or the dB's,' whereas you could point to about a thousand bands and say REM was an influence.
Posted by: david at July 20, 2007 05:44 PM
You know, now that I listen to all of them, the Joy Division is my fave, but it doesn't fit the rules, so I kinda prefer "24 Sycamore." It's got some verve...
Posted by: Jeff K at July 20, 2007 09:26 PM
24 Sycamore has an eerie quality indeed. You can almost see Dean Stockwell miming to it with a lamp in a David Lynch movie...
Posted by: david at July 21, 2007 04:13 PM
At the risk of belaboring the point, David, I think it would have been tough for REM to escape Mitch Easter's influence when he produced those great early albums on IRS. As for dBs-influenced Athens bands, you might want to check out Christopher Alexander's February 23, 2005 review of Stands for Decibels in CokemachineGlow. He thinks Elephant Six and its indie-darling spinoffs have boosted a bit from Stamey, and he's not the only critic from whom I've read such a comment.
Posted by: Magister Ludicrous at July 23, 2007 01:26 PM
You had me at "Mitch Easter's influence." Now, if you'll excuse me, it's nearly 25 o'clock....
Posted by: Anonymous at July 23, 2007 09:19 PM
Let's Active was Mitch Easter's band. He produced the Radio Free Europe single and Chronic Town EP for REM, and co-produced Murmur and Reckoning with Don Dixon.
Posted by: Magister Ludicrous at July 24, 2007 02:48 PM
Madge,
Ok, the dBs and Let's Active had an influence on a worthy but largely unknown-outside-of-indie-rock-enthusiasts collective of American bands known as the Elephant 6 group, but so did REM, and my point was that REM had an outsized influence on the entire era, while the other two did not.
Posted by: david at July 25, 2007 09:09 AM
I certainly can't argue with that!
Posted by: Magister Ludicrous at July 25, 2007 05:10 PM
In that entire back-and-forth...no one said a word about Pylon. Sheesh! You call yawselves completists?
Posted by: david's brother jonny at July 30, 2007 12:03 AM
