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May 02, 2008
Numerology: Twilley's Moony For 47, "47 Moons" For Us
Finding a 47 song—one that I could believe in—was turning out to be a tough task. “PO Box 9847,” the Monkees’ version of “Want Ads,” was not eligible, although it was surpassingly stupid and catchy. Mark Kozalek of Red House Painters was certainly eligible for “Metropol 47,” a sincere and heartfelt, if lugubrious, love song, in which he sings about his desire to kiss his beloved’s “sweet koala face,” but I am much more fond of his AC/DC covers (even though they sound pretty much like this) on that same Rock ‘n’ Roll Singer EP (2000). The rollicking “47th Street Boogie” by legendary blues pianist Memphis Slim and his hero, Roosevelt Sykes, displays charms a-plenty, as it extols the virtues of New York’s 47th Street—a place where, it assures us, you’ll meet the hepcats and the fly chicks, as well as get your solid kicks. And while the song’s main lyric, in which Slim pleads, “Don’t talk me to death/Babe, I ain’t ready to die,” feels at odds with the song’s celebration of hedonism, I’ll take the 47th Street of Memphis Slim and Roosevelt Sykes any day over the place that Duane Peters sings about in “47th Street,” with his skate-punk band, Die Hunns. Peters, the inventor of such skateboard moves as “the fakie hang-up” and “the loop of death,” brays a chorus of “I’ll bury you at 47th Street” like a feral wolf, but apparently that’s par for the course for the prolific Peters, who also records with U.S Bombs and the Exploding Fuckdolls.
Feeling a bit desperate, I dug around in my vinyl collection, and turned up something promising, off an out-of-print record from 1977, and that discovery led me to an even better one. Funny thing was, both songs were by Dwight Twilley.
Now, I’ve been mining number songs for over a year now, actively searching for connections, sometimes stretching and pulling muscles in the process. Usually it entails sifting through a slew of vintage anecdotes about songs and artists, but this one—no. 47—was different. The question I wanted to answer wasn’t answerable through the usual channels. It was really up to me to find out why Dwight Twilley wrote two songs featuring the no. 47 in their titles.
So I called him, at his home in Tulsa, a week ago, and he was kind enough to explain it all to me.
“I think it's a sexy number. You know, when you just say it, the way it rolls off the tongue. It has great syllables.”
It sure does. In fact, “Rock and Roll ’47” (the second track off Twilley’s excellent yet ill-fated 1977 sophomore effort) captures what a man sounds like when he is truly enamored of a number. Dwight sings it like this: “Forty-seh HEH-HEH Heh-eh-vunn,” echoing Buddy Holly’s “A weh-aheh-aheh-ell” intro to “Rave On,” But from a lyrical standpoint, the inclusion of the number seems arbitrary. I mean, it’s hard to know what to make of a line like, "Heard a song, baby, yesterday/Saw a man understand/That he plays what he says—47."
Dwight Twilley - "Rock & Roll '47"
So is that it? Now that we know how much the man digs the 15th prime number for its mouthfeel, should we simply conclude that the number was included solely for its syllabic usefulness? We should not, because that’s not the whole story.
“That came from the musician's union in Los Angeles, which used to be called, and maybe it still is, local union number 47.” [It still is.]
But wait. How, or why, does this tough, twitchy little song end up with a title containing an oblique reference to the L.A. musicians’ union in its title?
“Because, well, that was kind of the point of it. Like, this was just another rock ‘n’ roll song. It could have been 46, it could have been 45, could have had a name or not had a name. Coulda been a bit more up-tempo or slower, but it’s just another rock ‘n’ roll song.”
Dwight Twilley - "Girls"
When Dwight Twilley first began making records, the “just another rock ‘n’ roll song” aesthetic still had legs. Rock was, after all, a familiar idiom, and, even though it had been turned into something complicated by a lot of progressive outfits, people like Dwight Twilley were more interested in mining rock ‘n’ roll for its primal pleasures. When he got his first record deal in 1976 (with the notoriously badly managed Shelter Records, whom his label mate and early collaborator, Tom Petty, successfully sued), it was during the brief mid-‘70s heyday of power-pop, when bands like the pre-Budokan Cheap Trick, the Raspberries, Badfinger and Big Star wrote catchy, Beatles-influenced songs featuring tight harmonies and sharp guitars. Most of them were about girls. With its choppy chords, heavenly harmonies and badass swagger, “I’m on Fire,” Dwight’s first single, (no. 16 on the Billboard chart in April 1975) typifies the genre as well as anything. One thing that distinguishes Twilley’s early records is the glorious vocal interplay between him and drummer Phil Seymour, with whom Twilley cofounded his first outfit, the Dwight Twilley Band. Another trademark was Twilley’s fondness for the rockabilly “slapback echo” effect, which gave his vocals more than a touch of Sun Studios-era Elvis, amid the ringing, stinging chords. You can hear these vocal characteristics on “Rock and Roll ’47,” a strutting number with a section in the song’s brief break that sounds a bit like John Lennon’s upper-register keening at the end of “Hey Jude.”
But the stunning title track from 47 Moons, Dwight’s 2005 album on the digital-only label DMGI, is another thing entirely. It’s a song most definitely made by a grownup, with sumptuous Spectorian production (the song was lovingly engineered by Dwight’s wife, Jan), an indelible minor-key melody, a gorgeous guitar excursion courtesy of longtime Twilley guitarist, Bill Pitcock IV, and a palpable sense longing and melancholy that puts one in mind of the Righteous Brothers.
“I think I had to drive somewhere, [I was] driving at night, and I tuned into one of those late-night radio shows, you know, where they talk about UFOs and zombies and stuff. This particular show they had a scientist on—a real specialist—and so it wasn’t so much fiction, but scientific oriented. And he just happened to matter-of-factly point out that Jupiter had 47 moons, which immediately caught my attention. And it kind of begged the question, it’s kinda like: Doesn’t seem fair; we only have one. And obviously, with the word forty-seven, it was just a natural for me. And because of having the other song—it was just another rock song called 47—I felt compelled to write this song. So I spent a considerable amount of time working on it, because I got real serious about it, and then, coincidentally, about a week later I had finished the song, or I thought I had finished the song, and I open up the newspaper here in Tulsa, through the science section, and there’s a big headline that says: More Moons Discovered Around Jupiter. So I had to go back and add another verse: I sing, I believe, “They thought that there were forty-one/They’ll find a thousand before they’re done.” Like, there just keeps being more and more moons around Jupiter.”
--But that totally finishes the song.
“Yeah,” he says, “in a way it does.”
He doesn’t sound completely convinced. In Dwight’s mind, having to add the final verse to accommodate new scientific findings was something he had to deal with. But to me, the curveball that forced him to add that verse is icing on the cake. It takes a fan to see it as a masterstroke, the part where the camera pulls back and hints at a future, rendering the song into a powerful, poignant meditation on time and space, and the endless cycle of change. And when it’s done, what began as a lullaby and swelled to an anthem finally, blissfully, floats off into the ether, where both heavenly bodies and heavenly songs reside.
Numerology is our pal Dave's ill advised quest to find the definitive song for every number from one to a hundred. It's starting to creep everybody out.
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, 24, 25, 26/27, 28 , 29 , 30, 30 (counterpoint), 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46
Posted by David Klein at May 2, 2008 12:00 PM
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Comments
Three things:
1) Exploding Fuckdolls is kind of a good name for a punk band actually.
2) The video for "Girls" couldn't be funnier if someone tried to parody it.
3) Really good piece, Dave.
Posted by: Jeff K at May 2, 2008 01:56 PM
hehe..thanks dude. Yeah, when you base a video (or anything for that matter) on Porky's, you're asking for trouble.
Posted by: david at May 2, 2008 02:54 PM
