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May 29, 2008
Numerology: Alot 49
In a cavern, in a canyon,Excavating for a mine,
Dwelt a miner, forty-niner,
And his daughter Clementine.
About a century before the Joe Montana era, “My Darling Clementine” made “forty-niner” a household word. Alas, “Clementine” lacks a 49 in its title, but “The Days of ’49,” also rooted in the California Gold Rush, is a traditional folk song that has been covered by a long line of guitar-wielding troubadours, from singer-songwriter/real-life cowboy Jules Verne Allen to a guy who changed his name to Dylan. The song recounts “a few hard cases,” men who met their fate “in the days of old/when we dug out the gold/in the days of ‘49.” Dylan’s version comes from his much-maligned Self Portrait (1970)—a double LP that included inferior versions of his own songs and seemingly tongue-in-cheek Paul Simon and Gordon Lightfoot covers—and which was widely interpreted as a flip of the bird to his audience. (An audience, we would later learn in Chronicles Vol. 1,, that to Dylan circa 1970 was represented by the most rabid, garbage-sifting, house-invading element.) In spite of Greil Marcus’s notorious pan of the record—which began, “What is this shit?”—Self Portrait is neither an outrage nor a misunderstood classic. Call it a grab bag with an unusually low ratio of hits to misses for a guy like Dylan. “Days of 49” is clearly one of the hits. Originally a lilting folk number, the song in Dylan’s hands becomes a rocking cowboy song, presaging the rustic direction Dylan would take, both musically and sartorially, in the decade to come. (“Days of 49” is also the name of a song by the Blue Aeroplanes, which lacks the spoken vocals of Gerard Langley, much to its detriment.) It should also be noted that State Route 49, which passes through many a historic California mining town, inspired songs by Big Joe Williams and Howlin’ Wolf, both called “Highway 49.” Wolf’s is undoubtedly the greatest song ever written about a woman named Melvina. (It’s pronounced mel-VEYE-na, by the way.)
“49 Bye-Byes,’ the Stephen Stills-penned closer on Crosby, Stills & Nash’s self-titled debut record, sports plenty of the trio’s trademark harmony vocals, but it would take a hardcore CSN freak with a pronounced contrary streak to champion it. Certainly the weakest of the four songs Stills contributed to the first record, “49 Bye-Byes” comes up wanting next to the record’s many indelible melodies. But you can forgive S for a bit of self-indulgence: While C and N were solely lending their golden throats to the enterprise, Stills was doing the lion’s share, playing every instrument but drums, contributing four tunes, and singing his ass off. As on virtually every song he’s ever recorded, “49 Bye-Byes” finds Stills—who would soon embrace a look based entirely on jeans and sports jerseys—singing about his “lay-day.” But Stills’ line of seduction falls short of his best. Let’s face it: “Steady girl, be my world” is no “Love the one you’re with.”
Nick Nicely remains obscure, even in a world where technology has ensured that the obscure are faring much better than they used to. In 1982, Nicely released a pair of singles and disappeared, leaving people like XTC’s Andy Partridge in awe. The guy sure knew how to pick his psychedelic onions: “49 Cigars” is a close cousin of “Tomorrow Never Knows” until it breaks into a middle eight that bears a striking verisimilitude to Barrett-era Pink Floyd. “49 Cigars” is a swirling, lysergic delight that, unlike most if not all others of its ilk, was recorded in one take.
“49 Second Romance,” (1980) a minimalist, “dark-wave” dance track by German synth duo P1E, sounds like a Teutonic Joy Division without a bassist or anything vital to say. Compare the relative poetry of JD’s “Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance to the radio” to P1E’s “You, you, you like to dance” to see what I mean. I still find the song faintly, weirdly irresistible—especially the intro, which combines the best elements of Peter Schilling’s “Major Tom” and the Sweet’s “Fox on the Run,” and vocalist Ute Droste’s gift for making boredom palpable.
In a usage that one has to applaud for its stubborn mathematical sense, even as one decries the singer’s excessive reasonableness, “Forty-Nine, Fifty-One” by Hank Locklin employs 49 specifically because it alone signifies the amount of effort one man is willing to accept from his woman and still have things be hunky-dory.
“If you’ll admit that you’ve been wrong/I’ll take half the blameIf you say half the fault was yours/Than I will do the same
We really need each other after all is said and done
If you’ll try forty-nine percent than I’ll try fifty-one”
Hank Locklin - "Forty-Nine, Fifty-One"
Of course, by the time the kicker comes around—“If you try forty-eight percent/than I’ll try fifty-two”—you begin to suspect that old Hank is headed down a slippery slope. Locklin is still active; at 91, he’s the oldest member of the Grand Ole Opry, and he also maintains an active fan club in Norway, home of the electronica practitioners Royksopp. If that segue struck you as both abrupt and arbitrary, let me assure you that it’s not arbitrary: Royksopp’s “49 Percent,”—the second single from the follow-up to rightly celebrated Melody A.M. (2001)—features a refrain that makes a mockery of the hopefulness in Hank Locklin’s equation:
“49 percent/one percent less than half/and less than half ain’t really much of nothing.”
I could forgive the song’s defeatism if I could get past its generic dance feel, which pales next to the warmth and quirky textures of the first record; once it gets going, it just doesn’t have anyplace special to go. Sadly, what Hank Locklin accomplished in less than two minutes was, in this case, a lesson lost on the Tromsø-based duo, whose name means, among other things, “mushroom cloud.”
Pere Ubu - "49 Guitars and One Girl"
A mushroom cloud of toxicity hangs over much of the early work of Cleveland’s Pere Ubu. “49 Guitars and One Girl,” from New Picnic Time (1979), is abrasive in the extreme, a caustic collision of demented chicken vocals and several (though definitely not 49) jabbing guitars. David Thomas’s sputtered “Don’t panic, don’t panic” does little to reduce the tension, nor does the debauched laughter at the end, which is way creepier than the fadeouts of “I Am the Walrus” and Sabbath’s “Am I Going Insane.” Cubed.
“49th Parallel” by Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel makes no reference to the 49th parallel, which separates the U.S. from Canada. Instead, the song reflects Harley’s desire “to drift away to a land of my own.” That sentiment, coupled with a Little Feat-style funk groove, place the song squarely in 1975, the year in which Harley recorded his signature hit, “Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me”). “49th Parallel” is nowhere near as memorable as that.
In The Crying of Lot 49—a paradigm of postmodernism (i.e., a book I don’t really understand) by Thomas Pynchon—cultural references and historical digressions abound. The heroine of this short novel, Oedipa Maas (one of many characters whose contrivance of a name has to be ignored in order to get caught up in the story) must discover how she fits into the mysterious death and life of her ex, one Pierce Inverarity. It’s not giving away a major plot point to mention that Lot 49 refers to a set of rare postage stamps up for auction. At times like this, I breathe a sigh of relief that I am a musico-numero-obsessionist, and not a literary critic. My sole obligation is to report that at least three bands have called themselves Lot 49; the addressee on a letter to Radiohead’s merchandising arm is W.A.S.T.E., an acronymic reference to the slogan of the book’s Tristero organization; and that Yo La Tengo got cute with “Crying of Lot G.” Most appropriate for our purposes, a jangly blast by the oddball English musician known as the Jazz Butcher is called simply “Lot 49.” In its unforced shagginess and deadpan glee, this is a song that speaks to a less fettered time in the world of indie music. These days the climate is more nurturing toward a certain studied D.I.Y. aesthetic, in the spirit of Final Fantasy. In a dictionary of the near future, the definition of “precious” will include a picture of a small dog clad in renaissance garb and a recording of “49 MP” by Final Fantasy (from the 2007 release, He Poos Clouds, a title that supports my snideness).
The stellar 1988 Creation sampler called Doing it For the Kids, from whence “Lot 49” came, is a fine compendium of songs from that era, including two that define “haunting”: My Bloody Valentine’s “Cigarette in Your Bed,” and “House of Love’s “Christine.” (In a dictionary of the near future, the definition of “precious” will include a picture of a small dog clad in Renaissance garb and a recording of “Many Lives 49 MP” by Owen Pallett aka Final Fantasy. Sufjan Stevens is James Hetfield next to this guy.
Last week, as I was considering the merits of “Funk #48" by the James Gang, I had no choice but to discuss the band’s radio rock staple “Funk #49” (1970), which, indisputably, is the definitive 49 song. If the number of precocious kids and adults attempting to master this song on YouTube is any proof, “Funk #49” has had a lasting impact far in excess of position no. 73 on the Billboard chart, its zenith as a single.
It’s hard to remember that there’s a middle section, with jungle noises and mucho cowbell, that sounds like it was flown in from a Kool & the Gang song. What you remember is the force of that guitar lick and how it meshes perfectly with the limber bass line and the, yes, seriously funky drumming. You remember lines like, “Sleep all day/out all night/I know where you’re going.” On paper, it sounds like a warning against self-abuse, but when Joe Walsh delivers those lines in his crooked croon, above that hot-asphalt riff, it feels more like a tribute to the very things the song ostensibly advocates against. Yet, deep in my heart, I’m sure the people cranking “Funk #49” at all-night parties in the’70s were too busy shaking their hip-hugger encased booties to feel scolded.
*In a Pynchonian turn of events, Graham Nash recently collaborated with a ha, Norway’s biggest musical export of the rock era until Royksopp.
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 , 47, 48
Posted by David Klein at May 29, 2008 12:40 PM
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Comments
enjoyed this post 49 times...and at 43 only 6 away and 6 down and 6 off...
Posted by: harold hollingsworth at June 5, 2008 06:45 PM
it's quips like Stephen Stills and his love of jerseys that keep me coming.
Posted by: Sebastian at June 6, 2008 04:06 AM
Woah, dude. One of your best, especially for turning me on to Nick Nicely (how did I miss him?), reminding me why, although I "appreciate" and even "revere" Pere Ubu, I've never been able to "like" them, and P1E....awesomenal, as we used to say.
This is a worthy and wonderful gift you are assembling, entry by entry. Sir, I stand at attention in my lederhosen, and snappily salute you!
Posted by: jonny at June 9, 2008 02:01 AM
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