« Denver/Boulder: Shows this week | 7.21 - 7.27 | Main | Out of context files: Black Eyed Peas head new socially aware Genre? »

July 21, 2008

Numerology: Be 52

Mathematically, 52 is an “untouchable” number—meaning it’s never the sum of the proper divisors of any other number—and maybe this fact has some bearing on the demonstrable scarcity of 52 in the world of song. A deck of cards, the number of weeks in a year, these are the greatest hits of 52. so wouldn’t it make sense that there’d be a gambler’s lament called “52 Pickup” or some old chestnut with a refrain that talked about “…loving you 52 weeks of the year”? There is indeed a handful of “52 Pickup” songs, but I’ll be damned if any of them are notable. Certainly none can lay claim to being the musical equivalent of 52 Pickup by Elmore Leonard, the taut crime thriller that was turned into a pretty damned good movie starring Roy Scheider, Ann Margaret, and former Prince protégé, Vanity. (Not to mention a party sequence featuring Ron Jeremy and Amber Lynn. Good times!)

The closest I found to a 52-weeks song was “50 Weeks of the Year” (on a box set of country line dance music, for all those line-dancing completists out there). 52 is the name of a DC comic starring Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Ralph Dibney the Elongated Man, and a new superhero, Supernova, which was released in 52 weekly installments. In the world of jazz, Manhattan’s West 52nd Street was once synonymous with its world-class jazz clubs, and it earned many a musical tribute, including “52nd Street Theme” by Thelonious Monk and “Forty Six, West Fifty-Two” by Chu Berry, as well as Billy Joel’s 52nd Street (1988).

But just as sure as the 52 on Dontrelle Willis’s jersey, as sure as the 52 white keys on a piano, 52 means only one thing in the world of rock ‘n’ roll. And that’s the B-52’s. As the story goes, one night in 1976 after collectively sharing a mystical libation at a Chinese restaurant, the Athens, GA quintet had themselves a joyous first jam session and dubbed themselves the B-52s—not in the sense of the strategic bomber that figured prominently in the Cold War and Dr. Strangelove, but after a Southern slang term for the towering beehive hairdos favored by vocalists Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson. (The bouffants were so nicknamed because they resembled the nose cone of the legendary aircraft properly called the B-52 Stratofortress.) In a recent interview, Cindy Wilson recalled how the glorious harmony vocals that are the siren call of the B-52s first developed.

“It was that first night - we worked well together right away. When we started rehearsing, we came up with “52 Girls” and we sang in unison a lot, and naturally went into harmonies and played around with it and it became natural.”

“52 Girls” is immediately arresting, a perfect calibration of Keith Strickland’s unignorable drum beats, Ricky Wilson’s sinewy guitar riffs, and Cindy and Kate’s laser beam vocals. (And the temporary absence of Fred Schneider’s Sprechgesang does not feel like any kind of loss.) The song seems to be a celebration of girls, which is not unusual--only it’s sung by girls, and that is unusual, especially in 1977. And it’s not about the typical girls of song--heartbreakers, teases, impossible dreams, etc. This is about the girls who weren’t clichés: Tina, Louise and Hazel and Mavis. Wanda and Janet and Ronnie and Reba. These [emphasis mine] are the girls of the U.S.A. The true cool ones. Thirty years ago, when “52 Girls” came out as the B-side of “Rock Lobster,” that was a bold statement, perhaps even quietly revolutionary. Yet the message, if I read it correctly, was not easy to decipher. You can listen 100 times and still not hear “Effie, Madge and Mabel and Biddie” as the song’s opening line. No doubt the sheer elusiveness of Kate and Cindy’s vocals, veering from pep-rally clarity to something bordering on pure sound, is part of the song’s enduring appeal. (link to no embed You Tube clip from 1978 here)

B-52's - "52 Girls"

It’s safe to say that no one has ever managed to look or sound like B-52’s. After hearing their music, John Lennon was inspired to return to the recording studio after a lengthy hiatus. So arresting was the blend of quirky influences (a wag at People magazine likened their sound to “the illegitimate offspring of George Jetson and the Shirelles”) that in the hands of lesser mortals it would have come off as mere camp. Instead, the B-52s never projected anything less than total commitment. Surely the most unheralded element of the band’s first two records is Ricky Wilson’s distinctive guitar playing. The B-52’s could have not have existed without Wilson’s work on a four-stringed, custom-tuned Mosrite guitar. Simply by removing the two middle strings and tuning the remaining pairs way down (down! down! down! as the song goes), Wilson achieved a limber yet punk-toughened take on surf guitar that even without a proper bass was able to make the music really swing.

The B-52s cast an outsized shadow on the world of 52 songs. The Boredoms, Japanese avant-noise purveyors with a proven interest in numbers, did a 36-second deconstruction of “52 Girls” called “52 Boredom (Club Mix). Surprisingly, it’s only the second-shortest track on the Boredoms’ critically hailed Soul Discharge ’99 collection. (The prize goes to “Hamaiian Disco Without Bollocks,” the collection’s four-second closer, which has the distinction of being the shortest song in rock.) Elsewhere, there’s “52 Seconds” by Bad Religion, a 58-second grenade of a lead track from New Maps of Hell (2007), which finds the SoCal hardcore stalwarts sounding invigorated well into their third decade. “52 Pilot” by the often-sublime Saint Etienne is as pleasant as it is forgettable. Honorable mention goes to Richard Thompson for “1952 Vincent Black Lightning,” a love song of the highest order that would have nabbed a place of high honor here had Richard only opted to use the apostrophic form of “1952.”

Boredoms - "52 (Club Mix)"

Bad Religion - "52 Seconds"

There’s only one other song up for serious consideration, and that’s “52 Stations” by Robyn Hitchcock, a singular figure in music whose principal musical touchstones are Bob Dylan, Syd Barrett, John Lennon, the Byrds, and Lewis Carroll. “52 Stations” begins with two lines that positively thrum with information. If there’s not a whole movie here, I see a great opening sequence shot in the London Tube:

There’s fifty-two stations on the northern line
None of them is yours, one of them is mine

In two short lines we know the singer is a spurned man, an obsessive type who knows perhaps too much about train schedules, and rides the Tube lamenting lost love. He seems resigned and wistful at first (“In sorrow not in anger/you forget the best/You remember how she was looking and then you forget the rest.”) but eventually sadness turns to anger: “One night/I hit her in a car park/left her in a car park/and I just went away.” Now he’s haunted by her memory, wanted for assault (if the police are doing their jobs) riding the Northern Line (the black line on the color-coded London Tube map, by the way) a shadow of his former self (and a menace to his fellow riders.) For a man whose catalog includes songs like “Veins of the Queen,” “The Man with the Lightbulb Head,” “Uncorrected Personality Traits,” and “Sandra’s Having Her Brain Out,” a song like “Fifty-Two Stations” is lightweight stuff. No insects, no Egyptian cream, no one having her brain out—just a desperate man who’s romantic enough to see the face of the woman who done him wrong every time the train stops.

Robyn Hitchcock - "Fifty-Two Stations"

Endnote: There are actually 50 stations on the Northern Line. According to wikipedia, the last station to close, South Kentish Town, did so in 1924. So either Hitch was channeling a ghost (entirely possible in his case) or he needed an extra syllable, and “two” provided both a triple dose of alliteration while minimizing his exaggeration, something one imagines would matter to a man who named his first solo album I Often Dream of Trains.

“I was never intentionally obscure,” Hitchcock once said. “It’s just that everything seemed to me so confusing that my songs always seemed very fragmented ‘cause that’s how I perceive things.”

Numerology is our pal Dave's ill advised quest to find the definitive song for every number from one to a hundred. The higher the digit, the lonelier the climb.

Previously: No. 1, 2-4, , 4 (redux), 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, 49 , 50, 51

Posted by David Klein at July 21, 2008 10:31 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.merryswankster.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/1682

Comments

Posted by: Randall Monty at July 21, 2008 06:57 PM

Posted by: Sebastian at July 21, 2008 07:28 PM

Posted by: david at July 22, 2008 09:03 AM

Posted by: Phoenix2027 at November 27, 2008 12:31 PM

Post a comment