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August 28, 2008
Numerology: Song 54, Where Are You?
A fame mosaic from Studio 54's heyday
If you look closely at Studio 54’s iconic white-on-black “54” logo, the 5—clearly the masculine of the two numerals—seems to be subtly humping the 4. And the salacious, Disco Era connotations of 54 don’t end there: Xenon, a popular but less legendary nightclub from the same period, took its name from the element whose atomic number just happens to be 54. Coincidence? Possibly, or perhaps it was a deliberate but subliminal nod toward the biggest thing out there, in the best tradition of the Sex Pistols inspiring the tweaked version of their name: Celibate Rifles. In any case, no song from that sozzled epoch actually uses a Studio 54-iented title, although several dance tracks from later decades do. “Fifty-Four,” by Sea Level, a ‘70s outfit formed by a trio of musical refugees from the Allman Brothers, came out in the heyday of disco, but it’s not clear if the title of this funky lite-jazz instrumental has anything to do with the club.
In 1972, five years before the Studio 54 opened its hallowed doors, Harry Nilsson was at his commercial zenith. Nilsson Schmilsson had yielded three wonderfully diverse singles: “Without You,”—a cover of a Badfinger song—was four minutes of Orbison-worthy melancholia; the lilting, utterly ridiculous “Coconut” had millions of people around the world humming “You put de lime in de coconut” in spite of themselves, and “Jump Into the Fire” was a thunderous slab of nerve-jangling rock ‘n’ roll that featured Nilsson’s desperate, ragged vocal and an aggressive bass line played by Klaus Voorman. “Without You,” which topped the U.S and UK charts and languished in the Top 40 for months, has since been covered by a vast swath of the musical world, including Heart, Donny Osmond, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Shirley Bassey, Air Supply, and most lucratively, Mariah Carey. (Even Nilsson couldn’t help himself from re-releasing the song, not once but twice, after he first struck gold with it in ‘72.)
And with his breakout success, Nilsson, who once caused Little Richard to exclaim, “My, you sing good for a white boy!” suddenly went from musician’s musician (Paul McCartney called a then-unknown Nilsson his favorite American singer at a late-‘60s press conference) to successful recording artist, and the Brooklyn native wasted no time in following up his commercial breakthrough with a bit of rock-star indulgence that the 70s music biz both tolerated and nurtured. “You want to record the follow-up in Africa? Sure thing, Harry. What, you say you want to include a chorus of octogenarians on “I’d Rather Be Dead” (key lyric: “I’d rather be dead/than wet my bed”)? You got it, son. As long as there’s a single.” Son of Schmilsson did contain one glorious single in “Spaceman,” which cracked the Top 40, but the rest of it was just too eccentric for the masses.
Why am I telling you this? Son of Schmillson opens with the stomping “Take 54,” in which the singer laments his lost groupie-muse with the refrain: “I sang my balls off for you baby!” Today, it still comes off as a pretty rude lyric; in the Nixon reelection year it was doubtless even more jarring. And throughout Son of Schmillson, Nilsson gives full vent to his penchant for the weird, the blunt, and the gleefully off-kilter. On subsequent records, indulging his interest in such noncommercial genres as English music hall and old-school pop standards, Nilsson thinned out his audience even more. That his best-known achievement of the late ‘70s was getting thrown out of the Troubadour in L.A. with John Lennon for heckling the Smothers Brothers says a lot about Harry’s career arc.
History buffs and fans of Canadian rock will recognize the phrase “Fifty-four forty or fight!” The slogan originated in a border dispute in the 1880s between the U.S. and Britain over what was then called the Oregon Country, and turned into a rallying cry for Americans who believed that any British claim to land south of the 54th parallel meant war. In the end, President James K. Polk accepted a dividing line at the 49th parallel, which remains in place today. The Canadian alt-rock band calling itself 54-40 or Fight never laid a claim to the U.S. market, but has the ignominious distinction of one of its songs being covered by Hootie & the Blowfish.
Like several songs on the ambiguously pronounced Drukqs collection by Richard “Aphex Twin” James, “54 Cimru Beats” has a Welsh name (Cimru is Welsh for Wales), but anyone hoping for something with a touch of the Welsh folk tradition—a fiddle perhaps—will be disappointed. Instead, “54 Cimru Beats” is a tangle of simultaneously caressing, scraping, whooshing, and pummeling sounds sewn together by an obsessive and inscrutable master’s hand—all quite typical of James’s upbeat stuff. But it’s so un-Welsh sounding it may as well be Swedish, like the Dandelions, whose single “On the 54” was featured in a Volvo ad and certainly enhanced the clothes-shopping budgets of this snappy-dressing Stockholm five-some.
Lest we forget, we have the obligatory highway song (“Highway 54” by Wayne “The Train” Hancock), an explicit rap number (the Smut Peddler’s “54” off Porn Again), “Demo 54,” a dance track from the GusGus collective with a brontosaurus-fart bass line, and the annoyingly titled “Agenht 54: The Outer Void Intrepid Sailor” from Guy Franklin of the annoyingly named Architecture in Helsinki. My vast knowledge of British fighter planes told me that the burly bass-lined “B-54” from London's XX Teens had something to do with the Blackburn B-54, a post-World War II anti-submarine aircraft, but what I could make out of the lyrics made me question this theory. So I went to the horse's mouth, and found out I was way off base. Lyricist Rich Cash helpfully informed me that the song, which has trace elements of the Gun Club's twisted psychobilly, is in fact, “a typical coming of age story…[about] six young boys in a hurry to grow up [whose] churlish sexual experimentation is witnessed by an elaborate passerby, who later gets eaten by a snake that everyone had just assumed was an odd looking baby.” I see now—it’s one of those songs.
Standing high above this assortment of fifty-fouria is “54-46 Was My Number,” an oft-anthologized, oft-covered classic of reggae featuring a laid-back groove offset by the urgent exhortations of Frederick “Toots” Hibbert and his spirited backup singers, Nathaniel “Jerry” Matthias and Henry “Raleigh” Gordon. The song’s iconic status is reflected in how often it has been covered, nicked or referenced in one way or another. To name a few: Joe Strummer can be heard chanting the title phrase in the fadeout of “Jail Guitar Doors”; the melanin-challenged toaster Yellowman vamps “64-46 BMW” in his “Nobody Move,” and this refrain was picked up in “Take 5” by Northside, leading lights of the waning Madchester scene who toiled in the shadow of an army of flannel-shirted Seattle bands in the early ‘90s, but did manage to produce several groovy dance sides. Sublime’s version of the song, “54-46 That’s My Number/Ball and Chain” mixes in touches of rap and rock, but much more sublime is “Engine 54” by the Ethiopians, prolific if somewhat unheralded contemporaries of the Maytals. (It’s not the same song, but it does seem to fit here.)
Toots & the Maytals - "54-46 Was My Number"
But the Toots version remains the ultimate. He wrote it after serving an 18-month prison sentence, not for possession of ganja, as is commonly believed, but, he says, simply for showing up to bail out a friend. While he was inside, he became fully committed to his Rasta identity, and the singles that he put out following his incarceration, including “Do the Reggay” and the immortal “Pressure Drop,” have earned a well-deserved place in the pantheon. “54-46 Was My Number” is a picture of life behind the walls, distilled down to the singular humiliation of having one’s name replaced by a number (which Hibbert made up for the song). The repeated phrase “listen what I say” serves as rhythmic linchpin, but oddly enough I hear an echo of Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say?” which also features stops and starts, call and response, and multiple release points. And like the Ray Charles song, “54-46” draws on the blues and gospel traditions, creating something joyous and danceable out of pain and injustice.
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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, 52, 53
Posted by David Klein at August 28, 2008 07:45 PM
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Comments
Whoah, did Nilsson just say he was gonna "sing his balls off"?
Posted by: Jeff K at August 29, 2008 03:15 PM
Jeff, I guess you're busy with Neon Lights: Here's the gist: "Son of Schmillson opens with the stomping “Take 54,” in which the singer laments his lost groupie-muse with the refrain: “I sang my balls off for you baby!” Today, it still comes off as a pretty rude lyric; in the Nixon reelection year it was doubtless even more jarring
Posted by: david at August 29, 2008 03:32 PM
yeah, not an alert/active reader this morning
Posted by: Jeff K at August 29, 2008 04:05 PM
the Canadian rock band is 54-40 not 5440 or fight.
Posted by: Allen at September 2, 2008 02:15 AM
Isn't that what it says?
Posted by: david at September 2, 2008 01:18 PM
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