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September 26, 2008

Numerology: Getting Your Kicks in 1956

Fifty-six is responsible for some primo sepia-toned moments of the past century—Joe DiMaggio hit in 56 consecutive games, Shirley Temple had exactly 56 curls on her head, to name two—but these admittedly alluring phenomena did not inspire songwriters to render specific numerical homage. Thus, 56 is perhaps best known to rock enthusiasts not through a song title but for a brief but memorable walk-on part in a Bob Dylan song that goes:

Meet me in the morning, 56th and Wabasha

Meet me in the morning, 56th and Wabasha


Honey, we could be in Kansas


By time the snow begins to thaw.

No more eloquent mention of 56 exists in the annals of popular music. 56th and Wabasha, where Dylan dreams about meeting the lover whose absence torments him throughout Blood on the Tracks, is the pinnacle of explicit musical 56-ness. (“Love Potion #9” with its line, “I told her that I was a flop with chicks/I’ve been this way since 1956” is a close second.) But if you’re thinking about making a pilgrimage to 56th and Wabasha as part of a mad quest to visit every place ever mentioned in a Dylan song, think again. While Dylan’s songs are full of real place names (on the previous track he mentions Honolulu, San Francisco, and Ashtabula) if you visit the Wabasha Street near the University of St. Paul, where Dylan spent formative time, and expect to find your way to 56th Street, you’ll be disappointed. They do not intersect. Another, much huger, thing that it pains me to note is that this admittedly rich discussion has focused on a song called “Meet Me in the Morning” and not “56th and Wabasha,” which forces me to acknowledge that after a quadruple run of classic songs by classic artists (B-52s, Ramones, Toots & the Maytals, Tom Waits) numerical reality has slapped us upside the head, pointed an impudent finger at our chests, and said, “Are you SURE about this? Is there really a cool song with 56 in its title?” The answer is yes, barely. On a technicality—but yes. (Be patient: we’ll get to it.)

Several in the rarified world of 56-titled songs refer to 1956, a glorious year in rock ‘n’ roll’s brief infancy when the charts were clogged with Elvis, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, and other charter members of rock’s pantheon. “Nineteen Fifty-Six” by the Rascals—one of the premier singles bands of the ‘60s—is good fun, a rocked-up blues number that borrows perhaps a bit too much from “Kansas City,” but it doesn’t rank as essential listening. “Nineteen Fifty Six, Fifty Seven, Fifty Eight,” a jaunty Bollywood rave-up celebrating the rush of progress, comes from a 1959 film called Anari (The Naïve One). It features the distinctive vocal talents of one of the most celebrated Bollywood playback singers, Lata Mangeshkar, who was once alleged to be the world’s most prolific recording artist and is now acknowledged to be a merely fantastically prolific one, with many thousands of recordings to her name. While classic Bollywood music is based on ragas and other traditional Indian structures, the genre also included a kitchen sink of influences, every single one of which seems to make an appearance in “Nineteen Fifty-Six.” And somehow in all of it I detect a curious Fiddler on the Roof meets the “Russian Sailors Dance” flavor. Oddly enough, it has a far stronger Eastern European flavor than “Budapest ‘56” by Paris Violence, a song about the infamous Soviet crackdown on Hungary, told via shouted French vocals and Ramones chords.

Lata Mangeshkar - "Nineteen Fifty Six, Fifty Seven, Fifty Eight"
Paris Violence - "Budapest '56"

Unsolved 56 Mystery: Michael Stipe sings the word “yeah” 56 times on R.E.M.’s Andy Kaufman tribute “Man on the Moon.” On Nirvana’s yeah-fest “Lithium,” Kurt Cobain sings it 56 times. Why??

Another mystery is why 56 is so well-liked on the West Coast, but there’s no refuting the facts: “56 Hope Road” by Orange County action-figure band Sugar Ray, “Haunting 56th Street” by Oakland’s Push to Talk, as well as Goldenboy, a skate punk band (OK, from the west coast of Norway) that cites Paul Anka, Chuck Norris, and White Lion as influences, and sounds a note of Weezerian power punk on “Fifty Six.” Bringing a jaunty ska beat to the proceedings is “Dub 56” by the Toasters, a long-running American ska revivalist institution whose members appreciate the sound of a good saxophone, and would no doubt dig “Fifty-Six,” a marvel of invention and technique by the legendary tenor sax player Johnny Griffin. “4:56 A.M.” from Roger Waters’s midlife-crisis-themed album, The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking, is graced by plenty of Floydian sax, courtesy of David Sanborn. And “A Dip in the Lake: Ten Quicksteps, Sixty-two Waltzes, and Fifty-six Marches for Chicago and Vicinity” doesn’t call for a saxophone, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t one. This theoretical work, conceived by John Cage in 1978, called for groups of people to visit hundreds of predetermined addresses in Chicago and “either listen to, perform at and/or make a recording of the sounds at those locations.” So if a man happened to be playing saxophone at one of Cage’s addresses, and one of the delegations opted to make a recording of him, you could say the work had a saxophone in it. But that’s far too esoteric for me.

At least with Australian black-metal exponents Spear of Longinus (named after the spear that pierced the side of Christ) and a song like “The Sine of Satan is 56,” you know damn well there’s no saxophone, and you’re glad for that certainty.

Certainty though, has been in short supply during my search for the ultimate 56 song. While I prefer to confer top honors on a title that uses the numeral in a deliberate or evocative way, sometimes that’s just not possible. The song I’ve chosen, “Five Feet of Lovin’ ‘56” by Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps, is identical to the original 1956 version of “Five Feet of Lovin.’” (It was not unusual for Vincent to revisit songs from his back catalog, a practice that yielded a slew of alternate takes and alternate titles.) What really matters is that “Five Feet of Lovin,’ ‘56” by any name, shows off the talents of a singular, tragic figure, in all his snarling rockabilly glory.

Born Vincent Eugene Craddock in rural Virginia, Gene Vincent came storming out of the gates in 1956 with “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” an original composition allegedly inspired by the Little Lulu comic book character that ranks as one of the indisputably great songs of the early rock era. But Vincent never came close to the upper reaches of the charts again. Abandoned by American radio, he found favor and adulation in the UK. But while on a1960 tour of the UK, he was in the horrific London taxi crash that killed Eddie Cochran and left Vincent permanently damaged. For the next 11 years, on various labels and amid numerous personal crises, he struggled to revive his career. In 1971, while visiting his father in California, Gene Vincent died of complications related to a bleeding ulcer at the age of 36.

The Gene Vincent story is as sad they come, and it is one that has inspired rock writers to do their best work. As a preteen I learned about Gene Vincent from the hallucinatory Rock Dreams, which distilled two decades of rock iconography and poured it into the folds of my fevered teenage brain. One haunting illustration showed a hunched, switchblade-clutching Gene Vincent, surly and defiant, cornered in an English pub, facing down a constable holding a badge. The accompanying passage is something I’ve never been able to forget:

“After he hurt his leg, Gene Vincent always performed in pain and the possibility of collapse, and he stood on stage without moving, leaning forward, with his bad leg half-bent in front of him. Sometimes he seemed quite desperate, and he would shudder and strain and shake himself like a maimed, black-leather animal, castrated by captivity.” --Nik Cohn, 1973.

In the fantastic 1001 Songs, Toby Cresswell reckons that Mick Farren, “a writer and sometime rocker, put it best when he said, “Gene Vincent was a drunk, a pillhead and at times, a dangerous and creatively erratic asshole, but that may have been the true power of the man….His leather clothes have been copied so many times down the generations that they have become one of rock’s visual clichés. His attitude has been copied in some part by most of rock’s wannabe philosopher desperadoes and pretend warrior poets.”

Gene Vincent - “Five Feet of Lovin’ ‘56”

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, 54, 55

Posted by David Klein at September 26, 2008 12:00 PM

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Posted by: jonny at September 26, 2008 01:29 PM

Posted by: Kelli at September 26, 2008 02:48 PM

Posted by: david at September 29, 2008 03:05 PM

Posted by: Kelli at September 29, 2008 04:23 PM

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