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December 23, 2008

Numerology: 60 Minutiae

The number 60 gives us no less than a sense of mastery over time. What would we do without the 60 seconds that make up the 60 minutes that make up our hours? Civilization would collapse. And we wouldn’t have songs like “Sixty Second Interval” by the Vapors. (Anyone hoping for a hidden gem by the men who brought you “Turning Japanese” would be wiser to consult the first half of New Clear Days (1980). “60 Seconds” by China Drum, the hard-rocking outfit whose audacious version of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” is one of the great radical cover songs in recent memory, comes up short with the generic-sounding “60 Seconds.” Far better is Ennio Morricone’s “Sixty Seconds to What?” from the For a Few Dollars More soundtrack. With its yearning trumpet and bombastic church organ, it immediately calls to mind the iconic visage of a stogie-chomping, poncho-draped Clint Eastwood. As Clint will tell you, living to be 60 years of age is no big deal these days. According to a recent study, 70-year-olds feel 15 years younger than their age. That might have surprised the young Elton John, who wrote “Sixty Years On” early in his career and liked it enough to include it on both his self-titled debut record and the numerically toothsome live album 7-12-71. Addressing old age, Elton demonstrates a heady prescience of infirmities yet to be experienced as well as his precocious melodic gifts.

The great American composer Aaron Copland said, “If you want to know about the Sixties, play the music of the Beatles.” Indeed, the 60s were a decade whose overriding cultural force was a single pop group, yet encapsulating the decade in a song has proven to be a tricky business. T. Bone Burnett gave it his best shot, but despite vocal help from Pete Townshend, “The Sixties” comes off as heavy-handed social commentary (Sample lyric: “Auto dealers don’t just sell drive-trains/Sometimes they also deal cocaine”) Most people know Burnett as the Grammy-winning producer of O Brother Where Art Thou? as well as the Robert Plant/Allison Krause smash collaboration, Raising Sand. But Burnett played guitar with Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Review in the mid-‘70s and had a critically acclaimed, commercially marginal solo career in which he gained support from an impressive array of rock royalty, including Mick Ronson, Elvis Costello, Richard Thompson, and Bono. Despite these impressive credits, his albums sold poorly, and it’s not hard to see why: despite his abilities as a writer and arranger, Mr. Burnett’s nasal singing voice is an acquired taste to say the least. He had a penchant for substituting narration for singing, an approach with limited appeal. “The Sixties,” is just such a narrative. It begins, “I have a painter friend who says he’s actually slept with Jacqueline Kennedy… or was it John Kennedy? Maybe it was Jacqueline Bisset. At any rate I can tell I’m starting wrong. Let me begin again.” Sadly, he does begin again, and the result lends an eerie prescience to a lyric his man Dylan would write more than a decade later: “The next sixty seconds could be like an eternity.” Sub-T. Bone efforts of this ilk include the irony-deficient “Green-Tinted Sixties Mind” by Mr. Big, “Sixties Man,” a trifle by the Sweet, well past their prime, which scatters allusions to Woodstock and San Francisco over a faux new wave beat, and Barclay James Harvest’s “A Tale of Two Sixties,” which references Bowie’s Hunky Dory and Aladdin Sane (both from the ‘70s), serving only to make the Sweet look historically astute in comparison. Perhaps wisely, “Six Six Sixties” by Throbbing Gristle and “Sixties Remake” by Tokyo Police Club employ “60s” as part of an evocative title phrase and leave it at that.

Nico - "Sixty Forty"

The ‘60s were good to Nico (formerly Christa Päffgen), whose achievements in that decade included acclaim as an international fashion model, appearing in La Dolce Vita, fronting the Velvet Underground on their groundbreaking first record, inspiring Bob Dylan to write “I’ll Keep it With Mine,” and attending the Monterey Pop Festival on the arm of Brian Jones. She left it all behind in the ‘70s to forge her own stubborn musical path in collaborations with Brian Eno and others, but her career and personal life took a cruelly downward spiral. Despite producing some critically praised records, she fell into near obscurity and heroin addiction, and spent years living in out-and-out squalor. In 1988, she moved to Ibiza and tried to turn it all around, only to have a bicycle accident end things once and for all. The music from her final years was increasingly bleak, still sung in the haunted, slightly flat voice that was her signature, adorned in the end by only a mournful harmonium. “Sixty Forty” is so bleak you want to run and hide, with lyrics that chill you to the bone like a New York winter:

“At least I've given it away
/To keep it only would have made me stay

Will there be another time? Will there be another time?”

New Order - "60 Miles an Hour"

Sixty miles an hour is a critical benchmark in the automotive world. Seventies soft-rockers Pablo Cruise actually worked themselves into a lather with “Zero to Sixty in Five,” which was deemed rockin’ enough to earn a spot in Guitar Hero II, but New Order’s “60 Miles an Hour” certainly wins the 60 mph crown. Showing off everything this legendary outfit does well, it more than lives up to its celebration of the cruising ethos, while suffering slightly from having to follow the godlike “Crystal” both as a single and in the record’s song sequence. Regardless, the powerful melody and soaring production add up to track with plenty of staying power, and in absence of strong competition it would be good enough for the top spot.

Boards of Canada - "Sixtyten"

Here’s a set of oddball 60-related songs I offer up in the name of completeness: “Sixtyten” by Boards of Canada, a spooky yet vaguely funky number from the excellent Music Has a Right to Children, “Sixty Sixty,” an off-the-cuff instrumental from the late-era Faust, “60%,”a spirited blast of pop-punk by NOFX, and “60 Revolutions” from Gogol Bordello, whose lead singer starred in Madonna’s directorial debut and was cheekily described in the New Yorker as “explosively hairy.” Bob Seger, who is no slouch in the hairy department, gave The Numeral Formerly Known As Three Score a measure of pop immortality in “Night Moves” when he solemnly rasped, “Out past the cornfields where the woods got heavy/Out in the back seat of my ’60 Chevy.”

Gogol Bordello - "60 Revolutions"
(live on Later with Jools Holland)

But songs about 60 as a rate of speed, a signifier of a decade or a measure of time cannot but pale next to one celebrating the glories of what can be accomplished in a single 60-minute period. Thus, “Sixty Minute Man” by Billy Ward & the Dominoes leaves them all in the dust. It’s one of the great sexual boasts in musical history, and it’s all the more striking for becoming a national hit in 1951. It hardly needs to be said that musical expressions of raw carnality were not a staple of the pop charts during the Truman administration. (Chart-toppers that year included Patti Page’s “The Tennessee Waltz,” “Aba Daba Honeymoon” by Debbie Reynolds, and “On Top of Old Smokey” by the Weavers.) The raw blues has a long history of such references, of course, but when blues songs became crossover hits, the sex tended to be cloaked in metaphor e.g., “I’m like a one-eyed cat peeping in a seafood store” or imagery that sounded like voodoo incantations, e.g., “I got a black cat bone/I got a mojo, too.” But Billy Ward and his salacious protagonist, Lovin’ Dan—whose sexual prowess and stamina was voiced by the rich bass of Bill Brown, and not Clyde McPhatter, the Dominoes’ celebrated vocalist—were having none of it. “Sixty Minute Man” leaves little to the imagination:

Billy Ward & the Dominoes - "Sixty Minute Man"

There'll be 15 minutes of kissing

I'm a sixty-minute man

Many radio stations banned it, but the song went to no. 1 on the R&B charts and became a crossover hit under the guise of a “novelty song.” As outrageous as the lyrics were, it wouldn’t have become a classic if it weren’t so downright irresistible, with its sly guitar licks, spirited backing vocals, and delightfully swinging arrangement courtesy of the Julliard-trained musical prodigy Billy Ward. These days, sexual boasting is commonplace, but this recording has a light touch and a sense of joy that’s never been matched, even by John Lee Hooker, who upped the ante in 2006 with “Four Hours Straight.”

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, 6 (redux), 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, 56, Footnotes, 57, 58, 59

Posted by David Klein at December 23, 2008 12:30 PM

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Posted by: Jon Klein at December 23, 2008 03:00 PM

Posted by: Jeff Klingman at December 23, 2008 03:31 PM

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