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May 12, 2009

Numerology: Vera, Chuck, says Dave

We’ve had 800-pound gorillas in the room before, but with 64, one song so dominates that it seems to have cowed most sensible songwriters into submission. Let’s be clear: 64 has never been a popular number in song titles (“64 Bars on Wilshire” by ace jazz guitarist Barney Kessel notwithstanding). But since the Beatles made “When I’m Sixty-Four” in 1967, they have simply owned the number. The song is a modern standard. It’s instantly recognizable by young and old, yet it’s one of the most atypical songs in the Beatles canon. Not because it doesn’t rock—from the very start, the Beatles showed a willingness to make forays into a number of non-rock styles: from the gentle balladry of “And I Love Her” and the squeaky-clean “Till There Was You” from Broadway’s The Music Man, onward to “Yesterday,” which convinced many skeptics (or squares) that the Fab 4 were more than a passing craze. “When I’m Sixty-Four,” with its crooning vocal and cheekily comedic tone, falls squarely in the British musical-hall tradition of the early 20th century. What makes it singular is that it sounds old. Yes, they would repeat this trick with “Your Mother Should Know” and “Honey Pie,” but on the screamingly psychedelic Sgt. Pepper, the song stood out, in the words of author/Beatles savant Ian MacDonald, “like a comic brass fob-watch suspended from a floral waistcoat.” Indeed, sandwiched between Harrison’s “Within You and Without You” and the shimmering colors of “Lovely Rita,” it constitutes a hard 180-degree turn into the musty but innocent past.

The Beatles - "When I'm Sixty-Four"

“When I’m Sixty-Four” was almost wholly a McCartney creation. John contributes some acoustic guitar in the last verse, Ringo provides minimal drums and some chimes, and Lennon and Harrison sing background vocals (their ‘ah-ah-ahs” after “you’ll be older too,” as Tim Riley points out in Tell Me Why, are the aural equivalent of a grown-up’s finger wag), but Paul composed and sang it, played the piano on it, and wrote it for his dad, Jim. The song had kicked around since the band’s earliest days in Hamburg, when they would play an instrumental version when experiencing technical difficulties. McCartney says he wrote the song when he was 16, and was inspired to record the thing when his dad turned 64, in 1966. The pronounced oompah-band vibe must have added interesting visuals for young people using Pepper as the background for an LSD trip, but it’s hard to imagine that it was any kid’s favorite track on the album, and just as hard to imagine it not being the favorite song of those in Jim McCartney’s generation.

“The most devilish thing is 8 times 8…” –Marjory Fleming (1803-1811)

Marjory Fleming, a child poet, writer, and diarist from Kirkaldy, Fife, Scotland, and a favorite of Sir Walter Scott, showed prodigious literary abilities in her brief life, writing in a bold, clear-eyed manner (“Sentiment is what I am not acquainted with”) far beyond her years. As the above quote indicates, she found the product of 8 x 8 extremely vexing (and had even more trouble with 7 times 7, about which she wrote, “…it is what nature itselfe can’t endure.”) Whether Black Francis of the Pixies was influenced by Marjory for the “If the devil is 6/than God is 7” section of “Monkey Gone to Heaven” is unknown, but she might have been on to something about 64. It may just be coincidence, but from the looks of it, covering “When I’m Sixty-Four” is not a wise move. You might say that “When I’m Sixty-Four” is to the Beatles what Macbeth is to Shakespeare. (It is considered bad luck to even utter the name of Shakespeare’s 29th play inside a theater—performers wishing to avoid the mishaps associated with it refer to it as “the Scottish play.”) I make this allegation because several of the best-known performers who have covered “Sixty-Four” never reached the age of 64, including Keith Moon, who sang it on the misguided all-Beatles collection All This and World War II; John Denver, who died in plane crash in 1997, and former child star Jack Wild, who starred in H. R. Pufnstuf and died a protracted death of cancer in 2006 (the year McCartney turned 64). Others who covered it experienced high-level personal tragedy: the chanteuse Claudine Longet was convicted in 1976 of manslaughter in the death of her boyfriend, skier “Spider” Sabich, and never performed again, and 25 years after the British singer and performer Georgie Fame sang the song, his wife, the former Nicolette Harrison, Marchioness of Londonderry, leaped to her death from the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol. Parodying the song, however, does not seem to have any associated risks. The Rutles did a spot-on pastiche called “Back in 64,” and to my knowledge, the lesser talents who came up with “When I’m 84” and “When I’m 43” have not incurred the heavy hand of fate.

Claudine Longet - "When I'm Sixty-Four"
Keith Moon - "When I'm Sixty-Four"

Most people have stayed away from attempting a 64 song of their own. The most interesting item I’ve come up with is an obscurity lover’s dream: a song by the former band of a one-hit wonder. It’s not quite as juicy as, say, something by the teenage garage band of the guy who did “They’re Coming to Take Me Away Ha Haa,” but it’s close. Roger Jouret, better known as Plastic Bertrand, had a European smash hit with “Ca Plane Pour Moi,” a delirious bit of new-wave doggerel built around Jouret’s nonsensical French and English rant and its wordless pseudo-Beach Boys hook. Punk and new wave were not known for a sense of humor, and Belgium is hardly a cradle of rock ‘n’ roll, (though it has produced a smattering of fine acts, including Front 242, dEUS, Evil Superstars, and some commercial hit makers like Technotronic), so the charmingly goofy “Ca Plane” ranks high among the country’s contributions to pop music. I’m telling you this because previous to his brief moment in the sun, Jouret played drums for Hubble Bubble, which produced two undistinguished records in the late ‘70s. “Number 64” from Faking (1979), is an innocuous folk rock/new wave hybrid, with ringing acoustic guitar chords and a typical chugging eighth-note groove.

Nifty Sixty-Four Fact: The Kama Sutra contains a total of 64 sexual positions, or “64 arts,” but it’s really an 8 x 8 affair, with eight main positions that can be combined with eight sexual techniques. Incorporating an octopus adds exponentially to the fun.

“All alone at the ’64 World’s Fair/Eighty dolls yelling “small girl after all.”

–They Might Be Giants, “Anna Ng”

1964 was a cultural treasure trove: the World’s Fair in New York City introduced the world to Belgian waffles; the Beatles kicked off the British Invasion with “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and it was a good year for cars. “My 64” by rapper Mike Jones pays tribute to his “chopped and screwed” 1964 Chevy Impala, a classic muscle car that aficionados often convert into a low rider. The year provided a starting point for ’64 - ’95, the numerically rich third release by the English duo Lemon Jelly. After two albums that were mostly danceable ear-candy affairs graced with sun-dappled production and left-field samples, ’64 - ’95 was an ostensible concept album, with each track named after a year and built around a song from the same time period. By and large, the textures were far more caustic than before, and in most cases the songs defied the expectation that they would sound like the year on which they were based. Witness “’64 AKA Go,” a song featuring William Shatner that’s loosely based on (but doesn’t actually sample) “Ringo,” recorded in 1964 by Lorne Greene, better known as Pa Cartwright on Bonanza. The two songs have little in common save for some spoken-word narrative provided by an actor trying his hand at being a recording artist. Shatner, who began his recording career in 1968 with The Transformed Man, has surprised many by transcending joke status as a singer (unlike, say, Leonard Nimoy, whose “Proud Mary” has to be heard to be believed) and ascending to an impressive level of cool. In 2004, he put out the Ben Folds-produced Has Been, which found him collaborating with a slew of top-notch musicians, including Lemon Jelly on one track, and doing a shockingly good cover of Pulp’s “Common People.” On “’64,” Shatner intones in ominous Beat-poet style: “And so I went, alone/East, west/East, west…” over a hypnotic pulse that slowly builds in complexity. After tolling bells herald a quiet section, the song erupts into a thunderous power-chord climax that destroys all traces of the gentle, groove-alicious Lemon Jelly sound and culminates in a final utterance from Shatner, channeling his role as a pitchman for the travel Web site Priceline:

“And so at last I understood. Go.”

Lemon Jelly - "'64 AKA Go"

William Shatner is Terrorized by Some Sort of an Airplane Yeti
(Twilight Zone episode, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" aired October 11th, 1963)

Numerology is our pal Dave's ill-advised quest to find the definitive song for every number from one to a hundred. We hear 60 is the new 40, and now we're not even that impressed by his progress.

Previously: No. 1, 2 (redux), 3, 4 (redux), 5-7, 5 (redux),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 , 60, 61, 62, 63

Posted by David Klein at May 12, 2009 01:05 PM

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Posted by: Randall Monty at May 13, 2009 12:23 AM

Posted by: Jeff Klingman at May 13, 2009 01:11 AM

Posted by: david k at May 13, 2009 09:10 AM

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