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October 16, 2009
Numerology: A Bit of 67 Magic
What comes to mind when you think of 67? The number of throws in judo? “Jailhouse Rock?” (Rolling Stone calls it the 67th greatest song of all time.) The 67 seconds it took Elliot Spitzer to announce he was resigning from office? Your local mathematician will tell you that 67 is what’s known as a lazy caterer’s number, meaning it’s part of the so-called lazy caterer sequence, which has to do with the number of pieces of a round object—say, a pizza—that can be made with a specific number of straight cuts. For example, if you make three straight cuts that meet in the middle of the pie, you get 6 slices, but you can make 7 if they don’t meet in the middle. Thus, a lazy caterer who knows what he’s doing can make 11 strategic cuts in an enormous pizza (imagine he’s catering a wedding) and make 67 slices. But you don’t have to be a math whiz to know that the lazy caterer’s sequence doesn’t exactly speak to songwriters.
“Have you seen her hair/it’s a style from heaven
Ah! She’s nowhere/she thinking this is 1967?
She's so square, she’s nowhere…” -XTC, “She’s So Square”
Nearly every instance of 67 in a song title is a reference to the year of Sgt. Pepper, Are You Experienced?, “Light My Fire,” the Human Be-In, and more generally, the Summer of Love. (It’s also the year Walter Matthau won the Oscar for best supporting actor for The Fortune Cookie.) “Supersexy ‘67” by Coltrane Motion (who won Numerology’s top spot for “Twenty-Seven,” a lacerating anti-tribute to Kurt Cobain’s “stupid club”) demonstrates singer Michael Bond’s predilection for alliterative syllables. Bond, who spoke with me via e-mail, was unaware that he had a thing for sevens, but acknowledged that the sound of the syllables is part of 7’s charm. With its half-sung vocals, canned beats, and ramshackle production, “Supersexy” is clearly indebted to early Beck, a charge that Bond readily cops to. In fact, he says, it was Beck’s Odelay that spurred him to start recording his own music in the first place. The music for “Supersexy,” which had been kicking around for a years, was Bond channeling Beck channeling Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” The slyly suggestive lyrics came later: “I was on vacation, and in the middle of reading Thomas Pynchon’s V, and his weird, paranoid description of ‘60s counterculture really resonated with me, especially when placed against the backdrop of the modern American beach town, which has a similarly jarring, almost trashy vibe. The lyrics are a kind of stream-of-consciousness flow about watching your culture get sold back to you, filtered through decades of commercials. Nothing particularly deep, but for those of us whose first glimpses at the ‘60s were through Monkees reruns or the Beach Boys guest-starring on Full House, it should make a little sense.”
Coltrane Motion - "Supersexy '67"
Two outsized forces on the 1970s pop charts showed up for the 67 party. “Questions 67 and 68” was the first single released by the group formerly known as Chicago Transit Authority. (The band shortened its moniker to avoid the same kinds of legal hassles more recently experienced by the Postal Service.) Say what you will about Chicago, the group has sold more records than any American band but the Beach Boys. And while many of the hits were right in line with formulaic ‘70s radio pabulum, Chicago forged a signature sound from the disparate influences of jazz, classical, and rock. I will also give Chicago credit for two juicy numerical singles (the other one being “25 or 6 to 4”). The numbers in the title refer to the years ‘67 and ‘68, when Chicago keyboardist Robert Lamm was besieged with commitment questions by his girlfriend. Elton John vied with Chicago for chart dominance during the “Me Decade” but his “Old ‘67” comes from The Captain and the Kid, a 2006 follow-up to the classic Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. The song has some of the Americana-steeped flavor of early Elton LPs like Tumbleweed Connection, but as often happens, the follow-up record failed to measure up to the original.
It’s not clear if ace producer Mitch Easter, who once facetiously referred to himself as “the Dr. Dre of jangle,” was riffing on the ever-popular “Route 66” when he named the instrumental closer on his excellent Big Plans for Everybody “Route 67” or if he was merely referencing a highway in his native North Carolina. But this frantic, slide-guitar-driven nugget feels miles away from the twee-ness of the records he made when the group was actually together, and even departs from the luminous, layered pop constructions that preceded it on the essentially solo Big Plans. The record remains an underappreciated gem, although at the time of its release it received accolades from a variety of sources, including Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant, who said he would be happy to mow Easter’s lawn.
Since 1967 is the outsized influence here, a brief accounting of 1967 songs seems in order, despite the fact that these songs are not eligible for highest honors. The suite-like “1967,” from Adrian Belew’s most commercially successful solo outing, Mr. Music Head (1992), has a cerebral charm and surrealistic lyrics, but I have to dock it points for having nothing to do with 1967, at least as far as I can tell. More to the point is “1967” by the Auteurs, which revolves around an undeniably Beatle-esque descending chord pattern and the arch, insinuating voice of main Auteur, Luke Haines, and, yet, upon closer inspection, lines like “The Beatles and the Stones mean nothing to us” reveal it to be a sort of anti-1967 song. (The snarling “67” by Love Battery, veterans of the ‘90s Seattle scene, takes a similar tack: “Well me and my friends were sittin’ round/talkin’ bout a thing called love/Since 1967 well it’s never been enough.”) “1967” by Tom Robinson of “Glad to Be Gay” fame is a touching backward look, with images of “eating apples off the allotments” and “swapping cigarette cards,” while Don McLean (who as a youth was apparently a lonely teenage broncin’ buck with a pink carnation and a pickup truck) avoided the metaphorical trappings of his landmark “American Pie” on his “1967,” a song narrated by a disillusioned Vietnam War vet. Some folks avoided that war by heading to Canada, home of Dayglo Abortions, whose 1981 debut LP, Out of the Womb, featured the taunting “1967” (as well as “I Killed Mommy,” and “Too Stoned to Care”).
“I shouted out, “Free the Expo ‘67”
Till they stepped on my hair, and they told me I was fat ”
–They Might Be Giants, “Purple Toupee”
Expo ’67, the April-to-October international extravaganza held in Montreal, featured a geodesic dome by Buckminster Fuller, a live broadcast of The Ed Sullivan Show, and performances by the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Tiny Tim. A weeklong pass set you back 12 bucks. Montreal ska band the Kingpins saluted that event in their highly infectious “Last Train to Expo ’67.” (Meanwhile, in Trinidad and Tobago, where the yearly carnival celebration is commemorated in a song competition, the winning ditty that year was a joyous romp called “Sixty-Seven” by the Trinidadian calypso singer Lord Kitchener.) A number of songs have employed the Expo ’67 nomenclature strategy of tacking ’67 onto a solid noun or place name. “Detroit ‘67” by the Quebec-born Sam Roberts and his band is built around a honky-tonk piano figure that sounds both well-worn and timeless. In this rousing recollection of a time and place, Roberts yearns for a world he’s too young to remember; he laments the loss of Detroit’s past, from the sordid (Jimmy Hoffa) to the sublime (Motown), from the recent past (the assembly line) to the long-gone (the Chippewa). The chorus is earnest and infectious as the third-person narrative shifts to a direct plea: “Does anyone here remember those times? Can anyone here just tell me what they felt like?” “Jagger ‘67” by the Infadels, a twitchy storm of in-your-face beats and declamatory vocals, celebrates London’s lustful dance music scene, a girl with “twisted hair” and a “lip-ring stare.” (Note to rock trivia buffs: the song’s insistent dance groove is powered by drummer Alex Bruford, son of original Yes drummer Bill Bruford.)
On the fringes of 67-dom are “67 Degrees” by echolyn (that’s right, the “e” is lowercase), a Pennsylvania prog rock institution that formed in 1989 from the ashes of Narcissus; “Sixty-Seven” a synth-driven instrumental by Korean duo As One; “67” by King’s X, a complaint about the surfeit of offerings on cable TV; and “Les Bonbons 67” by Jacques Brel, which features lines like “I say meow meow” and “I hear my hair push,” (at least according to my rudimentary French) and is strictly to be avoided. Meanwhile, on the same continent, Dutch saxophonist Candy Dulfer, who has collaborated with Pink Floyd and Van Morrison and received a shout-out from Prince on his 1989 single “Partyman,” offers up a frothy cup of jazz-funk on the instrumental “Finsbury Park, Café ’67.” Rounding out the European category is “Dirty 67” by Belgian hardcore punks Sunpower, from Pain For Profit (2007), which also features “I Hate Authority” and “Gonna Cut Myself.”
But getting down to the matter at hand, choosing a winning song for 67 proved an unusually nettlesome task. The Coltrane Motion and Sam Roberts songs are damned good, but I was determined to rustle up a bit of 67 magic. A few months ago, after bending the ear of my friend Zeebling Monroe, a New Zealand-born musician who tends bar at the Lower East Side watering hole Barramundi, I managed to get him jazzed about writing a 67 song. As a bonus, he also directed a video for it, and I think the results speaks for themselves. I realize I am setting myself up for allegations of voter fraud or influence pedaling or whatever, but if Zee’s song did not deliver the goods, I wouldn’t be crowning it king. But it does, and I am. It’s haunting and heartfelt, and Zee’s video incorporates some of the magical elements I was looking for. Here’s what Zee has to say about it:
“The song was inspired by master Hong Kong movie director Wong Kar Wai, who is one of my all-time favorite directors and inspires me no end. In particular, the song refers to and contains sound bites from In the Mood for Love and its sequel, 2046, both breathtakingly beautiful movies with minimal dialogue, dripping in emotion. Its kind of a different sound for me, but the stuff I got together for this album is all pretty varied, with a lot of Japanese influence, both in Japanese artists I’m working with on it and samples I’m playing with.”
Zeebling - "Hong Kong 67
The cinematic inspiration finds expression in the atmosphere and structure of the song, which bleeds into existence with a tremulous synth tone, a disembodied voice from a Wong Kar Wai film and the eerie childlike vocals of Yumi Kaizuka, which bring to mind those little she-devil twins in The Shining singing to themselves while playing mumblety peg in the Overlook Hotel’s hedge maze. Zee weaves a slow, insistent melody, his words indistinct, like whispers, over a mournful piano, a fat, blasted-out guitar and some softly pummeling beats. Sonic touches waft in and out of the mix, a fuzzy shard from a film score here, a slice of slowed-down Fellini dialog there; at points the sound melts away for a few moments, like a slow fade to black, followed by a smash cut back to the song. What stands out most in the end is the eerie “na-na-na-na” vocals, which feel like an eerie re-imagining of the joyous final section of “Hey Jude.”
In contrast to the picture the music paints in the mind's eye, the video, far from being ominous, is hopeful. In numerology, 67 becomes the sum of 6+7, 13, which is bad luck in our culture but a magical numeral in others. In the clip, a lone character (played by Yumi Kaizuka) uses magic to transform her situation. She does a tarot reading in her Manhattan apartment and draws a card that indicates emotional disappointment. She then pretties herself up, draws a magical sigil, and uses it to dress a candle to cast a spell. After reading the cards again, she finds her offering has been acknowledged and heads out into rough-and-tumble New York, where she pays her respects to the powers responsible for the change, making a humble public offering before walking off into an ostensibly brighter future.
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), 6.4, 7 (counterpoint), 7 (redux), 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, 64, 65, 66
Posted by David Klein at October 16, 2009 03:45 PM
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