*** OT - OFFICIAL cyclones500 & MeanDean Weekly Wednesday Music Post ***

[MeanDean]

Hey all, @cyclones500 and I have been mulling over the idea of doing a weekly music related OT post. I'm launching the first one today and he'll be alternating weeks with me so watch for his next week.

Our idea is to put some music related content out there every week and hopefully elicit some discussion and go from there. Without further ado, here comes No. 1.

"On that Note" is not adopted as the real name of the series. Just something to get going. If you have an idea for a good name please chime in. Maybe something that ties into both ISU/Cyclones and also music?

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ON THAT NOTE

MeanDean

"Writing About Music is Like Dancing About Architecture"

The value of writing about music has been questioned for a long time. How can mere words in any way portray the musical notes, percussion, vocalization and emotion of a musical piece? Fact is, they can't. That the above quote is of unknown origin seems somehow appropriate. (It's usually credited to either Frank Zappa or Elvis Costello - who credits it to the comedian/actor Martin Mull).

Of course, cyclones500 and I are always commenting on virtually every music thread in the CF Off Topic Forum. I'll admit there are few CFers I notice above the din, but eventually his presence and placement of remarks caused me to notice - so I reached out to him digitally.

Then, when an article about user generated content appeared a few months ago I asked c500 if he would be interested in teaming up to become regular contributors. He agreed so here we go! We plan to alternate the input weekly. My musical commentary will cover popular music from the beginnings of Rock and Roll through approximately the mid 1980's when my interest in newer output began to wane. c500 may overlap that a bit but plans to mostly cover recorded output from the more recent third of a century.

Back to that quote; One thing different nowadays versus when it was originally spoken - we have the magic of the internet and availability of the hyperlink. No longer is a writer limited to verbiage - a link allows the reader to actually hear the music.

I intended to include some personal musical biographical background here but want to keep these features short - that will come in time. And also, no real musical commentary from me this installment. I hope our stuff will generate reader comments on our articles and maybe expand some musical tastes and knowledge. And selfishly, I too hope I can find some new-to-me music to enjoy as a result.

And to ensure this isn't just us in this first installment, here are a couple links to some thoughts about musical commentary:

http://www.collapseboard.com/features/columns/where-the-metaphor-fails-writing-about-music-is-like-dancing-about-architecture/

https://www.everything2.com/title/Writing+about+music+is+like+dancing+about+architecture

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[IsUaClone2]

I'm looking forward to these articles. My attention span normally leads me away from anything but soundbites but the combination of this content and you is drawing me in.

 

[Clone83]

I saw just yesterday some good commentary on the 50th anniversary of The Doors' Light My Fire and how the song came to be. It includes a link to an NPR interview of the keyboardist.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/07/light-my-fire-at-50.php

 

[Angie]

Looking forward to this weekly thread - LOVE music threads!

 

[MeanDean]

I saw just yesterday some good commentary on the 50th anniversary of The Doors' Light My Fire and how the song came to be. It includes a link to an NPR interview of the keyboardist.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/07/light-my-fire-at-50.php

Definitely the Doors version is the original and best. I also had a strong recollection of the Jose Feliciano version. He might have even done it on the Ed Sullivan Show if I remember correctly. 50 year old memories are always iffy.

Over the years I've sort of dismissed his version as "just a cover". But I've listened to it a lot more lately and it is definitely a good thing in it's own standing.

Robby Krieger, (The Doors), says in a 1990 interview about the cover: "It's really a great feeling to have written a classic. I think I owe a big debt to Jose Feliciano because he is actually the one, when he did it, everybody started doing it. He did a whole different arrangement on it."

 

[jcyclonee]

This series should be named "Smoke on the Water".

Also, good idea. This could be pretty fun.

 

[MeanDean]

This series should be named "Smoke on the Water".

Also, good idea. This could be pretty fun.

Sweet Smokin' Caroline on the Water

 

[Clone83]

Interesting how on the Ed Sullivan Show, Jim Morrison sang the original lyric "girl we couldn't get much higher" instead of the agreed to "girl we couldn't get much better." Sullivan didn't shake Morrison's hand after the performance and cancelled plans for a series of performances by the Doors.

Here is a bit from the Sullivan show performance:


And a full performance in the same year on the Jonathan Winters show:

 

[Clone83]

I wonder if Jose Feliciano's version of Light My Fire wasn't inspired in part by The Girl from Ipanema. I recall a good review of that song on its 50th anniversary in 2012:



The Elusive Girl From Ipanema [gated]
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303649504577492603567202024

Before 1962, if John Q. Nobody gave any thought to South America at all, it probably didn't range much beyond banana republics, fugitive Nazis and Carmen Miranda. That changed 50 years ago this summer when a tall and tan and young and lovely goddess was born.

She was "The Girl From Ipanema."

Like a handful of other international crossover hits ("Day-O" from Jamaica, "Down Under" from Australia), "The Girl From Ipanema" pretty much put an entire country's music and ethos on the map. In this case, the land was Brazil, the genre was bossa nova [from dictionary lookup: "a style of Brazilian music derived from samba but placing more emphasis on melody and less on percussion", • a dance to this music; "Origin: 1960s: from Portuguese, from bossa ‘tendency’ and nova (feminine of novo)‘new.’"], and the atmosphere was uniquely exotic and elusive—a seductive tropical cocktail "just like a samba that swings so cool and sways so gently," as the lyrics go.

At the time, bossa nova wasn't exactly unknown in the U.S., as shown by the Grammy-winning success of "Desafinado" from the 1962 album "Jazz Samba" by Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd. But "The Girl From Ipanema" ("Garota de Ipanema" in the original Portuguese) was something else altogether. Not only was it one of the last great gasps of pre-Beatles easy listening, it was an entire culture in miniature.

"To the layperson, 'The Girl From Ipanema' sounds like 'a nice song,' " says the Brazilian-American guitarist and musical director Manny Moreira. "But to the trained ear it is perfection."

In the half-century since its genesis, "The Girl From Ipanema" has become inescapable. According to Performing Songwriter magazine, it is the second-most-recorded pop tune ever, surpassed only by "Yesterday." . . . . . . . .

Clearly, this is art for the ages. But why?

One reason is the girl of the title. The embodiment of sultry pulchritude, she is also utterly unobtainable: "But each day when she walks to the sea/She looks straight ahead, not at me."

"It's the oldest story in the world," says Norman Gimbel, who wrote the English lyrics. "The beautiful girl goes by, and men pop out of manholes and fall out of trees and are whistling and going nuts, and she just keeps going by. That's universal."

So reasoned composer Antônio Carlos Jobim and poet Vinícius de Moraes five decades ago. Stalled on a number for a musical called "Blimp," they sought inspiration at the Veloso, a seaside cafe in the Ipanema neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. There they remembered a local teenager, the 5-foot-8-inch, dark-haired, green-eyed Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto, whom they often saw walking to the beach or entering the bar to buy cigarettes for her mother. And so they penned a paean to a vision.

Originally crooned by the popular Brazilian singer Pery Ribeiro (who died in February), "Garota de Ipanema" went over well enough in its home country. Then the U.S. music publisher Lou Levy asked Mr. Gimbel to devise an English cover. With Mr. Jobim on piano, Stan Getz on sax, João Gilberto on guitar and Portuguese vocals, and Mr. Gilberto's wife, Astrud, handling English vocals, the U.S. version was cut for the album "Getz/Gilberto" in March 1963.

While Mr. Gilberto's soft Portuguese sets the tone for the song, it is his wife's English response that still captivates after all this time. By all rights, it shouldn't. Although Astrud could speak the language, her delivery was decidedly unpolished. "Before the recording, I had never sung professionally," she says on her website—and you can hear it. Often she emphasizes the wrong sounds and seems to be enunciating phonetically. Her very first word, "tall," comes across as "doll." Contrary to Mr. Gimbel's lyrics, she sings, "She looks straight ahead not at he." It was supposed to be "me."

"I was tearing my hair out when I learned that later," Mr. Gimbel says. "It upset me no end."

But when combined with her tentative delivery, Mr. Getz's breathy sax and Mr. Jobim's gentle piano, the errors make the result ever so slightly foreign—just out of reach, like the girl herself, and thus irresistible.

"The Girl From Ipanema" went on to win the Grammy for record of the year in 1965 and was guaranteed immortality that same year when Heloísa was revealed as its inspiration. Today, as Helo Pinheiro, still stunning at 66, she is a local celebrity, happy to give interviews and pose for photos. Unlike her ethereal counterpart, she is personable indeed.

And that, perhaps, is ultimate reason why the song endures: The remote, mythic beauty—the impossible dream—turned out to be as real as you or me.

—Mr. Vinciguerra is the editor of "Backward Ran Sentences: The Best of Wolcott Gibbs From the New Yorker."

There was apparently some controversy about the song at the last Olympics, which allowed the Wall Street Journal to revisit the song:

The Woman Who Inspired ‘The Girl From Ipanema’ Says the Olympic Opening Ceremonies Didn’t Do Justice to the Song
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-wo...onies-didnt-do-justice-to-the-song-1470865218

. . . . . . . . . . . . In response to questions from The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Meirelles wrote in an email that “The Girl From Ipanema” segment was intended to depict the internationalization of Brazilian culture and “the creation of the mythical Rio de Janeiro” of the 1960s by artists like Mr. Jobim, Mr. de Moraes and architect Oscar Niemeyer, among others.

He added that the segment was intended to honor not any particular Ipanema girl, but the inspirational spirit of all Ipanema girls.

Like many great unrequited-love songs, “The Girl From Ipanema” was born in a bar. The one the songwriters frequented was called Veloso, said Ruy Castro, the Brazilian author of “Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World.”

Ms. Pinheiro, then a vivacious 17-year-old known as Heloisa Helena, was a neighborhood habitué and a gymnast. She practiced routines on the beach, where she caught the songwriters’ attention. “They found her beautiful,” Mr. Castro said.

Their masterpiece went on to become one of the most covered tunes in pop-music history, most memorably by Frank Sinatra, and by Astrud Gilberto, João Gilberto and Stan Getz.

Mr. de Moraes, who died in 1980, and Mr. Jobim, who passed on in 1994, remain such national idols that one of Brazil’s official Olympic mascots, a yellow catlike creature, is named Vinicius, while the other, a blue-green shrub-like being, has been dubbed “Tom.”

Tom Jobim Airport is the moniker given to Rio’s main international terminal, and other locales also bear his name. He has a statue on Ipanema beach. Mr. de Moraes has a Rio street named for him. . . . . . . .

Although the two articles are gated, I believe the associated WSJ videos can be viewed at the above links. Here are the same two videos, however, available via YouTube:

 

[Clone83]

I like the thread concept and will try to participate.

I'm not sure how many people here can relate, how things have changed, but YouTube is great to explore songs and groups I recall growing up. I certainly don't recall many, let alone all, but any performance on shows like Ed Sullivan or The Smothers Brothers, it's likely I saw the original performance. And that is just one aspect.

 

[cyclones500]

Interesting how on the Ed Sullivan Show, Jim Morrison sang the original lyric "girl we couldn't get much higher" instead of the agreed to "girl we couldn't get much better." Sullivan didn't shake Morrison's hand after the performance and cancelled plans for a series of performances by the Doors.

I think I read in the Sugarman/Hopkins book that Morrison told the producers afterward he was so excited/nervous that he "completely forgot" to sing "better." Which could've been complete B.S., who knows.

Another Doors-related censoring note. On "Break on Through," The Doors were forced to cut the word "high" from the segment "she gets high." ... A few times in recent past I've heard the song on classic radio with original mix, so "high" is include.

Thing is, that sounds really strange now, I'm so used to that choppy "She get!" ... the original lyric somehow doesn't have the same punch (to my ears). "She get" seems to match the music frenzy in that section better. Maybe that's due to familiarity.

 

[IsUaClone2]

Hey Mean, someday you could cover these types of songs:

When I attended Iowa State there were three guys for every girl. Listening to songs like this fed a lot of fantasies.