One Hit No More, No. 81: Cerrone Makes "Love in C Minor"

I didn't mention the sci-fi theme?

The Hit
I was listening to a podcast the other day - You’re Wrong About, Disco Demolition Night (August 2020) - that framed that dumb, destructive (racist, homophobic) night by talking about disco music and how it came about. Keeping people dancing was one major inspiration - which meant ditching pop music’s plus-or-minus-three-minute time limit, because who wants a three-minute party?

Marc Cerrone - just Cerrone on stage - embraced that format/argument by filling the A-side of his debut album with just one song, “Love in C Minor.” Despite (or because) clocking in at just over 16 minutes, it became an international hit - or, more likely, the radio edit did - topping out at No. 3 in the United States in 1977. The scene/sound opens with “ladies night” - in this case, a group of sophisticated women sizing up the night club fauna (“that ain’t no banana”; “any more champagne in there?”). Right after that vignette's swinging singles come together, the electric violin bleeds in, followed by the insistent bass beat that formed the spine of disco. After a delay, a funk bass bubbles over the beat, counter-poised with more slashes of violin, then comes the high-hat, then the “chicka-wah” guitar, really just one instrument/tone after another - flutes, jittering synth scores, and so on. As said in a contemporary review in Billboard, it was:

“…a 15-minute disco opus with strings and female vocal harmonies behind a relentless beat that should wear out all but the most durable disco dancers”

Before six minutes are gone, orgiastic audio snippets join the general orgy of sound. Whether in music or on album covers, Cerrone embraced human sexuality with gusto. When Atlantic Records released Love in C Minor, the album, in the States, they replaced the naked woman on the original album cover with four hands grabbing four wrists in a square. American/marketing puritanism strikes again…

Cerrone had already established himself in his native France by the time he went solo, but his arrival in the States came both by accident and organically. As explained in a worthwhile 2018 interview/retrospective in PopMatters:

Crash Course Timeline, No. 22: Louis Armstrong's "Hot" Sessions

The OG Hot Five.

I decided to see out the 1920s with a look at the early career of one of the biggest American musicians of the first half of the 20th century, Louis Armstrong. The content will bleed ever-so-slightly into the 1930s, but, unlike earlier posts on blues and country, the notes on jazz will end right around the same time the Jazz Age did.

Before digging in, I’ve got a frustration to acknowledge: the audio on Spotify’s early holdings for Armstrong is…well, just crap, muddy and barely audible to boot. That made it hard to hear the music I was hearing, which made it hard to appreciate the same. Basically, I don’t have the same sense/connection to the music that I typically do, which means the sampler will be a short, mildly pissy list of songs (or something else entirely). If Youtube doesn't have better audio, I apologize in advance. Also, the Internet didn’t have much on Armstrong’s early period, so this post relies heavily on Wikipedia. As much as I hate to mono-source, sometimes it's what you have.

Now…Louis Armstrong. I’m confident that a strong majority of people of a certain age can pick out his voice and I think those same people have clear sense of the music he played. Going the other way, the rest of it, especially his early years, would surprise most of those same people.

Born in New Orleans, in 1901, Louis Daniel Armstrong grew up hard, as indicated by the name of a neighborhood he came in and out of, The Battlefield. Both his mother and father came in and out of his life, and to the extent that he spent some years being raised by the Karnoffskys, a family of Lithuanian Jewish street peddlers. That short period of his life clearly meant something to Armstrong, who honored it by wearing a Star of David to the end of his life. He also gained fluency in Yiddish and his first experience with a musical instrument of any kind, e.g., the tin horn he played to attract people to the Karnoffskys wagon.

He was living with his mother again when he dropped out of school at age 11. The same year (or thereabouts) saw him get arrested for stealing his stepfathers’s gun and firing a blank into the air. The legal system shipped him to the “Colored Waif’s House” (aka, 1920s juvie) and into the care of a man named Captain Joseph Jones, a fan of all things military, including discipline. The upside of Jones’ love of the military was the presence of a marching band in the “waif’s house,” and that’s where Armstrong first found brass instruments. It also put him in front of the famous New Orleans trombonist, Kid Ory.

One Hit No More, No. 80: Afternoon Delight in Starland

How I like to see them after this. Ready, man.

The Hit
Before starting, I want to acknowledge and celebrate my long-standing fondness for the Mamas & the Papas. As one member of the Starland Vocal Band told Songfacts, “People love to hear people singing in harmony - there's no two ways about it.” Guilty.

And that brings the story to Starland Vocal Band’s famous and storied single, “Afternoon Delight.” You know it, hell, you’ve probably laughed at, even if from that scene in Anchorman. (They even made a bonus video for it.)

After 12 second or so of a 12-string guitar dueling with a six-string, an languid rhythm combination kicks in, just enough to give the tune a bottom, but the vocals carry and raise it. I have to confess that I didn’t remember any of that (thanks, Anchorman), but it’s quite pretty, honestly, but giving a close listen to the lyrics…well, it complicates the experience.

The interviewee for that Songfacts interview (which, for the record, contains some fun notes on the song-writing process) was Jon Carroll, and whatever anyone feels about “Afternoon Delight” doesn’t hold a candle within a goddamn mile of what he’s got going on his in his head. From loving the song to never getting tired of performing it to worrying about what Morris Day (of Morris Day and the Time) thought of it to forever fretting about winding up as a punchline in 70s revival events, it’s possible Carroll has felt everything that it is possible to feel about Starland’s (yes) one hit. Before summing up all that - and it’s a pretty fun read - he summed it all up with this:

“I'm very proud of the song but I really had to live it down.”

Due to the numerous times “Afternoon Delight” has been treated as a punchline - e.g., Good Will Hunting mocked it, a Rolling Stone article about the shooting of a Tom Petty video somehow found a way to crap on it as “the top of the heap of wimp rock,” and so on - Carroll earned all of that sensitivity. And it does get strong reactions. While hunting for material for this post, I stumbled across a personal reflection on a site called Perfect Sound Forever that, apart from solid notes on consent, has some truly wonderful things to say about the song’s unsubtle sexual allusions:

“Even me, the gormless innocent, got it. First time. Here were the angelic voices of some apple-pie lovelies not just singing about rumpy-pumpy but celebrating it, rejoicing in the anticipation of a round of hide-the-sausage.”

The same author also passed on this truly eloquent note:

Crash Course Timeline, No. 21: The (Paul) Whiteman Cometh

Paul Whiteman at the office.

Paul Whiteman led the most popular “jazz” orchestra for the duration of the 1920s, but the internet doesn’t have much to say about him or that. All of what’s below mainly relies on just two sources (Wikipedia and a piece for Syncopated Times), and most of the information between those two sources repeats. Call it historical revisionism, call it historical correction, the memory-hole has by and large swallowed Whiteman’s legacy. Still, his life and career open a revealing window into how popular music and the way people talk about it has evolved.

Some part of the that follows from a latter-day controversy over his promotional nickname as “the King of Jazz,” an appellation that doesn’t work on at least two levels. First, and on a purely stylistic level, Whiteman discouraged improvisation - aka, the “heart of jazz” - to the point of excluding it outright; his orchestras played carefully constructed arrangements instead, in which no one went off script. Second, and more significantly, he borrowed a musical form created by Black artists - a lot of them his contemporaries - polished it up and presented it to White audiences. To repeat a phrase I read over and over in the light research I did, Whiteman wanted to “make a lady out of jazz.” Or, to borrow from a couple places:

“While most jazz musicians and fans consider improvisation to be essential to the musical style, Whiteman thought the genre could be improved by orchestrating the best of it, with formal written arrangements.” (Wikipedia)

“But for the ‘King of Jazz’ title to be given to a white musician who never took a jazz solo instead of Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, or any of a dozen other African-American jazz greats hurt Whiteman’s reputation despite his contributions to American music and the jazz age.” (Syncopated Times, 2020)

I appreciate that he had nothing to do with it, but the fact that his surname is “Whiteman” borders on Dickensian…

One Hit No More, No. 79: Wild Cherry, Playing That Funky Music (White Boy)

This, but funky and from Eastern Ohio.

The Hit
Raise your hand if you think KC & the Sunshine Band put out “Play That Funky Music” half the time. Anyone? (For the curious, here's them playing it live on and old TV show.)

Wild Cherry was the band that dropped it in 1976 and it blew all the way up. Both single and album went platinum in a flash, Billboard named Wild Cherry the Best Pop Group of ’76 and, beyond the song and group picking up a couple more nominations, the single picked up an American Music Award as the top R&B single of the same year.

Guitarist Bryan Bassett came up with the classic opening guitar riff - as he told an outlet called Brave Words, “I have played a million notes in my life but those are the seven notes that people will remember.” - but Wild Cherry front-man, Rob Parissi, wrote their monster hit in a burst of inspiration with desperation snapping at its heels (“Disco was coming. Rock clubs were closing down.”). The details vary from one telling to the next, but the story of where that inspiration came from follows the same, broad outline. I credit Bassett for giving the tidiest version:

“We were playing Led Zeppelin and Robin Trower in the clubs at the time when The Bee Gees and KC & the Sunshine Band were coming out. We were playing in these big clubs that had a thousand people and we were rocking out while all these people were just looking at us. We would take a break and the deejay would come on and play all these new dance songs and the dance floor would immediately be packed. Literally, one guy actually came up to us and said, 'You better start paying some funky music, white boy.' We were still a covers band so we went out and learned the hits of the day.”

With that thought in his mind, Parissi said to his bandmates, “how about if Led Zeppelin did ‘That’s the Way I Like It”? He borrowed a drink order pad and pen from the bar and started writing before they went on one night and had most of the lyrics worked out before they took the stage; he finished it later that night on the cab ride home. When he played that song for people - e.g., people at his label, even his dad - they all thought adding “white boy” after “play that funky music” would absolutely never, and in no way fly (his dad begged him to take it out). Parissi stuck to his guns and he got it right. I’ll leave it to American Songwriterto sum up the origin story:

Crash Course Timeline, No. 20: Bix Beiderbecke, Davenport, Iowa's Hippest (Drunkest) Son

Why not go with the famous photo?

With an eye to future chapters, this post drags music back to the jazz of the 1920s - specifically to one of the genre's great innovators, Bix Beiderbecke. Even though he was born miles, and arguably worlds, away from the cities where jazz was born, Beiderbecke’s name moved in the same circles as the legends. That respect went both ways too, as noted on a Stanford University site called Riverwalk Jazz:

“Later, both Bix and Louis avowed that the other was ‘the best horn player he had ever heard.’”

I saw comparisons between Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke over and over as I dug into the latter’s legend - and it is a very much a legend. Some of those comparisons read differently today than the would have two, three decades ago. For example:

“Where Armstrong's playing was bravura, regularly optimistic, and openly emotional, Beiderbecke's contained a range of intellectual alternatives. Where Armstrong, at the head of an ensemble, played it hard, straight and true, Beiderbecke, like a shadow-boxer, invented his own way of phrasing 'around the lead.' Where Armstrong's superior strength delighted in the sheer power of what a cornet could produce, Beiderbecke's cool approach invited rather than commanded you to listen.”

Fans of American football should hear a faint echo from conversations about, say, wide receivers in that...

Leon Bismark “Bix” Beiderbecke was born into a well-to-do family in Davenport, Iowa in 1903; a lively, if pointless, dispute surrounds whether his middle name was actually Bismark or Bix, but he clearly preferred the latter and never went by anything else (as he signed off in a letter to his mother, written when he was 9-years-old, “frome your Leon Bix Beiderbecke not Bismark Remember”). His father trafficked in coal and lumber and his mother’s father was a steamboat pilot, but Beiderbecke must have fallen in love with music the second he heard it. His sister recalls him playing piano by age three - he played with his hands over his head - and, when the local press caught wind of him, they hailed him as a seven-year-old boy musical wonder,” and under headlines reading, “Little Bickie Beiderbecke plays any selection he hears.” He learned how to play a couple instruments, but he would latch onto the cornet and never let go.