One Hit No More, No. 106: Utopia's "Set Me Free" & Freedom from Prog

O.G.

Nope. Didn’t know this one either…

The Hit
The only remarkable thing about Utopia’s “Set Me Free” is that it came from the primary musical project of one of the most prolific men in 1970s music. Maybe. And yet, no great tales surround it’s creation - it’s the opposite, if anything - it didn’t make Utopia famous (already there), and it came less from a sound that defined them as an act than it dropped a marker on their evolution. According to Wikipedia, that single and the album it appeared on (Adventures in Utopia) derailed their career arc.

It does sound like its time, with the warm 1970s sound (especially on the keys) blending with the cooler synth production the 1980s made popular. If I had to compare it any song I’d ever heard before, I’d go with “Believe It or Not,” the song Joey Scarbury wrote for TV’s The Greatest American Hero.

It didn’t chart that high - it only reached No. 27 on Billboard’s Hot 100, and didn’t blow up internationally - but that’s entirely on-brand for Utopia.

The Rest of the Story
“Utopia as a group is to convince people of the potential reality of the concept. Utopia isn't even the greatest potential reality, it's just what we can afford now. We're the Disneyland of rock and roll bands. Anyone can get into it with a little bit of effort.”
- Todd Rundgren, a 1973 feature in the UK Guardian (reissued in 2013)

Utopia started as “Todd Rundgren’s Utopia,” and it was very much his baby. The original members included various musicians he’d worked with on his post-Nazz solo material, and even all that happened somewhat by accident. Shortly after Nazz petered out, Rundgren found himself without a job, a band and, as he explained to Songwriter Universe in a 2018 interview, “I did not have any confidence as a solo artist.” He had, however, started writing songs for Nazz “because that’s what bands did…after the Beatles.” Rundgren’s first songs trafficked in the usual themes - e.g., the ecstasy and agony of romantic love - and, after having to force himself to sit down to write the first few, it didn’t take him long to understand how easily the process slipped into formula. And hold that thought for now.

One Hit No More, No. 105: Pucker Up and Kiss...Lipps Inc.

The band's all here. For a time.

On the one hand, who does not know this song? On the other, who knows where it came from and how that connects it to a musical legend?

The Hit
For anyone who has ever wondered what puts the digital fry into vocals in the verses in Lipps Inc.’s “Funkytown,” it’s a vocoder, the parent (or grandparent) of Auto-Tune. For anyone who thinks of it as a disco anthem, it dropped nine months after the rightly infamous Disco Demolition Night. As noted on the official Funky Town site:

“’Funkytown’ put the Minneapolis group Lipps, Inc. on the map, at a time when popular music was pre-Prince and post-punk. The obituaries for disco were being written; Lipps, Inc. put the funeral on hold.”

Shit. I meant to bury the Prince reveal, but the way he flits on the edges of the story flags an important divide in the larger, yet brief narrative.

As for the song, it starts with a naked kick-drum that could lead into just about any pop song. To put the rest in a Name That Tune frame, I’m guessing 40% of contestants when the rattling cowbell comes in (0:04); the snare drum (0:08) doesn’t give much away, but the honking car horn (0:12) might knock another handful of contestants off the fence; another 20% would catch on with the loping bass (0:23), and I’m confident you’d arrive at 100% after the first four notes on the keys, maybe even two. It’s a lot of wash-rinse-repeat from there and the album mix probably goes on longer than you think (just south of eight minutes), but, when you’re on the dancefloor (probably a touch high), you don’t give a shit. As the great Marv “The Leatherman” Gomez says in the film classic, Thank God It’s Friday, “Dancing! Everything else is bullshit!”

Musically, it serves a purpose. Thematically, it speaks to something broader. From a 2018 edition of Time Out from “Funkytown’s” Wikipedia page:

One Hit No More, No. 104: McFadden & Whitehead, the World's a Hard Place for Writers...

Wish I had a shot of them writing...

If you bet me $20 this song is in the movie Running Scared, I would take the bet. Even though I think I’m wrong…wait, yeah, that was based in Chicago...helluva cast, man...

The Hit
“During the 1970s, the label released a string of worldwide hits that emphasized lavish orchestral instrumentation, heavy bass and driving percussion.”

McFadden & Whitehead’s “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” puts that description into musical form. Since picking around Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes a couple years back, I’ve spent the time in between trying to figure out how and/or why that sound clicks so easily with me. My best guess is that was what the music I heard growing up and that lets it check a bunch of boxes on the lizard-brain level.

It doesn't hurt that it just works. What starts as a strong bass-line line turns busy and bubbly under a medley of strings that tickle your ears like a summer breeze; what's not to love? To admit one drawback - especially for a guy who later switched on to songs with a hard three-minute limit (and most wrapped up in two-and-a-half) - your average Philly soul song tends to play out on a groove that lasts nearly that long.

That didn’t stop “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” from climbing high on the charts; it topped the R&B charts through the summer of 1979 and ticked up as high as No. 3 on the mainstream pop chart. It had a real cultural resonance as well, with some people calling it “the new black national anthem” and Philadelphia sports adopting it as an anthem of their own. According to a blog post on a site called From the Vaults (best single source I read, fwiw), McFadden & Whitehead recorded their hit in just one take; it also claims Whitehead made up the lyrics on the spot. For anyone wondering how the pair reached such a high level of proficiency, here’s…

The Rest of the Story (don’t sue me from beyond the grave, Paul Harvey)
Gene McFadden and John Whitehead grew up on the hard-scrabble side of Philly in the 1960s. There isn’t much about them growing up (e.g., no musical parents, no playing at church or performing in the choir, all common back-stories), but they formed a band they named The Epsilons by the mid-‘60s, i.e., in their late teens. They recruited other members - Allen Beatty, James Knight and, future member of the Blue Notes, Lloyd Parks - and start performing locally. The group did well enough for Otis Redding to bring them on, an arrangement that lasted until Redding died in a plane crash in 1967. From the Vaults' post includes a sentence that hints at even broader exposure, but it’s hard to really nail that down due to an absent verb:

Crash Course Timeline, No. 39: Jimmy Dorsey, the Nice One

A man and his (signature) horn.

My favorite story about either of the Dorsey Brothers is the one about their famous split. From their Wikipedia page:

“The band performed live mainly in the New England area, with acrimony between the brothers steadily building up, until a definitive falling out between Tommy and Jimmy over the tempo of ‘I'll Never Say Never Again Again’ in May 1935, after which Tommy walked off the stage.”

That brotherly feud didn’t formally end for 18 years. Over tempo. Related, because I placed this chapter in the late 1930s/1940s, I decided to write about each Dorsey as they played and functioned for all those years, i.e., separately. From what I gather, Jimmy, the older brother and the subject of this post, was the nicer of the two. Then again, I’ve only really read his side so far.

James Francis Dorsey was born in 1904 in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. His father worked as a coal miner at the time of his birth, but moved to teaching music at local schools and leading his own marching band shortly after. Both Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey played, and well, from a very young age, as demonstrated by the fact Jimmy started playing in his dad’s band by age seven. He started on trumpet and had the chops to play with a New York-based group called J. Carson McGee’s King Trumpeters by age nine, but he switched to the instrument that made him famous, the alto saxophone, by the time he turned 11. (Just to note it, he played clarinet as well, using the Albert system.)

It's fair to call both brothers precocious: as early as 1920, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey formed a third of their first band together, the Dorsey’s Novelty Six, a name they later changed to Dorsey’s Wild Canaries. They had some success with this group, even landed some airtime on the radio as “one of the first jazz bands to broadcast.” [Ed. - I can’t document it, but that doesn’t sound right.] With so much experience under their belts, and at such a young age, both Dorseys moved to New York to work as professional, full-time musicians.

Neither of them struggled for work. They played live, worked recording sessions, and did radio work throughout the 1920s, a lot of that time with decade’s best (e.g., the Paul Whiteman Orchestra). Jimmy, at least, played every orchestra of the 1920s I’ve ever heard of; he even recorded “the iconic 1927 jazz standard” “Singin’ the Blues” with the Frankie Trumbauer opposite the half-legendary Bix Beiderbecke. Before long, the Dorseys, some friends, peers and competitor built on what they learned playing in the ever-expanding orchestras of the late 1920s/early 1930s to create (white, mainstream) popular music’s next big thing. To name one early partner, Glenn Miller co-wrote, arranged and played trombone on a couple of collaborations with the Dorseys at the tail-end of the 1920s - e.g., “Annie's Cousin Fanny,” “Tomorrow’s Another Day,” and “Dese Dem Dose.”

One Hit No More, No. 103: Gary Numan, The Machman

Point A.

I had an unbalanced loathing of most things with synthesizers growing up. But I made a quiet exception for this song - almost certainly because I liked it, but felt like I shouldn't. Related, a very young me found Gary Numan fascinating for reasons I had neither the experience nor vocabulary to express.

The Hit
I can think of no better way to start this than with this quote from a solid, very current (2021) interview in SongwriterUniverse.com:

“I did have a piano by then, but it’s difficult if you’re not a good keyboard player, to come up with good synth/bass lines on an upright piano. So I bought a Shergold Modulator bass guitar from the West End in London, and brought it home. I opened up the case, pulled out the guitar, and the first four notes that I played was, “Do-do-do-do,” (he sings the bass hook of “Cars”). And I thought…That sounds pretty good, I’ll keep that. And then I did something else—the next four notes became [the other hook]. It was really simple, like a child’s song. It took me 5 to 10 minutes to get the three parts of the song worked out, and figure out a structure. Then it took me another 20 minutes to do the lyric.”

I love that it was that simple. Moreover, it makes a lot of sense after you read just a little about Numan. That fuzzy, modulated bass/rhythm riff he stumbled on dominates the song in such a way that I can’t imagine anyone associating any other sound with it, but it's that mixed with lose long treble synthesizer bleeds (for they way they, for lack of a better word, descend) that made Numan’s signature sound. At least at his frenzied peak. And frenzied it was…

The Rest of the Story
“You know, his album Replicas never left my turntable in junior high school. There are people still trying to work out what a genius he was.”
- Prince. Wait for it…

Born Gary Anthony James Webb, somewhere in London in 1958, the man who later transformed into Gary Numan grew up (mostly) as an only child (there was the late addition of a cousin) in a stable, supportive family. His parents hardly had money to burn - his father moved luggage for British Airways - but they indulged his interests often enough that he didn’t seem to want for anything. While he gravitated to the same interests most boys do - e.g., Numan told GQ in a 2020 interview that he wanted to be a pilot until he found out that only 1 in 1,000 make the cut - he became obsessed with music at a fairly young age and set his sights on the opportunity-rich career path of paid musician. Possibly related, Webb was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome at age 14. Never mind. It’s related.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 38: Nat King Cole, Before He Became "Unforgettable"

Before.

He started in life as Nathaniel Adams Coles, but left it among counts and dukes as jazz royalty. The man who became Nat King Cole was born in Montgomery, Alabama in 1919, but his hometown didn’t play any discernible role in his life: his musical life started in Chicago and he made his name in Los Angeles. That doesn’t mean it came easy. From the best source online I found on Nat King Cole (and take a bow, Indiana Public Media):

“Before he became the ‘Unforgettable’ star of both music and television, Nat King Cole was just a work-a-day pianist in Los Angeles, trying desperately to secure his next gig.”

Like a lot of musicians of the era, Cole first learned music in the church where his father served as minister. It was his mother, however, who first sat him down in front of a church organ. The young man proved a quick study, playing his first song in front of a crowd at age four (“Yes, We Have No Bananas”; old one), but the Coles family was precocious like that: all three sons - in order, Eddie, Nat, Ike, and Freddy - went on to pursue careers in music.

The call came early for Cole, before the end of high school, in fact (I found no mention of what his parents thought of this). He took his first stab at forming a band in 1934, at age 15, with a group he named the Royal Dukes. When that act sputtered out, Cole found a place as a member of a touring band under Noble Sissle (again, nothing about his parents’ thoughts). Once he got back to Chicago, Nat Cole teamed up with his older brother Eddie to form a sextet called Eddie Cole’s Swingsters. That group enjoyed some local success, even managed to record a couple sides for Decca Records, but Sissle came calling again and Nat Cole went.

The offer was better this time, a role in the touring group of a revival of Sissle’s once-groundbreaking musical, Shuffle Along. That one decision changed his life. He met and married his first wife - Nadine Robinson, who was also part of the Shuffle Along tour - and, when the revival petered out in Los Angeles, the young couple decided they liked the city and the weather and settled down. It being the late 1930s, Cole attempted to organize one of the big bands that dominated the era. When that stab at the big time failed, Cole tried something novel for the time - i.e., bringing together a band that could fit on any stage, even a seedy nightclub: a trio.