One Hit No More, No. 119: Studying Modern English

Ah, the glory days...

You remember this one because you have never been allowed to forget it.

The Hit
“The lyrics, I sat down on the floor in London in my house and I wrote those lyrics in 20 minutes. I was stoned, I had a joint, sat down on the carpet, and I just wrote them all out in about 10 to 20 minutes.”
- Robbie Grey, to The Big Takeover, 2020

That’s probably the best story about Modern English’s “I Melt With You,” a single that achieved a level of pop culture ubiquity rare for a one-hit wonder. Wikipedia tells me it never climbed higher than No. 76 in the States – something I find completely unbelievable, if only because I still remember every edit in that original video.

The song appeared on their second album, which meant it came out of nowhere in more ways than one. After self-producing a very different debut album, the band called in a professional producer named Hugh Jones, who Grey (the only guy you really hear from) credits for teaching them the songwriting craft. It paid off gloriously, both at the time – the driving rhythm at the open with an frantic acoustic rhythm over, how that gives way to that clean plucked melody and those memorable double thwaps on the drum – and for the rest of the band’s long, (once) ongoing career.

People of a certain age will recall them re-releasing the “I Melt With You” in 1990, with very different look and sound, but they released it again in 2020 to give people a happy breathe of nostalgia during the pandemic.

At any rate, they released the song on the 4AD label in the UK on 1982’s After the Snow. Sire Records carried it States-side and it just got picked up one radio station at a time until it smothered the airwaves and then slipped into the Valley Girl soundtrack (which featured a couple by Sparks too; and had The Plimsouls as a house band at the wimpiest punk bar in Los Angeles). It was big. And it changed their world over night...

One Hit No More, No. 118: Dazz Band Means "Danceable Jazz"

Exhibit A.

I would never have guessed where this band came fro - and I couldn’t have connected them to their hit with a gun to my head.

The Hit
“Harris realized quickly that ‘Let it Whip’ was special — ‘It’s a fun song and easy to sing, so people can sing it’ — and chasing the brass ring at the same level would be futile.”

The “Harris” in that quote refers to Bobby Harris, the founder of a succession of jazz, jazz-fusion, and, by that time, funk/R&B bands that hailed from Cleveland, Ohio. Big as it blew up – it topped Billboard’s “Hot Soul/Black Singles” charts, came within one spot on the “Dance Club Play” charts, and hit No. 5 on Billboard’s Hot 100 - I didn’t stumble into any great stories about the making or inspiration behind “Let It Whip.” That’s less surprising when you know Harris’ back-story, but still.

When I just think of the song, all my mind’s ear hears is a monotonous electronic drum, that squiggling bass and some pulsing synths, but “Let It Whip” holds up nicely in a closer listen – and how the hell does my brain hiccup over that guitar? – but the vocal fills/harmonic melodies are what tickle my ears just so...

...not bad for a songwriter who only never really thought of R&B/funk until he learned he could make a decent pile performing it.

The Rest of the Story
“’It was like cooking biscuits from scratch and I cook biscuits from scratch,’ he said. ‘It’s an old-school formula. You grow organically and don’t try to force a square peg in a round hole.’”

“’We never did stop performing,’ Harris said, laughing that he avoided ‘sitting on a corner with a tin cup in hand.’”

I didn’t find many killer quotables for Dazz Band, but those two do what I know of them justice. Charming as I found the long-form interview with Harris (linked to below with the rest of the sources), they lean far harder into the working band mold than they do something visionary. I don’t mean that as a knock. They formed back in 1976, if with a different name, and just kept on putting out music and performing from there.

Crash Course Timeline No. 54: Louis Jordan, Jukeboxes and Jump Blues

Speaks to the energy....

I’d heard a Louis Jordan something like 40 years before I ever knew his name. God bless Tom & Jerry...

He was born in the tiny town, Brinkley, Arkansas in 1908, but Louis Jordan became King of the Jukebox at his very impressive peak. Jordan also rates as one of the transitional figures in 20th- century popular music:

“Jordan began his career in big-band swing jazz in the 1930s, but he became known as an innovative popularizer of jump blues, a swinging, up-tempo, dance-oriented hybrid of jazz, blues and boogie-woogie. Typically performed by smaller bands consisting of five or six players, jump music featured shouted, highly syncopated vocals and earthy, comedic lyrics on contemporary urban themes. It strongly emphasized the rhythm section of piano, bass and drums; after the mid-1940s, this mix was often augmented by electric guitar. Jordan's band also pioneered the use of the electronic organ.”

His father, James Aaron Jordan, started him on both the clarinet and what would become his signature instrument, the alto sax. When the elder Jordan wasn’t teaching, he organized and coached the community band, the Brinkley Brass Band. By the 1920s – the year’s indistinct here; you get everything from 1920 (Blackpast.org) to the late 1920s (Wikipedia) – the younger Jordan’s talent earned him a spot in Ma and Pa Rainey’s touring company, the Rabbit Foot Minstrels. The general fuzziness of Louis Jordan’s younger years continued (online at least), but they generally agree that he wound up in Philadelphia for some time in the early 1930s, and either with or without his entire family, before moving to New York around 1936, where he split time singing in front of Chick Webb’s legendary orchestra (profiled here) with Ella Fitzgerald. I saw stray notes here and there about Jordan getting typecast as a comedic foil during his time with Webb, but that period wrapped up fairly quickly. By 1938, Jordan poured his considerable talents into a band of his own.

The original line-up of Louis Jordan’s Tympany Five featured nine players, but by the time they started their residency at Harlem’s Elks Rendezvous Club the line-up had shrunk to six members - Jordan on sax and lead vocals, Courtney Williams on trumpet, Lem Johnson played tenor sax, Clarence Johnson the piano, while Charlie Drayton laid down boogie-woogie bass lines and Walter Martin laid down the shuffle rhythm on the drums. Unlike the big bands, which often featured nearly 20 players and sometimes bloated to over 30, leading a smaller set up made Jordan’s band more affordable, while also letting each member earn more. And that both prefigured the standard rock ‘n’ roll lineup and changed the business:

One Hit No More, No. 117: Thomas Dolby & More "Science" Than You'd Expect

The sensibility was always complicated.

Pretty sure this one never fully checked out of the Western zeitgeist, but you tell me.

The Hit
For whatever reason the aside, “Good heavens, Miss Sakamoto, you’re beautiful” remains one of my main memories of Thomas Dolby’s, “She Blinded Me with Science.” As people of a certain age know, that song was all over the place in the early 1980s (circa 1982), so I always thought of Dolby as a big star. He did better in the UK – and wasn’t too shabby on U.S. album sales at his peak – but that single was his only U.S. hit. It topped out a No. 5...but, swear to God, MTV had that on whatever’s denser than heavy rotation for a solid year.

Here's where I admit I didn’t mind it. It’s nicely busy, the tones perky, the rhythm bouncy and kind of fun; better, the whole thing feels a bit campy. And, if you ever thought Dolby came up with the video/concept before the song...ding, ding ding!

“Yeah, I came up with a storyboard for a video. I'd recently seen a Japanese magazine awarding a Young Scientist of the Year in 1981. I took that as kind of amusing. If I was going to be a scientist, I'd need a hot Japanese lab assistant and I'd need a cool vintage motorcycle hat, kind of an homage to deranged scientists. I phoned up this famous TV scientist for the BBC, Dr. Magnus Pike [to appear in the video]."

"The record execs liked the idea of the video, but said, ‘Where's the song?’ I said, ‘Oh, how about I bring it in on Monday morning?’ and went home over the weekend and did the first bit of the song.”

Fuck it. It’s fun. Moreover, it prefaced things to come in Thomas Dolby’s career.

The Rest of the Story
“I'm not a very proficient keyboard player, so the computer became my musical instrument ... None of the equipment is essential, though. In a way, I was happier when I just had one monophonic synthesizer and a two-track tape deck.”
- Wikipedia

Crash Course No. 40: Feeling the Cramps

The literal beating heart of the band.

The Very Basics
The Cramps started when Erick Lee Purkhiser (aka, Lux Interior) met Kristy Marlana Wallace (aka, Poison Ivy Rorschach) at Sacramento University in a class called Art and Shamanism. They bonded over collecting in general, records in particular. They started a pilgrimage east from there, stopping first in Akron, Ohio (1973), then New York City (1975), where they became a staple of the scene around CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City; after they played their first show, Lux Interior offered this bon mot: “Gee, we could do this again.” When they nailed down an original line-up, it featured Bryan Gregory on guitar and Pam Balam on drums, but twisted knot at the heart of the Cramps would forever and always be Lux Interior on vocals/front-man presence and Poison Ivy commanding lead guitar. Nick Knox (drums) deserves honorable mention as the longest-serving member of the band, lasting from 1977 to 1991. After several years in New York, the band returned to the West Coast and based themselves in Los Angeles.

Their debut EP, Gravest Hits (1979) buzzed big enough that Big Star’s Alex Chilton produced their debut album, 1980s, Songs the Lord Taught Us. The then-fledgling I.R.S. Records released it, but the Cramps chafed at the lack of creative control from the off and the relationship quickly soured. After 1981’s Psychedelic Jungle dropped, I.R.S. blocked them from releasing any new material until 1983’s live album Smell of Female. There's no real telling how much that hurt the band in the States , but they always did better in the UK, where they had their first hit singles - e.g., “Can Your Pussy Do the Dog” and, their one and only UK Top 40 single, “Bikini Girls with Machine Guns” – and where Stay Sick! (1990) charted at No. 62; meanwhile, back in the States, they couldn’t even find distribution for 1986’s A Date with Elvis until 1990. The rest of their discography, includes studio albums Look Mom No Head! (1991), Flamejob (1994), Big Beat from Badsville (1997) and Fiends of Dope Island (2003), plus the compilations Off the Bone (1983, released illegally, apparently) and, most famously (or this was the first one I heard), Bad Music for Bad People.

While critics have classified under a grab-bag of genres (e.g., psychobilly, gothabilly, garage punk, rockabilly, garage rock, horror punk, neo-rockabilly, punk rock and surf), the Cramps dubbed it “rockabilly voodoo” on their early promotional flyers. They claimed various influences, everything from early rockabilly (e.g., Jerry Lott, aka, The Phantom), “rhythm and blues, and rock and roll like Link Wray (both big fans) and Hasil Adkins,” 60s surf acts, 60s garage like The Standells, the Trashmen, the Green Fuz and the Sonics, The Ramones on the punk side, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and, believe it or not, Ricky Nelson. A quote from Wikipedia about A Date with Elvis speaks to their aesthetic arc:

“The album featured what was to become a predominating theme of their work from here on: a move away from the B-movie horror focus to an increased emphasis on sexual double entendre.”

One Hit No More, No. 116: Marshall Crenshaw, The Motor City Mellow Dude

This one felt most right...

To think it all started with Beatlemania...which left the artist feeling conflicted...

The Hit
Marshall Crenshaw wrote “Someday, Someway” in only 30 minutes and it only strayed into “hit” territory (it topped out at No. 36), but it’s still a cool little tune by a largely forgotten singer/songwriter. He built it around Gene Vincent’s “Lotta Lovin’” (loosely), but made it his own:

“Crenshaw wanted to use the beat to create a hypnotic effect and wrote a new melody around it. The lyrics were described by Crenshaw as simple, but with a hidden depth; he later claimed that the lyrics had been influenced by the beginnings of his marriage.”

You’ll hear that slightly-fuzzed, reverb style guitar all over Crenshaw’s considerable catalog, but there’s definitely a better version of the single knocking around – e.g., The 9 Volt Years collection version. The studio version from his debut album is still a fine song...but, Lord, the crunch on that guitar on that 9 Volt version. Simple isn’t always better, but it sure as hell can be.

I remember seeing Crenshaw’s video on early MTV growing up, but only appreciate now just how far it went over my head. It’s a love song about the rarest subject of the form: the actual work of a relationship, as opposed to the fun shit of infatuation.

The Rest of the Story
“Although he was seen as a latter-day Buddy Holly at the outset, he soon proved too talented and original to be anyone but himself.”
- Trouser Press (quoted in Wikipedia)

Crenshaw was born in the Detroit, Michigan suburb of Berkley in 1953. There isn’t much about his childhood on the web, but he did mention how every high school seemed to have five or six bands. He formed his first band at age 15 – and it may or may not have been named “Astigfa” – an acronym for “A splendid time is guaranteed for all” borrowed from The Beatles’ “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” but the records show he played in that one. In any case, they played yard parties around the area before they could play the bars, and they played the bars after that. That carried Crenshaw to his early 20s, when he decided he wanted more.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 53: Hank "Herky" "Skeets" Williams, Country's OG Rock Star

I like this one. Captures the fuss.

“Hank Williams’s legend now overshadows the rather frail and painfully introverted man who spawned it. Born Hiram Williams, the ‘Hillbilly Shakespeare’ came from a rural background.”
- Country Music Hall of Fame Bio

The Basics
The Country Music’s Hall of Fame doesn’t have much to back up that framing, but Hank Williams did squeeze a lot of hits and a lot of trouble into a short life. He was born Hiram Williams in 1923 in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, called Mount Olive. He was also born with spina bifida occulta, a cosmic accident that shaped his life from cradle to grave, but had more consequences on the back end.

His father, Elonzo Huble “Lon” Williams, supported the family with work on lumber company railways, but he disappeared from Hank’s life at a young age. Lon Williams fell off a truck while serving in World War I and those injuries lingered until 1930, when he started developing facial paralysis brought on by an aneurysm. He spent more than eight years in the hospital – the balance of Hank’s childhood – which left his mother, Jessie Lillybelle “Lillie” Williams to raise the family. She proved more than up for the task, working multiple jobs (during the Depression to boot) and ran a succession of boarding houses - even after the first one burned down.

Lillie also encouraged Williams’ love of music. The story of how he got hold of his first guitar varies – one version has him selling peanuts to buy it, another has people from all over whichever town he lived in at the time (they moved around a bit) claiming they bought it for him – but the man who taught him to play it was a busker named Rufus “Tee-Tot” Payne. Lillie paid Payne when she could for Hank's music lessons and fed him when she couldn’t, but he taught Williams the basics and on a blues-based foundation. Later, Williams would call Payne “my only real teacher.”

Circumstances – in this case a fight with a phys. ed. teacher – planted the family in Montgomery, Alabama, which is where his musical career starts. In 1937, Williams entered and won a talent contest at the Empire Theater playing a song of his own composition, “WPA Blues.” That earned him $15, but also an angle to sell himself to the local radio station, WFSA, when they saw him busking in front of their building on weekends and after school. The station’s producers handed him the equivalent of a part-time job ($15/week), but it started him on his way.