DB's Song of the Day (day 345): "STORMY WEATHER" (1959) Frank Sinatra

Here’s the last song from the 1950s in this series. And it’s to mark the birthday of Francis Albert Sinatra, born this day in 1915. Sinatra, as I’ve said, was a main musical figure for my parents but, other than a few tracks I really liked on Frank Sinatra’s Greatest Hits (1969), released on Reprise, I didn’t pay much attention to Ol’ Blue Eyes till much later. After the dude was dead, in fact (he died in 1998).

Which may be a way of saying that Sinatra, as a person, was just a bit too much to get into in the Seventies and Eighties. But it’s also a way of saying that I had to hit 40 myself before I had ears for his music. And the stuff of his I gravitated toward were the Capitol albums, including one of my faves, No One Cares (how could I resist a title like that?). And on that album, which was released in the year of my birth, we find a track of Sinatra’s that I actually got to like a lot c. 1982 when it showed up by chance on a tape my Philly friend Harvey laid on me. “Stormy Weather” is classic Sinatra to me—and the song dates originally from 1933, the childhood of my parents.

Today’s version of “Stormy Weather” graced a playlist of songs I made after my mom passed away in January of 2011. I needed some Sinatra on there because he was her favorite, and this song became sort of the mantra of that time of mourning. “Don’t know why / There’s no sun up in the sky /  Stormy weather / Since my gal and I ain’t together / Keeps raining all the time.”

And even more: “Life is bare / Gloom and misery everywhere / Stormy weather / Just can’t get my poor old self together / Keeps raining all the time.” That was the feeling, and this was the song. And Sinatra supposedly referred to the album as a collection of suicide songs. Fair enough: “Can’t go on / Everything I had is gone,” but the song, with Gordon Jenkins’ arrangement, is so darkly beautiful, a little polished nugget of obsidian. And that bit about “If she stays away / That old rocking chair’s bound to get me.” What can I say? My mom loved rocking chairs and the chair itself is a figure for a brooding sojourn, lost to thought, unreachable.

So what is it about a song that it can be both a consolation and a provocation? And Sinatra’s voice is warm, but also deeper than it often is, sounding slowed down and leaden. It conveyed loss so well—and with that big, full voice prayer to “walk in that sun once more” that, for me in 2011, had nothing to do with recovering some changed love object, but everything to do with reclaiming one’s sense of possibility. When one’s parents are gone, the buffer between your generation and the end is gone, and that becomes surprisingly clear.

There’s almost a tidal sense to the strings in the song at certain points, feeling like an elemental tug—not just the “eternal note of sadness” that Matthew Arnold hears on Dover Beach, but a tug of the heartstrings themselves as they feel the ebbing of the tide. It’s going out and taking another spirit with it.

When she went away / The blues walked in and they met me. Recalling that meeting might not be the most fitting way of paying tribute to Sinatra’s memory, but it is for me. If I wanted to be truer to Sinatra, the man, and to my mother’s sense of him, I’d go with “My Way” (1969) which was one of his latter day songs that she loved as capturing her sense of Sinatra as larger than life and a one of a kind talent. Yet that seems so overdetermined, so much a part of Sinatra lore. “Stormy Weather” is delivered in such a ripe and fulsome fashion and makes me appreciate what the arrangers on the Capitol albums wrought. That was the height of Sinatra, to me, marking the world I was born into.

DB's Song of the Day (day 339): "TUTTI FRUTTI" (1955) Little Richard

Today is the birthday of Richard Wayne Penniman—82, known to the world as Little Richard. If you can listen to his debut album, or, hell, even just today’s song, its lead-off, and not feel better, then I fear for you.

“Tutti Frutti” is more than high spirits. It’s a rave, it’s a celebration of the ability to rock. At whatever point you first hear this song—I expect I was in grade school—you suddenly have the striking realization that some people in this world are having a great time. Penniman is so enthusiastic it’s contagious. But why take my word for it, let’s hear the Library of Congress put it all in perspective for us, as they did in 2010 when citing the song’s historical importance: the "unique vocalizing over the irresistible beat announced a new era in music." Jeeze, are these guys stiffs or what?

Well, OK, I’m game. “Unique vocalizing”—there it is. Nobody sounds like Little Richard, but everyone—including John Lennon and Bob Dylan, big names for yours truly—wanted to. Richard just makes it all as natural as . . . well, other urges you might have. And, since this is the birth of rock’n’roll and this is a black man with a pompadour, sometimes bouffant, and a pencil moustache and make-up, the vocalizing isn’t the only thing here that’s “unique.” Little Richard is the first prima donna of the rock’n’roll way of life. It was always about threads and hair and gear, but when you’re painting your face as well, well, that’s a level of show-biz that even now few aspire to. Penniman was there, as flamboyant and “gender-bending” (before that was even “a thing” that could be acknowledged in print) as they come.

Which is a way of saying “they”—name your preference—all owe something to Little Richard. He upped the ante. And his first album is a prime party record that I bet would still add some life to any lame gathering you could muster. Yeah, for real, Daddy-O. And it all announces itself with LR counting off the beat with words that should be engraved on the big tablets of Rock Godhood: Womp-bom-alu-bom-a-lomp-bom bom! Which has to be one of the most distinctive uses of onomatopoeia in the vernacular.

Little Richard was a performer on the “chitlin circuit” and he knew how to have a good time on stage. But his recordings weren’t working till he convinced his producer to go with this song which was much more ribald in its original. The lyrics on the recording, re-written by Dorothy LaBostrie, are more anodyne, though they have the jist, with a “gal named Sue, she’s knows just what to do” and a “gal named Daisy, she almost drives me crazy”—we get what he means but it sounds harmless. As to “tutti frutti, aw rooti,” how much better would it be as it was originally—and as would be permissible today: “tutti frutti, good booty.” Yup, from the start it was all about the thrill of the dear rear.

And the thrill is in Little Richard’s voice, particularly—those unique vocalizings again—of the high-pitched “oooooo” and the quaver on “ga-al,” and the “frut-tay,” and then that scream before the sax solo. This is the sound of a hot band getting down and its leader getting off on it. And that’s the formula for a helluva lot of successful rock’n’roll songs. In fact, if that’s all it is—someone getting off on the sound they’re making—then that’s good rock’n’roll.  And, sure, a song called “all fruits” isn’t likely to make us restrict our taste to just one kind, one way. Nope, we imagine, it’s about any that’s ripe for pickin’…

If it don’t fit, don’t force it / You can grease it, make it easy

DB's Song of the Day (day 338): "BLUE SUEDE SHOES" (1956) Carl Perkins

Today we’ll hail one of the great seminal rock’n’roll classics of all time. “Blue Suede Shoes” may be more famous by Elvis Presley, since it leads off his landmark debut LP, but the original recording was by Carl Perkins, at Sun Studios, and it was the first Country song to cross over to R&B and pop charts and do as well on all three.

I can’t say that I would have made much distinction between the two performers of the song (and many others recorded it) based on my own recollections. Certainly I’d heard both Elvis and Perkins. But not too long ago a collection of Sun Studio singles came my way and Perkins’ version is on there and, hearing it recently, I decided it needed its post.

What to say about Carl Perkins: he’s the guy who put the rock into rockabilly. The song is also more or less a formula for rockin’ attitudes, from its famous count-off—“Now it’s one for the money / Two for the show / Three to get ready / And go, cat, go”—to its off-repeated line “don't step on my blue suede shoes” it manifests the proud peacock aspects of life. Stepping out in style, and jumping in on the beat.

Rock’n’roll was always about fashion, to some extent. There have always been costumes and hairstyles, suits and boots, to help sell its fascination. And it may have ended as only a fashion, a fad, but it caught on and stayed the course, mostly. Or so far it has done so, though with fallow periods and periods when youth—who were always its staunch supporters—chose to look elsewhere for the thrills once found therein. Perkins, way back in 1956, makes it all sound so exciting, and that’s because the song still proclaims its Country origins, played faster but still present. And that speediness, that jumpy quality, is what makes it feel alive and full of beans.

Perkins plays it like it’s a statement of humorous intent. It’s not that he doesn’t mean it, it’s that the idea of someone stepping on his blue suede shoes—dampening his spirits when he wants to party—would be ludicrous. Presley’s version is boppier and I think he puts less into the lyric than Perkins does, gets less of its cool cat vibe. Which may be a tough call, since Elvis was a king of cool, but, still. There it is. Perkins, to me, has more rockabilly cred on this one, and the song needs it. And I can’t help thinking of the Japanese kid in Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train (1989), drawling out the name “Carrrrlrrr Parrrrkinses,” touting him above his girfriend’s worship of Elvis.

The injustices that the song contemplates—and invoked very much in a similar spirit in The Grateful Dead’s “U.S. Blues”—are instructive: “You can knock me down / Step on my face / Slander my name / All over the place.” Getting knocked about in the press comes with the rockin’ territory. It’s almost a “turn the other cheek” attitude except that the threat about stepping on the blue suedes might go beyond being ostracized from Coolness. “Burn my house / Steal my car / Drink my liquor / From an old fruit-jar,” yeah, strip me of my possessions, who cares? All that matters is them blue suede shoes, the badge of honor, we might say, certainly the fetish of identity and status and self-worth.

Do anything that you want to do, but, uh-uh, honey, lay off them shoes. Some things are too precious to be bandied about. Rock'n'roll not least.