Myron Grumbacher, a drummer whose history includes a stint with Pat Benatar, became involved professionally with Lita Ford some time before I produced Lita’s album Dangerous Curves. I mention Myron because he was a great guy, a great drummer, and a great help with the album. Possessing a healthy sense of humor, he was able to offer suggestions all the time without seeming to butt in or to try to do other people’s work for them. He was a pleasure to work with. Lita, too, was very upbeat, funny and really pleasant. The one difficulty we had with the recording was vocal pitch.
While Lita was a good singer in a live situation, there was something about the headphone scenario that gave her trouble. She was just a hair off pitch when she sang with those headphones on. We tried opposing speakers for monitors ( you can try placing speakers directly facing each other on either side of the microphone, like giant headphones, and this should allow the singer to hear the mix while the two speakers theoretically “cancel each other out” so that the microphone hears only the vocalist), but this method is only occasionally successful. (more…)
Ladies and gentlemen, meet the rarest of breeds in the music world: the protest remix.
It’s unclear which is more inconceivable today: that a major label would release a stinging protest song aimed at the government of an extremely wealthy country, or that the song would crack the Top 40. But thanks to the overwhelming good will that came from Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” in late 1984 and USA for Africa’s “We Are the World” a few months later, benefit fatigue had thankfully not yet kicked in, and “Sun City,” shepherded by Steven Van Zandt, became a surprise hit in late 1985. Now consider some other curiosities about the track:
– Two of the verses feature rappers, a full six months before Run-DMC and Aerosmith would drop their game-changing collaboration.
- The production was by New York big beat maestro Arthur Baker, who was adored by musicians but not exactly known as a hitmaker.
- The majority of the artists who sang on the record hadn’t scored a Top 40 hit of their own in years, if ever.
Indeed, “Sun City” is about as hipster a benefit/protest record as you’re likely to find. Daryl Hall and John Oates, Pat Benatar and Bruce Springsteen are easily the biggest commercial names at the time to appear on the record, while socially conscious artists like Peter Gabriel, Midnight Oil’s Peter Garrett and, of course, Bono would find mainstream success in the coming years. The rest of the contributors are a who’s who of New York cool. Joey Ramone, Afrika Bambaataa, Kurtis Blow, Run-DMC, Duke Bootee, Grandmaster Melle Mel, Stiv Bators and Lou Reed all make appearances, as do Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, George Clinton, a pre-comeback Bonnie Raitt, Temptations David Ruffin and Eddie Kendrick, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Wolf, and Herbie Hancock. (Jackson Browne contributes as well, though getting him to work on a protest song back then was like shooting fish in a barrel.) Bob Geldof’s name appears on the 12″ single’s back cover, though one wonders if that was the benefit record equivalent to giving Berry Gordy writing credit on a Motown single; whether he contributed to the track or not, you gotta put Bob’s name on it.
The song itself is easily the best of the big benefit singles, with a crazy catchy “I ain’t gonna play Sun City” chorus and a slammin’ rhythm track assembled by Baker. And again, one must give credit to Van Zandt and Baker for leading off the song with rappers, an unprecedented move at the time. Some stations refused to play the song for that very reason – which just seems hilarious in today’s musical climate, where whitey is the odd man out – and that makes its rise into the Top 40 all the more impressive. What, then, would Baker do with the remix?
Go absolutely apeshit, that’s what. The A-side mix is over nine-and-a-half minutes long, and the “Not So Far Away” dub mix is a gargantuan twelve-and-a-half minutes. He samples Daryl Hall’s voice and turns it into a percussion track – something Girl Talk would turn into a copyright supervisor’s nightmare some 20 years later – and allows what I can only assume to be Hancock to noodle for the final five minutes of the dub mix. And, per usual, there are lots and lots of edits, though the credits for those edits go to Albert Cobrera (note the spelling) and Aldo Miran, which has to be the Latin Rascals (Albert Cabrera and Tony Moran) in disguise. Can anyone confirm or deny?
One of my favorite things about the A-side mix was how Baker turned the last lines in the verses sung by Springsteen, Bono and Bobby Womack into a cappella bits, only to bring the track thundering in on that fourth drum beat in the final measure. And man, listen to that Bono vocal. He hasn’t put anything that passionate to tape in ages.
These days, of course, “Sun City” has as much relevance as songs about occupied Germany, since apartheid came to an end in 1994. I am also reminded of a professor of mine who taught a class on the Sociology of Popular Music (help me out, Ohio University grads: he had a wooden leg, and would sometimes turn it around backwards to mess with people): he thought “Sun City” was fascinating because it’s basically musicians singing to other musicians. After all, no one buying this record was about to play Sun City, were they? (You could make a similar argument that Michael Jackson was singing about how he and his fellow pop stars are the world, and the ones who make a brighter day, blah blah blah.) And, adding an extra dose of irony, half of the artists who sing on this record were nowhere near the Sun City concert director’s radar (though if the video below is to be believed, Daryl Hall turned down $2 million to play there), which means that their declaration that they ain’t gonna play Sun City is like me saying that I’m not going to do business in Dubai. It’s good to have principles, but it’s a lot easier to have them when you know that you will never have to exercise them.
Still, you can’t deny that “Sun City” did an incredible job raising the average person’s awareness to an alarming human rights issue, and that was Van Zandt’s primary goal all along. That the song cracked the Top 40 as well was gravy. I will confess that I did not rip either of the tracks below (still need to save up the coin for a USB turntable, right after I plunk down my soul for the upcoming Beatles version of Rock Band), and the dub mix has a skip in it, but hopefully this will make up for it: the video I’ve included for “Sun City” is done “Pop-Up Video” style, woo hoo! Who would have thought that a third of the video’s budget was spent covering Jimmy Cliff’s hotel room?
Post script: I spent a day at Sun City in 1997, and while this may fly in the face of the thousand words before it, I have to say, the place was pretty sweet.
There are several degrees of expectation, but the key ones are low expectation, high expectation, and original Metallica fans. You’re aware of the first two, I’m sure, but number three may be a mystery to you, and for good reason, as satisfaction requires nothing less than a wormhole in time, a crate of Jagermeister, and just maybe the reanimated dead. Intrigued?
Friday marks the release of Metallica’s latest, Death Magnetic, and already the fists are flying. Some are claiming it’s a return to the sound somewhere between … And Justice for All (1988) and the eponymous “Black Album” (1991), and they’re not too far off. Balancing between the hard rock Metallica’s been working for the past decade and the guitar-solo heavy thrash of their earlier benchmarks, Death Magnetic is a study in compromises. Yes, it was produced by Rick Rubin, who made his early mark producing Slayer. (He’s also produced Jay-Z, Johnny Cash, and Red Hot Chili Peppers.) Yes, it has that dry, reverb-adverse sound that dogged Metallica’s previous album, St. Anger (2003). Yes, guitarist Kirk Hammett gets to wail again. No, this is not Master of Puppets II.
That last bit is key — after having been promised and teased that those young and angry lunatics had returned, we have the album you would expect to have followed the previous ones. Robert Trujillo is a fine bass player, but, to paraphrase Chevy Chase, Cliff Burton is still dead. Thank you and have a pleasant tomorrow.
This is where the divide becomes clear: those who appreciated “The Black Album” will find much to like about the new one, and not unintentionally. There’s a reason why the dominant graphic tone on the cover is a stark, blinding white and why we’re now up to “The Unforgiven III.” But to those who thought of “The Black Album” as some kind of heresy, this is another injustice (pardon the pun).
A friend of mine the other day brought up Pat Benatar as a potential Lost in the ’80s “When New Wave Happens to Old Artists” post, since she flirted with synths and drum machines on later singles such as “We Belong” and “Sex As A Weapon.” But I had to remind him that Benatar had New Wave influences right from the start of her career, with no small thanks to producer Mike Chapman (him again?).
While Benatar’s debut, In the Heat of the Night, cemented her image as a tough female rocker, thanks to the hits “Heartbreaker” and her remake of John Cougar’s “I Need a Lover,” songs like “We Live for Love” showed that synths were equal to guitars in her world. Not only were Pat and future husband Neil Geraldo unafraid of New Wave, they practically embraced it with futuristic tomes like my favorite, “My Clone Sleeps Alone,” (download) one of many ’80s tunes that touched on that trendy subject:
No VD, no cancer
On TV’s the answer
No father, no mother, she’s just like the other
And you know and I know, my clone sleeps alone
Here’s Pat & Neil performing the song live in 2000:
Benatar’s New Wave leanings continued on her second album, Crimes of Passion, where she covered, of all things, Kate Bush’s debut single, “Wuthering Heights.” (download) Pat’s version is beefier, with a more assured, less histrionic vocal — would it be heresy to admit I actually prefer it to Bush’s original? (more…)
The story of how I completed my collection continues in 2006. I was winding down to the end. I found that collecting the first 4,000-plus songs to hit the Billboard Hot 100 in the 1980s was no big deal, but the last 200 or so were giving me issues. If I had to pinpoint why, I’d say the three biggest obstacles were:
1. “Single-only” songs. The songs released by artists never heard from before or since, and only available on 45, were the most difficult ones to find by a long shot.
2. Crappy records from the tail end of an artist’s career. Contributing to the difficulty of my task were the artists that had had hits for 20 years prior to the ‘80s but just didn’t know when to stop recording, or tried to make a failed comeback attempt. Half the time the artist was crap once the ‘80s rolled around, and his/her/their LP sales were so poor there was never a second pressing or a proper CD release. The other half of the time the artist’s label decided enough was enough, so he/she/they had to release one final album on a new label — naturally, the singles from new-label, final-label albums don’t appear on 99 percent of greatest-hits compilations since they weren’t spawned from the same label as all of the artist’s other songs.
3. Price. I could’ve finished my collection a lot sooner than I did had I been willing to spend anywhere from $12 to $25 on an LP. But I’m not made of money, so aside from some pretty rare albums, a limit of a few dollars was my peak price. In almost every case, what I needed was considered rare mainly because it was crap and no one’s ever had the desire to release it again: go ahead and charge $250 for a rare Beatles 45, but just because you have a tough-to-find Unipop single doesn’t mean it’s worth anything. The end result of it all is that I was eventually able to find everything at the price I wanted.
Here’s the thing, though — I say my collection is “complete,” but technically it’s not. I have 4,229 of the 4,230 songs (approximately) that charted in the Hot 100 from 1980 to ’89. I’m missing just one record: “American Memories” by Shamus M’Cool. Though I do have it on MP3, it’s the hard copy I desire, but I can’t locate it. And I’m never going to locate it, but after a few years of searching I’m finally okay with that.
As far as I’m aware, only ten copies of this 45-only song were ever made. It’s easily the hardest to find of any charting song in the ’80s, and some historians will tell you it’s the hardest song to locate in the history of the Billboard chart. Up until April I’d only seen one copy available, as part of a full collection of music going for $300,000. Then a crazy thing happened — there was a dude on eBay selling this record! The end price was $3,600; if I was going to spend that much money on something I’d have ponied up an extra hundred and bought Oran “Juice” Jones’s $3,700 lynx coat. Trust me, though, it pains me not to have “American Memories.” Instead I’ve filled that hole with the purchase of the original contract that Shamus M’Cool signed to perform the song on The Mike Douglas Show back in 1981. It hurts to collect for so long and then not be able to finish my collection, but such is life.
Of course, I just couldn’t stop there, so next week we’ll end the story with where I’m currently at today with the collection. In the meantime, enjoy some more Bottom Feeders starting with the letter “B.”
I’m a fan of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and feel that it’s important in preserving the history of the art form and recognizing important musical artists. However, they don’t always get it right. I mean, ZZ Top? Bob Seger? Whatever. Here are two that should be included and, with any luck, will be soon.
PAT BENATAR
There’s a moment in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) where a character points out the various girls at school who dress like rocker Pat Benatar. It’s a funny joke, but there’s also an important point being made: Benatar was so influential in the early ’80s that girls wanted to be her. Moreover, her brand of mainstream rock had crossover appeal, with her records and concert tickets selling equally well among men and women. While Heart’s Wilson sisters, Fleetwood Mac’s Nicks and McVie, and Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders — all important female artists — did their work within the confines of a band, Benatar has always been front and center bearing the success or failure of her music on her shoulders.
Independent, smart, and one of rock’s most powerful voices, she was able to take on the male-dominated AOR radio world and succeed time and again; “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” “Heartbreaker,” “Fire and Ice,” and her pointed, angry anthem against child abuse, “Hell Is for Children,” all continue to receive heavy airplay on the radio. When MTV suddenly ruled the universe, Benatar seamlessly made the transition to videos with hits like “Shadows of the Night,” “We Belong,” and, of course, “Love Is a Battlefield.”
Madonna, one of this year’s Hall of Fame inductees, receives a lot of credit for her determination and ability to change her musical approach throughout her career, but Benatar was doing it long before the Material Girl and was kicking ass in the process. (She even expanded her sound on 1991’s True Love to explore her love of the blues.) To this day, Benatar tours extensively (with Neil Giraldo, her guitarist for the past 29 years and husband for the past 26) and continues to prove that rock and roll isn’t just a man’s world. (more…)
– Two of the verses feature rappers, a full six months before Run-DMC and Aerosmith would drop their game-changing collaboration.
There are several degrees of expectation, but the key ones are low expectation, high expectation, and original Metallica fans. You’re aware of the first two, I’m sure, but number three may be a mystery to you, and for good reason, as satisfaction requires nothing less than a wormhole in time, a crate of Jagermeister, and just maybe the reanimated dead. Intrigued?
A friend of mine the other day brought up Pat Benatar as a potential Lost in the ’80s “When New Wave Happens to Old Artists” post, since she flirted with synths and drum machines on later singles such as “We Belong” and “Sex As A Weapon.” But I had to remind him that Benatar had New Wave influences right from the start of her career, with no small thanks to producer Mike Chapman (him again?).
PAT BENATAR