Muzak, Monks, and Food Shopping

By Barbara Groark

However, if you do want to hear the pop music of our own grade school and high school years, sung by the original performers, you need go no further than the your local food store. At least that’s what’s been happening in my neighborhood starting a few months ago. The company that puts out Muzak is no longer using the much-disparaged easy-listening versions of older popular songs – in recent years it’s been Laura Nyro, Billy Joel, The Who, and Jefferson Airplane given the Muzak treatment if I remember correctly, however vaguely. The company now serves up original recordings for shoppers and elevator riders, and the era of current choice is the late fifties and first half of the sixties. I don’t know if the stores are making a mistake.

The other day I was minding my own business picking out some bread or cereal or lettuce or milk, and I almost started doing the Slop as “Carol” by Chuck Berry came on (not “Oh Carol” by Neil Sedaka). I controlled myself, but it was a bit distracting. Then it was the Beatles “I Wanna Be Your Man,” which is not a great sing-along for me, and is kind of noisy if you’re trying to read Nutrition Facts. But then “Just One Look” came on with that opening piano, and I almost (almost) compulsively got into girl-group stance to start singing along. This song is really good for singing along. I tried to remember who the artist was – it kind of sounds like Tina Turner, or at least the Ikettes, but I really couldn’t remember. I wrote down the song name on my shopping list.

Well, thank heavens for YouTube. It turns out that I never knew the woman’s name in the first place, only every word to the song. She was an obscure one-hit wonder of a singer named Doris Troy, and here she is, or was. (Warning: Don’t play this link until you are in a place of relative privacy, with enough dance room for a cha-cha.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvpLeRa4phk


Before YouTube, what did we do to find out important historical information such as this? Well, we had arguments in bars and at family reunions, and when nothing came of that went to the people who are the archivists and historians of our age, such as Jerry Blavat (who currently has a one-hour educational oldies radio show on WXPN-FM in Philly on Saturday evenings at 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time if you’re interested [ http://xpn.org/xpn-programs/geator and I think you can listen on the Internet if you are from way out of town.]).

Or go to Dave Marsh’s book The Heart of Rock and Soul: 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made (New York: DaCapo Press, 1999). I resorted to this valuable book at one point after hearing a band in a bar playing a pretty nice version of “Some Kind of Wonderful” (not the Drifters song), and my cousin-in-law reminisced about the song as recorded by Grand Funk Railroad. Not blaming him a bit for being a few years younger than I, I pointed out that I thought the original was by another group, a black R&B group whose name wouldn’t come to me. We put the issue aside (no money involved). But I got to the reference section of a bookstore later on and found the above-mentioned song-critique encyclopedia and looked up the title in the index (“Kind of”, not “Kinda”).

Item 594, the Soul Brothers Six. Atlantic, 1967. As it says on page 390, “As for the Soul Brothers Six, who knows what became of them? They seem to have been from Philadelphia; judging from what I can hear, they may have been that town’s answer to Dyke and the Blazers.” [“Bugaloo Down Broadway”]

I was glad to be vindicated, and I sent my cousin-in-law a memo (no email at the time). And I went back to the store and actually bought the book, which has proved valuable since then. And who knew that Dyke and the Blazers even needed an answer?

If you’d like to refresh your memory, here is a version by neither GFR nor SB6, and I think it sounds better than both of them, being by a men’s a cappella group:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHRLrYWPVwo&feature=related


Have you been to any grade school or high school choir concerts lately? It seems that the music teachers and choir directors have been digging into the girl and boy doo-wop and R&B repertoire for the past few years and getting the kids to learn some of our era songs, like those guys in that video. Since one of my nieces is a singer, I’ve heard concert versions of “My Girl” by Mary Wells, “The Lollipop Song” (I forget by whom), as well as “Over the Rainbow,” which by the way has been again recorded by one of today’s singers, and the kids like it all over again. Sounds like they are trying to have fun with the older music, and please some of the parents and grandparents in the audience (and possibly annoy others).

It seem like adult choirs and barbershop quartets are also making a comeback among the really rebellious, and the barbershop guys are incorporating doo-wop and R&B sounds among their older standards. I can vouch for this, since I saw a barbershop singing competition a few years ago, rebelliously, at the Wildwood Convention Center (Wildwood, now advertised as the Doo-Wop Capital of the World). That was fun to hear.

And if we recall our history even more, class, we can see why, for example, communism never really took hold in this country. We already had a voice of the people on the radio every day. While other people had Hitler or Mussolini haranguing them, the Allies had Bing Crosby and Duke Ellington. While other people had Khruschev, we had Elvis. Are music and dancing the opiate of the masses? Or did they help us win wars? Or are they just excellent anger management tools? (All of the above?)

Anyway, there was a time in the 1970s, following the political assassinations, when that old American music was disparaged and apparently voluntarily suppressed. Even the blacks stopped dancing. Something was obviously wrong. Only the gays, like the monks of medieval Europe, seemed to be keeping the knowledge alive till the Renaissance came. Are we seeing that time now?

Here’s another obscure hit that’s made a return; two versions. I give them both because I don’t think Alicia gets the better of Brenda, though she does a good job. And the sound, not great, on the Brenda version is unrestored to digital. [Ibid., page 599, Item 946, Tamla 1964: “…more reminiscent of the pop-soul set pieces Burt Bacharach and Hal David were constructing for Dionne Warwick in those years. Which also marks Holloway as the first really adult Motown artist….”] Again, I would be in a non-public area before opening the links:

Here’s Brenda Holloway: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SzeReQR-kw

Here’s Alicia Keys: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfycwdZoseM&feature=related

In other news, from some time in the nineties, one of my sisters and her husband, whose son was touring with the Philadelphia Boys Choir, traveled to South Africa in the period after apartheid ended. Her report when she got back included the kinds of music the South Africans were playing on the radio: old Elvis music and other old American rock and roll and R&B. Who would have guessed this would be their choice? They apparently found the songs to be appropriate accompaniment to the big social upheavals that were, and still are, happening in that country.

OK I have work to do. I can’t be browsing around YouTube all day and night!

But another interesting thing that is happening with this music is that it is really big, and I mean really really big all over again in England nowadays, as confirmed by my hairdresser, whose husband is British and goes back home a few time a year. There are some radio guys there who call themselves Northern Soul who are promoting the old R&B music and creating dances that look like a combination line dance, break dance, and just a mushy shuffle, but anyhow it’s not mosh pit metal. These are the guys dancing in back of Duffy on this song, which has a sound a little like “Sally Go Round the Roses” and a little like “Nowhere to Run Nowhere to Hide.” I give it about a 95. It has a good beat that makes you want to dance, or at least join the background girls in the “yeah, yeahs.” See if you agree.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE2orthS3TQ

And finally, something completely ridiculous. This is the Northern Soul guys again, from England, apparently YouTube-savvy, combining an old Motown song with an unrelated dance clip by the Nicholas Brothers, the old vaudeville-type dance team whose heyday was the 1930s and -40s.

I sense a great disturbance in the Force.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_UudmXWuMg&feature=related

And I still haven’t finished my food shopping.

And Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers and grandfathers out there.