DONNA SUMMER

A four act show always runs the risk of dragging, even when the organisation is as meticulous as it was last Saturday at New York’s Radio City Music Hall when Archie Bell & the Drells, Donna Summer, Bobby Womack and the Temptations all appeared in one of a series of concerts promoted by black WBLS disc jockey Frankie Crocker.

But the use of two stages, one at the rear and one at the front which rose as the curtains closed on the rear, kept the show moving with the kind of precision that every road crew must dream about. Apart from a ten-minute break before the Temptations, there was no delay at all, Summer following Bell and Womack following Summer so quickly that their respective songs almost segued into one another.

My most particular interest lay in Womack and Ms Summer, as did that of Mick Jagger who, I was reliably informed, was closeted up in the balcony of this massive ancient theatre chatting before he went on with Womack who wrote ‘It’s All Over Now’, one of the Stones’ biggest early hits.

Donna Summer has had a massive disco hit in the US with ‘Love To Love You Baby’, and her album of the same title, the first side of which contains a 16 minute and 30 second version of the same song, is also a hot seller. Her act is based entirely around this song, although she sang two other numbers besides, one of which was a dead ringer for ‘I’m A Man’, the Steve Winwood classic recorded by the Spencer Davis Group. 

Entering the stage rather as Cleopatra entered Rome, carried by a couple of hunky guys and wearing a gold hairpiece, Donna opened with a brief version of ‘Love To Love You’ accompanied by a couple of dancers and a biggish back-up unit called Smoke. There followed the two other songs and a five-minute spell of instrumental funk noodling before she reappeared for a final, lengthy reprise of ‘Love To Love You’, on which she was joined by six dancers, three amorous couples, and plenty of dry ice.

While Ms Summer warbled the lyrics and cooed in the orgasmic fashion of the record, the dancing couples, all dressed in skin tight, flesh-coloured garments that gave the impression of nakedness from where I was sat, simulated various sexual positions. It all seemed a bit Benny Hill meets Carry On Up The Khyber to me and the audience, bored rather than shocked at this massage parlour display, responded limply. 

        It took Bobby Womack and his excellent band to stop the giggling and bring back the music. Most of Womack’s material was new, up-tempo funk. He pushed it along with hoarse vocals, and was perpetually prodding at the band to get the most out of them, especially the three-piece brass section. Looking rather like a Cuban revolutionary in his beret and khaki clothes, he strapped on a Les Paul during his final two numbers and sounded remarkably like Hendrix.

He was good but rather anonymous. He didn’t play ‘It’s All Over Now’ – I was rather hoping Mick would join him for this as an encore – but he didn’t get one, even though I thought he deserved one. Both Bell and his Drells and, most especially in the light of their hit-strewn back catalogue, the Temptations delivered traditional black soul, complete with fancy steps, nice vocal harmonies and, in the case of the Drells, some Kung-Fu action. 

ELVIS: ALOHA FROM HAWAII

Earlier this week I watched Elvis: Aloha From Hawaii, a live concert augmented with additional songs, on Sky Arts. It’s been around for years, of course, but I don’t think I’d seen it before, not the whole thing. It took place in January, 1973, before Elvis lost control of his figure, and was a big deal because it was broadcast live via satellite to Asia and Oceania, then Europe. 

In view of this it might be assumed that Elvis would do something special but although he’s absurdly handsome and for the most part does a reasonable job, there’s something strangely routine about his performance. Most of the songs he sings are on the short side, mostly abridged versions of his hits, and he seems in a hurry to get the show over and done with, as if it has interrupted some activity that he would prefer to be doing. His band is superb, especially guitarist James Burton who gets a chance to solo brilliantly on two or three of the quicker R&R songs, but the overall feeling is that Elvis isn’t trying too hard. 

The audience don’t seem to expect more from him and they are undemonstrative, clapping fairly politely at the end of each song but showing little excitement. A few women close to the front or the catwalk become animated when Elvis approaches them, standing up to hand him white handkerchiefs (or perhaps freshly-laundered knickers) with which to mop his brow and he rewards some by tossing them scarves. A lucky few get a kiss on the cheek. When he leaves their immediate vicinity, the women sit down again, politely. As far as I could see, no one in this vast audience rose to their feet at any time during the show – unlike the crowds at pretty much every big rock show I saw in America.

This was clearly a show that Elvis had performed countless times before, and the slightly cheesy karate poses he adopts at the end of each song begin to look
hackneyed after a while, as do his occasional attempts at humour. A comment about his trousers splitting during ‘Suspicious Minds’ simply spoilt any drama that  generated during an otherwise excellent interpretation, adding to a feeling that Elvis treated the show frivolously, almost as public appearance in much the same way as, say, soldiers in red coats march up and down outside Buckingham Palace, with the music secondary to the opportunity simply to see him in person, perhaps to confirm that he’s still alive

Cheesier still were songs, three – all ballads from the movie Blue Hawaii I think – that accompanied the scenes of romancing couples as they traipse around Hawaii’s beauty spots, thus lengthening the film of the show by about 20 minutes, which means the actual concert didn’t last much longer than an hour, about half as long as shows by premier league rock bands of the era. These songs evidently weren’t part of the concert but were tacked on later and appeared designed to promote Hawaii as a tourist destination.

Towards the end, during an instrumental break between songs in the ‘American Trilogy’ medley, Elvis seemed lost in thought, gazing absent-mindedly at the ceiling. Perhaps he was wondering what it all meant, how very little he needed to give of himself to please his fans. It was all over soon after that, a dramatic ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’ closing the show. He walked off very quickly. “Elvis has left the building,” someone announced before he’d had time to do so. 

To my utmost regret, I never saw Elvis perform live, let alone reviewed him in concert, though my two predecessors as Melody Maker’s US Editor, Roy Hollingworth and Michael Watts, both did. Roy attended a press conference that Elvis and his manager Colonel Tom Parker gave on 9 June 1972, the same day Elvis appeared at Madison Square Garden and described the show as a “fiasco… not very good at all. The audience was as responsive as a lot of doped sheep. Lazy, he had been lazy.”

Our colleague Michael was almost as unimpressed when he reviewed Elvis at Nassau Coliseum out on Long Island the following June. While allowing that Elvis’ voice is “deeper and richer than ever” and none of his songs – Michael lists 11 – are “bummers” which he sings well, he performs them all “mechanically. His act seems to be a whole medley in itself, cutting short on each one, running straight into another. The machine is so well greased it all slips painlessly through the mind. It’s showbusiness without melodrama and that’s the worst.” 

        Like Roy, Michael comments on the relentless hawking of Elvis merchandise, even as the crowds were filing out. “There are full colour posters of Elvis… superb reproductions… only two dollars,” rings in his ears as he left the arena, repeated six times. 

By the time I got to America for my stint as MM’s man there, Elvis had evidently decided to bypass New York. He wasn’t seen there during 1974, ’75 or ’76, though he was back at Nassau Coliseum in July of ’75 which just happened to coincide with my visiting the UK for a few weeks. He performed in smaller cities within an hour’s flight of NY but the press office at RCA Records was unusually uncooperative when I asked (more than once) if it was possible for them to arrange transport for me to see an Elvis show. In contrast, virtually every press officer from every other label laid out the red carpet for me to fly to see anyone anywhere in America, usually the next day with an interview and a night in a hotel thrown in too. Perhaps MM was on a blacklist after Roy and Michael had taken their scalpel to the King Of Rock’Roll. Reading what they wrote this week, I would probably have drawn similar conclusions, perhaps worse as a couple of years down the line Elvis’ concerts were deteriorating fast. 

This might explain why, after I’d left MM but was still living in New York, I somehow got hold of two tickets to see a cancelled Elvis show at Nassau Coliseum that would have taken place in September, 1977, about a month after he died. It was one of about a dozen cancelled shows. 

A month before Elvis died I was in Memphis, tour-managing a group formed by the Muscle Shoals session guitarist Pete Carr and singer Lenny LeBlanc. While there Pete, Lenny and myself went to visit Graceland, just to stand by the gates with the wrought-iron outline of Elvis and look up the drive towards the famous mock Gothic porch and four imposing pillars on either side of the front door. I have every reason to believe that its famous occupant was in residence that day, so this was the closest I ever got to the singer whose records in the 1950s turned me on to rock’n’roll when I was 12 years old. I can’t remember who took our photograph outside the gates – that’s me in the middle, Pete on the left, Lennie on the other side – probably one of their band, or even how I came to have a copy of it but I treasure a print still. About six weeks later Elvis was carried out of Graceland on a stretcher. So I never did get to see him. 

JOHN & PAUL: A Love Story In Songs by Ian Leslie

I can recall with unusual clarity the first time I ever heard The Beatles. It was the second Sunday in January, 1963, and I was 15 and already a committed pop fan. I was in the passenger seat of my father’s car, a white Triumph Vitesse, being driven from Skipton back to boarding school at York. On the car’s back seat was his red Roberts radio, tuned into the BBC Light Programme, its reception enabled by a cable that snaked its way to an aerial clamped outside the rear window. The programme was Pick Of The Pops, hosted by DJ Alan Freeman, freshly appointed to the role, and as we cruised through Harrogate, sometime between 1 and 2pm, he played ‘Please Please Me’, the group’s second single, just released.

Hello, I thought, that sounds different, funny, really good, terrific in fact. Who on earth is it? I strained my ears to listen but it was over too soon. I wanted to hear it again straight away but I couldn’t, of course, and I didn’t catch the name of the act. But the important thing is that I recognised something, the singing, the guitars, the harmonica, the oh yeas, in the two minutes of ‘Please Please Me’ that stood out from all the other records that Freeman played that day, stood out from pretty much anything I’d ever heard before in fact. I was an instant fan of whoever it was and I didn’t even know their name. 

Sixty-three years later, it is reassuring to be told yet again that my adolescent ears weren’t deceiving me. “‘Please Please Me’ is impatient, lusty, playful and reproachful,” writes Ian Leslie in this extraordinary book, and later: “[It] is a series of climaxes: the mouth organ’s clarion call; the opening harmony; the call and response; the sweet release of the chorus; the final oh yeahs. It combines Bing Crosby, the Everlys, Little Richard, girl groups and Motown, yet instead of sounding patched together it is utterly itself, unified by force of collective personality.” Quite. 

John & Paul: A Love Story In Songs was published late last year to universal acclaim. I was hoping that Santa might drop a copy down our chimney but that didn’t happen so I waited until it was available in paperback, as it was last week. This edition has three pages of laudatory reviews at the front, eight similar snippets on the cover and I’ve been utterly absorbed by it for the last five days. 

        The reason for all the fuss is that it’s a different sort of Beatles book, not a biography or chronicle or diary, not a memoir by someone who knew or worked for them, not an exposé of disreputable behaviour, not an arty picture book, not a critical study, not even a structural analysis of their music, not really. It’s simply a deep dive into the minds of John and Paul, focusing almost exclusively on their relationship – the Love Story of the subtitle; a beautifully written account of how the two principal Beatles worked together in the studio, where their songs came from and how they wrote and recorded them, how John and Paul in particular bounced ideas off each other and how the ying and yang of their contrasting personalities somehow fused together to create a body of work that to this day remains the shining exemplar of popular music. 

        “The twentieth century tilted on its axis,” writes Leslie of the day in July 1957 when Paul introduced himself to John, nailing his colours to the mast at the close of Chapter 1. It wasn’t long before they realised that, musically, they could read each other’s minds. To the astonishment of everyone around them, not least producer George Martin, their rivalry drove them to get better and better until it simply exploded into a situation where communication stopped, like the breakdown of a marriage, a tragedy that even now leaves everyone scratching their heads (and authors writing books like this). 

        Seeking comparisons, many reviewers have likened John & Paul to Revolution In The Head, Ian MacDonald’s 1994 book, widely acknowledged as the pinnacle of Beatles criticism, but there are important differences: MacDonald is comprehensive, covering every Beatles track, Leslie is selective, choosing songs – 43 in total, not all written by them, a handful written after the split – that support or amplify his themes; MacDonald is disparaging, sometimes brutally, of songs he considers under par, of which there are plenty, Leslie does nothing but shower praise; perhaps most importantly, Leslie’s emphasis on the group’s principal songwriters gives it an entirely different feel to previous books on the group. George and Ringo barely get a look in.

        At the heart of John & Paul is the author’s theory that many of their songs are, in fact, coded messages between the two. Building on his knowledge of human behaviour, about which he has written extensively, Leslie interprets songs in ways that no previous Beatles critic has done; they might be songs of encouragement, or convey feelings of jealousy or vulnerability, or love or hurt, or simply friendship. In short, their songs are about, or aimed at, themselves and because of this the Beatles’ music contains hidden emotions that reveal themselves only after time, and this is the reason why, after all these years, it is still universally loved. 

        This might sound contentious but in many instances Leslie’s interpretations hold water. Try it: do they believe they can work it out; was the relationship getting better during the Pepper sessions; is Paul urging John to go and get Yoko in ‘Hey Jude’: does Paul want John to get back to him; does John plead with Paul not to let me down; is Paul telling John he’ll never do him any harm and can’t make it alone in ‘Oh Darling’; and surely the memories referenced in ‘Two Of Us’ are their own. And when John sings ‘Nobody else can see, just you and me’ in ‘Look At Me’, written in 1968, was he addressing Paul? After the split, of course, these messages became far more transparent: ‘How Do You Sleep?’ from his LP Imagine is John’s scathing, unfounded attack on his former song-writing partner, while ‘Dear Friend’, the poignant closing track on Wildlife, is surely Paul’s conciliatory message to John.

        Interwoven between this hypothesising is a concise and accurate resume of the group’s career, drawn – as Leslie freely admits – from existing sources, all credited in his acknowledgments at the close. The roles played by Yoko and Linda are discussed, along with revealing conversations and meetings between the two couples that reinforce the love John and Paul still felt for each other after the group split up. Suggestions throughout that John needed Paul more than the other way around go some way to redressing the balance as regards which senior Beatle was more crucial to the construction of their catalogue of songs. Leslie quotes many instances where John would bring a song to the group and how Paul would transform it, but far fewer cases where the opposite was true. John often arrived at Abbey Road with fragments, Paul with completed songs. In this respect Leslie mistrusts the somewhat inevitable canonisation of John following his murder, attributing much of it to Philip Norman’s revelatory book, Shout! The True Story Of The Beatles, first published in 1981. 

        Each chapter in John & Paul is titled after a song, a handful of which towards the beginning of the book are covers. Chapter 4, Will You Love Me Tomorrow, intrigued me insofar as there is no recorded evidence of The Beatles performing this much-admired song, only narrative evidence in Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In. “If there’s one of these lost cover versions I would love to hear, it’s ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’, a Shirelles song Lennon liked to sing at the Cavern,” writes Leslie (and, by the way, so would I). “Lennon understood, in his bones, the emotion that animates ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’: wanting love and not trusting it to stay. What he learned from Smokey [Robinson] and from black teenage girls was how to communicate feeling rather than just feel it.”

        At the other end of the book, in a heart-rending closing chapter that considers ‘Here Today’, Paul’s hypothetical conversation with John from his 1982 Tug Of War album, Leslie bows out with the realisation that by sharing the love they had for one another with the world, the music it inspired has made this world “an immeasurably better place”. Who would argue with that? 

        John & Paul deserves to be read by every Beatle fan. My paperback edition has 433 pages including 24 pages of reference notes (including my own interview with Paul in 1971), a superb index and, as a sort of coda, a Q&A with the author conducted by Kate Mossman. Though well known, the eight pages of mostly b&w pictures are carefully selected to complement the text.