Everybody goes for a love story. Okay, here’s one. I’m in love. Love at first sight.
Well, maybe not love. But real, true, deep infatuation that will last at least until I open my eyes.
The biggest problem right now is that I have a lot of trouble remembering her name. Radka Toneff. You have to admit, that’s objectively a hard name to remember, even if you’re in love with her. Just as lovers revel in reconstructing how they first met, I’m trying to remember how I stumbled on her. I guess I was looking at all the YouTube hits for ‘Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most‘ or – hey, Jeff, the music?
Right.
Radka Toneff (1952-1982) was a Norwegian singer “of legendary stature”. Well, in knowledgeable jazz circles in Oslo, perhaps. For me she was new. But I’ve been listening to a lot of Scandinavian music over the last couple of years, and I’m working hard at cultivating that taste and broadening my knowledge.
I admit a certain bias towards Nordic singing. At its best, it’s flawless, perfect, precise, technically refined on a level we just don’t encounter in our more familiar neighborhoods. With female singers, that can be intoxicating.
It all depends on the material. When my new love Radka (I need to practice using her name) hits on the right material–which she does sometimes, not too regularly–it can really be breathtaking.
For convenience’s sake, we’ll call Radka Toneff a jazz singer, though that’s not really accurate. She recorded a wide range of material – from rarified jazz to hackneyed pop, a pinch of Bulgarian folk (her father was a Bulgarian folk singer), with a little bit of soul thrown in, paying her Nordic dues to the mothers of her music.
If you did the math above, you got that she died at the age of 30. It’s usually called a suicide, but the fullest version I found (in English) says: “Her sudden death was described by newspapers as a suicide, but friends said that although she brought it on herself, it was an accident.”
A while back I wrote about Eva Cassidy, in Song of The Week 29. The similarities between Eva and Radka are rather uncanny. Eva died from cancer at 36, a restrained and tasteful singer of an unclassifiably wide range of material. If you remember Eva’s “Over the Rainbow“, especially as compared to the other versions we compared it to, it’s a model of good taste and restraint, of the tension created by strongly felt passion being expressed without histrionics—a fan dance of the heart.
Eva had no career whatsoever. Radka recorded 3 albums–”Angel Heart”, “Fairy Tales”, and the posthumously released “Live in Hamburg”. There are also 2 compilations of other cuts, and a lot of live videos in all kinds of settings–small combo, big band, orchestra, many with material not found on the CDs.
Radka’s material includes classic jazz. One of my favorites is her treatment of ‘My Funny Valentine‘. I have a lot of respect for that song, and I’ve heard it butchered and demeaned more often than I care to remember. Her version is heart-rending. (Ever wonder why singers always make the song mournful? The lyric is quite loving. Hmm.) There’s also ‘Nature Boy‘, sung pretty much perfectly, but a song I’ve never warmed up to [written before The Real Group’s magical treatment]; a Nina Simone; one by Kurt Weil and Maxwell Anderson!; two personal beatnik favorites of mine by Frances Landesman and Thomas Wolf, ‘Ballad of the Sad Young Men‘ and ‘Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most‘.
Her upbeat songs, and the ones that try to be black, are uniformly unsuccessful. Oh, but when she hits the bulls-eye, it’s right to the heart of your heart.
Jimmy Webb is a story to himself. Excepting Burt Bacharach, the only ‘non-performing’ (we wish) songwriter of our time to get his name above the title. He’s the auteur of hits such as ‘Up, Up and Away’ (5th Dimension), Glenn Campbell’s ‘Wichita Lineman’, ‘Galveston’ and ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’, and the Richard Harris epic ‘MacArthur Park’. That’s some very, very fine music there.
But there are a couple of problems with Mr Webb. First of all, he kept trying to become a singer, which only damaged his reputation. But more significantly, he was so talent-inebriated that he couldn’t walk a straight line, constantly teetering from the poignant to the maudlin, from the sublime to the grotesque. ‘Someone left the cake out in the rain’? C’mon. If that’s not bad enough, he (or someone) chose that as the name for one of the compilations of his greatest hits. Jimmy Webb, haunting at his best, embarrassing at his worst.
I don’t want to detract from those Glenn Campbell songs. Glenn Campbell is also a story in and of himself. (Why do people say I ramble?) He was a studio guitarist on Blonde on Blonde!!! He has the God-given voice of a cowboy angel, and the good sense and taste and intelligence of a Texas Longhorn steer.
Glenn Campbell had the initial hit of ‘The Moon’s a Harsh Mistress’. Judy Collins also got a hit out of it (you’re lucky I couldn’t find that on YouTube—it’s a pretty horrifying experience), as did Joe Cocker (well, Joe, you know). It got a lovely, respectful treatment by Charlie Haden and Pat Metheny on “Beyond The Missouri Sky”. Versions such as Jimmy Webb’s own and that of Joan Baez, believe me, you don’t want to hear.
It’s not hard to get why so many people want to do this song. The title, by the way, is that of a novel by Robert A. Heinlein, “about a lunarcolony‘s revolt against rule from Earth. The novel expresses and discusses libertarian ideals in a speculative context.” (Thanks, Mr Wikipedia). What that has to do with this lovely song is beyond me. Listen to the mean modulation at “I fell out of her eyes,” right at the shift in the lyric from the outer to the inner.
The one other version I do recommend you take a listen to is that of Linda Ronstadt. We Americans think of Linda as having a pure, gimmick-free voice. Well, listen to her version. Then listen to that of Radka Toneff. I’m sure you’ll hear how precise, fine, dignified, and moving a singer she is. And maybe you’ll see why I used to be in love with Linda, but now it’s Radka who holds my heart.
See her how she flies
Golden sails across the sky
Close enough to touch
But careful if you try
Though she looks as warm as gold
The moon’s a harsh mistress
The moon can be so cold
Once the sun did shine
Lord, it felt so fine
The moon a phantom rose
Through the mountains and the pines
And then the darkness fell
And the moon’s a harsh mistress
It’s so hard to love her well
I fell out of her eyes
I fell out of her heart
I fell down on my face
Yes, I did, and I — I tripped and I missed my star
God, I fell and I fell alone, I fell alone
And the moon’s a harsh mistress
And the sky is made of stone
The moon’s a harsh mistress
She’s hard to call your own.
I know, I say The Bee Gees and your eyes roll and you start to snicker, conjuring up sounds of bung-jaga-jaga- jaga and sights of a studly Italian undulating cockily down the street in flared white pants so tight you can see his gjamidanker.
I’m talking about the other Bee Gees. The ones who once upon a time were compared favorably with, ahem, The Beatles. Yes, Virginia, really.
You see, les frères Gibbs used to be sound like three white Australian brothers. Before they started sounding like three black American sis-tahs.
So unroll those eyeballs, cowboys and Indians, and listen to the tale of The Bee Gees, Incarnation #1.
Barry (b 1946) and twins Robin (b 1949) and Maurice (inexplicably also b 1949) were b’ed on the Isle of Man. In 1958 the parents moved to Australia (I think because they wanted a daughter), where the boys drank a lot of milk, underwent puberty, and sang together so well they had their own Brisbanean TV show. (Here’s an example, but I’m warning you, I couldn’t sleep for a couple of nights after watching it, so use your own judgment.) But they had their eyes on the big-time, which in 1966 was good old England. So back they went.
The England to which they returned was producing a new brand of ‘pop’ music: ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’/’Penny Lane’, ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’/’Ruby Tuesday’, ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’. America was in its original flush of psychedelia – ‘Purple Haze’, ‘Light My Fire’, ‘Somebody to Love’.
Brothers Gibb, 1968
The Bee Gees will ever be indelibly engraved in your minds and ears as those silly guys in the embarrassing clothes making the whole world bounce to dance rhythms, with their high harmonies and funk beat. But for those of us who remember the 1960s better than the late 1970s (don’t ask), The Bee Gees were something wholly other. You don’t believe me? Here’s a quote from Lillian Roxon’s prototypical “Rock Encyclopedia” (1971):
…Their first single, ‘New York Mining Disaster’ …was like having a wonderful new Beatles single out on the market. For those who were bewailing the loss of the comparatively uncomplicated pre-Sergeant Pepper Beatles, the Bee Gees were a godsend and their first album a delight. …They sounded more like the Beatles than the Beatles ever did and … they wrote songs considerably better than the Beatles had done that early in their career.
Huh? Are we talking about the same guys?
Brothers Gibb, 1977
Well, yes. See, when the Bee Gees hit the radio in mid-1967, they were decidedly Old School. ‘Words’ and ’To Love Somebody’ sounded more like ‘Norwegian Wood’ ‘We Can Work It Out’ than did ‘All You Need is Love’ and ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. Sure, we loved our head music. But there were also those daytime hours when your mind was lucid and you wanted to hear something pretty.
It’s true, their lyrics were a lot more convincing after you’d smoked a few:
The Bee Gees Band (the Gibbs are the ones with the Colgate smiles)
Ooh you’re a holiday , such a holiday Ooh you’re a holiday , such a holiday
It’s something I think’s worthwhile
If the puppet makes you smile
If not then you’re throwing stones
Throwing stones, throwing stones
Ooh it’s a funny game
Don’t believe that it’s all the same
Can’t think what I’ve just said
Put the soft pillow on my head
Millions of eyes can see
Yet why am I so blind
When the someone else is me
It’s unkind, it’s unkind
But the Bee Gees provided beautiful songs, beautiful performances, beautiful productions, all within a ‘Yes, I am experienced’ context. And you can never get enough of beautiful songs, can you?
As impressive as their recordings were, they couldn’t duplicate the lush, extravagant productions live. By 1969 they’d split up, regrouped a year later, floundered for five years till The Plague of 1977, when young people on both sides of the ocean began to display inexplicable weekly episodes of convulsive twitching, what subsequently became known as The Saturday Night Fever. The rest, as they say, is hysteria.
I interviewed Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel sometime in early 1967.
I knocked on the door of their dressing room. Paul opened the door, all 5’3” (1.6m) of him, turned and called into the room, “Hey, Art, this guy looks just like you.”
Young Friends
Paul and Art were both 26, riding the tide of three straight hit singles: ‘Sounds of Silence’ (#1), ‘Homeward Bound’ (#5), and ‘I Am a Rock’ (#3). They were widely credited with inventing folk-rock, marrying the fun of rock and roll to the gravitas of folk music. No one foresaw that they were to become cultural icons.
I was 18, a music nerd away from home for the first time, at Allegheny College in Meadville, PA, “tryin’ to do like the Gentiles do”. No one foresaw how badly that would turn out.
Young Jeff
Art and I, it turns out, were both early sporters of jewfros, a coiffure in style amongst some young members of our notoriously nerdy tribe. We thought that if we grew long kinky hair, maybe we’d be able to jump as high as Dr J or sing as raunchy as Wilson Pickett. Spoiler alert: we couldn’t.
I recently turned 70. So I’ve been thinking (in addition to finishing my tax return and watching the new season of Ozark) about stuff like The Meaning of Life.
I am now officially old. This is a new state for me. Most of my life, I haven’t been old. It only crept up on me recently. How do I know that I’m old? Because of a 1968 Simon and Garfunkel song.
Old friends, old friends, sat on their park bench like bookends.
A newspaper blown through the grass falls on the round toes of the high shoes of the old friends.
Old friends, winter companions, the old men lost in their overcoats, waiting for the sun;
The sounds of the city sifting through trees settles like dust on the shoulders of the old friends.
Can you imagine us years from today, sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange to be seventy…
Old friends, memory brushes the same years, silently sharing the same fears.
A time it was, and what a time it was, it was a time of innocence, a time of confidences.
Long ago it must be, I have a photograph.
Preserve your memories – they’re all that’s left you.
Jack Weinberg (sic), a harbinger of the revolution at Berkley in 1964, coined the phrase “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” Our parents were over 30. Richard Nixon was over 30. We figured it must be true.
But as kids of 18 or 26, we were of course immortal. We could drink and drive, indiscriminately consume whatever drug was available, practice free and unprotected love whenever we could, stay up all night listening to The Stones and sleep through Logic class in the morning, with no repercussions. We were immortal.
Again, spoiler alert: It didn’t quite work out that way.
The Ohio National Guard shot four of us. We graduated (by the skin of our teeth, and only some of us) and had to Get A Job. We fell in love and tied the knot. We had babies. We signed mortgages. We turned 30.
And then 40.
And then 50.
And then 60.
And now 70.
Funny, she doesn’t look Jewish
As I said, this is new for me. Memories used to be ten years old. Then twenty. Now I have memories that are a lifetime older than I was when Paul said, “Hey, Art, this guy looks like you.”
I don’t know why I blame Garfunkel for that line. Simon wrote it, and deserves all the credit and all the blame. But it is who Art sings that B-part: Can you imagine us years from today, sharing a park bench quietly? How terribly strange to be seventy…
Well, Art (Paul), I got news for you. You got it wrong.
I don’t sit on park benches. I don’t wear high shoes with round toes. My ‘overcoat’ is a spiffy leather jacket, and I ain’t lost in it. And for damn sure, no dust is settling on my shoulders. So screw you.
I got me a new soul brother, William Butler Yeats. At 63, he wrote:
Old Art
What shall I do with this absurdity— O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature, Decrepit age that has been tied to me As to a dog’s tail? Never had I more Excited, passionate, fantastical Imagination, nor an ear and eye That more expected the impossible—
Three months ago I started writing a novel. I’ve finished about a quarter of it, and I’m pretty pleased with the results. I’m determined to see it through to the end. It will be my first big work of fiction, after one stillborn attempt at a novel, one short experimental novel, one attempt that ended when I painted myself into a corner. No tragedy. As I learned very clearly from my playwrighting days (twenty plays in my forties, two a year for ten years), you learn immeasurably more from failures than from successes.
Old Jeff
See, that’s something I didn’t know at 18. I’ve actually learned something over this threescore and ten—a failure isn’t the end of the world. I wish I had known that at 18. And at 26. And at 40. It would have given me solace and confidence to grapple with the challenges of those daunting years.
Yes, I’ve learned a thing or two. But I also realize that there’s much more out there that I haven’t learned than what I have. But that’s cool.
So, yes, Art, I am officially old. But you know what? I have more of my jewfro left than you do. If you want to feel old, you go ahead. I have too much to do. That other guy from back then sporting a jewfro, Bob Zimmerman, transcended the clichés of the time. He was 24 when he wrote ‘he not busy being born is busy dying’.
So, yeah, on paper I’m old. But I’ve still got my creative juices, such as they are, flowing like an agitated mountain stream in spring, choked and rushing furiously with melted snow; and I’m going to be spending the next month thanking the Almighty for blessing me with the health and energy to channel these energies into a project that keeps me off the streets and out of my wife’s hair.
Soon enough, I suppose, I’ll be sitting on a park bench with dust gathering on my shoulders. But I have a sneaking suspicion that in my earphones I’ll be listening to The Who’s Roger Daltrey singing “Hope I d-d-d-die before I get old”.
I live in what I like to call the only non-Christian country in the Western world. We’re Jewish here, and we have a looong history of being different. In high school and college, half of my classmates and most of my neighbors were Jewish, but the subject was virtually unmentioned. Unmentionable. Obliquely noted only on a very few holidays, it was not something you talked about. If you weren’t ashamed of it, it was certainly nothing to strut.
Why would you want to be different?
Well, most of my friends chose that route, and they became less different than their parents (first-generation Americans) and grandparents (European-born, speaking English with a Yiddish accent). The Old World was left back there, Hitler obliterated it anyway, we are all Americans. Well, most of us.
Our grandparents had rescued us from Hitler, our parents had couched us comfortably in suburbia. But in the throes of the Vietnam War, the Chicago convention and Kent State, the American Dream was going sour. My entire generation sought meaning elsewhere – Molotov cocktails, drugs, alcohol, feng shui, communes, even dentistry. A perverse few even did a retro backflip into the religion of their forefathers. A substantial number of them – well, us – found ourselves in Israel, embracing and embraced by Zionism, Orthodox Judaism, and 10,000 miles distance from our nagging mothers. I even wrote a song about this very odyssey.
We Jews have our own calendar. The day starts at sundown (yeah, I know, that’s oxymoronic), the month starts with the reappearance of the moon (whew, I was really worried it wouldn’t show this time), the year on Rosh HaShana (Head of the Year), which occurs (according to our half-lunar/half-solar calendar) somewhere between September 5 and October 5 (except after 2089, when it will come no earlier than September 6 – let me tell you, this is one tangled can of worms).
Spirit in the Dark
The event is proscribed in the Bible (Leviticus 23:24 and Numbers 29:1) as a day of blowing the ram’s horn. Nowadays here in this Jewish country it’s a two-day holiday. Everybody puts on their holiday finery, buys a lot of flowers and newspapers, and gifts for the friends who are hosting them for a holiday meal. This year it begins at sundown Sunday and runs till Tuesday night. So if you start counting from tonight (Friday night, the beginning of Sabbath) and take into account that nobody does anything constructive on Sunday other than cooking for the next two days, that makes this a five-day bacchanalia.
For most folks here, five days of vacation and rest. For those of us who joined OAR (the Observe All the Rules club), it means the Day of Judgment, in which we’re called to account for our behavior during the past year. It’s the beginning of a ten-day period of soul-searching, climaxing in the Yom Kippur fast. In practice, Rosh HaShana is a 48- hour prayer marathon in synagogue, with occasional breaks for (a lot of) eating and (a lot of) sleeping and (a lot of) reading the newspapers. I want to tell you, 48 hours without screens is a very long time. Or, to put it more philosophically, “Life is short, but the days are very long.”
Some people, spiritually more highly evolved than myself, manage to engage the day in all its gravity. I overheard a young security guard at the entrance to the mall saying to a friend, in utter earnest, “It’s so frightening – on Monday we’re all gonna stand before The King in judgment. Scary, man!”
I won’t tell you how challenging that prayer marathon is for me, because My Better Half reads this and she likes to try to picture me with a gray beard swaying in rapture.
I will confess that my two regular synagogue buddies and I occasionally exchange during breaks in the prayer a word or two (or a few trillion) about such spiritually lofty subjects as the new officially released boxed set of Dylan’s Basement Tapes. Z and D and I grew up with Lesley West’s Mountain more prominent in our landscape than Mount Sinai, and we all made a similar journey to the same pew in the same synagogue saying the same prayers for 72 hours that our great-grandfathers did in Eastern Europe. That’s a very gratifying concept, but great-grandpa was hardwired in a way that we’re not. Our attitude to spirituality is somewhat wry, to put it mildly. So it’s at times like this, with Divine Judgment hanging over our mortal souls, that Z and D and I and our like reach into the bag of cultural resources on which we were raised for a booster.
And there’s nothing more boostful than Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles’ rendition of her ‘Spirit in the Dark’ as performed at the Fillmore West on March 6, 1971. The folks up on the stage grew up singing their hearts out in churches in Detroit and rural Florida. The kids in the audience occasionally visited Temple Beth Israel in Squirrel Hill or Shaker Heights.
The 3-night gig was a big one for Aretha, her commercial popularity burgeoning. Jerry Wexler put her on stage in front of a white audience singing popular white songs (Beatles, Paul Simon, Stephen Stills) mixed with pop soul (‘Respect’, ‘Dr Feelgood). He replaced her road band with A-level studio musicians King Curtis and his band The Kingpins (featuring Billy Preston) and The Memphis Horns, with Aretha’s regular backup singers.
On the second night, she spontaneously brought Ray Charles on stage to duet with her on ‘Spirit in the Dark’, a quasi-spiritual she’d written and had a hit with a couple of years previously. She sings the song, then disappears off-stage, then returns with The Genius: “I discovered Ray Charles”, she quips, a reference to Flip Wilson’s Christopher Columbus 1967 skit in which “Queen Isabel Johnson” tells Chris that he can have “all the money you all the money you want, honey — You go find Ray Charles!” And shouting/testifying (drunk) from the dock, “Chris gonna find Ray Charles!”
God
We’ve written before about Aretha and about Ray. As Ray said, “There are singers, then there is Aretha.” She calls him “The Right Reverend Ray”.
The gig was documented in the album “Aretha Live at Fillmore West”, not one of her big hits, but gaining respect over the years. It includes a recording of part of the second night’s version of ‘Spirit in the Dark’ with surprise guest Ray. “I actually saw Ray a week or so earlier and told him what I was doing at the Fillmore but I didn’t think too much about it – until the night and there he was in the crowd. The next thing I knew he was up onstage and we were singing ‘Spirit.’ It was really a fantastic show and one that I’ll always remember.”
In 2005, Rhino Records released a 4-CD box set, “Don’t Fight The Feeling: The Complete Aretha Franklin & King Curtis Live At Fillmore West”, but the version of ‘Spirit in the Dark’ there is from the first night.
The entire duet with Ray is recorded in video, all 25 minutes of it. Technically, the quality is low. Musically, it’s sublime. Do yourself a favor, watch it all. Then watch it again. Watch it just before Rosh HaShana. Watch it just before Christmas and before Aid al-Fitr. Watch it before Martin Luther King’s birthday. Watch it before your own birthday. Watch it on your cat’s birthday. Just watch it.
Aretha is ostensibly singing about God, but it’s one very gritty God: Are you gettin’ the spirit in the dark?/People movin’ oh and they groovin’/Just gettin’ the spirit in the dark/Tell me sister how do ya feel?/Tell me my brother, how do you feel?/Do you feel like dancin?/Get up and let’s start dancin’/Start gettin’ the spirit in the dark./Riiiiide Sally ride/Put your hand on your hips/Cover your eyes/And move with the spirit.
Ray may be singing a church tune, but he’s doing it across the street in a honkey-tonk: Every time you get a girl singing with you, can you feel it deep inside?/When my woman wake me up in the morning, she give me the spirit/I gotta find me a woman tonight, ‘cause I feel the spirit.
Maybe Brother Ray can find The Spirit in a honkey-tonk or at the Fillmore West, but me and Z and D, we’re going to be in our neighborhood synagogue, and if we do any singing it’s gonna be a whole lot more bowdlerized than Ray’s. What can I tell you? We didn’t grow up in Rev. Franklin’s church. Well, we didn’t grow up in Grandpa’s shtiebel either, but each of us decided that those are the roots we choose to embrace. Not drugs, not Moonyism, not Fillmorism. We’re gonna sit in shul for three days and be bored out of our minds and try real hard to reconnect with where we came from and seriously ponder our destiny for the coming year. And maybe here and there we’ll even sneak in a little schmooze about Aretha and Ray’s ‘Spirit in the Dark’.
Everybody goes for a love story. Okay, here’s one. I’m in love. Love at first sight.
I admit a certain bias towards Nordic singing. At its best, it’s flawless, perfect, precise, technically refined on a level we just don’t encounter in our more familiar neighborhoods. With female singers, that can be intoxicating.
Eva had no career whatsoever. Radka recorded 3 albums–”Angel Heart”, “Fairy Tales”, and the posthumously released “Live in Hamburg”. There are also 2 compilations of other cuts, and a lot of live videos in all kinds of settings–small combo, big band, orchestra, many with material not found on the CDs.
Jimmy Webb is a story to himself. Excepting Burt Bacharach, the only ‘non-performing’ (we wish) songwriter of our time to get his name above the title. He’s the auteur of hits such as ‘Up, Up and Away’ (5th Dimension), Glenn Campbell’s ‘Wichita Lineman’, ‘Galveston’ and ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’, and the Richard Harris epic ‘MacArthur Park’. That’s some very, very fine music there.
I don’t want to detract from those Glenn Campbell songs. Glenn Campbell is also a story in and of himself. (Why do people say I ramble?) He was a studio guitarist on Blonde on Blonde!!! He has the God-given voice of a cowboy angel, and the good sense and taste and intelligence of a Texas Longhorn steer.
