Curio Cabinet / Song Curio

For folk trio Peter, Paul & Mary, having bags packed and a ticket in hand didn't exactly mean they were ready for take-off. Fellow singer-songwriter John Denver originally wrote their hit Leaving on a Jet Plane as he was alone and melancholy at an airport. Denver's original band, the Chad Mitchell Trio, was falling apart, and feelings of displacement from touring were getting to him, especially in a space where things were always left behind. The verses' tale of a difficult breakup played a somewhat ominous portend to Peter, Paul & Mary, who had their first #1 hit with the song in 1969. It would be their last single released, as the band would break up the next year. Still, the group's gentle three-part harmonies and acoustic underpinnings lend to a sense of melancholy that just can't be shaken off, even with the desperate appeal for smiles and kisses in the chorus. Next time we fly, we're keeping our minds busy with long check-in lines and magazine kiosks, lest we remember this song and start crying about airports!
 

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Image credit & copyright: Rhino / Warner Bros.
 

"By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong...." Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's song, Woodstock, was a tribute to the famous music festival, which took place almost 50 years ago today. The band performed at the concert, but the song was written by a last-minute dropout from the three-day festival of peace and love: Joni Mitchell. Mitchell watched news reports about the festival from a hotel room and Graham Nash, her boyfriend at the time, told her about it. Mitchell would later say that the music festival, which remained peaceful and joyous despite unexpectedly large crowds, rain, and overwhelmed facilities, seemed to her a modern miracle. With its sweet, yearning music and lyrics, the song reflects the hope the concert inspired: "We are stardust, we are golden / We are billion year old carbon / And we got to get ourselves back to the garden." Mitchell; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; and the band, Matthews Southern Comfort, all released successful versions of Woodstock, which remains the anthem of the legendary concert. In this case, it seems you didn't have to be there after all!  

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Image credit & copyright: IcePop
 

It's hard to imagine a world before Madonna, but that's where we were when Dick Clark first introduced American television audiences to the singer on a January 1984 episode of American Bandstand. Before she sings her hit Holiday, Clark gushes as he introduces her, "This lady started off as a dancer, went to New York, went to Paris—and is she hot!" Then Madonna appears in black, bracelets, and boots; she busts out some moves with her signature brass, and a star is born! Since then, the singer has gone through countless transformations, from Material Girl to New-Age Madge—and many in between. She now has six children, including four adopted from Malawi, and for her 60th birthday today, she launched a Facebook fundraiser for children and orphans in that country. Those many years ago on American Bandstand , Dick Clark asked Madonna about her dreams for the future. "To rule the world," she replied without missing a beat. And she does!
 

Below: Madonna and her children last year on her 59th birthday, from her Instagram feed.

 

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Image credit & copyright: Gary Heery; Instagram
 

Okay, so maybe Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber wasn't a Canadian pop star and Calvin Klein underwear model, but he remains one of Baroque classical music's outstanding figures. Born this week in 1644, Biber was a Bohemian-Austrian virtuoso on the violin, who shredded on the instrument like no one before him: his unique playing style and reach allowed for standard playing at much higher registers on the violin neck, and he experimented with scordatura, or alternate tunings for his stringed instrument. Many of the pieces that make up the Mystery Sonatas feature detuned violin parts to allow for varied and unusual harmonies set against a basso continuo (a bass figure, often played on an organ). Perhaps the most outstanding of them is the sixteenth and final piece, The Guardian Angel Passacaglia in G Minor, a work for solo violin which is played in triplet time, with a repeating theme in the bass. Over about nine minutes, the soloist hypnotically returns to the bass notes, while building increasingly dramatic flurries in the higher registers. The unparalleled beauty of this sacred music is so good, we can almost forgive H. I. F. Biber for not being a teenage heartthrob.
 

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It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives in honor of World Lion Day.
 

Despite thriving for nearly 80 years, The Lion Sleeps Tonight hides a king of the jungle-sized controversy. Originally recorded in 1939 as Mbube ("lion" in Zulu) by the South African singer Solomon Linda, the track was an example of fasi pathi, a high falsetto singing style in the Zulu tradition. It sold over 100,000 copies in Linda's native country but earned him a pittance. In the '50s, the song made its way out west when Pete Seeger transcribed the tune with a new name: Wimoweh, after the baritone chants. A decade later, the Tokens put their own spin on a doo-wop version of The Lion Sleeps Tonight (Wimoweh). It hit #1 on the Billboard charts December 18, 1961, giving it a global appeal: it's been recorded over 150 times and had a resurgence in the '90s with Disney's The Lion King film and Broadway musical. A 2000 exposé in Rolling Stone revealed Linda died in poverty, having been swindled of royalties for decades. It was only in 2006 that Linda's family finally reached a settlement which restored financial and musical dues to the original singer of one of the 20th century's greatest songs. Ee-e-e-um-um-a-weh to go!
 

Below: Solomon Linda's Mbube; the Tokens' hit The Lion Sleeps Tonight.
 

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Image credit & copyright: Disney
 

Summer Nights, the hit duet from the movie, Grease, provides alternating—and very different—descriptions of a summer fling. Sandy (Olivia Newton-John) tells her friends about a honeyed infatuation ("He got friendly, holding my hand") while Danny (John Travolta) brags that he scored ("She got friendly, down on the sand"). Danny is the leader of a greaser gang, and when the two end up at the same high school after their summer together, he must maintain his bad boy image by pretending to have no interest in the straight-laced Sandy. Grease, which was adapted from a 1971 Broadway musical, became an international sensation when it was released in 1978 and is still popular on its 40th anniversary—one reviewer recently called it, "a sugary rush of a film." But a contemporary viewer will notice that in Summer Nights, Danny seems to be boasting about sexual assault as his friends egg him on ("Did she put up a fight?" one companion asks). Sure, the story takes place in the 1950s, and Danny (and Sandy, too) reflect the sex roles of the era; besides, he quits his macho posturing in time for the happy ending. But in the #MeToo era, we can't help wishing Danny would take a dip in the ocean to cool off and get his head straight!

 

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Image credit & copyright: Dave Friedman, Vanity Fair
 

When N.W.A dropped their debut Straight Outta Compton 30 years ago today, the "World's Most Dangerous Group" made one of the most intense and innovative rap records ever. Unfortunately, their gritty (and sometimes hyper-macho) look at life in Compton, California was often too explicit for airplay—save for the Dr. Dre-helmed track Express Yourself. Under a funky sample from Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, Dre lays down a monologue that trades expletives for more radio-friendly "...subject and a predicate / [added] on a dope beat." Even without the regular verbal arsenal, Dre manages to wax lyrical about the stifling nature of civility and censorship when some hard truths require more direct avenues of expression. These days, the influence of Straight Outta Compton can't be overstated, with the album having been selected for the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry in 2017. But when it originally came out, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, and the rest of the crew were giving voice to stories they'd never heard before in music, sometimes doing it with brutal honesty… and a great beat.
 

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Image credit & copyright: Photoshot
 

Calling Tash Sultana a "YouTube sensation" may not be giving her enough credit. When the 23-year-old Australian musician's song Jungle took off while she was still busking on the streets of Melbourne, she suddenly found herself touring to sold-out shows and playing festival stages around the world—which sounds like every musician's aspiring dream. Yet Sultana's music carries a message that focuses on internal over external success. "I said the road is long / Keep carrying on / I don't need your loving for my salvation," she sings in Salvation, the lead single on her latest album Flow State, which will be released later this month. The tune is an anthem to independence and self-validation, as well as a goodbye to an old lover. It features Sultana's crisp vocals layered over electronic beats reminiscent of '90s neo-soul. Sultana's experimentation isn't limited to the musical field; the video for the song shows her skydiving over Australia. Looks like this musician's road is angled skyward!
 

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Image credit & copyright: Dara Munnis
 

It's impossible to stay seated when Do You Love Me comes on. The Contours brought their all to the recording, which they viewed as one of their final chances to prove their worth to Motown records. Lead singer Joe Billingslea's sheer energy radiates as he asks his former lover if she's happy now that he's learned how to dance. The song's playfulness is built into its structure. The tune tapers off to near-silence about two minutes in... but wait! Billingslea's voice erupts again, propelling the song forward. Do You Love Me also mentions classic '60s dance moves like the Mashed Potato and the Twist. Its evocation of a specific era meant that it had legs beyond 1962, the year it was released. When it was included on the soundtrack of 1988 film Dirty Dancing (which was set in the 1960s), Do You Love Me managed to top charts for a second time, over a quarter century after it first became a hit. Not bad for a group that was barely hanging on to its recording deal!
 

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Image credit & copyright: The Contours
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

The music is lovely, but the plot… not so much. The Nazis adored composer Richard Wagner's compositions for their beauty as much as their underlying ideology: shameless sexism and anti-Semitism. Born on this day in 1813 and living until 1883, Wagner later became a Nazi symbol of pride as Adolf Hitler's favorite composer. None of Wagner's works broadcast his ignorance quite like his final opera Parsifal, a tale filled with lecherous women, a treacherous sorcerer of Jewish/Arabian connotation, and a shapeshifter who transforms into yet another lecherous woman. The plot follows young Parsifal, a masculine symbol of innocence and purity, who overcomes numerous sexual propositions on his adventure to defeat the evil Klingsor—and might we add that Klingsor castrated himself in an attempt to overcome his own lusty thoughts? Repression, much? Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said, "I despise everyone who does not experience Parsifal as an attempted assassination of basic ethics." In due time, its message caused theaters to ban it. Still, it's hard to deny the opera's musical beauty—even Nietzsche went on to admit Parisfal's melodic mastery. Listen to the prelude of Act III below: the restless, trembling climb culminates with an emotional explosion of crescendos at 2:55. We're listening with awe, unease, and downright bewilderment.  

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What are pals for, anyway? Dionne Warwick gave us the answers to that question in her 1985 hit That's What Friends Are For. Songwriters Burt Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager, both pictured in the middle, between Warwick's group of all-star singers, originally wrote the song for the 1982 film Night Shift, before seeking Warwick's help in transforming the song into a hit single. In turn, Warwick only agreed if her buddy Stevie Wonder could be on the track, too. Soon after, Gladys Knight and Elton John were in the mix, helping Warwick push for a charity single that would benefit the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR). The song went on to hit #1 on the Billboard charts, raised over $3 million for AmFAR, and became an anthem for AIDS awareness at a time when the disease was a misunderstood illness. For Warwick, the tune hit home: having lost a family member to the disease, she would dedicate the next few decades to supporting AIDS research and reminding others to keep smiling, shining, and caring for those afflicted by the disease.
 

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Image credit & copyright: Carole Bayer Sager
 

We'll take a slice of hamminess with our jazz standard, thank you. Released on August 2, 1929, Thomas "Fats" Waller's Ain't Misbehavin' (co-written with Harry Brooks and Waller's longtime lyricist, Andy Razaf) was originally part of a vaudeville review called Hot Chocolates. The show proved so successful, it was moved to Broadway with Louis Armstrong serving as bandleader. When Armstrong's interlude of Ain't Misbehavin' became far more popular than anticipated, Waller and other jazz artists scrambled to record their versions of the hit tune. Waller, who claimed to have written the song while humbly serving jail time for unpaid alimony, released his own recording that same year, imbuing it with his stride piano (an improvised outgrowth of ragtime piano) style. While he may have been fibbing about that bit of musical history, Waller's fantastic keyboard skills and elastic facial expressions added to the charm of the goody-two-shoes narrator and the ascending, lovelorn melody. His re-recording for the 1943 film Stormy Weather even made it into the Grammy Hall of Fame and the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry. No time off for good behavior when it comes to this song!
 

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Image credit & copyright: Left Bank Magazine
 

"The Go-Go's are to music what botulism is to tuna." Ouch. One of the Go-Go's early shows evoked that review: when the group began playing Los Angeles shows in 1978, they were floundering amateurs who botched chords and missed notes. But lead singer Belinda Carlisle paid no mind to what the critics said, and had no doubts they'd be famous from the get-go, even though she had to recruit guitarist Charlotte Caffey because nobody in the band knew how to plug a guitar into an amp. Bassist and future Go-Go's member, Kathy Valentine, saw one of their early shows and was unimpressed. "If you'd told me I'd be playing with them less than a year later, I would have laughed," she recalls. Nevertheless, the Go-Go's honed their chops and, one day, Caffey was inspired to write the anthemic chant, We Got the Beat, while watching the Twilight Zone. Released on July 27, 1980, Beat crested at No. 2 and catapulted the album Beauty and the Beat to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100—making the Go-Go's the first all-female band who wrote and performed their music to top the charts. Who had the beat? The Go-Gos (after much practice)!
 

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Image credit & copyright: Mario E. Ruiz/ZUMAPRESS.com
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

51 years ago in May, Capitol Records announced that the Beach Boys' plans for a follow-up to the band's classic 1966 LP Pet Sounds had fallen through. The new album was supposed to be titled Smile—ironic, given that it never materialized due to frontman Brian Wilson's declining mental health. Fans were devastated. Even as the band moved on from the material and Wilson receded from his role, interest in the Smile sessions only grew, lending the unheard music an air of mythology. Rumors of 50 hours of tape, 80 chaotic recording sessions, and contributions from Van Dyke Parks and Paul McCartney stoked the flame of interest. Various bootlegs were leaked and some material was repurposed for later albums, but it wasn't until 2011 that the original tape was given a proper release. The sessions reveal that the group never abandoned its shining vocal harmonies. But its lyrics—a mind-boggling mix of childish naivete and LSD-influenced gibberish—and oddball instrumentation help us peer into the mind of Wilson in the midst of a crisis. Vega-Tables, one of the more fleshed-out tracks, is a great entry point into the recordings. McCartney appears on this track, although you wouldn't know it from first listen. In the liner notes, he is credited with chewing celery in the background.  

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It's all fun and beachside games until someone gets hurt! In 2009, British pop singer Vanessa "VV" Brown took a bite out of the pop music scene with her breakout hit Shark in the Water. After a failed attempt at recording an album in Los Angeles, and subsequent stints as a backup singer for Madonna and the Pussycat Dolls, Brown finally got to do things her own way with the debut album Travelling Like the Light. On Shark, a song she co-wrote, a breezy acoustic guitar belies the warning in the chorus. Though it's easy to think a "shark in the water" refers to a sneaking suspicion about a cheating partner, Brown actually wanted the term to become a catchphrase for anything that can cause a sense of anxiety — be it the elephant in the room, a skeleton in the closet, or a Jaws-like predator approaching by sea!
 

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Image credit & copyright: Tunefind
 

If God had ears, what would he think of Joan Osborne's 1995 hit, One of Us? American singer-songwriter and Philadelphia native Eric Bazilian wrote the catchy pop hymn in a single night at his fiancée's behest. To show her how the composition process worked, he conjured up a four-track demo recording of a guitar riff that had been stuck in his head. But his main squeeze wasn't quite satisfied. "Well, sing it," she said, to which Bazilian replied there were no lyrics yet. Determined, he kept at it until One of Us fully appeared in his head later that night. Bazilian excitedly took the demo to the studio the next day and, lacking the vocal power of a mass-marketable performer, offered it up to Kentuckian Joan Osborne for her upcoming, hard-rockin' blues album, Relish. With Osborne's throaty, sinuous vocals elevating Bazilian's humbling questions to a swaying spiritual, One of Us soared on a wing and a prayer… and heavy radio rotation. The song was nominated for two Grammys, and Relish one, a feat we can thank Bazilian for about a bazillion times!
 

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Image credit & copyright: Jeff Fasano
 

Hello, world! These are your wild girls! In the mid-'70s, punk rock was in dire need of some hardcore, breakout female icons—and the Runaways were determined to fill that role. Gathered together by scuzzy record producer Kim Fowley—known for cheating and abusing musicians—the teenagers initially performed at house parties, where they honed their chops as stage performers. Drug-addled audiences threw bottles at them, and Fowley regularly cursed them out. But through addiction, a mid-tour abortion, and a failed suicide attempt, the Runaways managed to make it big with their hit song, Cherry Bomb. Singer and guitarist Joan Jett (shown second from left) had composed the song with Fowley for 15-year-old, bleach blonde auditioner, Cherie Currie (far left). Currie, raised in a broken home, had the impassioned "it" factor it took to own the lyrics about a young woman's combative sexuality. Unfortunately, Currie would decline into alcoholism and flee the band four years later; Jett, her on-and-off lover, would also leave to begin a tremendous solo career free of Fowley's abusive presence. Today, the Runaways are regarded as members of the grizzled punk vanguard—the group that proved women could rock 'n' roll with the big boys… before they were even old enough to vote!
 

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Image credit & copyright: Name
 

In 1988, the rock gods were smiling upon alternative metal band Living Colour. When the musicians were in the studio hashing out songs for their debut album Vivid, a simple case of miscommunication produced their greatest hit, Cult of Personality. Singer Corey Glover was trying to sing a riff he had in mind to guitarist Vernon Reid. Reid, struggling to hone in on Glover's voice, inadvertently conjured half the main riff for Cult. The guitarist stopped for a second, totally forgot what Glover was getting at, and thought "wow, I kinda like that." He repeated the riff twice and added a flare before asking drummer Will Calhoun—born on July 22, 1964—to quickly lay down a beat. By the end of the recording session, Living Colour walked out with Cult of Personality in tow, as if the tune had popped out of thin air. With Glover's powerhouse vocals condemning idolatry, Cult would peak at No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100, give visibility to African Americans in mainstream rock, and win the band a Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance in 1990. And suddenly, Living Colour were the smiling faces on your T.V.!
 

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Image credit & copyright: Travis Shinn/Courtesy of the artist
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Here's an (inter)stellar swingin' tune if we ever heard one. Bart Howard's Fly Me to the Moon was recorded by a number of jazz singers in the decade before Frank Sinatra interpreted it. But it was Sinatra's version that became the standard recording of the track. Ol' Blue Eyes had help from some of the best; pianist and bandleader Count Basie and his Orchestra provided accompaniment, and a young Quincy Jones arranged and produced the song (Jones would rocket to stardom a decade later working with Michael Jackson). While the tune may have a legacy as an incredible love song on Earth, it also has quite the ties to outer space: it was the theme music for NASA's Apollo space program and one of the first songs played aboard Apollo 10 when it orbited the Moon in 1969! In 2008, in celebration of NASA's 50th Anniversary, Quincy Jones presented astronauts John Glenn and Neil Armstrong with platinum record copies of Sinatra's Fly Me to the Moon. A small token of appreciation for bringing jazz to the extraterrestrial masses!
 

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Image credit & copyright: GAB Archive/Redferns/Getty Images