Over the hills and everywhere

[venta]

On Fridays this year, we ask...

What's in the Box?

The Box in question is the glovebox of my car, home to my extremely motley tape collection. By the time I owned a car with a tape player tapes were on the way out and most of my music was in CD format. However, charity shops were practically giving tapes away, which meant that I bought rapaciously and eclectically. A half-remembered 80s band who once released a single I'd liked a little ? A band I'd vaguely heard of ? An unknown group with good cover art ? Bring them on.

Of course, the net result is that I've ended up with a tape collection which any music-lover would be slightly ashamed of. There was a relatively narrow window (late 70s to later 80s) when tapes were big news, and my horde represents that. However, in amongst the terrible pop I've found some gems and I reckon its time to come clean about my guilty musical secrets.

In The Box this week we have:

Simon & Garfunkel - Wednesday Morning 3am

The Box would like to apologise for is recent silence. I wasn't well enough to rummage last week, and the previous week was up a hill in Cumbria.

Walking along Bleecker Street in New York a few years ago, I was cheerfully warbling to myself: "I met a boy on Bleecker Street, who stole my heart". I was quite surprised recently to discover that Helen Love wasn't the only person to write a song about Bleecker Street. Simon & Garfunkel did it earlier, and very probably more famously.

Simon & Garfunkel are one of those bands like the Beatles where you think you only know one song, then listen to an album and discover that nearly every track is an old friend. I bought Wednesday Morning 3am, and was surprised to find any number of tracks I knew on it, including two that were regulars at junior school assembly. It also has a cover of Times They Are A-Changin', a song which is incredibly famous but which I'd managed never actually to hear.

In terms of the Simon & Garfunkel 'big hits', I think only Sound of Silence would really count, and I find it an oddly lumpy album, lurching about between different styles of content in a fog of inconsistency. It does, however, have a couple of songs I'm really pleased to know, and this is one of them:

Simon & Garfunkel - Bleecker Street

[Poll #1165690]

Comments

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Good, though I don't like it as much as Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme or Sounds of Silence (which is a strange, dark little album).

Bleeker Street always reminds me of the traditional song 'New York Girls' (you'll have heard it, Steeleye Span did a version, though I know the version with the Tiffany earrings in best). It's the one with the chorus "Oh! You New York girls / can't you dance the polka".

"As I walked down through Chatham Street
a fair maid I did meet,
She asked me to see her home--
she lived in Bleecker Street."

[venta.livejournal.com]

I do know the song, though I don't know the Steeleye Span version. So I expect it to be:

"As I walked down the Broadway
One evening in July,
I met a maid, who asked my trade,
I'm a Sailor Jack, said I".

(He takes her to Tiffany's in that one, too - apparently he didn't mind the expense.)

So being on Broadway made me sing that. NYC is a beggar for that, pretty much every major street name set me off singing something.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

*nods* There seem to be two principal versions - one where he gets drugged/beaten up and robbed, and one where the girl just ditches him after he's bought her the Tiffany earrings ("My flashman he's a Yankee, with his hair cut close behind" - so you'd better beat it before he gets home!).

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Good, though I don't like it as much as...

It was their first album, recorded when they were pretty young, and seems to me like a fairly random mix of miscellaneous stuff they presumably liked performing.

But I think back in 1964 albums were mostly pretty incoherent collections: look at the Beatles' early ones.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

*nods*

I like some of the tracks on it a lot, I'm just not sure it holds together that well as an album. Sounds of Silence is still probably my favourite, if a bit heavy on the suicide songs (A Most Peculiar Man, Richard Corey).

[pigeonhed.livejournal.com]

To be fair they were young but had already had some success as Everlys style singers as Tom & Jerry, and many of the songs on the first two S&G albums had appeared earlier on The Paul Simon Songbook (Sound Of Silence, the neglected but gorgeous A Church is Burning, etc.)

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

This was one of the first albums I ever heard (my mother played S&G and classical music to me as a very small baby, my dad played Beatles & Dave Clark 5) so I always assumed people knew it as well as they knew, say, Bridge Over Troubled Water. Sparrow used to make me cry, as did this song. I love it, and 'Good' is not strong enough.

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

It always surprises me that Greatest Hits compilations pick the title track from Wednesday Morning and not the vastly superior Bleecker Street.

[venta.livejournal.com]

My reaction to that was "but there isn't a track called 'Wednesday Morning 3am'" - which just shows how utterly memorable it isn't. Even now, I can't remember how it goes.

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

They later reworked it as the funkier 'Somewhere They Can't Find Me'. It was still pretty forgettable.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, the two 'I robbed a liquor store' songs. I wondered why that was.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's that one. I remember now. It's not bad, but as huskyteer rightly says, it's not a patch on Bleecker Street.

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

I, err, quite like Wednesday Morning 3am.

And I know how it goes :)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

By way of clarification of my poll answer: although I've selected "good" it's not something I'd ever want to listen to. There's something about that slow, sleepy vocal style that I find instantly offputting. In fact weirdly, it's actually quite stressful in the same way as being stuck behind someone who's climbing a flight of stairs incredibly slowly or listening to someone explain something in an unnecessarily meticulous manner.

[venta.livejournal.com]

In fact weirdly, it's actually quite stressful in the same way as being stuck behind someone who's climbing a flight of stairs incredibly slowly

That's a really interesting thing to hear someone say - I can't quite imagine how a song could make you feel like that. Except, maybe, something like The Rattling Bog which has a sort of drowning inevitability about it.

Do you ever like slow songs, or do they all elicit the same response ?

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I like some slow songs a lot, but they have to sound like they ought to be slow. REM's Everybody Hurts, for example, definitely doesn't want to be faster.

The best example I can come up with is Burning Down the House (Talking Heads). They have two versions (not sure which came first), a fast one and a slow one. The slow version I don't like at all, but the fast version is a long-time favourite of mine.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Cornershop absolutely minted it with the "Fatboy Slim Remix" of "Brimful of Asha", which (I heard, possibly erroneously, but I think in an interview with one of the band members) came about precisely because Norman Cook heard the original and said something to the effect of, "nice, but it needs to be faster". So he put it up from 110 to 126, changed the arrangement a bit, padded it back to the original length, job's a good'un. The crime that they didn't retitle the original "Brimful of Asha (on the 33 1/3)".

pre-Fatboy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rQmB7SCrzc
post-Fatboy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XniTypXFje4

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

job's a good'un

I concur. Mr Cook FTW!

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

I sometimes feel that way when songs outstay their welcome. Some songs need to be long, especially dance tracks (although I guess they technically aren't songs anyway even if they have vocals), anything planning on more variations than verse-chorus-solo, etc. But does e.g. "Let's Dance" by David Bowie strictly need to be seven and a half minutes long, given that it has done almost everything it is going to by the end of minute 3? That would be three minutes, aka, "the perfect length for a pop song"...

[j4.livejournal.com]

Bleecker Street always makes me think of Freight Train (I know it from Peter, Paul & Mary, who do sing 'Bleecker Street' instead of 'Chestnut Street').

If I had to only keep one S&G album, it'd be "Sounds of Silence".

This is entirely unrelated to Simon and Garfunkel :)

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

...but it turns out that I don't have your email address...

As part of last night's work I redid Andy's logo. There's now a .png version on his USB stick, and he also has the Visio source for it, and the RGB for the background colour I used so the web page can match it.

And I thought I'd tell you all this directly, because the incomprehending looks I was getting when I told him what I'd done suggested that things might get muddled if I didn't :)

Re: This is entirely unrelated to Simon and Garfunkel :)

[(Anonymous)]

Well, her certainly hasn't mentioned it this morning :) A PNG is great, I'll try and extract it from him.

My website is blacktreacle.com, and you know my name, you can figure out my email address :)

Re: This is entirely unrelated to Simon and Garfunkel :)

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

You'll likely want to resize it down slightly; I worked on the principle of creating the largest version anyone is ever likely to want :)

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

My parents had Wednesday Morning 3am on cassette. I have a suspicion that it's somehow ended up among my cassettes, by a process of larcenous osmosis. I have an equally good suspicion that I have my father's vinyl of Bridge Over Troubled Water, by similar process.