And here we are yet again with what has to have become the Patron Band of Singalong Scriptures, my favorite modern power pop combo, The Fountains of Wayne.
This is a cut from Out-Of-State Plates, the two-disc collection of rarities, b-sides and unreleased tracks the band put out in 2005, and according to Adam Schlesinger, it's literally a load of nonsense inspired by seeing a copy of the magazine California Lawyer in the boardroom of the band's lawyer.
And to be fair, it is nonsense--the lyrics really are light-weight and borderline incoherent, the song boiling down to 'I'm going to Cali, I'm going to bust things up with my girl and my German Shepherd named Doug, then I'm going to sleep.' And at no point does Adam even hint at what being a California Sex Lawyer entails (outside of the obvious answer of being lawyer-ly and having sex). But what drives this song is not the lyrics but the arrangement, which is pure-d Left Coast. The band manages to create this laid back guitar rift that is occasionally punctuated by synth-twinks that seem to make our POV character's contentions seem entirely plausible. Hell, with that crunchy bridge, I'd be willing to drop everything for an L.A. position as a California Sex Lawyer.
Damn, that phrase just makes me silly every time I write it. Which may have been the whole point of the band writing the song.
(And incidentally, have I ever not done one of these yearly song cycles without a FoW song in the mix somewhere?)
I promise sometime soon to get back to my 'Me And...' series dissecting how I came to love this band so much soon. Until then, here's the song itself.
And here we have a band that I thought was dead and buried, another carrier of the power pop banner, another band from Boston, who I originally wrote off because I found their biggest hit loathsome.
You see, when I first started working in the store, there was this one employee I came to know as 'The Penguin' due to his longish torso and stubby legs. The Penguin always insisted on putting on his own mix of music from the moment he arrived to the moment he left, and his taste in music was hideous. Generic techno and that modern sludge the record labels try to pass off as rhythm and blues, bands like Train led by doofuses who obviously wrote their lyrics in college to get into the pants of freshmen girls and bands like Guns and Roses who equate loudness and brashness with importance...and most importantly, bands with a certain type of vocalist.
It was from this last category that I threw The Click Five due to the fact that The Penguin only played their one hit, 'Just The Girl' in his rotation. 'Just The Girl' is one of those songs which falls apart once you listen to the lyrics--when you realize what I total sadistic jerkhole the woman the POV singer is talking about, and what an even bigger jerkhole the singer is for putting up with all this terrible abuse with a smile on his face, the song stops being fun. This isn't like, let's say, The Offsping's 'Self-Esteem,' which presents us with a POV character who recognizes his inability to leave his abuser as pathetic, or Fountains Of Wayne's 'I'll Do The Driving,' where the POV character stays with a desire to lead his girlfriend out of her small-minded habits...this is a guy who seems to crave this abuse with a smile on his face and open arms.
(Imagine my surprise, incidentally, when I learned that 'Just The Girl' was co-written by Fountains of Wayne maven Adam Schlesinger, and that the FoW had a hand in convincing Atlantic to sign The Click Five.)
Eventually, The Penguin moved on, and I went about my life...until the Music section of the excellent Popdose website ran a story about The Click Five and their struggles with their original label Atlantic (a struggle apparently built around their desire to move away from their original proto-Mod gimmick) and their search for a new label. The article came with a rather generous sample of songs from their two Atlantic albums, so I downloaded and sampled them...
And they're good. They're damn good. Great harmonies, excellent melodies that sometimes evoke the classic new wave of the 80's, sometimes the overproduced-on-purpose denseness of the Phil Spector school...and even though their canon contains songs similar to 'Just A Girl,' they show a greater deal of self-awareness and wit than that song I hated so much.
This song is from the new wave end of the Click Five pool; that skronky keyboard is definitely from the early days of MTV. And it's about a classic power pop delimma--namely, the boy who wants the girl who is attracted to him but embarrassed by his un-coolishness. And unlike the willing victim in the cycle of abuse that is the singer of 'Just A Girl,' this POV character is taking the high road...he's acknowledging how he's been used, how his lack of status is what's keeping them apart. But, he warns the object of his affection that he's under her skin, that even as he lets her go off on her own, he knows she'll return to him...and he won't sit in a corner by the phone, but he will be waiting. And the song has so closely melded the vocals with the melody that it's hard to separate them.
Apparently, The Click Five has been quietly touring New England and cultivating their big followings outside of America...and unbeknownst to us, a new album, TVC, is out and waiting for our purchasing....
This is the second part of the series that tracks my relationship with one of my favorite bands. You can find the first part here.
So after 'Stacy's Mom' finally disappeared from the Top 40 Hell of Z100, that was it for a while. I sort of packed the Fountains away in the back of my mind with such bands as Eve 6 or Unwritten Law, who managed to write one song that captured my imagination.
Flash forward a few years. By this time I was starting to explore the wide world of podcasting with my own, first tenative step on that road, Other People's Toys. And I was listening to a lot of other people's podcast. I had taken to visiting Podcast Alley every day to look for random podcasts to sample, some of which I added to my list of regular listens, some of which I discarded after an initial spin.
At roughly the same time, one of the music blogs I followed--I really wish I could tell you which one, but it's faded from my aging memory--posted about a new podcast it participated in called The Contrast Podcast. The idea behind this one intrigued me--one Tim Young would announce a particular theme for each episode, then invite podcasters and music bloggers to contribute a song each, accompanied with a minute-or-so introduction explaining why they chose said song. It sounded like fun, so I went to Tim's website and downloaded the four episodes extant at the time. The third episode's theme was songs that were exactly three minutes in length...and one of the songs featured was 'Hackensack.'
This song just drew my attention instantly. It's unlike a lot of what people think of when they think of The Fountains of Wayne, and it's obvious it's different from the opening, loping intro. There's a certain...sneakiness to it that insinuates itself into your brain, while also giving is an insight into what kind of story we're about to hear. This is not the story of a hero, or a romantic lead; this is the story of some poor suck who lives his life on the edges of society, some individual we wouldn't think twice about passing unacknowledged.
...and when we finally hear this person's voice, his plight is even sadder than we imagined. Given a fawning, desperate tone by vocalist Adam Schlesinger, we learn that this is the kind of man who's done nothing--and I mean nothing--with his life. His most glamorous job has been working in a record store, and now he works in the family business 'scraping the paint off hardwood floors,' existing in quiet, horrific monotony...
And then he sees a schoolmate 'in the strangest places'--on television, in magazines, and 'talknig to Christopher Walken' on television. This allows him to create a strange fantasy life where he's waiting for this classmate who made it out, for the moment where she'll come back to Hackensack and save him from his empty world with, it's implied, her love.
On one level, it's a sad little story about seeing a peer make good and inspiring hope in you. We've all had that one classmate who went on to bigger things that lets us know that we can go on to bigger things as well (unfortunately, mine was Vin Diesel...). But that little cameo-in-carpenter-pants isn't enough for Adam and crew. No, with his vocals he gives our POV character a subtle hint that his inspiration is more sinister. He might not just take solace in his classmate's movie star success, but be inspired to take up the mantle of fan/stalker, obsessing about this girl who may be a celebrity, but to him is still the girl he went to school with every morning at 8:15, preparing to return to him.
I've made it clear in the past that I love songs with a tension between melody and lyrics. This isn't quite an exact example of this...but the extra darkness Adam's voice shades it with is what made me pay even more attention to this band.
I still wasn't there to pure fanaticism...but I was getting close.
Next time, we stay with the Contrast Podcast, my strange relationship with a girl who looked like an Ed Benes drawing of Black Canary, and the FoW song that bore her name....
As you know, elsewhere on this blog I'm discussing one of my favorite bands, Fountains of Wayne, by discussing how I grew to love them item by item. I'm about to discuss the second FoW song I ever really grooved on...but before I do, it occurred to me that there's a Cover-versies attached to that song I wanted to write on.
The song in question is "Hackensack," a rather sad song that appeared on The Fountains' third album Welcome Interstate Managers. I'll be discussing this little three minute gem in the second segment of Me And...The Fountains of Wayne a little later, but here's a video of Adam and co. performing it so we can set up the compare and contrast....
So last year, Katy Perry decided to cover this song on an episode of MTV Unplugged. Here is her take on it... .....
I hate this version.
No, really. I can't fucking stand this version.
And it's not just because I can't stand Ms. Perry as a whole, one of those idiots who seem to feel that it's okay to be unbearably cruel to people under the guise of 'keeping it real.' I honestly feel that Ms. Perry gets a pass frequently because she is, to quote my partner on BiTD 'Zoe Deschanel's Head On A Porn Star's Body' (I don't see this comparison, but so many people do I will let it stand). But this is a person who calculatedly took a page out of Scott Stapp's playbook and started her career as a 'Christian Contemporary' artist so she could grab a sizable, gullible fanbase; whose first single was a half-assed, atrocious tune that she was able to bull onto the Top 40 charts because of some ham-fisted 'controversy' ("Hey, she's hawt...and she's talking about being a lesbian!"); who said with a straight face that her so-fluffy it'll float away single 'California Gurls' was an answer song to Jay-Z's love letter to New York, 'Empire State of Mind' (so your answer to 'I love my hometown' is...'oh, yeah, well we're hawt?'); and whose newer singles are built around metaphors and imagery so torturous that in other circumstances they'd be considered out-and-out parodies.
And the thing is...I almost find her more detestable because you get the sense, unlike with (Am I A) Lady Gaga, that she might actually have some sort of songwriting talent. But she's so aggressively stupid and lazy in expressing that talent that I just want to pummel her.
(And let me just say that as far as I'm concerned, Perry and that mean-spirited grotesque Russell Brand deserve each other...and I don't mean that in a positive way.)
However, a lot of people who would tear her apart overlook her lack of artistry and her clumsy bids to be a STAH overlook at it because...well, she's 'hawt.' Don't take my word for it--just wander through the intrawebs and see all the comments about her. Not a lot of comments about her songwriting, is there?
Anyway, this cover....she takes a subtle, borderline creepy song about a sad man escaping from the misery of his life by fantasizing (and maybe even planning to stalk) a classmate who has achieved fame as an actress and butchers it. The simply fact that she opens up the orchestration destroys the sense that the original is an interior monologue from the singer late at night as he watches one of his obsession's movies. And check out that awful vocalization--the way she seems to swallow the last syllable of each line drives me up the wall. It's so mannered that, once again, you have to wonder if in a parallel universe this is a parody of a Fountains of Wayne song. On some level, even though Perry is affecting a 'sad puppy with cancer' voice, the song sounds...brighter, less desperate.
Quite frankly, given Ms. Perry clumsy career choices, I know exactly what this is supposed to be...this is the mainstream Top 40 pop stah trying to get a little 'sensitive artist' cred by covering a non-single track by a band known for being a little cerebral, a little culty. I give her credit for going with FoW as opposed to other, rather more obvious choices--I shudder at the version of 'Landed' or 'Brick' or 'Hallelujah' we could've gotten. But this is another bald-faced attempt to win over a few people she hasn't impressed yet by acting all 'quirky' and showing that yes, she likes lesser known artists, too.
Of course, it occurs to me that if she chose 'Brick' or 'Suzanne' or any of a number of better-known culty songs, she couldn't count on the oblivious segment of her fanbase insisting that 'Hackensack' is her song that she wrote and performed herself--thus giving her more cred for being a 'deep and sensitive artist.' And the fact that I know deep down inside that this move worked with more people than I care to imagine.
Fuck you, Katy Perry, and fuck this cover.
I've complained more than once about alternative artists doing 'ironic' slow jam covers of hip-hop singles to give them some hipster street cred. This cover is cut from the same cloth--an artist playing at being real bo-ho and smart by aping a great song in a way that is designed to glorify how bo-ho and smart the singer is.
Yeah, I can take some solace in knowing that once her looks start fading, Katy Perry will disappear into the reality TV hosting limbo she belongs, while The Fountains of Wayne will endure long after. But it's little solace. For now, all I can do is grit my teeth and put on Traffic And Weather in an effort to drown her caterwauling out.
Ahhhh....another song by a band I really like. One of my all-time favorite bands, in fact.
This is a very short one by a band that is perhaps best known for its uncanny Cars tribute, "Stacy's Mom." The thing many people don't realize is how lead singer/songwriter Adam Schlessinger has this amazing talent for writing sweet, tiny little songs that are gentle little landscapes...and this is one of them, a paen to watching the world go by in Camden, New Jersey during the fall and realizing how transitory your life is...
And only someone of Adam's talents could turn the lyrical orientation of this song from 'isn't this a nice place to be?' to 'wow, maybe what we're joking about now will become immortalized on our tombstones' without once breaking the wistful, atmospheric melody. This is the sort of tension that I just adore--a tension between the way the music feels and what it's actually saying that very few bands can get right. The Jam got it right, The Connells got it right in spades...and so do FOW when they want to. This, "Fire In The Canyon," "Mountain Valley Song," "Barbara H.," "Fire Island"....all exhibit that sort of sounding good/being bad structure.
Here's the song playing over a static picture of the flag (its the only video of the song I can find)....
