This Is Your Song For...November 5th, 2013: Sunday Papers (Live) by Joe Jackson

Portrait of a misanthropic crumudgeon as a misanthropic
firebrand.

Sorry I’ve been quiet for so long...but I’ve brought one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite artists with me!

This is a live recording from 1979 Los Angeles show I got from a sadly long-gone blog devoted to archiving all those bootlegs us music fans used to get from Music Stores of Questionable Means.  Here in New York, there were a number of record stores in and around Bleeker Street that would have this one cabinet in a corner somewhere with stacks upon stacks of cassette tapes with monochrome construction paper covers of badly photocopied pictures of the star contained within.  While I never got this particular concert, I did get a number of Robyn Hitchcock and New Order ‘rarities’ from these stores that I listened to until the emulsion wore off.  There was something about having this forbidden fruit, even if the sound levels were, well, lousy, that made them all the more special.

I love this song--I used to sing it a lot at karaoke until my good friend Vinnie Bracco started using it as an ‘icebreaker’ song (i.e. the song that a karaoke DJ uses at the top of each rotation to loosen up the crowd and convince them to participate)--and it fascinates me how the practices of the English Press that Jackson is criticizing in this song have become prescient for the American press.  This performance begins with Jackson gleefully reading out random headlines from a British newspaper, and they’re no different from some of the stuff I can see being printed in The Daily News and The New York Post.  This was meant as satire when Jackson wrote it, and now it’s reality for me in one of the most literate cities in this country.

This particular performance is also interesting because it gives us a glimpse of Jackson’s misanthropic nature back when, in that moment in time when punk and new wave were the king of the musical heap, it was not only acceptable but welcome.  Listening to the bootleg straight through, you can’t escape that Jackson has a bit of a contempt for his audience.  Oh, he appreciates them on some level and is grateful they’ve come out for his show, sure....but there’s a surliness to some of his banter that serves as a hint of some of the greater ugliness to come.  Sure, this misanthropy will wax and wane with his musical periods--when I saw him live during the Big World Tour, he was positively charming--but I can’t help thinking this was one of the times he didn’t feel the need to hide the monster inside, and probably took pride in mocking his audience while basking in its praise.

It’s not my favorite song of this period; I still hold the title track for I’m The Man (another song that seems erieely prophetic here in the Age Of The Tentpole), and contend there are moments of ‘Is She Really Going Out With Him?’ that threaten to make it the most perfect pop song ever.  But it’s a great number, and a great little captured moment in the career of this man.  Now he seems to have once again retreated into his jazz-o-philic tendencies, but hearing this track reminds you of how he once was one of the nastiest, surliest, pop star ever....

Here is a live performance from 1980 of the song--probably from the same tour as the one this recording is taken from.

36 Songs, 36 Days (2012 Edition), Day Sixteen: Under The Bridge by The Red Hot Chili Peppers



Yeah...we're having fun!  Or Drugs!  No, it's fun!

And now....the band that tells you you're not a fan if you don't like their songs...which, I guess, makes sense.

This is a live version from a performance in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1999. And here's where Anthony Kiedis and Flea and them get to tell me I'm not a fan because....

I've got to admit, I never much cared for this song.

And I like loads of The Red Hot Chili Peppers work once they matured. There was that very early, very sloppy period at the very beginning of their careers where the funk and rock aspects sounded as if they were actively fighting each other (and when the band members seemed more concerned with misbehaving on purpose)...but then the death of original member Hillel Slovak seemed to act as a slap in the face of the rest of the group, and subsequent work showed a darkness and a sense of maturity--without losing the chaotic feel of those original albums--that suited the band to a 't.' Hell, one of my favorite songs of theirs still remains 'Knock Me Down,' where we are witness to Kiedis literally working out his feelings about Slovak's death in musical form. There are still moments where I think the group gets its head way too far up its own collective asses--the massive mess that was Stadium Arcadium, which was at its core a really, really great EP and some b-sides trying to fight its way out of a two record set that was intended to be a three record set, is a real sore spot, criticism of which prompted Flea to sneer the aforementioned comment about not being a fan if you didn't like their songs--but overall they've been consistently entertaining ever since the release of Mother's Milk.

But this song simply never grabbed me, which has always baffled me. I know it is an extremely sincere number, written by Kiedis to express both feelings of loneliness as he struggled with sobriety and his love of his home town of Los Angeles. But I've always felt the key changes and the choral break by his mother's church choir, and the general theatrics always serve to push me away rather than draw me in. And the funny thing is I suspect Kiedis felt something similar to how I feel about the song; according to stories, he resisted putting it on Blood Sugar Sex Magic and felt that the decision to release it as a single was a bad idea. But then, it might just have been that this particular song is so personal for him, so intimate, that the idea of throwing it out to the masses to embrace or reject on their whims was too painful to contemplate.

Obviously, I'm in the minority here, as this is one of the band's signature songs. And to be fair, it continues to mark a maturity of songwriting that falters a bit once John Frusciante left and came back and left and came back. So while I don't appreciate the song itself, I certainly appreciate the impact its success had on this band.

Even though I'm sure you've seen it by now, here's the video....