GROW BIGGER EARS #11: The "Audio Autopsy" Obsessive Power Pop Playlist Vol. 2-It's All About Wanting...More
From love to sweets to carpentry implements...the list of things we want is beyond lengthy. No wonder Santa makes two trips. The human condition according to recording artists...Volume 2.
As always, our “Audio Autopsy” (with mini-deep dives into songs and artists) Power Pop Playlist is neither a ranking nor a top sales chart of any sort. Nor are all chosen songs literally or specifically “power pop.”
They’re simply songs lovingly filtered through my generally power pop-informed sensibilities, and all are songs I’ve known (and loved) since original release!
Marvin Gaye “I Want You,” 1976, Tamla/Motown
He had had his share of hits prior to 1976’s “I Want You,” and while most of his fans were all over his “What’s Going On” and “Mercy Mercy Me” five years before (both Top 5 hits, with the former, #2), as well as ‘73’s #1 “Let’s Get it On,” I was bowled over by the lead track of this title song on his 14th album!
Oh, they’re all properly slinky in that special way that was Marvin’s, but maybe it was having just turned 21 (and was programming my on-air music mix for Baton Rouge commercial FM-rocker, WFMF, as their prime time evening DJ), that made this hypnotizingly sexy track so repeat-worthy!
Sadly, the album wasn’t OK-ed for play on our “progressive rock” format, but that didn’t stop me from giving this Leon Ware/Arthur “T-Bone” Ross (Diana’s little bro) song a few spins in the last hour of my daily 7-midnight on-air shift! Such was the benefit of being at the mic long past the hour our program director hit the hay!
Produced by Marvin and Ware, the latter helped move Gaye from a decidedly funk lane into a smoother, disco-friendly groove. Regular readers have already discovered my love for all things smoothly danceable! That might help explain my instant attraction to this #15 smash, which hit the top spot of the US hot-selling soul chart!
Unusual and fascinating video: Marvin and musicians in-studio, rehearsing “I Want You” between takes. What’s so odd? Marvin is singing while seated and reclining on the studio couch! Smoooooooth. I’m gonna stop thinking that, at any time in my life, I was ever anything close to being this cool!
Todd Rundgren (with Bobby Womack) “The Want of a Nail,” 1989, Warner Bros. Records
It’s fitting to follow an accomplished soul singer with another (no, not Todd). Soul legend Bobby Womack (who passed in 2014 at 70 as a 2009 Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame inductee) accompanies 2021 Rock Hall inductee, Todd Rundgren, on his “The Want of a Nail” composition, as he takes a centuries-old proverb and adds notes, chords, and rests.
(Video above: Live performance of the song with Todd and Bobby, with Dave’s studio band on Late Night with David Letterman, a mere 8 days after the Nearly Human album was released!)
Unlike many of Todd’s solo albums on which he produced, arranged, and played all the instruments and sang all lead and backing vocals (joining the likes of Roy Wood, Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, Prince, and a handful of others who have “played the studio” in their careers), Nearly Human (from whence this track comes) was performed live in the studio with several musicians, including the members of Rundgren’s newly-defunct band, Utopia (Roger Powell, Kasim Sulton, John “Willie” Wilcox).
Scott Mathews (formerly of the 1979 Durocs band and album on Capitol, given the “Audio Autopsy” treatment here) and former Tubes Vince Welnick (keyboards) and Prairie Prince (drums) also performed on Nearly Human.
Brent Bourgeois and Larry Tagg of Bourgeois Tagg, whose album, Yoyo, Rundgren had produced for Island Records in 1987 (he had also produced The Tubes’ Remote Control for A&M in ‘79), also played on the album, making Nearly Human essentially a Rundgren/Utopia/Bourgeois Tagg/Tubes collaboration, or a small reunion of artists for whom Todd had twiddled knobs! All that were missing were Hall & Oates, Meatloaf, XTC, and dozens of others!
A rare peek of Todd in a crowded northern California studio recording the song. They’re playing and singing to track, but it’s a well-edited video using various takes:
Related: Drinks with Todd post-show in ‘78:
Toad the Wet Sprocket, “All I Want,” 1991, Columbia Records
Toad follows Todd, with an equally uniquely astounding composition. Whereas Todd has written hundreds of songs in his 5+ decade-long career, “The Want of a Nail” stands on its own as a songwriting achievement, largely due to its arrangement: Unusual construction for a pop song (for one who has written several that literally cemented the template, “Open My Eyes,” “Hello It’s Me,” “I Saw the Light” to name three), but manages to retain its allure and catchiness.
Never before on Santa Barbara, CA natives, Toad the Wet Sprocket, I leapt on this song when it was released a year after its parent album, Fear, came out (produced by Gavin MacKillop), and proceeded to catch up on their album catalog, and even bought a collection of their video singles on VHS!
For my money, this song matches or exceeds, the angst, “seriousness” and earnestness of REM’s 1991 “Losing My Religion” (with Toad’s music video, a year later, occasionally echoing similarly stark visual elements of REM’s, with a different director), or more currently, much by Coldplay (except the stirring “Viva la Vida”).
Written by the band (lead singer/guitarist, Glen Phillips, guitarist Todd Nichols, bassist Dean Dinning, and drummer Randy Guss), I had the thrill of being in a packed New Orleans Superdome for a national youth gathering in summer of 1992: “All I Want” was blaring over the stadium loudspeakers during a break.
It was so loud that I was able to walk around singing it at the top of my lungs and no one in the crowd of 40,000 could hear me! Lump-in-the-throat for me (for whatever only-the-heart-knows reason), has always been the line:
Nothing's so cold
As closing the heart when all we need
Is to free the soul;
But, we wouldn’t be that brave I know,
And the air outside so soft, confessing everything…
Everything.
Glen backs me up when he tells Songfacts’ Dan MacIntosh in a recent interview, “I mean, a song has to elicit an emotion, right? That’s what it has to do. Has to make you feel something. And whether it’s note for note, line for line, actually based on anything else, or as long as it makes you feel something, it’s successful.
“Most of my songs are Post-Its,” Phillips, who writes all the songs’ lyrics, continued. “Even ‘All I Want,’ if you look at the verse, it’s very much about how fleeting any kind of epiphany is. It’s all about the moment passing very, very quickly, and how there’s a desire to hold onto it. That would be a constant, but it comes and it goes, and it goes very quickly.”
Jellyfish “All I Want is Everything,” 1990, Charisma Records
One-fourth of this writer’s Power Pop Mt. Rushmore (with The Records, Raspberries, and The Rubinoos filling it out), the only “non-R” band, Jellyfish, goes greedy with this one from their Bellybutton debut of only two true albums (not counting live, EPs, compilations, etc) they released on Charisma Records.
Bellybutton was produced by Albhy Galuten (Bee Gees, Barbra Streisand, Saturday Night Fever soundtrack album) and Jack Joseph Puig (who produced Taxiride’s magnificent Imaginate debut album; that album’s “Audio Autopsy” can be viewed in its entirety here…it’s the article for which Taxiride singer/guitarist, Jason Singh, thanked me by saying, “You reminded me how good we used to be”! More exclusive band member interviews also included!):
Jellyfish, for this album, was singer/drummer Andy Sturmer (who wrote “All I Want is Everything”), singer/keyboardist Roger Manning, and guitarist/bassist Jason Falkner. Redd Kross’ Steven Shane McDonald also contributed bass.
In a review for Columbia, South Carolina’s The State, staff writer Michael Miller gave the album five stars and called Bellybutton “the best pop album of the year.” He asserted that the album incorporated “the inventive melodies of the Beatles, the vocal harmonies of 10CC, and contemporary rhythms of XTC and Crowded House.”
Scritti Politti “First Boy in This Town (Lovesick),” 1988, Warner Bros. (US), Virgin (UK)
Lovesick (I want ya) and baby I don’t wanna be
Lovesick ...anymore, let me tell you ‘bout it.
At first glance, a song that seems to sidestep wanting much of anything, but alas, the ole reliable wanting of another’s love is the subject of the duo of Welshman, Green Gartside and New Yorker, David Gamson. Fred Maher joined in on drums. It was Green and Gamson who wrote the songs and produced the Provision album, where we find our lovesick hero, occupying the third track of this, their second album for Warner Bros.
One Word
I discovered Scritti Politti in 1985, in an album review for their Cupid & Psyche 85 Warner debut. I was 30, and on the road for ten weeks in northern California, fronting an all-singing, all-dancing, all-acting youth ministry team, spending a week in a Lutheran church in ten pre-arranged NoCal cities.
I had to keep up with new music, somehow, as I was only about three years removed from my decade-long radio and record biz careers, and was still eagerly “in search of the perfect riff.”
Somewhere between San Jose and Vacaville, I came across a syndicated review by the Los Angeles Times’ vaunted rock critic, Robert Hilburn. He described the music on Scritti Politti’s Cupid album as “precious.”
Somehow (and herein lies the beauty of effective music critique), I knew I had to have that CD! I had to discover a music that the respected Hilburn deemed “precious.” He wasn’t wrong, and I wasn’t disappointed. The band’s Warner Bros. double-whammy of the ‘85 Cupid and 1988’s Provision make a right proper DID (Desert Island Disc) on any given party game-night!
While live performances happened early on for Scritti, by the time of Provision’s recording (in no fewer than ten different studios, split about evenly between New York and London), at least Gamson had had enough, and live shows became but a memory for them (drummer Fred Maher also found reasons enough to end his Scritti tenure after Provision’s release).
Plus, it was difficult to replicate the band’s heavily electronic and keyboard-laden soundscape in various venues, combined with the added nightmare of travel logistics.
While collaborating with Green had improved since the Cupid album (according to Gamson), in later years, he acknowledged the negative experience of making the album (according to anonymous sources): “It was the most digital-sounding analogue record ever made. It was one long very exhausting grind. I got physically ill at the end of that record because I was so exhausted.”
Gamson concluded, “Provision took an incredibly long time to make. The initial drum tracks were all recorded with the Synclavier (early digital synthesizer) and at that point the Synclav’s sequencer was extremely primitive. Lots of inputting kick and snare hits via SMPTE numbers rather than beats and bars. Ultimately, I think we kinda lost the forest for the trees on that album.”
With Maher and Gamson deserting Gartside by the time the “First Boy” music video was recorded, it was up to Green to appear with a busload of extras (aka “background artists,” effectively reflecting a variety of styles, but all with a very ‘60s vibe):
Want more wanting? Try GROW BIGGER EARS #3, here:
Fun list. SP is my favorite of the bunch, brings back memories of party life in the 80's. Had not seen that version of the Marvin Gaye, but of course the song is a classic. Never had any use for Rundgren, and Jellyfish are new to me. So, here is my nominee for a "Want" song: The Ramones, of course! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm51ihfi1p4
Big Scritti fan here, too! Provision is great but I would probably count Anomie & Bonhomie as my #2 album of theirs, after Cupid & Psyche ‘85, of course. Also, my dirty secret is that I prefer I Want You to What’s Going On and Let’s Get It On!
Here are a couple more “wanting” songs for ya: https://youtu.be/Hh62kjQVSUU?si=rBClC-B0SKfDtoSg
https://youtu.be/qPNa9KD4Y_k?si=WUfqJ01XBvNJ6QwM