Trapped

While watching a couple of videos of tracks from Bruce Springsteen’s upcoming Western Stars release, I scrolled YouTube’s sidebar suggestions of other videos to watch. Among them: “Trapped,” which while not being a Springsteen composition, may be the most ‘80s song in his catalog.

The song was originally by reggae artist Jimmy Cliff, who wrote it in 1972 and watched it do pretty much nothing as a single. The lyrics use the language of a controlling or damaging romantic relationship to express a feeling of oppression in the singer’s culture — a pledge to “someday walk out of here again” could be seen as a promise to drop the bad relationship or throw off the oppression to take the human rights the singer is due.

While touring Europe in 1981, Springsteen bought a tape of Jimmy Cliff songs and liked “Trapped” well enough to try to arrange it for his E Street Band. Cliff’s arrangement had the jaunty rhythm common to reggae but Springsteen slowed the tempo, led with solitary, somber chords from Roy Bittan’s synthesizer and punctuated the song with the kind of anthemic chorus he and the E Streeters were known for. He debuted his arrangement of “Trapped” in England in May of 1981 and it stayed on the set list when the tour returned to the United States.

Then in 1984 a little thing called Born in the U.S.A. happened, and suddenly the devoted but middle-profile fandom that Springsteen had built through the 1970s and early 1980s became mega-stardom. “Trapped” was a popular concert number and made the set list for this tour as well; Springsteen shows had always been more than a simple showcase of his own songs and had their own entertainment modules that never saw an official album release.

In 1985, the famine relief project USA for Africa recorded the single “We Are the World,” featuring dozens of music stars. All money from sales went to famine relief for a variety of sub-Saharan countries, in a ramping up of the Christmas 1984 Band Aid project “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” USA for Africa also wanted to release an album to help raise funds, and several artists donated new or unreleased tracks for it. Springsteen donated an August 1984 recording of “Trapped.” Neither it nor any other donated song was ever released as a single, but “Trapped” hit #1 on what was then called Billboard’s Top Rock Tracks chart and spent 11 weeks in that chart’s top 40. The “official” single release of that time frame, “Glory Days,” spent longer on the Top Rock chart but peaked at #3. Released as a single, of course, it also charted in the regular Top 40.

“Trapped” was the only We Are the World song to gain radio airplay other than the title single and frequently the best-reviewed track on the album. In an interview, Cliff said he appreciated that his song caught Springsteen’s ear and he liked the arrangement — he also liked that through one of his songs, people in difficult situations were getting some help they needed.

The chart position and heavy airplay on album-oriented rock (AOR) stations are things that would probably not happen on radio today. Like many middle-aged people, I am convinced that things were better when I was younger, but in some cases there’s evidence to back me up. The idea that a station’s playlist would include a non-single cover of a decade-old obscurity doesn’t compute at all. None of the various iPod programs that pass for radio station playlists today would have room for it, and no radio station personnel would be given the leeway to play it. That’s if the DJs are actually in the studio when songs were playing instead of being piped in from a station somewhere else or just pre-recorded themselves.

Sure, in terms of music released for purchase these days there’s more variety and diversity than there probably ever has been. But since no one ever gets to hear any of it, the diversity rings a bit hollow. This week circumstances have had me listening to the radio in my truck instead of the podcasts I usually download and play. And so in my own little way, I guess I can also say, “Seems like I’m caught up in your trap again” to the shallow cookie-cutter, lowest common denominator programming on my dial. But I’m headed home tomorrow, so Mr. Podcast can help “teach my eyes to see/beyond these walls in front of me/And someday I’ll walk out of here again.”

Repeated Melody

Rhett Allain at Wired writes in the wake of a recent court decision on music plagiarism about how many songs the different notes can create.

Tom Petty successfully sued Sam Smith, claiming the latter's "Stay With Me" copied his "I Won't Back Down" to a substantial enough degree that Petty should earn a piece of the pie brought in by Smith. Such lawsuits are a regular feature of the popular music world, and sometimes the judgment goes one way and sometimes another. Of course, the real losers were all of the people in the courtroom who couldn't make the rational response to hearing "Stay With Me" begin over the speakers: Change the stinkin' radio station.

Allain does some math to determine how many different combinations of three notes there could be, since the claim that the three-note patterns of the refrains of "Stay" and "Down" were similar enough to find in Petty's favor. It turns out the number is just under 75,000, according to his calculations -- but then he decides to discard variations based on rhythm and comes up with 343. He does note that a music professor who sort of knows more about these things than he does comes up with a number north of 30 trillion when she runs her analysis.

He then gets clever, and writes a song that contains all of the 343 variations which he will now use as a basis to sue everyone who releases a pop song for copying his work.

At this point, if you are familiar with this blog and its author's middle-aged, curmudgeonly ways, you would expecting him to make some snarky aside about how even with all of those combinations, nothing on Top 40 radio today can be told apart like it could in his day. You may consider this remark made, and thank you for listening.

Audio Matters

I've been on the road a lot over the last few days and so I've listened to a lot of radio. Some thoughts and questions:

-- Kudos to one of the OKC "classic rock" stations (I can't remember which one, and they probably can't either) for playing the long version of the Steve Miller Band's "Jet Airliner." A lot of instrumentation, left off the single version, which makes the song that much better for highway cruisin'. Which also, of course, includes the brief synth song "Threshold," often thought of as the intro to "Airliner." The two became so linked in radio land that Miller actually included "Threshold" on the band's Greatest Hits 1974-1978 album, even though it was never released as a single, never charted and thus can't be considered a "hit."

-- And kudos to another oldies station for doing the same with KC and the Sunshine Band's "I'm Your Boogie Man." For whatever reason, I hated disco as a teenager (probably a mixture of liking punk and rarely having the courage to ask girls to dance), but I heard enough of these songs at junior high social gatherings that I almost get a an actual Kool-Aid and cookie sugar rush when they play. Harry Wayne Casey led a funky band.

-- Naturally, as August neared its end, a couple of stations trotted out Earth, Wind & Fire's "September," another fa-funky booty shaker.

-- "It's a Long Way to the Top (If You Want to Rock 'n' Roll)" actually shrinks the distance between two points when played on a vehicular radio. "You Shook Me All Night Long" does the same.

-- You know, I realize that all of the words Night Ranger drummer Kelly Keagy sings in "Sister Christian" are English. And I realize that the rhyming couplets are either complete sentences or sentence fragments that represent actual human speech patterns. And I also realize that he wrote the song for his teenage sister Christy as a kind of "Hey, slow down, kid...you'll grow up quick enough" meditation, and his enunciation of the lines "sister Christy" during the recording led bassist and usual lead vocalist Jack Blades to think he was singing "sister Christian," so they changed the words.

But I still have no idea what in the heck that song is talking about -- it strikes me as an excellent example of a power ballad which strings together complete sentences that may be profound to the writer but sound like jabberwocky that was matched up "'cause it rhymes."

Oh well, time to be motorin'...

Leftover

Something I overlooked last week.

When I set out Christmas morning to drive to my parents' house, I had the radio set on a station from Dallas that plays music from India. I listen to it because it's something different, because I've developed a strange fondness for songs from Bollywood musicals and because I like the dance tunes. Yes, they are in Hindi and I can't understand what they're singing, but I can't understand half of the mush in the dance tunes on the Top 40 station either, and they're allegedly in English.

Anyway, I was listening while getting my iPad ready to plug in and play some sermons on the drive home (somebody else's -- even I don't have enough ego to want to listen to three hours of myself). While I was listening, the DJ gave a brief meditation on the meaning of Christmas, even to a person who is not a Christian, and then played a song in appreciation of the transcending meaning of the season. The song was by Celine Dion and I don't remember what it was -- I have a hard time telling her stuff apart also.

But I sat and thought for a moment. A Hindi-language station playing out of Dallas, Texas, had a Hindu lady reflect on the meaning of a Christian holiday and honor it by playing a song by a French-speaking Roman Catholic Canadian woman.

I love this country.

Radio Radio

There are a lot of things everybody knows about radio and the music it plays. Such as, there are a few big stations that influence what everyone else plays. They play songs first and then other stations in smaller, less hip markets pick up the trail and start playing the same songs.

Also, that broadcasting conglomerates, especially like Clear Channel Communications, control what gets played on the radio. Clear Channel, in fact, was almost solely responsible for driving the Dixie Chicks off the airwaves after singer Natalie Maines snarked on then-President George W. Bush at a concert in London.

And that radio driven by ever-increasingly hyper-specialized formats stinks up the universe.

UCLA sociology professor Gabriel Rossman has something to say about the first two sets of common knowledge in his book Climbing the Charts. He may have something to say about the third, too, but he doesn't say it in this book. Rossman studied things like when songs began to be played on what radio stations, how quickly a song gained airplay and what pattern, if any, did the airplay starts follow among the different stations.

Among the things Rossman learned was that the idea of a few key stations leading the way for all the rest doesn't pan out when you study the numbers. He calls this the "opinion leadership hypothesis," and when he examines how the airplay of some popular songs spread when they were introduced  -- their "diffusion" -- the numbers don't add up. When graphed, diffusion by opinion leadership (everybody follows in the footsteps of a few key stations or one large conglomerate) would make a smooth "S"-shaped curve. But the actual diffusion stair-steps, which is a lot more like the shape that would show up if airplay was driven by an external factor, such as record company promotion.

As far as the Dixie Chicks shutdown, Rossman's study of when stations stopped playing their songs showed that the smaller broadcasting companies and more independent stations stopped first. The larger conglomerates lagged behind. Again, this is the kind of thing that shows more radio stations responding to outside forces -- in this case, listeners upset with Maines' comments -- than to some kind of top-down decision. It would also seem to make sense with the idea that local stations, which depend on local ads, would respond to pressure more quickly because they don't have any broadcast partners to help carry the load if they get in trouble with their listeners.

Since he's a sociology prof, Rossman's primary interest is in watching how changes spread through networks. That's the meaning of the subtitle phrase "diffusion of innovation."

Because the other meaning of innovation, which has to do with change and creativity, hasn't been very applicable to most of 21st century radio or the music it plays for quite some time now.

Deja Vu

This being Memorial Day weekend and the occasion of the Indianapolis 500 race, a local radio station is using that theme as the "Oklahoma 500," in which they will count down the top 500 classic rock songs of all time.

They have as yet omitted how this will differ from any other weekend, playlist-wise.

Definitioning

"Classic Rock" (n.) A radio station format that will play Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock and Roll" four to five times a week but will never play any actual old-time rock and roll.

"Convoy" (n.) 1) Group of vehicles traveling together for mutual protection and support. 2) Novelty song by C.W. McCall jumping on the CB radio craze; the funniest thing 1976 produced other than the idea Jimmy Carter could be president and without that idea's tragic aftermath.

"Morning Show" (n.) Name for radio morning drive time programming. Ingredients: Two air "talent personalities," assorted subordinate personalities, various readily identifiable shticks and "comedic" acts. Humor, good taste, music optional.

"Irony" (n.) Condition in which expected result or situation differs from actual result or situation. Ex. Hearing greater variety of music on a station promoting itself as playing the "greatest country hits of all time" than on one using the slogan "classic rock's next generation."

Bright Blue

It's a gray, drizzly afternoon with temps in the upper 40s or low 50s. It's the kind of day that, when I was living in Chicago, would move in sometime in mid-March and not move out until finals. It's the kind of day that would get me out of Seattle faster than an NBA team bought by Clay Bennett.

But it's one fine day indeed -- the Beale Street Caravan show featured the late Son Seals, one of the most innovative bluesmen who ever picked up a guitar from Sears, and Robert Randolph and the Family Band. The latter are a soul/funk/kick your tuckus into high gear band featuring Mr. Randolph on steel guitar, drawing on a Pentecostal musical tradition called "sacred steel."

Seals was best-known for his Grammy-winning album Bad Axe, but one of my favorites of his is "Buzzard Luck." In it, he laments, "Can't kill nothin'/And won't nothin' die." He also notes his longing for his native Arkansas in "Going Home (Where the Women Have Meat on Their Bones)" and just flat tears the roof off any building within a 50-mile radius with the instrumental "Hot Sauce."

Randolph's set includes the gospel number "I Don't Know What You Come to Do" that is really too powerful for any mere radio signal to contain. The 11-plus minute version played on the Caravan could turn Osama bin Laden and Christopher Hitchens into footwashing Baptists, have enough over to clean up Bill Maher's act and even open Hugh Hefner's eyes to how creepy he's been for the last 50 years. Play this on an NPR station in Rush Limbaugh's hometown and he'd donate to their pledge drive. Bill O'Reilly would shut up. Keith Olbermann would get a clue. Rosie O'Donnell would...naahh, it's just a song, after all.

But a darn fine antidote to a gray gloomy day.

No ID Required

Because of the radio station switchover I mentioned the other day, I'm back to listening to the regular dismal radio stations available in Oklahoma City when I drive. Sure, the former Spy has been replaced by a jazz/pop standards station that plays some really good music, but something may have changed about the broadcast signal because it's not as easy to pick up anymore.

So earlier today I had the radio tuned to one of the "classic rock" stations in town -- I can't remember which one and it doesn't really matter -- and the disc jockey followed up a performance of Fleetwood Mac's "Go Your Own Way" by saying, "That was Fleetwood Mac 'Go Your Own Way' off their album Rumours." That made me laugh.

Really? You play a 34-year-old song that probably gets air on your station at least four or five times a week and you feel like you have to identify it? The whole point of the classic rock format is to never play anything new: Who in the heck is not going to know "Go Your Own Way" when they hear it? I kept listening, and the DJ subsequently identified Aerosmith's "Sweet Emotion" and the Rolling Stones "Brown Sugar." Good thing, too, because it takes probably a full second of either song before it's obvious what it is.

In the earlier days of radio, DJs often selected the music they played. Bands and artists would send songs to the station and the DJ would pick some, see if people liked them, and keep them in rotation if they won approval. At the very least, the DJ had the role of telling you what song you had heard, because you might not have heard it before. Now they rarely if ever do the former, and it seems like 80 percent of the time, they don't need to do the latter.

Nowadays, DJs seem to do very little beyond yammer, either in the studio or at some remote broadcast with a sponsor. Maybe them yammering is preferable to some car dealer yammering during a commercial, but not by much. When it comes to the classic rock format, disc jockeys are rapidly nearing the screen-door-on-the-Nautilus stage. One more step towards "Radio Nowhere."

A Case of Partial Extreme

Earlier today I heard Blondie's tear-down of gossip-columnizing the world, "Rip Her to Shreds," from their 1976 debut Blondie (This is the song that said TMZ would be awful well before anyone had ever thought of TMZ or the internet).

On my radio. Thanks, Ferris.

Blessed Omission

This morning, because of humid air or temperature layers or something else I don't quite understand (I know, I know -- the list is not thus much narrowed) a Dallas station came across my truck radio at the same frequency as our local radio station The Spy. In the space of the five minutes it took me to drive to work, I heard car dealer commercials, get-out-of-debt service commercials and payday loan commercials -- three of the least enjoyable kinds of advertisement pollution that clog modern radio airwaves. And I realized that I pretty much hadn't heard any of those in a while, and I further realized that's because they don't seem to get played on The Spy.

Thanks, Ferris.

Squeezed to Smithereens?

This week I heard Squeeze's "I Think I'm Go Go" off 1980's Argybargy, a slow wander through a London the songwriter doesn't recognize anymore, and the Smithereens' 1990 statement of defiant change (maybe) to an old flame,"Yesterday Girl" from 11.

On my radio. Thanks, Ferris.

Cranking

Over the last couple of weeks, I've heard "Not Fade Away," by Buddy Holly, the Dirty Projectors' cover of the Bob Dylan classic "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine" and a rip-the-knobs-off live version of "Middle of the Road" by the Pretenders. 

On my radio.

Thanks, Ferris.

Cool Indeed!

This past week, I heard "Cool for Cats," the witty tribute to old movies from the early-period Squeeze album of the same name, as well as a cover of the Kinks' tune "Stop Your Sobbing" by the Pretenders, originally released as a single in 1979 before appearing on their 1980 debut Pretenders.

On my radio. Thanks, Ferris!

You! Me! Dancing!

I just heard the more-fun-than-humans-should-be-allowed-to-have song of that name by the indie pop band Los Campesinos! (The exclamation point is part of the name.)

On my radio. Thanks, Ferris.

I Don't Want Your Money, Honey...

I just heard the pure-trash fun of Transvision Vamp's "I Want Your Love," followed closely by the toe-tapping thoughtfulness of 10,000 Maniacs' "These Are Days."

On my radio. Thanks, Ferris.

Medicine!

This morning I heard "Breathless," an X cover of the 1958 Otis Blackwell-penned Jerry Lee Lewis hit, released on their 1983 album More Fun in the New World.

On my radio.

This week looks a little better now.

You Make the Call!

OK, so on my drive to the gym on different mornings this week I've heard Social Distortion and The Pursuit of Happiness. On my radio.

Still a couple of days left in it, but I think I'm going to call this week good.

Just a Spy in the House of Love...

When I first returned to central Oklahoma, I noted that the radio listening experience was not an uplifting one. There was simply no way to listen to a station for longer than fifteen or maybe 20 minutes before one's fingers lunged for the station preset buttons in an attempt to find something, anything that the ears hadn't heard possibly thousands of times (KISS-FM, JACK-FM, BOB-FM, The Buzz, KRXO) or was nearly one hundred percent twaddle (KJ103, KSPI). I changed stations more often than I change lanes on I-35's construction zone between Moore and Norman. Reliably amusing, if crude, on-air personalities had become reliably crude, not amusing. And others who had always stunk (Jack and Ron, of course) still did.

But over the last few months, I haven't touched the truck's station changer more than twice or three times a week. We in the OKC area have seen a return of "The Spy." Originally, the KSPI station based in Stillwater went by that name, and a disc jockey named Ferris O'Brien played a wide range of alternative/new wave/punk/indie/whatever name we've given this week to music that hasn't been processed through the A&R grinder releases. Later, The Spy operated out of an Oklahoma City station for a few years, until station owners first switched it to a Spanish-language music format, then to the Spanish-language version of ESPN radio.

O'Brien brought the station back through a local marketing agreement with Citadel Communications. He's said his ultimate plans include buying the station outright. The refreshing aspect of playing Ear Spy in my truck is that I don't hear the same songs I've been hearing for decades -- songs that aren't actually bad, but which can't justify having greater airplay now than they had in their initial release.

There's no way I could claim to like everything I hear on the new SpyFM. I lost my chance to be a bona fide New Waver in the early 80s when I said out loud that I just didn't get The Smiths and I didn't think that Morrissey was really that great, and 25 years haven't changed my mind. I'll probably lose any chance at being "indie," the 21st century equivalent of New Waver ("Not punk. New Wave. It's a totally different head. Totally." Thank you, Johnny Slash) when I say that Vampire Weekend does absolutely nothing for me. But even the things I don't like I can stand, because they're not the same thing that just got played 15 minutes ago on another station.

O'Brien probably has a longterm plan for the station to develop its alternative voice and its promotion of local musicians, and kudos to him. The Spy already features several homegrown programs -- local music on Thursday; rockabilly, jump blues and the actual old-time rock and roll Bob Seger was referring to on Friday evenings; dance music late Friday night and early Saturday morning and a Wednesday night show that features music the Spy would have played had it been on the air for the last six years. The latter's the weakest. While the music is good, the show hosts are a pair of OKC bloggers who, like most of us, are a lot funnier to themselves than they are to others and who do better writing short, sometimes humorous bursts online than they do coming up with enough chat to fill the spaces between an hour's worth of songs (A reason you'll never hear me on the radio, by the way). But even they're playing stuff that's not the same old thing.

I'd love to see O'Brien branch out with a show featuring some of the Americana music of the last few years that's taken country, bluegrass and roots music as far beyond the Nashville hats-and-tarts scene as Los Campesinos! took folkish poppy dance tunes beyond the Billboard graveyard. And there's a little too much Morrissey and way too much Flaming Lips (of course, for me, that level is reached the first time a Lips tune gets played, which shows I'm still not ever going to be cool). But I've found a half-dozen bands I'd never heard of and now enjoy tremendously and I've got a notepad in my car to write down lyrics when I hear them in the non-DJ portions of the day so I can search them later (and stop bothering O'Brien's email inbox with a "What was that song you played about 9:30 this morning" again).

And listening to the radio is fun again. Thanks a lot, Ferris & The SpyFM, and good luck.

(The headline is taken from the song of the same name by the dB's, a power pop band of the late '70s and '80s that deserved the acclaim R.E.M. got and which wouldn't have frittered it away on junk like Up. Or from a different song by the quirky duo of Was (Not Was), who also helped us "Walk the Dinosaur" and warned us that when the "woodwork squeaks...out come the freaks.")

WXRT

During my time as an undergrad in Chicagoland, I first decided to try to be a loyal Wildcat and listen to my school's own radio station, WNUR (Northwestern University Radio, if you're curious). It was a short-lived experiment. WNUR was intentional about playing stuff no one had ever heard and only stuff no one had ever heard. I like a radio station that plays new things, but I also like hearing some things I've heard of before.

I toyed with a station called WLUP ("The Loop," which refers to Chicago's central downtown area), which at the time played a hard-rock format similar to the KMOD ("The Rainbow Station") I knew from my high school days. But WLUP was a little more metal-minded than my comfort level admitted, and my tastes were shifting somewhat anyway. Just as well, for The Loop would soon move to the "Classic Rock" abomination of a format that some dubbed "Radio Big Chill" after the early 1980s movie featuring a bunch of thirty-something baby boomers having a nostalgia weekend.

And then one day, sometime in October of 1982, I spun into 93.7 and heard, if I remember correctly, a Dave Edmunds song on the radio. Other than the quick cup of coffee his former band Rockpile's "Teacher Teacher" had with the Billboard charts (No. 51 in 1981), I'd never heard Wales' own king of retro on the airwaves and was astonished. What was this broadcast wonder?

I had found WXRT, "Chicago's Finest Rock." XRT, as we fans called it, played an eclectic mix of just about anything. Each weekday had a featured artist, who would be played a little more heavily that day -- the first of every month meant a trip to Laury's Records to pick up the new Featured Artists Card, which told you the featured artist schedule. Each Sunday had an hour-long live concert recorded at a Chicago venue, from just about any band you could think of. Some box somewhere in my house may still have at least a dozen cassette recordings of these Sunday Night Unconcerts (sponsored by 7-Up, natch) lingering in it.

XRT mixed new music by established artists, older music and brand-new stuff from unknowns in a fascinating gumbo. A friend described it as the station that played songs you wanted to hear but didn't know you wanted to hear until they'd played them. When my trips home for Christmas or the summer were via automobile, I'd leave the dial set there as long as I could possibly distinguish sound from static. On the way back I'd start checking 93.7 somewhere east of St. Louis until it finally came in.

Ye olde Pandora had been losing its luster -- unless you input some modern indie band, the site's ability to match styles and offer great variety wanes quickly. So on a whim I looked at XRT's website and discovered I can listen online. It's not exactly the station I remember. They've pulled back from the cutting edge stuff and have mixed in quite a bit more baby boomer nostalgia music than they did in my days glued to their setting. But they still have New Music Thursday and I heard more new-release stuff that interests me and a wider range of artists in five days than I'd hear in a month of OKC radio broadcasts.

Heck, last Saturday they played Lou Reed's 1984 release "I Love You, Suzanne." I'd forgotten how much I liked that song until I heard it -- hey, maybe XRT hasn't changed that much after all...