To continue the task suggested by a friend:
"Your
mission, should you choose to accept it, is to post five cool songs in as many
days. Each day, I'm tagging three friends, in the hopes they'll do the same.
Expanding horizons, facilitating the tapping of toes, providing distractions
from the looming void, etc."
I’ve chosen my five songs for their significance in my life,
their illustration of larger musical currents of their era, and to some extent
(I hope) their relative obscurity.
If I had stuck to my personal favorites, I might have chosen
the Hollies’ “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress,” Creedence’s “Fortunate Son,”
the Moody Blues “Story In Your Eyes,” Thin Lizzy’s “Jailbreak,” the Monkees’
“Pleasant Valley Sunday,” half a dozen Beatles tunes (from “Nowhere Man” and
“Paperback Writer” to “Eleanor Rigby” and “She’s Leaving Home”) or even some
really great cover songs, such as Devo’s version of “(I Can’t Get No)
Satisfaction,” Santana’s killer cover of “She’s Not There,” and Dave Edmunds’s
“I Hear You Knockin’ ” -- nearly all of which I would imagine most of my
friends have heard.
My third song is the one you’ve most likely encountered
before. Besides being a beautiful and ironic love ballad, it’s interesting for
its provenance, and the history of the four musicians who created it. Wikipedia
refers to 10cc as an art rock band, but I’d call them progressive pop: much of the
music could qualify as AM Top 40, and occasionally did, but the albums also
offered a lot of wit, intelligence, and musical invention.
Kevin Godley and Lol Creme, the “stranger half” of the band,
knew each other as kids in Manchester, England. Graham Gouldman and Godley
attended the same secondary school and played at the local Jewish Lads’ Brigade.
By the mid Sixties, Gouldman was composing songs that became hits for various
bands: “Heart Full of Soul,” “Evil Hearted You,” and “For Your Love” for The
Yardbirds; “Look Through Any Window” and “Bus Stop” for The Hollies.
“Neanderthal Man,” recorded by Godley, Creme, and Eric
Stewart under the name Hotlegs, was No. 2 in the UK charts and a worldwide hit
in 1970. It sold 2 million copies. In the photo above, that’s Eric Stewart at upper left, Kevin Godley in the middle, Graham Gouldman at the right, and Lol Creme below (attribution: “10CC - TopPop 1974 2” by AVRO - Beeld En
Geluid Wiki - Gallerie: Toppop 1974. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia
Commons).
Formed in mid 1972, 10cc was shortlived: Its original lineup
was active 1972-76, although the various members have worked together and
occasionally reunited a number of times since. Early singles included “Rubber Bullets,” a catchy satire of “Jailhouse Rock,” and “The Wall Street Shuffle.”
Then came “I’m Not in Love.” A collaborative composition by
all four members of the band, it started life as a bossa nova tune with a title
devised by Stewart. Godley and Creme dismissed the original take as “crap,” but
noticed the studio staff kept singing it thereafter. Sensing they had a
potential hit on their hands, the band decided to record it again, but in a
different style.
Creme suggested they slow the tempo, and Godley came up with
ditching the bossa nova beat in favor of a background wall of voices. Compiling
multiple overdubs of all four men’s voices “ahh”ing various tones that could be
manipulated and recombined on a mixing board with faders, 10cc built a rich
choir sandwich of 256 voices to serve as a foundation for the song. (Two years
later, Billy Joel used the same voice-loop effect under his hit ballad, “Just
the Way You Are.”)
The singer is in denial about his feelings, repeatedly claiming “I’m not in love,” but betraying the truth of the matter through his
actions: repeatedly calling up the person he’s singing about, keeping her (or
his) picture on the wall … but only because it “hides a nasty stain.” During
the instrumental break, the band had the receptionist at their recording studio
whisper: “Be quiet, big boys don’t cry, big boys don’t cry, big boys don’t cry.
. . .” (The 1980s British pop-rock band Boys Don’t Cry took its name from that
bit.)
Released in May 1975, “I’m Not in Love” shot to number 1 in
the UK, but in the U.S. it hung for three weeks at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot
100 that summer -- repeatedly denied the top spot by a different memorable
single in each of those weeks: “The Hustle” by Van McCoy, “One of These Nights”
by the Eagles, and the Bee Gees’ “Jive Talkin’.”
The song’s release coincided with
my first love experience. A sophomore in high school that spring, I kissed her on
April 14, 1975, and we went together the rest of that school year. I remember we
heard the song on the bus to school and she nodded at the voice coming out of
the speakers and said, “He’s got it bad, doesn’t he?”
On the strength of “I’m Not In
Love,” the band had its contract with the fitfully productive Jonathan King
Label bought out by Mercury Records. The resulting album, The Original Soundtrack, was a huge commercial and critical
success. It included an eight-and-a-half-minute mini-operetta called “Une Nuit A Paris (One Night in Paris),” which may have influenced Queen’s “Bohemian
Rhapsody” half a year later.
Godley & Creme broke away in 1976
to pursue the Consequences project (a
three-disk concept album on an environmental theme that included guest vocals
by Sarah Vaughn and an extended comedy bit by Peter Cook) and to promote their
invention, the Gizmotron: an effects device for electric and bass guitars. (Jimmy
Page used it on Led Zeppelin’s In Through
the Out Door album.)
Stewart and Gouldman continued as
10cc and had decent hits with “The Things We Do For Love” on the Deceptive Bends album (1977) and
“Dreadlock Holiday” from Bloody Tourists
(1978). Godley & Creme turned out several albums that I really liked,
especially L and Ismism -- retitled Snack
Attack in the U.S.
(Trivia note: I discovered a copy
of Snack Attack in the album racks of
The Naked I, a long-gone strip club in Boston’s now-defunct red-light district,
“The Combat Zone,” when I was working as graveyard-shift custodian at the club
in early 1982. It was obviously a “cut-out” copy distributed free in the hope
of getting promotional airplay. Since it certainly wasn’t going to be broadcast
out of the Naked I, and I doubted anyone would be taking off her clothes to the
lyrics-heavy, perky and oddball tunes on the album, I lifted it for my
collection.)
They featured witty, sarcastic
narratives and commentaries like “Joey’s Camel,” “The Party,” and “Hit Factory/Business Is Business”
(take the opportunity to read the terrific lyrics on the links to these songs);
and peppy, poly-rhythmic instrumentals such as “Foreign Accents.” The duo could also evoke
pathos, as in the autobiographical depiction of anti-Semitic bullying on the
playground in “Punchbag,” and the creepy re-creation of a November 1963
afternoon in Dallas in “Lonnie.” (Unfortunately, there’s apparently no digital copy of this unsettling mini-masterpiece online.)
G&C also went into video
production and did the videos for Duran Duran’s “Girls on Film,” Frankie Goes
to Hollywood’s “Two Tribes,” The Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” Wang Chung’s
“Everybody Have Fun Tonight,” and the Peter Gabriel duet with Kate Bush, “Don’t
Give Up.” Creme has directed at least six U2 videos as well as The Beatles’
“Real Love.” The pair won a Grammy for Best Music Video, Long Form, for “The
Police: Synchronicity Concert” (1986). Stewart would work with Paul McCartney
on Tug of War and Pipes of Peace, and Ringo Starr on Give My Regards to Broad Street
(1982-84). You can read a fine 2012 interview with all four band members in The Guardian, which compares them at various times in their careers to The Beatles and Talking Heads.
As for “I’m Not in Love,” it has
been covered dozens of times, by everyone from Petula Clark, Amy Grant, Tori
Amos, and Donny Osmond to Richie Havens, Rick Springfield, and The Pretenders.
The London Symphony Orchestra recorded an arrangement for its Classic Rock album only a year after the
10cc release. The song has also appeared in the soundtracks of The Virgin Suicides, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, and Guardians of the Galaxy. It was even
used in the soundtrack for the video game “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
Stories.”
For a long time, the name 10cc (ten cubic centimeters) was rumored to indicate a
volume measure of semen that’s a little larger than that of the average man’s
ejaculate, to imply the band’s extra potency or prowess. Snopes.com has dismissed the myth, with a confirmation that the name came from a dream of the band’s original record label owner, Jonathan King. Although 10cc was supposed to exceed the “average” male’s production, the average is actually closer to 3cc and can vary anywhere from 0.1 to 10.0.
If you think all of this sounds immature,
consider the actual provenance of the name Steely Dan.
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