My Brave Face (1989)

Performer: Paul McCartney                                 Writers: Paul McCartney & Elvis Costello
Highest US Chart Position: #25                           Label: Capitol Records
Musicians: Paul & Linda McCartney, Hamish Stuart, Paul Wickens and Chris Whitten

Flowers in the Dirt was Paul McCartney’s last great album. What made the album so memorable for me was that it was also the only time I saw McCartney in concert. It was in the Seattle Kingdome and I went with my on-and-off girlfriend at the time. By then I had thoroughly digested all of the songs on the album and along with the plethora of hits, both Wings and Beatles, that he played in the show it remains my favorite concert of all time. “My Brave Face,” co-written with Elvis Costello, was the first single release. The album certainly benefited from the inclusion of Costello in the writing process. I remember watching an interview with him about writing this particular song. McCartney was apparently squeamish about the bridge because it sounded so Beatle-esque, but Costello told him in no uncertain terms that he needed to stop apologizing for being a member of one of the greatest acts in rock ‘n’ roll history. Of course it’s going to sound like the Beatles, because he was a Beatle. Though Costello only helped with three of the songs on the album, the entire thing benefits from the permission Costello gave McCartney to just be himself. The bass player hadn’t produced an album this good since 1982’s Tug of War, and he hasn’t made one as good since.

The song begins with an a capella vocal chorus on the first two bars singing, “My brave, my brave, my . . . brave . . . face.” The band enters on the downbeat of the last syllable with McCartney hitting the tonic on one and playing a triplet figure on three and four all through the intro and verse. The intro ends with the distinctive electric guitar line that is heard throughout the song, while at the end of the verse well-placed acoustic guitar strums can be heard. Both Hamish Stuart and McCartney play guitar on the track, so it’s difficult to know exactly who plays which part. The Beatle-esque bridge is a nice contrast to the rest of the song, a sort of descending then rising chord progression with jangling guitars is followed by a forceful chorus that ends with the dense vocals of the title line and, just like the opening, the instruments dropping out on the last line. It’s at this point that McCartney really indulges in some Fab Four material with a double acoustic and electric guitar line between another repetition of the drawn out title line, this time using some distinctive acoustic twelve-string picking prior to the third verse. After that verse the song goes right into another bridge, and into the chorus McCartney goes up an octave on the vocals. Paul Wickens’ organ keyboard patch and the bright, percussive sound of Chris Whitten’s drums create a terrific backdrop for the song throughout, and it ends with the twelve-string line and the vocals holding out the last syllable.

By this time in the late eighties, MTV was nothing like what it had been originally: a video radio station. Instead it became dominated by very unoriginal original programming and because pop music had also changed I had stopped watching several years before. But looking now at the video that was made for the song, it’s pretty corny. The bulk of the video is fine, a faux live performance with the group shot primarily in black and white, and Macca playing his Hofner bass, very appropriate considering his embracing of the past when writing the song with Costello. In fact, it was Costello who urged the bassist to use the instrument on the album. The conceit is that an equally faux Japanese collector of Beatle memorabilia is making a cloak and dagger attempt to steal the bass from McCartney, and the video of the song is a rare tape that he has acquired. Sigh. There are, however, other clips of McCartney as a Beatle that are unique, though not enough to justify the cornball premise. The single entered the charts at number seventy-two at the end of May, 1989, just a couple of weeks after it was released. Six weeks later, in early July, it had climbed to number twenty-five and stalled there, which is kind of inexplicable considering how really good the song is. Perhaps it was the video. It lingered on the chart for three more weeks, and by the end of the month it was gone. The B-side is a mid-tempo rocker called “Flying to my Home,” a song that didn’t make it onto the original album. “My Brave Face,” is the last McCartney song to crack the top 40 in America, the last great single in an amazing career.

Maneater (1982)

Performer: Hall & Oates                                       Writers: John Oates & Daryl Hall
Highest US Chart Position: #1                              Label: RCA Records
Musicians: Daryl Hall, John Oates, G.E. Smith, Charlie De Chant, Tom Wolk and Mickey Curry

Daryl Hall once called Hall & Oates the Beatles of the eighties, and so it seems fitting to begin this blog with one of their biggest hits of the decade. “Maneater” has several associations for me, primarily that of playing the song in a band I was in. We had recently fired our guitar player and searched around the area for several months, but couldn’t come up with anyone who really worked with our style. We had moved on from classic rock to playing Top 40 so that we could get more gigs, but the area we were in was full of head bangers. Eventually we simply decided to go with a three piece and that meant I had to play all the guitar parts as well as keyboards. The sound was thin, to be sure, but it worked. Though we couldn’t do all of the hits that were on the radio with our limited personnel, this song had a light enough guitar part that, along with the heavy bass part, I could forgo it and concentrate on the keyboards. The song was on the last of the duo’s monster LPs, H2O, and was the only number one from the album. It was also the peak of their career, as after this they would still be moderately successful for a few years but would never dominate the charts the way they had in the past.

Hall & Oates had always been inspired by soul music, especially the records coming out of their hometown of Philadelphia. For this number, however, the intro is pure Motown, Tom “T-Bone” Wolk plays the same rhythm on his bass as the percussion on the Supremes’ big hit, “You Can’t Hurry Love.” But when the keyboards come in, they are much more subdued, almost sultry, and that’s the point. The song is about a woman who devours men with her expensive appetites--though the original impetus for the idea was the way New York City did the same thing to people. After once around the progression with the keyboards the guitar comes in hitting on the upbeats another time through, and Charlie “Mr. Casual” De Chant’s saxophone holds on a single note into the next time around where he plays part of the chorus. A splash on a very loose snare drum by Mickey Curry on four launches Daryl Hall and continues on two and four through the verse. The first half of the verse is supported by a minimalist backing, primarily the keyboards with an overtone of marimbas playing staccato notes at the beginning of every two measures. The second half of the verse adds the guitar, and the distinctive chorus is layered with sustained keyboard strings and backing vocals warning that “oh oh, here she comes.” Another half verse and chorus is followed by the unique sax solo by De Chant, with a heavy delay that acts as a call and response to his playing. Finally the song ends on an extended chorus with Hall singing ad-libs through the fadeout.

The single was released in mid October of 1982 and entered the charts at a very high sixty-five. A month later it reached the top ten and took another month to reach the top spot. This was the most successful song in the duo’s history, spending four weeks at number one, and ending up as the number nine song for the entire year. The "Maneater" video opens on a woman’s legs as she walks down metal stairs. The group is in tableau, almost motionless and heavily shadowed. Once the verse begins, Hall and Oates become animated and on the chorus we get a glimpse of G.E. Smith and Tom Wolk, while images of the woman’s lips and eyes, and a jaguar are ghosted over the singers. De Chant is also featured prominently during the sax solo. The video received heavy airplay on MTV at the time, though Hall says he really had very little interest in shooting videos for their music and it really shows. The B-side of the single is an up tempo, guitar-oriented song with an organ backing called “Delayed Reaction” sung by Daryl Hall. The single was one of the many songs in which Hall was assisted by his long-time girlfriend Sara Allen, and the song is often used to open their live shows. “Maneater” is one of my favorite Hall & Oates songs and I have fond memories of listening to it and performing it live in the fall of 1982.

I Want My . . . '80s

Since I graduated from high school in 1980 and played in cover bands for the next four years, I was intimately involved in the music of the early part of the decade, and this is primarily the music that I wanted to write about. Of course there was a lot of music I enjoyed from the later half of the eighties, and I'll be writing about that as well, but for the most part it wasn't the music that was played on the radio. As a result, my eighties music blog won't represent the Hot 100 charts as closely as my seventies music blog. As in that blog, this is a personal journey, and it won't necessarily represent the experience of those who were younger than me, still in high school later in the decade.

In the eighties music went through a strange transition, but then that could be said about all of the decades. The reality in pop music is that, at least for the second half of the twentieth century, trends in rock 'n' roll usually began and ended in the middle of the decade. The first two years of the eighties were essentially holdovers from the late seventies. It wasn't until 1882 that we began to see a real shift in the music that corresponded with the popularity of MTV. By 1985, however, that influence began to wane and things began to splinter in the music industry in a way they hadn't previously. Still, there were artists from the seventies who were making the charts at the same time that a sea change was happening toward over-produced studio monstrosities that couldn't be duplicated onstage, and pop stars who didn't write their own music, harkening back to the days of the later Elvis Presley.

But that was just part of what made the decade so strange musically; the other part was format. At the beginning of the decade pop music was still a vinyl-based industry. Artists released LPs, and 45 rpm singles were pulled from the album. Midway through the decade the digital revolution began to take hold and record stores began converting to CDs housed in a long cardboard boxes that fit in the record bins. And with the death of vinyl came the death of the 45. Companies attempted to produce CD singles, but it was a little ridiculous to have an entire CD with only two songs on it. This was followed by the truly bizarre cassette single, with the same two songs on each side of a tape. Other strange hybrids like digital audio tape and laserdiscs also came and went. I don't believe I bought a single during the entire decade, choosing instead to purchase albums and CDs exclusively. It wouldn't be until the early 90s, with the advent of the MP3, that music would once again become a singles-driven industry.

Unlike the seventies, many of my associations with the songs also have to do with seeing the videos on MTV and so that will naturally be a part of what makes the songs significant for me, but ultimately that isn't the emphasis of my writing. As always, it is the music itself that is paramount. One of the pleasant surprises that I've undergone in writing about my experience with music, is realizing how diverse that experience actually was. Hopefully, in reading about music that you enjoyed, you'll find songs and albums you missed at the time and can discover a lot of great music that wasn't on the radio.