This is the second of a series. The first, on the song “Astral Weeks” can be found here.
Soon enough I’ll get to “Round Eye Blues,” one of the great songs you’ve likely never heard, by one of the seminal rock & roll bands you’ve probably never heard of, Marah, off of the best rock & roll album most people never heard, “Kids From Philly.”
But let’s start with Carnie Wilson of the celeb daughter girl group, Wilson Phillips. But, more salient to this discussion, she is the daughter of musical savant, Beach Boy Brian Wilson.
(Actually Wilson might not technically be a Beach Boy anymore. At some point recently, scumbag Mike Love, who apparently controls the band name and franchise legally, kicked Brian Wilson out of the band. Which is a scenario of such abject absurdity, it would take far more space, and too much wasted energy to dissect.)
Anyhow, Wilson the daughter, has been quoted at several places as sharing this memory from her youth. “I woke up every morning to boom boom-boom pow! Boom boom-boom pow! Every day.”
This is a reference to drummer Hal Blaine’s iconic kickoff to the Ronettes’ seminal smash, “Be My Baby.” Which, as most of us who grovel for every bit of rock & roll trivia know, is Brian Wilson’s favorite song of forever, one he claims to have listened to thousands of times, and the guiding light to the genius evolution of “Pet Sounds” and beyond.
Said classic tune is the key the opens the door to “Round Eye Blues,” but you’ll have to stick with me for a bit until I get there.
So, for reference purposes, and the fact that it’s one of the greats, and we’d all be wise to try and catch up with the wise Mr. Wilson, a musical interlude:
* * * * *
During the maturation of any artistic genre, the process starts to fold into itself. There’s a cultural inevitability. Hegel’s Dialectic at work. Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis. What was outré sooner or later is mainstream. Or, at least closer to the middle, more accepted by the entrenched.
Progenitorial references begin to appear, links to the gestation, homages to the original craftsmen.
To use smaller, more digestible words, I’ve always loved rock & roll songs that mention others that come before, that confirm how the music has become lifestyle, how some things in life, some moments experienced, are impossible to explain without a reference to what was on the box.
Like, oh, Lucinda Williams in “Metal Firecracker”: Once you held me so tight/ I thought I’d lose my mind/ You said I rocked your world/ You said it was for all time/ You said that I would always be your girl/ We’d put on ZZ Top/ And turn ’em up real loud . . .
Or, Williams again in “Little Angel, Little Brother”: Your R & B records your music books/ Your sense of humor and your rugged good looks/ I see you now at the piano/ Your back a slow curve/ Playing Ray Charles and Fats Domino/ While I sang all the words
Surely Ms. Lucinda’s far from the only one to mine this field, but she was most deft when doing so, very astute and effective.
So, yes, I’m a sucker for tunes that hearken back, that honor those that rocked before.
* * * * *
Which bring me to Marah, essentially cheesesteak-loving Dave Bielanko and a roving band of rockers, sometimes including his brother Serge, more often not.
The one time I heard them live, at Headliners, they seemed a quintessential bar band. A little too raucous. Using up too much of their pay for the gig on the brewski tab. The kind of group that could play “Old Time Rock & Roll” while passed on the stoop in the alley behind their regular haunt. After smoking a joint and doing whatever with the nurse from Sheboygan in town for a convention, the one who kept screaming out for Heart’s “Barracuda.”
Though, through the decades, truth be told, the band has traveled far beyond the states, and has crafted many an original with clever panache and a seriously high rating on the 35-98 Dick Clark American Bandstand scale. They have a great beat, and are easy to dance to. (You could do worse than check out the whole album, “Kids From Philly.”)
Plus the band uniformly hones in on the cultural moments that resonate with Bielanko and his mates, and which they are capable of sharing accurately and singleness of feeling.
None more than the eerily transcendent “Round Eye Blues.”
If I hadn’t mentioned Phil Spector’s “Be My Baby,” my guess is upon first listen you’d still get a sense of that classic from the get go, even if Marah’s :43 intro doesn’t exactly copy Hal Blaine’s intro.
The castanets give it away. The first time I heard the Marah tune, that sound gave me chills. Hearkening back to the College Inn in Lexington, Virginia, when I first hear the Ronettes tune off the jukebox in the fall of ’63.
(Actually I probably heard Spector’s classic in August of that year, when it was released. But there’s this distinct memory of that college hangout, with its tables lit by candles dripping from emptied Chianti bottles, checkered tablecloths, mozzarella burgers, and the sound of those castanets coming out of the blinking Wurlitzer across the room.)
Upon the first listen to “Round Eye Blues” and that iconic sound, I asked, where are these guys going with this? This is all so familiar.
And, so, while paying the greatest respect to Spector, the Wall of Sound, sweet Miss Veronica Bennett’s crackly, nasal bravissimo of a voice, Bielanko made the jump to one of the greatest musical Vietnam War considerations ever.
Last night I closed my eyes/ And watched the tracers fly through the jungle trees . . .
The fear, the horror of the wartime experience. How it felt. The veteran can’t shake the imagery.
And I was shakin’ like Little Richard/ And I was sweatin’ like ol’ James Brown
Later, perched at the sill of a window of his room, shivering, the memories remain ever present,
I was shakin’ with ol’ Proud Mary/ I was sittin’ on the dock of the bay
While Wrecking Crew drummer Hal Blaine is not copied beat for beat, the propulsion he adds to “Be My Baby” by playing behind the beat is evoked here as the story Bielanko is telling choogles forward inexorably.
Then an instrumental break. Spector used strings. Bielanko, a French Horn. But the listener’s memory is still tweaked. What’s this guy doing with this song?
Coming out of the break, the song’s wisdom permeates.
Fables tell of men who fell/ With swords dangling from their chest/ The old guys down at the taproom swear/ The Japs could kill you best/ But late at night I could still hear the cries/ Of three black guys who took it in the face/ I think about them sweet Motown girls they left behind/ And the assholes that took their place
Despite that lament for lovers this song really isn’t Ronnie Spector’s. But her presence is all over it.
Yet while your heart’s engaged, and your palms are sweating, and the Nam experience is force fed, there’s something missing. Those castanets, that drum beat are a set up. Will there be resolution?
Hold your breath boys hold your breath/ Finger your trigger and welcome death/ Because the chopper’s filled with your gut-shot friends/ Your hearts are filled with fear
And, then, finally, inevitably, when you can’t wait another second, with that French Horn playing that oh so familiar coda over the top, when you’re worried, wondering whether you’ve misconstrued this whole song, whether the hearkening back is just a figment of your imagination, that your thoughts of Brian Wilson and the College Inn and one of your top five oldies of all time were just figments of your rock addled brain, just then . . .
So won’t you please, be my little baby, be my baby, be my baby now.
— c d kaplan
(Note: I haven’t the slightest idea why the person who loaded this on youtube has the Marx Brothers as a visual.)