That brownstone house where my baby lives...

At the risk of this becoming Oboe: The Blog, I must mention another oboe-enriched delight that leapt out at me from a Gene Pitney compilation at the weekend: that strange and unique 1963 hit Mecca.

As with my first post on the oboe, I was a bit tentative about identifying the instrument in Mecca as an oboe. True, that does seem to be a flute in the instrumental break but Ted Swedenburg, over at hawgblawg, is with me in also hearing an oboe. It appears first in the the introduction, then throughout the song, embellishing a smashing rhythmic arrangement.
[Listen to excerpts: intro; instro break.]

Ted played Mecca on his radio show on KXUA last year, and I recommend the appreciation and commentary he posted about this weird song (Ted's word):

It opens with a vaguely Eastern sounding oboe, playing a riff that sounds like what passed for snake charmer music in all the cartoons I saw growing up in the ‘50s.

Ted confirms what I suspected, that little seems to be known about the writers, Neval Nader and John Gluck Jr. As my friend Phil commented, Mecca proves that all songwriters have at least one great song in them.

There is something unusual about Mecca. It's hard to say whether the colloquial use of 'Mecca' stood out at the time, or whether it only does that in our time, when such religious references are used less lightly.

The lyrics go beyond the secular use of 'Mecca' as a metaphor, though, by including its religious origins, and that is unusual in a romantic pop song. There's a Romeo and Juliet thing going on here, East side of the street versus West side of the street (get it?), and the guy 'worships at her shrine':

Each morning I face her window,
And pray that our love can be,
'Cause that brownstone house where my baby lives
Is Mecca, Mecca to me

Ted points out the faux-Eastern elements of the arrangement, which do conjure up a caricature of the Middle East. To my ears, it's only a side-step away from the slapstick desert scenario of Ray Stephens' Ahab the Arab (1962).

It's not surprising that Gene Pitney's repertoire could accommodate such a quirky masterpiece as Mecca. His repertoire was wonderful and wide, so wide that his list of hits in one place won't always match his list of hits in another.

In Australia, for example, Billy You're My Friend (1968) charted in Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane but not in Sydney; Hawaii (1964, the B-side of It Hurts To Be In Love) charted in its own right in Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane but not in Melbourne. Neither of those songs was a Top 40 hit in the US or Britain (although Hawaii's A-side was).

Pitney told his Australian audiences that he started including Who Needs It (1964) in his Australian sets because he noticed Aussies calling out, 'Who needs it?' and realised they weren't heckling him but were asking him to sing his Australian hit, a B-side elsewhere, a song that he'd all but forgotten.

This is why a Gene Pitney Best Of... with 18 tracks is never going to please every fan in every town in the world.

Even Mecca, a #12 in the USA that was popular in Australia (#4 Adelaide #5 Brisbane #7 Sydney & Melbourne) didn't make the Top 40 in Britain.

The first of three times I saw Pitney in concert over the past fifteen years or so, it was in a licensed cabaret in our provincial Australian city. All night a drunk in the audience kept yelling out, 'Do Mecca, Gene!' and, 'Gene, when are ya gonna do Mecca?' but Gene (quite rightly) declined to notice him, and he never did do Mecca, not that night or on his two later visits to our town, when he performed in an old but newly refurbished concert theatre where he clearly felt more at home.

On the third occasion, Jamie came too, and you can read his tribute to Pitney over at his blog. Nothing I can add to that, really, except that we wish there could have been a fourth time.

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Brownstone house image from www.BrownstonesDirect.com.

Iva Davies, oboist

Dave Allen emailed about a notable Australian oboist I didn't mention, Iva Davies of Icehouse, who had studied oboe and composition at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music before achieving fame with Icehouse and diverse projects over the years. Astute listeners will pick up Iva on oboe throughout his recordings.

Dave, who was flautist and saxophonist with Sydney band Flake, played with Iva Davies on a recording of film music written by Steve Gard. This was some time before Icehouse (initially Flowers) was formed, and it seems to have been Iva Davies' first recording.

Dave tells the story at his Burning Mountain Studio blog:

In 1972 Iva was a student at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. (Steve and myself also went there at other times). Steve was involved with the New Theatre at the time, where he met Chris Noonan (these days a Hollywood director [Babe, etc]) and Chris asked Steve to score music for a movie called Garbo he was making. Steve wrote the theme music and we recorded it at ATA studios in Glebe. Iva played oboe and tuba, Steve played guitar and piano and I played flute.

What a classic!

I can't believe I mentioned oboes, and didn't mention Tomaso Albinoni, that prolific 18th century composer of sublime oboe concertos.

When I first started listening to classical music I came to it after years of rock'n'roll, Brill Building pop and Merseybeat.

I know this means that I often missed the point: I was checking out the beat, the arrangement, the melodies. I had no idea about the development of a theme and the subtle counterpoint of several parts, for me it was, like, the sound, man.

Nearly forty years later I have a bluffer's knowledge of the classics, and I listen to them often, but I probably still miss the point a fair bit. Pop and rock remain my reference point, the music floating around in my head, and it's hard to deprogram all that.

It was J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concertos that hooked me. One summer evening in the late 60s I heard the opening movement of the first Brandenburg filling the house of one of my teachers. I decided that when I had a house, I would fill it with that same music. Really, that's what I've done, in all of the houses I've lived in over the years: blasted out the Brandenburgs every now and then.

I'd stumbled on the Baroque concerto and, like any pop record completist, I set about grabbing as much as I could, seeking out anything at all by Bach, but heading also for Vivaldi, Telemann, Albinoni, Corelli, Handel, and - later - Geminiani, Heinichen and Pergolesi... For me, it was like making my way through the catalogue of 60s bands, Animals, Manfred Mann, Zombies, Easybeats...

A movement of a baroque concerto might last 3 or 4 or 5 minutes, about the same as a pop or rock track, so I guess I treated an album of concertos as an 18th century jukebox, one hit after another, 18 Killers No Filler! Besides, the baroque concerto has a regular beat, no surprising time changes or long silences, fairly straightforward dynamics. It's pretty easy to get your head around that when you've come fresh from The Lovin' Spoonful or The Move, even if it doesn't go in for a danceable back-beat.

(There is a famous link between the Baroque and the Beatles: classical trumpeter David Mason was hired to add the soaring trumpet solo to Penny Lane after Paul had seen him playing on Brandenburg #2 with the New Philharmonia, just as Alan Civil had added the french horn line to For No One. Don't get too carried away with hearing Brandenburg #2 in Penny Lane, though: see Allan J. Pollock's commentary on the song.)

Thing is, these baroque cats could really, I was going to say rock, but that's not the right word.

Early on, I discovered Georg Phillip Telemann, who had a way with a sweet melody in the slow movements, but the first time I heard this the fast movement, from his Concerto in E Major for Flute, Oboe d'amore, Violin and Strings, a big smile came over me, as if I were listening to a newly discovered gem from Motown or Phil Spector. This That version, by I Solisti di Zagreb, doesn't seem to be available now.

An obsessive Stones fan I once shared a house with was onto this, and would crank out the first movement of Vivaldi's Concerto in C for Diverse Instruments on his old record player in between Sticky Fingers and Between The Buttons. The version he had was a particularly rocky one, more aggressively played than the version I finally bought years later by The English Concert, but it still sounds great.

Johann David Heinichen, a neglected composer who worked in Dresden, wrote some stirring fast movements. Some of his manuscripts became available only after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the CD I bought in the 90s by Musica Antiqua Koln was a result of that access. The opening track on the CD is a ripper; in fact I'd like to say it really rocks.

I might've come along for the stirring fast movements, but the slow movements grabbed me as well (the Baroque concerto often, though not always, has three movements, fast-slow-fast).

Works like Arcangelo Corelli's Christmas Concerto transported me to some other world, some ancient, leisurely world that probably never existed except in my imagination, but it was no less powerful for that.

Even the sleeve of the I Solisti di Zagreb LP had this effect, conveying elegance, beauty and scholarship at a glance, and after the noise of a Top 40 record bar it was indeed entering another world to be flicking through the classical LPs in Melbourne stores like Discurio or John Clements. Clearly, I was being seduced by the superficial trappings of the classical world as well as the Baroque concerto.

Maybe I was a bit jaded with pop after the heady years of my teens, which roughly coincided with the rise and rise of the Beatles, the British Invasion, and all that followed, and maybe I was ready to be transported to new worlds.

Over the years I've edged my way outwards from the Baroque concerto (what one Melbourne critic meanly dismissed as "Vivaldi twiddling") into, well, just about anything by J.S. Bach, and just about anything by anyone from the 18th and 19th centuries: Haydn, Beethoven, Dvorak, Ravel, Sibelius are on high rotation.

But I still have that ingrained pop reference point, so that I'll hear myself saying things that would make a classical music aficionado cringe: "You should listen to Beethoven's string quartets: he was the Jimi Hendrix of his day." Well, John Coltrane or Charlie Parker of his day might be more accurate, but let's not get into all that right now, or you'll really see me getting out of my depth.

Oboes

Look, some of these might not be oboes at all. I could be swooning over an oboe when I'm really hearing a clarinet or a cor anglais or... I don't know what else: a penny whistle? I believe we're at least talking woodwinds, but an electronic keyboard could be leading me astray. Maybe I should go back to The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.

With that caveat, these are some songs that show how an oboe (or something that sounds like an oboe), tastefully arranged and sparingly introduced, can be the making of a pop record:

The Chiffons - Sweet Talkin' Guy (1965)
This shuffling piece of girl-group pop has a joyful groove that makes you smile, but lyrics that are about heartbreak and deception, one of those contradictory songs mentioned in an earlier post. Still, the tasteful oboe line in the instrumental break does have a plaintiveness about it. (Sweet Talkin' Guy's writer credits are to Eliot Greenberg and Robert Schwartz, co-founders of Laurie Records, with Barbara Baer and Douglas Morris.)

Harpers Bizarre - Cotton Candy Sandman (1968)
Written by Kenny Rankin (mentioned earlier in connection with Nick Lampe) who had released it himself in 1967 on Mind Dusters. The lyrics are sentimental, but if that's not your bag just focus on the light, sunshiny melody, arranged in a perfect mix of orchestral instruments (strings, oboe and harp) driven along by a tight pop rhythm section.

Honeybus - I Can't Let Maggie Go (1968)
British band Honeybus gave us at least two classic songs: (Do I) Figure In Your Life (1967) - famously recorded by Joe Cocker - and I Can't Let Maggie Go, both written by Honeybus's Pete Dello (Peter Blumson). He used two oboes, a cor anglais and a bassoon in the arrangement, inspired by a work by Mozart for woodwinds (Welch & Soar, One Hit Wonders, 2003).

Rod Stewart - Handbags And Gladrags (1970)
Rod at his peak, with oboe intro, on a Mike D'Abo song that later grew legs of its own, thanks in part to its airing as the theme for The Office. See my page on its history, over at the website.

Dream Academy - Life In A Northern Town (1985)
I can't resist this: a band whose onstage line-up includes an exceedingly cool oboe player who also sings back-up vocals. The oboist is Kate St John, whose discography includes sessions with Van Morrison, Kirsty McColl and Nigel Kennedy, as well as albums in her own right. More at KateStJohn.co.uk. Meantime, press Play:
Image of oboist courtesy of the Special Collections Department, University of Iowa Libraries.