songwriting – Page 4

Jim Weatherly with Gladys Knight & the Pips in 1973

Here is one of my favorite examples in pop music of how a pretty decent song can be made into an absolute classic.

In 1970, a songwriter named Jim Weatherly called his buddy on the phone. He wasn’t home, but his girlfriend, this woman named Farrah Fawcett, answered the phone. Weatherly chatted with her a bit and Fawcett said she was packing for a “midnight plane to Houston.” He thought that sounded like a good title for a song, and wrote and recorded this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3_JQr6RqWs

Now, no offense to Jim Weatherly, but this track makes me want to slit my wrists. The bones are there, but it’s just not quite right. (As an aside, that line, “I’d rather live in her world than live without her in mine”? Dang.)

Well, Cissy Houston (Whitney’s mom!) heard something in it, even though when she went to record her version in 1973, she had to make a few changes.

“My people are originally from Georgia,” she said later, “and they didn’t take planes to Houston or anywhere else. They took trains.”

She asked permission from Weatherly and he said, “Change anything but the writer and publisher.”

Now we’re getting somewhere! Note how better it is with the gender switched and Houston’s pipes. (That moanful harmonica is a bit much for me.)

Weatherly’s publisher then sent Gladys Knight and The Pips the track. And with producer Tony Camillo, they turned it into the classic it is today:

That arrangement! The subtle lyric switches. (“Proved too much for the man.”) Those horns! That muffled snare way up in the mix. The backing vocals! So good.

Here they are doing it on Soul Train. (I love how Gladys laughs right after she lays it down so hard.)

And here’s them on Midnight Special doin’ it sitting down:

The song was such a gigantic hit and the band got so big, they became the joke of a skit on The Richard Pryor Show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdN27HzoyO4

And here’s a Doonesbury from 1974 sending them up (my father-in-law gave me this clipping years ago):

I was born in ’83, so I have a soft spot for 80s pop, especially the kind of stuff they played on 94.7 in Columbus, Ohio, “Sunny 95” (a rounding up that always confused me), which my mom listened to non-stop at the pool and in her ’86 Honda LX-I. (“Playing the 70s, 80s, and today!”)

A pop pinnacle of those days, for me, is Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” a song that’s so perky (and also a steal from Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”) but also has this tinge of sadness beneath it — a bit of lyrical dissonance — which, when you think about it, pop music has always been full of, but there were lots of my favorite cases from that era: Prince’s “1999” (nuclear war), Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” (about Vietnam vets) and “Dancing in the Dark” (a song about writer’s block!), Rod Stewart’s “Young Turks” (teenage runaways), etc. Those are the kinds of songs I really love: sad songs with a beat.

Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion is like Sunny 95 in a blender, and her song, “When I Needed You,” pulls off that 80s blend of lyrical dissonance really well. “The song sounds really happy now,” she says in an episode of Song Exploder, “but it’s a really sad demo.” She said it was nice to hide to the original emotion (inspired by a messy break-up) underneath a dance track, so it wasn’t so “all out there.”

I’ve been listening to so much Jepsen lately, but nobody else in my house wants to hear her. I’m reminded, again, of Whitney Houston, but for another reason: I once read a New York Times article from 1994 about her cover of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You,” which chronicled how sick everyone was of the song, so much so that it had inspired various criminal acts, like when a mother of two threw her upstairs neighbors’ stereo out the window:

“It was driving us all up the wall,” Ms. Hall told a local newspaper at the time. “I had just had enough.” The incident, in fact, became one in a series of several — all, oddly enough, in England — at the height of the song’s popularity. In October, a 20-year-old woman from Middlebrough County was reportedly sentenced to seven days in jail after she played “I Will Always Love You” so loudly and so often that her neighbors complained of psychological torture and the police charged her with noise pollution.

We all want to dance with somebody, but, it seems, sometimes we must dance alone… with headphones.