— William Shaw
I don't know if it was The Beatles becoming fashionable again, baby boomers flexing their financial muscle or a general ennui with modern production and synths but the sixties were back (BACK!) by the end of the eighties. (It was probably a combination of all three as well as a few other factors) There had previously been a considerable amount of disdain held towards the decade of hippies, flowers and surprisingly dull Who records but this was gradually swept away in the aftermath of Live Aid and the compact disc revolution. The "plinky synthesizers and drum machines blipping away" were only finding a more welcoming home in the works of Stock Aitken Waterman but those singles were for the kids; the grown-ups had all this "old rock", some of which was in effect new old rock.
Of course, there were always rock acts keeping the flame of the sixties going. Power pop inherited it for a while but it was largely kept to the periphery throughout the eighties. US college rock groups may have arisen during the heyday of new wave but many of them owed a much greater debt to earlier times. Indie groups may have looked like punks but their music was often much closer to the hippies they may have otherwise looked down upon. R.E.M. gradually began attracting attention as a kind of southern gothic equivalent of an English folk rock act. Paisley underground emerged applying punk energy to Beatles, Byrds and country rock numbers. Yet, in the midst of this came The Bangles, who are not typically acknowledged as being part of an old school rock revival.
I'm sure that sexism plays a part in this even if they're also overlooked as authentic rock chicks the way The Go-Go's, Pat Benetar and Joan Jett all were and still are. The Bangles were a self-sufficient unit but they relied heavily on cover versions (even though you'd have to look long and hard to find another group that does reinterpretations just as well) and were not above daft pop like "Walk Like an Egyptian" which ensured that critics wouldn't take them seriously. Their glamourous image and pop hooks also made them favourites of youngsters which also didn't do them any favours in attempting to be credible. Yet among all that, they were a great band, "geniuses of immense proportions", as William Shaw puts it. No one else in their day managed to make the sixties sound so current.
The Bangles' cover of "Hazy Shade of Winter" came during the gap between their breakthrough second album Different Light and its follow up Everything and was recorded for the soundtrack to the film Less Than Zero. I haven't yet watched it but I imagined the song playing out along its the closing credits, possibly with Andrew McCarthy and Jami Gertz preparing to leave their decadent LA lives behind for the more mature pastures of the east coast of the United States — the synthetic eighties giving way to a future that looks back to simpler times. Tipping me off is the fact that it's the last track on its soundtrack so it must be there at film's end, right? Imagine my surprise, then, that it actually comes in right at the start of the movie: McCarthy's character of Clay Easton is coming back to California for the Christmas holidays and the sunshine pop rock of The Bangles is there to welcome him back on his ride from the airport. I guess it's an acknowledgement of how the Golden State was once a mecca of free thinking and love which had descended into free market madness and mountains of cocaine twenty years later but I really should try to track down the movie before I pontificate further.
By Simon & Garfunkel's standards, "A Hazy Shade of Winter" is a rocker. Though always a talented songwriter and arranger, Paul Simon wouldn't really become musically ambitious until his solo career in the seventies, at a time when many of his fellow coffee house singer-songwriters were also spreading their wings. It ended up on their finest album Bookends but it had been written and recorded at the time of Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme and its flowery, impressionistic themes seem much more suited to the latter. Being so committed to folk music, Simon was not about to do a Dylan by plugging in and this was a rare number of his that you can say has something of a beat to it. I've never been much of a S&G person and I have to say that their version is unremarkable. The dullness of the recording really does an amazing job hiding the great composition underneath.
This version by The Bangles tops the original in every possible way. Susanna Hoffs, Debbi and Vicki Peterson and Michael Steele share lead vocal duties and the foursome are much stronger than Paul and Art, who even I'll admit had much better days in the studio. Rick Rubin's production gives it a shine that is nevertheless grounded in the sixties. Indeed, if anything it sounds much more of its time in the original summer of love than Simon's source material. A brief trumpet flourish that brings to mind "Penny Lane", sleigh bells not unlike "God Only Knows" and one of those insistent acid rock organs provide not-so-subtle reminders that this is a throwback.
Yet, we're still a ways away from the likes of Oasis instantly recalling The Beatles. This is very much The Bangles who were simply utilizing the sixties to make their records better. "Hazy Shade of Winter" comes from approximately the same time as the songs that would turn up on Everything, an album replete sitars, tablas, six-string guitars and baroque pop string arrangements but these only added depth to their sound; by being more like their influences, they ended up sounding more like themselves.
The sixties was becoming the new thing in 1988. Just four days after this issue of Smash Hits came out, a new American TV series made its debut. The Wonder Years was sentimental but it wasn't as hokey as Happy Days or That 70's Show. It reflected the period in which it came out just as much as the era it was set in. Looking back to a time of idealism seemed like a good way to get us through the cynical late-eighties. Though as Bono would sing later on in the year (with a line that is irreconcilable with the remainder of U2's Rattle and Hum album) "if you glorify the past, the future dries up". Rock star were going to have to decide if they wanted to be part of the present or stuck in its past. Too bad they didn't follow the lead of The Bangles who deftly toed rock's spacetime continuum.
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Also of some cop
Eighth Wonder: "I'm Not Scared"
A big part of an imperial phase is that a band can get away with anything and still be successful and even tapping into the zeitgeist. As if to prove it, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe gifted their first song to an outside act. Eighth Wonder had been releasing an endless parade of flops (though they did have hits in Italy and Japan) before the Pet Shop Boys entered the picture and ended their losing streak. As Shaw says, there's no sign of the male Wonders on this recording though you can hardly blame anyone for thinking that Patsy Kensit could do all the promotional heavy lifting while the others stayed in the background. She looked great but Kensit wasn't a brilliant pop star, her voice was distinctive but weak and her mannerisms smacked of too many years in stage school. It was decent of Tennant and Lowe to give her such an excellent song but they should have saved it for themselves; the far more throwaway "Heart" would have sufficed but that's a story for another time. Please stay tuned.
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