Stevie Wonder: "Do I Do"

10 June 1982 (with more over on the next page)

"Uptown, uptempo Wonderware and a zillion times more commendable than Stevie's recent pal-up with Paulie."

— Fred Dellar 

It is generally accepted that Wonder's classic period began with 1972's Music of My Mind and saw him through a fab five L.P. run up to Songs in the Key of Life four years later but I think it ought to be extended a little in both directions. 1971's Where I'm Coming From acts as a dry run towards his artistic independence but it is mature and individual enough to qualify. Post-'76, there's the eccentric Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants (imperial periods inevitably come with at least a small dose of hubris) and the hit-packed Hotter Than July from 1980. Despite the strong quality of the material, it tends to get left off of the "classic period" since he was no longer as prolific as he had been in the first half of the seventies and it may not have helped that it was his first long player lacking in a silly and/or slightly pretentious title since Signed, Sealed & Delivered a full decade earlier. For certain, his output had slowed down and this was just the beginning. ("Fun" fact: Stevie Wonder has only released four studio albums over the past forty years)

As if acknowledging that the creative peak was over, Stevie Wonder's Original Musiquarium I (a welcome return to form in the daft album title stakes) collects some of his choicest cuts from the previous ten years. Of note, the "recent pal-up with Paulie" is absent, possibly due to record label shenanigans, as are those fantastic early Wonder hits like "Fingertips", "Uptight" and "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours". A comprehensive career collection it isn't. Presumably, this is the stuff that the man himself was proudest of. I have trouble overlooking the decision not to include the sublime "Another Star" but it's a strong compilation all the same.

Possibly in an effort to get more people to shell out for yet another Stevie Wonder double album set, a generous four new tracks were included. Each one was placed strategically at the end of each side of vinyl with each newbie meant to fit in perfectly with their companion cuts. Side one of the first disc closes with the rocking "Front Line", a song about a Vietnam vet struggling with his post-war existence which fits the political tone of "Superstition", "You Haven't Done Nothin'" and "Living for the City". Flip the disc over and you get the sweetly "Ribbon in the Sky" which matches the loving and warm "Superwoman", "Send One Your Love" and "You Are the Sunshine of My Life". Put on the first side of disc two and there's the moody R&B groove of "That Girl" which hangs with "Higher Ground", "Sir Duke", "Master Blaster" and "Boogie on Reggae Woman".

The only trouble is, these closing tracks all pale in comparison to everything else. They can't even hope to come close to any of them. For example, "Front Line" might have made a fine deep cut but it lags when having to follow the mighty trio of numbers preceding it. "Ribbon in the Sky" comes across as just a cheap facsimile of some of Wonder's gorgeous love songs. "That Girl" feels flat held up against four of the catchiest tunes you'll ever hear.

Side four is a different matter. There are only three cuts, two of which are well-known selections from Songs in the Key of Life. Nothing against "I Wish" and "Isn't She Lovely" but they aren't quite standouts the way "Contusion", "Sir Duke", "Ordinary Pain", "As" and "Another Star" are. In fact, removed from Wonder's second album masterpiece and they don't manage to hold up as well. Thus, "Do I Do" closes out Original Musiquarium on something of a high note.

Still, it isn't quite grade 'A' Wonderware. The version on the compilation is a rather over-long ten minutes that doesn't quite justify its length the way both "As" and "Another Star" did on Songs in the Key of Life" (having said that, it doesn't get quite as tedious as either "Maybe Your Baby" or "Love's in Need of Love Today" so it does have that going for it); the single edit is more than enough with all the high spots covered. Yes, Dizzy Gillespie's solo has been axed but it's a disappointment so it isn't missed. (Jazz greats like Wayne Shorter, Walter Brecker, Victor Feldman and Jaco Pastorius had been appearing on a lot of pop and rock records in the late-seventies and their contributions vastly outstrip Diz's rather lax playing here) The one real issue with "Do I Do" is that it's clear Wonder was no longer leading the way. Bassist Nathan Watts was one of his secret weapons and here he plays the kind of frenetic scales that made Chic's Bernard Edwards into a star. And really, it could easily have been produced by Edwards and cohort Nile Rodgers in the midst of their post-disco boom period. Wonder's time as a leading light of pop and R&B was coming to an end.

Luckily, this did little to halt his success rate. The much maligned "Ebony and Ivory" had been a worldwide number one smash earlier in 1982 which seemed to launch Stevie Wonder as a more middle-of-the-road entertainer. His notoriety was such that even something rotten like "I Just Called to Say I Love You" was a megahit. The pleasant but inconsequential "Part-Time Lover" was probably the best he was capable of at the time. And there you have it with an imperial period: it may encompass a remarkable creative roll but it can even include shoddy work so long as it proves popular. And if you happen to be a national treasure, it can even carry on indefinitely long after the hits have dried up. When did classic Stevie Wonder come to an end? It's still chugging along.

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Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Modern English: "Life in the Gladhouse"

Band that did one famous song in 'I-Didn't-Know-They-Had-Other-Hits!' shock. "I Melt with You" has managed to take on such a life of its own over the past forty years that it's surprising it wasn't a lot bigger at the time. But it wasn't even their first go in the Top 40. As the late Fred Dellar states, "Life in the Gladhouse" is dominated by its percussion. It's also loaded with key changes and Modern English seem content to show off their generally overlooked diversity of sound. The downside is there isn't much of a song to go with their vigourous performance. Lots of fun and a sure-fire fan fave live but not the sort of thing that will be remembered in the future. That's where "Melt with You" comes in.

(Click here to see my original review)

The Undertones: "Julie Ocean"

23 July 1981

"Lush balladeering might not sound like typical Undertones country, but the passionate intensity that distinguishes all their work is here in spades."

— Johnny Black

Smash Hits was in its infancy as a top pop mag in the autumn of 1978 when along came a single from little-known Ulster punks The Undertones. It didn't exactly set the UK charts ablaze but it would eventually take on a life of its own, particularly as its reputation grew due to the endorsement of a national treasure. DJ John Peel would admit that "Teenage Kicks" delighted him so much the first time he heard it that cried and he went to his grave a quarter of a century later still rating it as the greatest single of all time. No record even enjoyed such a credible recommendation but it remains a favourite of many who have that fondness for old school punk. 

It's a fine recording even if I personally don't think it quite lives up to Peel's tears of joy. Like other punk classics — The Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant", The Clash's "White Riot", The Damned's "New Rose" — I find that it typically sounds better when it bounces around in my head than when I actually listen to it. The iconic riff tends to be caticher and more vigourously played, the pace is faster and the vocals are screamed in appropriate punk fashion rather than using Feargal Sharkey's much more restrained approach. I've heard played by Asian bar bands and at open mic nights and even in those circumstances it tends to be more thrilling than the actual recording. I have no ear for melody and misfit amateurs don't know what they're doing but, hey, that's the punk ideal, isn't it?

"Teenage Kicks" ended up overshadowing the rest of The Undertones' stellar run of late-seventies' singles. Records such as "Jimmy Jimmy", "My Perfect Cousin" and "Wednesday Week" may not have caused Britain's hippest DJ to go all dewy-eyed but they are every bit as good as their much ballyhooed debut. The streak of Top 40 hits kept going into 1981 with the jubilant "It's Going to Happen!". An obvious throwback to sixties pop, it is one of their most confident and irresistible recordings. Yet, it stands alone on their third album Positive Touch and it must have been a struggle to come up with a potential second single from a cohesive LP lacking in standouts. It seems like deep cuts like "When Saturday Comes" or "You're Welcome" would have been more sensible options for their next 7" but someone thought otherwise. That simple and delicate number that clocks in under two minutes was chosen instead.

Johnny Black seems impressed with what The Undertones managed to do with "Julie Ocean" and, in a sense, he's absolutely right. There's not much to the original LP version but the additions pad things out enough that it was given a new life. More than doubled in length, it nevertheless avoids being repetitive. Sharkey shouts "That's typical girl!" a few times and the always tight musical unit stretches out towards the end; if you didn't know any better, you'd swear it was meant to sound this way all along.

An admirable effort but my chief sentiment towards it remains indifference. Even with the extras and longer running time it smacks of an album cut. It's possible they wanted something that wasn't "typical Undertones country" but then they shouldn't have been surprised by it placing outside of "typical Undertones chart territory". Positive Touch seemed set to establish them as an albums act to match The Clash, Elvis Costello & The Attractions and The Jam — Ian Cranna in ver Hits argued that it was their first LP to do them "justice" — but at the price of their abilities as an exquisite singles band. Some manage to make the transition from one to the other (though the best groups are able to be both at the same time) but it eluded The Undertones. They no longer made DJ's cry and no longer made the charts on a regular basis. Nice try though.

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Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Stevie Wonder: "Happy Birthday"

"A million miles from his best", concludes Black. The twin hit single follies of "Ebony and Ivory" and "I Just Called to Say I Love You" are generally cited as Stevie Wonder bottoming out as a creative force (even if Macca is usually given most of the blame for the former) but the artist of the seventies was already in decline as the start of the eighties. It's hard to find fault in a campaign to get Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday recognized as a national holiday in the US but this limp track just about manages to do so. 1980's Hotter Than July is highly regarded in spite of it being a bit of a drop off from the heights of his '72-'76 peak to end all peaks but it lacks the heartbreaking melancholy of his best work. Now, I don't expect a celebratory composition such as this to be weighed down by Wonder's sorrow but there's little of the attention to detail in his earlier, much more effective tribute to an idol of his "Sir Duke". Basic as it is, it's remarkable that it is so forgettable. Still, kudos to Stevie for his good intentions and successful result even if bland songs always seem to capture the public's attention. 

(See my original review here)

The Teardrop Explodes: "When I Dream"

18 September 1980

"Further upstream from their once sombre, sparser sound, Liverpool's Teardrop devise a richly textured tuneful keyboard ballad (that's the word!) that's bursting its sides with lightness, depth and ingenuity."

— Mark Ellen

What I previously said:

Reviewer Mark Ellen described this as "bursting its sides with lightness, depth and ingenuity" and it's not difficult to see why. Julian Cope and his old Teardrop mates leave nothing on the table for this, even if it does go on a bit long — although there could be a single edit that I'm not aware of, I used the version that closes the kind-of-dated-but-also-kind-of-timeless Kilimanjaro. A cracker.

Pop music in the seventies had been all about mega-successful albums. Rockists will obviously cite Led Zeppelin's fourth LP and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon but it wasn't just at the long haired metal bands and prog rockers who dominated with the 33⅓ format. David Bowie, Elton John, Joni Mitchell and (see below) Stevie Wonder built their hall-of-fame careers on the string of extraordinary albums they released over the decade. Bob Dylan returned to the top with Blood on the Tracks, his best work in a decade. Marvin Gaye broke out of his Motown straight jacket when he delivered the hugely influential What's Going On. Even disco artists got in on the act: with 12" singles still in their infancy, Donna Summer released LP's with extended cuts on the label Casablanca Records that captured to sweaty ecstasy of Studio 54. Some of theses individuals also did well on the singles charts at the same time but it was no longer a requirement and 45's were typically neutered to more radio-friendly running times.

There were holdouts to this trend, however. Paced by punk, British acts of the late-seventies began to focus on singles. Now, a lot of musicologists will go into all that stuff about the crippling recession of the time but this big picture explanation leaves out the realities of the everyday person and the towns they were living in. The economy may have been suffering but music was thriving. Clubs were all over the place and there were eager bands aplenty to play them every night. Independent record labels also began springing up.

British pop at the close of the seventies marked a return of the single as the preeminent format and many of the best albums of the time are almost like greatest hits collections. XTC's Black Sea, Madness' Absolutely, Dexys Midnight Runners' Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, The Jam's Sound Affects, The Specials' More Specials all still sound like compilatinos of singles and b-sides and they're all the better for it. (Elvis Costello took it to an extreme with Get Happy!! which was designed to look like an obscure old album and was packed with twenty soul/Motown-esque tracks)

But no one did this as well as The Teardrop Explodes. With a background in the psychedelic garage rock of Love and The Thirteenth Floor Elevators, more prog tendencies on their second album Wilder and Julian Cope's subsequent career releasing sprawling LP's of thrilling nonsense, you might assume that they'd be a more album-oriented group like Joy Division or Talking Heads but you'd only be half-right. Debut Kilimanjaro has up to six singles on it (depending on which version of the album you have) but the group worked out a running order so expertly that you'd never know it was effectively a compilation album. Imagine if the numbers for, say, the classic Forever Changes had been culled from more than two years' worth of material while still sounding as coherent as it always has.

Initially a part of Liverpool-based indie label Zoo Records (co-run by David Balfe, who also happened to be their keyboard player, which is certainly a good way to get yourself signed), The Teardrop Explodes released a pair of well-regarded singles — "Sleeping Gas" and "Bouncing Babies" — that nevertheless failed to make much of an impact. Being on a tiny imprint, this hardly mattered: the records probably sold well enough around their Merseyside base while the group played gigs all over the place. An album was earmarked but didn't materialise in time. "Treason (It's Just a Story)" became their first single of the eighties and did well enough to become a sizable indie chart hit. Things were going well enough that they signed with major label Mercury and "When I Dream" became their first real shot at the mainstream.

Ellen is impressed that they've moved on from their former "sombre, sparser sound" which is something I'd never thought of until this week. It was only when I sequenced the Kilimanjaro album to play the first four singles in chronological order that I began to see his point. "Sleeping Gas" and "Bouncing Babies" are both spirited affairs but they were both produced with that clean, skeletal post-punk sound: chugging guitars, primal beats and some organ playing that could easily have been played by Steve Nieve of The Attractions — and with little else in the background. "Treason" is a turning point, with greater emphasis placed on dynamic effects courtesy of the famed Langer-Winstanley team. With major label backing, there was more of an opportunity to explore to the fullest extent, which sort of belies the punk ethos (one that is notably echoed by Julian Cope) that D.I.Y. values are best.

"When I Dream" wasn't the most obvious single in their repetoire. The closing track on Kilimanjaro, it is over five minutes long and really feels like the sort of deep cut that committed followers swear by while remaining obscure to everyone else. (Ellen calls it a "ballad" which is only really accurate in the realm of Teardrop/Cope numbers) They could've gone with "Poppies" or "Brave Boys Keep Their Promises" and no one would've blamed them. Yet, "When I Dream" deserved to have the privilege of headlining its own single. Less dense than earlier efforts, there's a pleasant bubbliness to the tune which lightens the song that Cope is singing. A much more restrained performance from Balfe on the keys ought to have been in order but that would have weighed it down. Cope is at his best when he sings profound material in as comical a style as possible and his Teardrop associates seem to understand this.

We tend to keep compilations at a distance from so-called studio albums (unless they happen to be one of those few accepted collections like Hatful of Hollow). Listeners like to think that groups craft their LP's in a similar fashion to the way The Beatles did with Please Please Me. Yet, "proper" albums may take months and years to record and they are frequently compiled just like a greatest hits. Either way, it doesn't matter; a sense of end-to-end unity is what we all crave when we sit down to listen to an album of any kind. Plus, it doesn't hurt to have some killer singles to put out at the same time. The Teardrop Explodes did more than enough in both respects, regardless of how it all came together.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Stevie Wonder: "Master Blaster (Jammin')"

Ellen is pleased that Stevie is back crafting lovely pop rather than whatever it is he was trying to do on that Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants thing. That said, he seems aware that the glory days are gone ("Three years ago his music was a celebration in itself. Now...who knows?"). Like Miles Davis, The Beatles and Bowie, Wonder had been leading music by the collar but now he was the one doing the following. "Boogie on Reggae Woman" was the closest thing to Jamaican music that I ever wanted from him but I'll take this as a bonus. Hotter Than July would be the first Stevie Wonder album in ages that no needed to have but at least the fumes he was riding on were from his incredible peak. Being a shadow of himself would have to wait a bit.

Stevie Wonder: "Do I Do"

10 June 1982

"Worth its weight in goldfish."

— Fred Dellar

A twenty-five word review: you're spoiling us, Dells. The brevity of this write-up is so stark that I went about counting the word length of all twenty-two singles up for consideration this fortnight. (I went through them just the once, not especially feeling like double-checking so there may be the odd error here and there) Bolstered by a seemingly Proust-like hundred and sixteen word critique of Carrie Lucas' "Show Me Where You're Coming From", the average length here is forty-seven words (and the median isn't much more forgiving, clocking in at forty-five). His concise "analysis" of Stevie Wonder's "Do I Do" is the shortest piece here, beating a dismissive review of ver Quo's "She Don't Fool Me" by four words. And, you know, it's cool. Dellar expended all the lexicography he deemed necessary for these pieces and maybe it's something I can learn from. Thus, in the spirit of prosaic economy, I present my own attempts at capturing Little Stevie's single in less than a baker's two dozen.

Stevie Wonder's run of seventies albums — Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness' First Finale and Songs in the Key of Life — is unbeatable. 

Wow, that's twenty-five already. I really shot my word count load listing off all those albums. Best not to bother with them.

Was Stevie Wonder aware that he was no longer on a creative roll? The seventies were in the can and his release rate began slowing...

Okay, so my penchant for kick starting these posts with vague notions that have been running through my head won't work here.

Taken from Original Musicquarium, the single set an annoying trend of new tracks being tacked on to a greatest hits, thereby ensuring purchase from fans.

So much for being able to add a little context.

As Dellar says, this is a marked improvement on his recent Macca collaboration "Ebony and Ivory". A pity that the inferior number is remembered today.

Well, I guess there's no space here to bring up Fred Dellar's critique, such as it it. Not a big sacrifice given there's so little there.

Chopped down to five minutes, the single mix leaves out an unremarkable Dizzy Gillespie solo and useless rapping. What's left is a typically Wonder-ful groove. 

Now, I don't like to write reviews on Amazon or iTunes or TripAdvisor but if I did they would probably read like the above. Next.

Oh, you do, do you? Well, I would do what you do if I had an idea what you're doing. I'm not done doing nothin'.

Token "clever" review you might spot in a free weekly paper. More than a little hackish.

Given how I can happily listen to the sublime "Another Star" on a daily basis, I can't help but feel this is pleasant but disposable.

Summing up my honest feelings towards "Do I Do". This blog — not to mention music writing in general — would be a whole lot different if I wrote about every song this way. I've always felt, for example, that over-analytical sports journalists and commentators could probably do with a simple "well, Team A won because they're better than Team B" bit of punditry but the impulse towards basic banalities is not something I aspire to. I got a head full of vague notions and theories I can't wait to share with the world.

Glorious goodness that Wonder churns out so effortlessly, "Do..." succeeds in spite of some clunky lyrics about candy kisses. A great bass gets it moving.

Not bad and perhaps the best I can do for now. Let's finish up with one more that reads like a cliché pop mag review that manages to say as little as possible:

Well, I'll be damned. Little Stevie turns that mother out with a luscious groove from the heavens. He's still got it and then some. Ace.

And there you have it. Sort of an Exercises in Style for singles reviews. Not something I see myself attempting again unless another Smash Hits scribe I encounter here has taken upon him or herself to compose a twelve word review of a Strawberry Switchblade record. Until then, we'll have to make do with my standard notions and context and a smattering of analysis — and the next novelty piece I manage to cook up.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Monsoon: "Shakti (The Meaning of Within)"

The missing link between sixties raga and the joss stick techno of Talvin Singh, this is enlightened pop that shines on into a Karmic cascade.

Damn, I suck at this.