My hmphs

Recently, the USA Network has been airing promos for the third season of the comedy crime show Psych (a very good show, BTW) featuring the two main characters, Shawn and Gus, performing a parody of Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s “Ebony & Ivory.” The parody is spot-on, down to the overenunciation of “piano (p’yah-no),” the oversized piano keys and silhouettes of the two hand-clapping.

The clip made me hunt down the original video from 1982, and somehow over 25 years, I’ve grown to hate the song. It was one of my favorites when it stood at the top of the Billboard charts for two months; but at age 13, I also liked Chicago, Styx and most other inoffensive white-bread artists. Looking back now, it represents McCartney near his creative nadir: While the tune and melody itself is rather pleasant, everything else is a mess.

First, the tempo seems plodding; the song can’t decide whether it’s a ballad or a dance number. McCartney aims for the middle of the road - always a safe place for him, but as Mr. Miyagi said in The Karate Kid, “Walk on road, hm? Walk left side, safe. Walk right side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later get squish! just like grape.” The tempo is just - squishy.

Then there are the lyrics. Oh, God. “Ivory” does not rhyme with “harmony.” And “keyboard” with “Oh Lord”? That’s just wrong. Of course, the meaning of the entire song is so apparent and shallow - black keys, white keys, black people, white people, get it?

I’m a huge Paul McCartney fan. I think he’s the greatest living songwriter. But this song represents all that was wrong with him after his stint with the Beatles - safe songs that probably took 30 minutes to write, featuring inane and trite lyrics. Remember, this was the man who wrote such tripe as “With a Little Luck,” “Temporary Secretary” (Another bad rhyme) and would soon curse us with “The Girl is Mine” and possibly the worst song he ever wrote, “Pipes of Peace.”

Stevie Wonder, I’m sad to say, caught whatever possessed McCartney when he wrote the song and two years later gave us “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” which rivals “Ebony & Ivory” as worst song of the 1980s.

Sorry, Paul. I’ll work on a post about the genius that is “The Back Seat of My Car.”

Ebony & Ivory (1982) (YouTube)

Psych parody of “Ebony & Ivory” (YouTube)

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Perhaps the only thing more quintessentially 1980s than a John Hughes movie is the soundtrack to a John Hughes movie. Music from such films as The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink and Weird Science usually had at least one Top 40 hit, and Hughes always seemed to be able to find the right song to capture whatever teen angst was being experienced on-screen.

His movies were formulaic, usually involving some awkward, misunderstood teen or someone who was a maverick, a latter-day James Dean who dressed differently and had no money. And the music was the same – usually consisting of semi-obscure, new-wave artists such as Altered Images, Oingo Boingo and Echo & the Bunnymen.

Hughes went way off the beaten path in finding music to the movie Some Kind of Wonderful. But as always, he found exactly the right music to fit the relationship between Watts (Mary Stuart Masterson) and Keith (Eric Stoltz), two awkward, misunderstood teens who, um, dressed differently and had no money. He found bands I had never heard of (and in some cases, haven’t heard from since): Furniture, Flesh for Lulu, the March Violets and Lick the Tins. The Jesus and Mary Train had been big in the UK, as had Pete Shelley, the former lead singer of the punk band the Buzzcocks. But the rest, at least to me, were no-names.

The music was unlike anything I had heard of at the time, but I immediately liked it. From Shelley’s upbeat “Do Anything” to Lick the Tins’ charming remake of Elvis Presley’s “I Can’t Help Falling in Love,” each song held its own. “I Go Crazy” from Flesh for Lulu sounded like the Psychedelic Furs (another Hughes alumnus). And Blue Room’s “Cry Like This” was a perfect song for those teens feeling despondent, featuring simple chords on a keyboard accompanied by heavy drumbeats.

In a way, the movie seems to be written for the songs. You remember Watts pounding the drums to “Cry Like This,” and you feel her sadness. You recall Watts and Keith practicing Keith’s first kiss during Stephen Duffy’s “She Loves Me,” her legs wrapping around his waist as they both realize that there’s a spark there. The quirky “Brilliant Mind” suddenly turns dark and dramatic when Amanda Jones (Lea Thompson) runs out of school in tears after being shunned by her friends.

Each song kept the momentum and quality high; there simply isn’t a bad song on the album. And the fact that the producers left songs by the Rolling Stones and Billy Idol off the album is a testament to its greatness. They simply didn’t need those songs.

It’s a rarity - the songs make Some Kind of Wonderful that much more enjoyable, and I mainly watch the movie nowadays just to hear the songs within the context of the film.

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Every year after school was out for the summer, my friends and I tested our manhood by becoming one with nature and braving the elements. Camping trips at age 16 are a perfect example of the confusion and contradictions that come with adolescence. We would set up camp somewhere in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, smoke cigars, chop firewood and stay up all night spitting, cursing and trading stories about the cutest girls in school - you know, manly stuff.

But we would also swing on vines, consume loads of Mountain Dew and Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls and Oatmeal Cream Pies, and listen to the radio for 48 solid hours, or until our set of D batteries went dead.

My friends and I loved junk food and spitting, but we worshiped music. We sucked in every new song as if it were pure oxygen, playing it relentlessly until it kept us up at night, bouncing around in our brains. Then when the next single came our way, we moved on and started the process over.

I wish I could say that we were ahead of our time and listened to the Violent Femmes, XTC and the Smiths, but growing up in North Georgia had its limitations. This was before the Internet went mainstream, and you could download any song you wished. We had to attach coat hangers and aluminum foil to our antennas just to get a clear reception from the radio stations in Atlanta and Greenville, S.C.

That meant lots of pop music - Duran Duran, Michael Jackson, the Human League and Journey. Eurythmics were about as avant-garde as we got. But it was all we had, and we clung to it.

The weekend of May 30 was the date for our annual camping trip in 1984. Fresh from our sophomore year in high school, we were ready to kick back, eat Little Debbies and crank up the radio so that every living mammal in the back woods of North Georgia heard “Owner of a Lonely Heart.”

It was a memorable weekend. The Eastern United States was in the path of a solar eclipse, and we watched in awe as  the day grew dim and birds ceased to chirp. No fear, for the jam box was busy; amid all the “Footloose” singles and Lionel Richie ballads, every station seemed to have added three new songs to their rotation:

• “Sunglasses at Night” by Corey Hart - Feh. It had that new-wave/synthesizer sound, but we never could take seriously a song with a chorus that began, “Don’t switch the blade on the guy in shades, oh no.”
• “What’s Love Got to Do with It” by Tina Turner - I thought she was a washed-up creation of Ike Turner. I was about to be proven wrong with her Grammy-winning song.
• “When Doves Cry” by Prince and the Revolution.

We had been Prince fans for about a year, having bought 1999 and worn out several copies of the cassette. There were rumors that he had a new album coming out that would be a soundtrack to his own movie. We were hoping for something bigger and better than 1999, and this was our first listen to the brand new single.

When the DJ announced the single, we gathered around the campfire and heard the stripped down funk, which sounded so solemn with strings and the minor key. We didn’t know what it sounded like when doves cried - we didn’t even know what that meant - but Prince seemed to have captured its essence. No one spoke during the song and afterwards, we all looked at each other and felt that we had heard something different. This was almost baroque in comparison to “The Reflex.” We changed it to another station to catch another spin. And we continued doing that for the next 48 hours, and didn’t mind when it stayed lodged in our brains.

Purple Rain came out later that summer, and we basked in the aura of “Let’s Go Crazy,” “Take Me With U” and “I Would Die 4 U.” We giggled at the adolescent filth of “Darling Nikki,” but solemnly endured all eight minutes and 45 seconds of the title track. We felt older - that somehow, this was more serious, mature music. Over the next two years, I discovered R.E.M. and U2, and Top 40 radio suddenly fell by the wayside. Just in time, too - I missed the whole Bon Jovi thing.

With the Internet, fans can instantly learn when their favorite bands are in the studio, get updates from insiders on the latest news, and download pirated versions of their CDs in MP3 format weeks before the release date. But 20 years ago, My friends and I heard the future sounds of music in the middle of the Appalachians, huddled around a boom box as if we were listening to FDR’s Fireside Chats, pretending we were grownups.

I can almost smell the cigar smoke now. Hand me a Swiss Cake Roll.

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