What do
bookshelves and Phil Spector’s music have in common? The answer is structure,
but you can’t talk about structure for very long without talking about
function.
For example,
you decide to build some bookshelves because you need a way to store your books
and yet keep them accessible. Storing
books and accessibility is about function;
how that is accomplished is about structure.
But first, some questions need to be asked and answered:
1. How many books are we talking about?
2. What are the sizes of the books?
3 3. Where will the bookshelves go?
We need to
make sure that we build shelves that are roomy enough to accommodate the books and
that the space between the shelves is sufficient to accommodate our larger
books.
Will the
bookshelves have to fit under a window? Then the shelves need to be long and
not very tall. If, on the other hand, the space is limited but the ceiling is
high, then the bookshelves can be tall and narrow.
Now we need
to consider some other things with regard to ability:
1. How much are we willing, and able, to
spend on materials and necessary tools?
2. How much time are we willing to
commit to the project?
3. And, realistically, is our skill
level and knowledge up to the realities of the project we envision?
Makes sense,
but how does this all apply to music? With music as with carpentry, no one just
begins to build something without
reason and motivation and without some idea of what that something is going to be. Creativity is not the exercise of the
infinite freedom of possibilities; creativity is the process of the limitation of possibilities. One needs to start with
an idea, and, no doubt, the idea can develop and change as the project
progresses, but one does need to start somewhere—with some idea.
Do I
envision a song, a motet, a sonata, or a symphony? Do I have the tools and skills
to succeed at the project?
Before the
beginning there was nothing and that nothing held infinite possibilities. After
something emerged, the very nature of something
eliminated the state of anything. The
first something became the cause and what followed was the effect, and that effect, became a further
cause.
I was ten
years old when I first went to summer camp in Hayward, Wisconsin. I think I
went to that camp for three or four consecutive summers. It was called, Camp Big Chief, if anyone is
interested. Hayward Wisconsin was about
500 miles from Chicago—where I lived. We travelled by train in Pullman cars—you
know, the ones where the seats convert into bunk-beds at night. Our train was
always a milk train that stopped at every stop along the way.
I liked the
lower bunks because they had windows, and I liked to look out the windows at
night while I listened on my little transistor radio to whatever rock and roll
station I could find. We’re talking somewhere between the mid and the late
fifties here. “Sh-boom, sh-boom, life
could be a dream sweetheart.” And
life definitely was a dream for this little kid—come to think of it, it still
is…
It was an
interesting time for pop music—a time of change. Influences were changing from
white to black—or maybe white to blues—and then a new white emerged—maybe
something more grey—and then a new black—and then there was Elvis who absorbed
and reflected all the influences from pop and blues to gospel and jazz and what eventually emerged was called
Rock and Roll—and I loved it!
It spoke to
me; it was my life; and I still listen to it, still love it, still respect it,
and I still learn from it. In fact now, I feel that I am only beginning to really
understand and appreciate the music of the 1950’s and 1960’s.
And Phil
Spector; was he a musical genius or what? Consider his famous Wall of Sound. I know we’ve jumped into the early sixties,
but the sixties were the natural emotional and spiritual evolution of the new music of the late fifties. Everything
is connected, nothing just comes and goes by itself—could there have been an
Elvis without first an Ellington? Did Miles, or Monk, or Coltrane, just emerge
from thin air?
Anyway, Phil
Spector was a master of structure and function. When he worked with a song he
knew what he wanted, and he was very particular—very demanding—in the recording
studio. The Wall of Sound was
something more than just filling all the space on the sound stage with sound. Sound without structure would just be
noise. Putting shelves just anywhere in any way in our bookshelves would
satisfy neither the demands of function or structure. And remember, that every
sound takes time, and so sound is not just about pitch it is also about rhythm.
Sound has to
respect and support the underlying structure of the music. Take for example,
and we really could take any one of dozens of Phil Spector productions as an
example, the 1963 mega-hit, Then He Kissed
Me…
He asks her
to dance, he walks her home under shining stars, they kiss, eventually fall in
love, and one day he proposes marriage. “I
felt so happy that I almost cried, and then he kissed me.” – sung
wonderfully by the Crystals.
Not a
complicated song; 4/4 time, key of E Major, pretty much a lot of I-V-I-IV, etc.,
but the arrangement is very intelligent and fully respects and highlights the
structure of the song.
The song
begins with an instrumental guitar lick—dum
da de dum, dum da de dum, etc. —between the I and IV chords. That same lick, joined by an organ, and later
strings, colors the empty white space of the sound stage with a kind of gray
under-painting. It stays with us to the
end of the song, also filling the space between the vocal phrases.
That little
lick catches your attention, no doubt, but really what grabs you are the
drums—that tambourine on the high hat—is that not the coolest little titillating
rhythm? It gallops all the way through the song. And then there is, in the
lower frequencies, the thundering drums and bass. Phil Spector really knew to
use drums for both tone and rhythm.
Oh yea, and
then there is the saxophone which moves to the front of the sound plane to underscore the verse’s
change to the sun-dominant IV chord.
And we can’t
overlook the use of the strings and upper range of the organ during the bridge
section. Listen to it with good head-phones; these are in your face sounds that all but scream at you and are perfectly
placed to heighten the climactic moment of the song, musically and lyrically, that comes at the end of
the bridge.
Contrast
this use of strings with the instrumental interlude between the last verse and
the repeat of the last verse. This is the verse where he asks her to marry him.
It is not the climax of the song, more the anti-climax,
that which begins to bring the energy down enough to give the song a
satisfying ending—like beginning to apply the brakes to your car in order to stop without going through the windshield.. Here the
strings have quite a different feeling than they did in the bridge. They don’t
scream; they express a sweet, soft, melody, which enables a subtle lessening of
the energy in the repeat of that last verse.
Again,
consider how important the repeat of the last verse is. Without it, the song
would not have had such a smooth ending, and even so, the last line had to be
repeated three times to bring it to a close.
And what do
we hear at the very end of the song? Yep, that same little lick we started
with:
dum
da-de dum,
dum da-de dum,
dum.
Oh, and by
the way, all that I described, and more that I haven’t, actually takes place in a mere two minutes and
thirty two seconds!
.
