Mick Jagger had been a longtime loyalist to the Rolling Stones from the early 60’s all the way up through the early 80’s. In 1983, the iconic rock ‘n roll band signed to CBS Records. One clause in this deal was the opportunity for all of its members to pursue solo projects without the band. Jagger was the first one to seize this opportunity during 1984. Keith Richards erupted in anger at Jagger during this time,publically accusing him of breaking allegiance to the Stones in a feud that took the rest of the decade to resolve. But Jagger’s solo career continued onward. As did his presence in the Rolling Stones.
She’s The Boss, Jagger’s first solo album,had a very different focus from what The Rolling Stones had done before. Whereas their albums featured the core band,production and a guest singer or musician here or there, this solo recording featured 32 musicians across its nine cuts. That’s somewhat more in keeping with the way the soul and funk albums were recorded at the time rather than rock. And in keeping with Jagger’s musical vision. That approach to the recording also spilled over into the sound of the music. And an excellent example of this is the title song.
A drum machine fanfare and deep digitized voice transition directly into Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare’s stuttering,tight bass and snare heavy drum interaction. Jeff Beck provides a rocking rhythm guitar over this-playing a higher chorded version of Shakespeare’s bass line directly over it. Jagger raps/talk sings the lyrics in his classic bluesy style during the refrains and choruses of the songs,featuring a heavier guitar sustain. Jeff Beck takes some harder rocking solos during the coarse of the song as well before the basic refrain fades it all out.
“She’s The Boss” is a very busy song,both in terms of style and instrumentation. Wally Badarou and Guy Fletcher’s synths,along with the percussion of Anton Fier and Aiyb Dieng’s talking drum provide extra textural and rhythmic bedding for this song. Stylistically, its a song that that blends a funk/reggae/rock mixture of approaches-all put together via producer Bill Laswell. Lyrically, it extends on “Emotional Rescue” by the Stones. Musically, that fact its a fuller affair stays in keeping with Jagger and the Stones keeping up with the progressions of black American music they had genuine love for.
Tomorrow would have been the 70th birthday of David Bowie, whose passing last year just after turning 69 was among the first of many signs that 2016 would be one long, miserable slog. I knew I wanted to commemorate the occasion in some way, but I wasn’t sure how. My initial idea was to write a bit about Bowie’s forays into funk- and soul-based music; that felt a bit disingenuous, though, as realistically the majority of the credit for his surprisingly great experiments in “plastic soul” needs to go to esteemed collaborators like Carlos Alomar, Luther Vandross, and Nile Rodgers. It’s also a solid time to look back at Bowie’s (excellent) final album, last year’s Blackstar, but I don’t think I have much to say about the record that either I haven’t already said or Andre didn’t cover in his post from yesterday.
It was while mulling over these options that I remembered a post I wrote soon after Bowie’s death last year, about a performance so infamous and unloved that I felt someone had to speak up on its behalf. I’m talking, of course, about his performance with Mick Jagger in their 1985 cover version of Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street.”
To be fair, there’s a reason why nobody tends to mourn Bowie with “Dancing in the Street”–that reason being that it’s pretty much universally considered to be the nadir of Bowie’s (and, for that matter, Jagger’s) substantial oeuvre. Bowie scholar of the moment Chris O’Leary describes it as “a rotten record for which everyone involved should be embarrassed” on his blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame. I myself have been unkind to the song and its accompanying video in the past. I’ve frequently called it a waste of a Bowie/Jagger collaboration that, in some superior alternate reality, would have been a jointly-recorded version of 1974’s “Diamond Dogs.” Back in 2006, I described it as “easily a career low point for both artists, complete with campy and ill-choreographed dance routines, an utterly soulless musical arrangement, and a concept (Dave and Mick, you guessed it, ‘dancing in the streets!’) that was about as rock-bottom as the video’s budget.” Last year, I was more concise, and simply dubbed it “execrable.”
And yet. The fact of the matter is that there’s not another Bowie performance in all five-plus decades of his work that has given me as much joy as has “Dancing in the Street.” I mean real, belly-laughing, hysterical joy. Every time I see the video, I have to see it through to the end–often freeze-framing, rewinding, or just pausing to collect myself at my favorite moments.
And oh, those favorite moments. I don’t even have to watch the video to name them. There’s the bizarre, unidentifiable accent Bowie adopts when he yells “South Americaaaaaaaa!” during the opening roll-call of countries and continents, foreshadowing the voice he would use the following year while singing as a Muppet in Labyrinth’s “Chilly Down.” There’s his actual first appearance in the video: doing some kind of weird back-and-forth skip (see the screenshots above), before leaping from a balcony and silently screaming like a feral, pouncing cat–presumably the same one he skinned for those pajamas he’s wearing under his khaki trenchcoat.
The list of highlights just goes on from there. The way he nonchalantly enters the frame behind Jagger, doing some kind of “walk like an Egyptian” move with his hands. The middle school talent show-grade choreography in which his legs suddenly emerge kicking into the frame from an open door in the foreground, followed by his whole body as he pops in and out to sing his lines. That inexplicable shot (see below) where he appears behind Jagger with his back to the wall, twirling his fingers roughly in time with the music before busting out the jazz hands and spinning around to join in on the chorus.
There is also, of course, the “Dancing” video’s rampant homoeroticism–or rather, its absurd grotesque of homeroticism–which might seem like a coy nod to Angie Bowie‘s claim that she had once caught David and Mick “in bed together,” were it not for the fact that that salacious story wouldn’t enter the popular imagination for about five years. The pair mince about like a demented pair of cartoon queens, routinely placing their faces mere inches from one another’s and mugging for the camera; the video ends with a freeze frame of their wiggling butts, for Christ’s sake. As O’Leary points out, it’s a weird tack for Bowie to take after his own, controversial rejection of a carefully-cultivated queer identity in an interview with Rolling Stone just two years earlier. But it’s also in many ways the least remarkable part of the whole thing. After all, anyone even vaguely familiar with Bowie’s 1970s peak has already seen him play gay–and, frankly, do it a lot more convincingly than he does in “Dancing in the Street.”
Instead, what comes as a shock, and what I think explains the video’s unremittingly dire reputation, is how goofy he comes across. After all, the one link between the manifold Bowie moments being shared across social media in the wake of his death was that all of them were, in a word, cool: be he Ziggy or the Thin White Duke or even Jareth the Goblin King, we like our Bowie aloof, poised, and impeccable, hovering seemingly far above us mere mortals in the splendor of his otherworldly stylishness. In “Dancing in the Street,” however, Bowie is the opposite of cool; he’s the distant, middle-aged relative on the dance floor at your friend’s wedding reception. And, for me at least, that makes the video both endearing and weirdly affirming. It’s a disarmingly human moment, from a man who spent his best-remembered years trying doggedly to convince the world that he was something other than human; it’s the kind of thing that should never be allowed to happen, but did, and is thus precious and rare.
So please, if you’re mourning David Bowie on the anniversary of his passing, I humbly request that you not forget this strange and wonderful footnote to his musical history. It’s only natural that when confronted by something like “Dancing in the Street,” one’s first reaction is to ask how and why it exists. But especially now, as we strive to make sense of a world without Bowie, perhaps the more poignant reaction is to reflect on how lucky we are to have lived in a time when two aging rock stars could unleash their poorly-made lip-syncing video on an unsuspecting fanbase, spawning 30+ years of unabated hilarity in the process.
The Rolling Stones have often been called the greatest rock ‘n roll band ever. That level of hype might seem typical. Still what makes them such a great band is that they understand the importance of evolution in the black American music they love. This took Mick,Keith,Bill and Charlie on a journey from the blues all the way to trip hop. Always in between was a lot of soul and plenty of funk. It wasn’t until my mid 20s that I began exploring their music outside the context of the hits played on oldies radios. And it was that sense of evolution with their creative influences is what came through most during this more in depth exploration of their musicality.
One album that had me the most curious out of all their work was the 1976 release of Black And Blue. The band had already toured along with Stevie Wonder four years earlier. And likely from that recognized that the direct,three minute soul style of the mid 60’s was transitioning into longer,more percussion driven jamming that people like Mick Jagger saw in James Brown as well when they both performed on the Tami Show over a decade earlier. With the replacement of guitarist Mick Taylor with Ron Wood for this album, an internal change within the band fully cemented their next musical transition. And the new album literally started out with some “Hot Stuff”.
Keith Richards starts off with a relatively high up on the neck lead guitar solo with a brittle Crescent City groove, before Charlie Watts kicks in with a potent 4/4 beat. Billy Preston’s stomping,bassy piano chimes in with the percussion of Ollie Brown and Ian Stewart coming in as a strong rhythmic element. Meanwhile Bill Wyman keeps up a high pitched mid 70’s P-Funk style bass line throughout the musical affair. With the chorus of the song preceding the the more atonal refrains, the bridge of the song features Keith playing a more rocking blues guitar solo in his classic style. On the final chorus, Mick Jagger basically raps in a reverbed Lee Perry reggae style until the song comes to a cold stop.
While many rockers in the mid to late 70’s made some incredibly funky music, this song stands out as a straight up funk groove in the context of a band. Since these players have just as firm an understanding of the blues as an Eric Clapton and John Mayall, they came to also understand what they both did. That by adding cleanly production and playing would evolve the music strongly. In the Stones case? They evolved into the funk sound. And everyone in the band and the accompanying session musicians understand why each riff,each solo worked so well within the song. And that’s what makes “Hot Stuff” likely the most fully formed funk the Rolling Stones ever threw down.
I’ve never heard a Rolling Stones album receive more overall flack than this album over the years. It always seemed that whenever they tried something that went beyond their “classic rock” style after the mid 1970’s the rock critics had their red pens at the ready to check mark any culturally disagreeable elements,by their standards anyway. And the mid 80’s was an enormous battlefield for that. The rawness of classic rock was being replaced by slicker production due mainly to technological progress and as with all things some didn’t get into that change. But for all the internal discord (including Keith Richards sporting “Who The $&#! Is Mick Jagger?” t-shirts in public) it’s a credit to this band that they were able to keep up with all the changes in the rock scene with a lot more dignity than one would give them credit for.
Luckily for any Stones fan whose eased past this with caution over the years this album contains primarily one type of music: ROCK,ROCK AND MORE ROCK! “One Hit”,”Fight”,”Hold Back”,the title track and “Had It With You” are all gritty,riff heavy rockers of a similar type that the Stones had started to run into the ground only a few years before but the hot production and yes a few of the loud mid 80’s drum effects give them a new flavor slightly different from the older Stones rockers. Many complain that Mick’s voice is nothing but abrasive on this album but it’s a style he often used so his constant growling of the vocals works here. A few additional highlights are the poppy shuffle of “Winning Ugly” and of course “Harlem Shuffle”,a retro Memphis/Wilson Picket Pickett type soul send up that comes off as a bit of a revved up version of Steve Winwood’s later Roll With It. There’s also “Back To Zero”,a NASTY funk jam with some heavy JB style rhythm guitar and sound pointed use of bass synth as accents.
The album includes another dub type tune in “Too Rude” and includes with the Keith’s heartland rock-style ballad “Sleep Tonight,which actually revvs it up quite a lot towards the middle and includes some wonderfully subtle moments. Believe it or not this album is actually comparatively light on mid 80’s production cliches such as gated drums and excessively loud guitars and synthesizers. It is a cconsistentlymore modern style in terms of the overall production of sound than earlier albums that had a garagier flavor on that end of things. All the same it was something you could here coming (in certain places) on their previous album Undercover. But it certainly isn’t as aggressively contemporary as Mick Jagger’s (in my opinion) equally underrated solo debut She’s the Boss and when it rocks it rocks hard and when it’s funky it’s some of the tightest,nastiest grooves they ever put on record!
Andresmusictalk 