DON MCLEAN – "Crying"

you’d cry too if a tiny little airliner flew up your nose!

(i assume “genesis” is the b-side)

What a strange cover picture. And what a pointless cover version, I know Roy Orbison was still alive then but this might have hurried him to an early grave. Do we blame Noel Edmonds for this one too?

Can I revise my opinion that 1980 was as good as 1979? At least there’s better to come.

I’d never heard the Roy Orbison original at this point; it was a much bigger hit in the US than here where it didn’t make the Top 20 (unlike pretty much everything else he did), and certainly wasn’t an oldies staple. Which possibly explains how Don’s mawkish, lightly country-fied take did so well.

It has to be said that the Big O doesn’t retain his dignity for long on Crying. I’d say the sweaty, anxious Latin rhythm of the original tends toward the overheated, while Don Mc is wallowing in tepid self-pity.

It’s a fine song anaesthetised by a bland, mannered performance. I wasn’t aware of the Roy Orbison original when this was a hit so it was my entry to the song – for which I give it slight credit.
Thinking back, 1980 was a pretty miserable year

Oh Tom, you really don’t like Don, do you?

There’s nothing wrong with the song to my ears. It’s just that Roy Orbison did it so much better. This is a nice but unexceptional rendering, and Don’s voice is rather lightweight to carry it.

I don’t like it as much as I do Vincent though. I’d give it four I think.

What were the Great British Public up to during the early Summer of 1980?

What a dismal run of Number 1 singles. This is the nadir though. Pitiful, 2’s about right. 1 wouldn’t have been unduly harsh.

14, I think that’s spot on. The niche marketing is probably reflected in chart terms by niche acts like the Jam going straight in at Number 1.

In terms of the cockpit of struggle, the contrast between this run of number ones and what’s bubbling along beneath couldn’t be sharper. Undertones singing about The Human League, OMD in the Top 40 for the first time, 2 Tone providing numerous hit acts, Adam about to release “Kings of the Wild Frontier”, the Liverpool scene, the emergence of Postcard, 4AD, and so on.

1980 was a good year – but the top of the charts – certainly at this point didn’t reflect it.

The pop magazines, “Smash Hits” and the newly-launched “The Face”, weren’t exactly writing about Don McLean and Johnny Logan either.

Not really, the only ‘new’ song I ever remember was when “back to black” was done by one girl group, even though it hadn’t been a single, and the next week the original version charted on downloads.

Not counting the winners songs, obviously.

I can’t think of anything useful to say about this one, other than that it was wholly unrepresentative of anything else that was happening in the charts. It’s funny how so many Number Ones of this era exist in their own little air-locked vacuums of cultural irrelevance.

when we get to a place where nobody dared to go…

yeah, but that’s only the ‘one time’…

aesthetical correctness gone mad!

Forgive me if I’m wrong about this but some Populistas are losing sight of the fact that Popular isn’t about the best pop music around, it’s about the best-selling pop music around at any given time, and the way that reflects the Zeitgeist. I learned at a very early age that there was no correlation between chart ranking and quality, and even less between chart ranking and what I actually liked (my sister’s beloved Cliff kept hitting the top, for example.)

One of my favourite rants, as a film enthusiast, is that my local multiplex shows a lot of dross that I have no interest in seeing, and fails to show ‘good’ films. How you define ‘good’ in this context is wide open to argument, but let’s mention in passing that Best Picture Oscar-winner No Country for Old Men didn’t get a showing at the local Apollo. A year ago, Atonement ran for a whole week and when my then boyfriend and I went to see it there were only two others in the auditorium. But I have to grit my teeth and acknowledge that that’s not what pulls in the punters. The same with books – we don’t expect best-selling blockbusters to be enduring works of art. But pop music seems to be different. Different groups of people get very aereated about their own niche.

Now, not that long ago I’d have got chewed up for saying this, but aren’t we all (and I’m as guilty as anybody) being very tribal about this? Populistas aren’t a particularly representative group after all, being by definition a bunch of pop anoraks past present and possibly future, and with a disproportionate number of public school and top university educated music journos. It’s not likely that there will be many fans of, say, Kenny Rogers or Don McLean commenting here, but I’ve encountered many of both in my time. In the same way that I never voted for Maggie Thatcher’s party and neither did anybody else in the circles I moved in, but there were enough of them to win three general elections between 1979 and 1987 by more than comfortable margins. (I was one of a good many Labour Party campaign workers in 1983 who were spat on in the street.)

I get a bit queasy about the attitude that “anything other than my music is crap” but I accept that as we move into a period which is the home turf of many Populistas that they are going to get very proprietorial about it and detached discussion of what’s selling in its context will suffer. But then although in June 1980 life feels pretty idyllic, things will soon go horribly wrong and I’m going to go into free-fall. From here until the time I’ve chosen to retire from the fray the number ones, whether I like them or not, form the soundtrack to interesting times, and you’re stuck with me for a while to come.

All this is a kind of prelude to saying that I’d like to stand up for Don McLean here. It’s not McLean’s best song but then, unusually for him, it’s not one of his own songs and I happen to like Roy Orbison’s own version a lot. I don’t much care for sentimentality but I know lots of people, very ordinary people for whom the idea of a university education and a job in journalism is pretty remote, do care. And amongst Roy Orbison’s many unique gifts was a huge capacity for making sentimentality palatable.

Conrad, unless I’m wrong I dont think that Rosie was aiming that comment at you more than anyone else. And her comment that we are talking about top sellers and not the best in our own eyes is something which perhaps I should take note of instead of just slagging everything off. The recent run of number ones has been for me pretty miserable and now I’ve seen the list there are only one or two for my own taste, the rest awful. But in for a penny in for a pound, although its difficult to pretend I’m interested in most of this shit.

Take your point, Rosie – but it’s hard not to feel a certain dismay at this juncture, with the uncommonly “representative” (subjectively loaded epithet alert!) glories of 1979 still fresh in the mind.

In my case, this raises a wider issue. Far away from the Populista hot house, I think you’d find plenty of people of my vintage who would a) champion the late 70s/early 80s as the Golden Age for chart pop and, almost in the same breath, b) get quite cross about The State of Pop Music Today. (“Today” being more or less any time since the Death of Britpop.)

(And I take an arguably disproportionate pride in excluding myself from the b) category… of course…!)

Sure, you could argue that ’twas ever thus, but I think the effect is more pronounced amongst those who were of the traditional pop-consuming age during this period, and also during the explosion of forward-thinking creativity that occurred around 1964-67.

Because, in a sense, we were spoiled. This was one of those periods where boundary-nudging creative innovation and mass popularity coincided in a major way – and once you’ve lived through something like that, your expectations remain set at a certain level. And so, generationally speaking, I’m almost bound to view all subsequent developments through the prism of this period.

One of the things that I’ll be looking forward to as Popular progresses is the claiming of subsequent periods as perfect-fit Golden Ages for successive generations. And I’ve got at least four possible periods in mind…

Anyhow. Bloody Don Bloody McLean! Bah! Boring!

Of course I’m of the age that regards 1964-67 as the golden age of chart pop but then I’m not going to be absolutist about that. I wouldn’t say there was less bitterness amongst me and my peers against Englebert Humperdinck, say, or Jim Reeves, or the Seekers.

I know what I like and what I don’t, and I know what’s significant and what isn’t, and I’ll say so, but I do think that every entry in Popular has a story to tell. There’s a nagging voice in the back of my head that says there was a reason – something in the news, not just Noel Edmonds playing it a lot – that made Crying a big hit at the time. But I’m blowed if I can remember what it is.

EDIT: Ok Mike, I’ve just re-read your post and I missed your comment about 64-67, so I’m arguing against myself to a degree. I don’t really recall how polarised things were in the 70s, although surely the same applies in spades to the punk period? Punk v Northern Soul and all that?

…and who decides what is “culturally relevant” – to read the “broadsheets” you’d have thought that the early 90s was all about”grunge”- maybe that was true for the circles that the media themselves moved in (6th forms/universities etc) but for British “youth” in general it was all about raving and ‘ardcore – similarly the heyday of Britpop was (notwithstanding Oasis and to a lesser extent Blur which were undeniably household names) to vast swathes of young people the era of the superclubs,the dj as superstar and eventually trance’s global domination.
It’s like Rosie says just because certain forms of music tend to be to the taste of the kind of people who write for a living it in no way represents what things are like for the masses and gives a very distorted idea of what it’s really like for the majority of young people yet alone for an all-age inclusive population…

Well I liked ‘American Pie’ AND ‘Vincent’ so stuff that in your sack, haters.

Though I’m not sure how this record reflects the zeitgeist, the only point of it is how it stands so completely outside it which pop records often do, especially when they’re played by non-zeitgeisty Radio One DJs with beards.

This one made no impression on seven-year old Billy.

The impression that it makes on thirty-six year old Billy is to tut “OH SHUT UP!” on the rare occasions that I hear it.

It’s a funny thing how great the original of this is, but how it seems to never be served well by cover versions, including Orbison’s own eighties duet with kd Lang.

I heard he sang a good song, I heard he had a style, and so I came to see him and listen for awhile. At the Albert Hall in the mid-nineties. And the rum bugger didn’t even play Vincent.

I love Don McLean’s voice, and would stand firmly behind the American Pie album: Winterwood, Till Tomorrow, Sister Fatima, Empty Chairs, The Grave (covered by George Michael!!). Subtly arranged, warm, cosy, rocking-chair-folk balladeering. I’ll take that any day over the hollow Xanadu. McLean h8rs can give this a listen and see if they’d rate it higher than a 2:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJdamx1GHq4&feature=related

Beyond that, Castles In The Air is a rare love song, a cowardly way of backing out of a relationship (Kenny Rogers would not approve) using the wonders of nature as an excuse for not being able to face the girl he’s leaving. Typical hippie.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=gdtxREoUiWU&feature=related

Crying isn’t good, granted, but like MASH it chimed with the social situation in Britain at the time. Summer was cancelled, by rain and unemployment.

I’m always out of sync with Populistas on this disco-lite stuff, but Funkytown drove me nuts. No.3 watch gives us the chunky Back Together Again by Donny Hathaway and… Roberta Flack, whose 1972 US number one was inspired by seeing Don McLean performing Empty Chairs. Ah, the symmetry!

Oliver sounding like a pre-cursor to Park Life, that kinda makes sense.

I agree with you No 41 but the media would have us believe otherwise and that usually “rock-influenced” forms which they themselves tend to like/understand/find easier to write about are the be all and end all.

To maybe start to go off topic here but anyway this idea of certain music being “easier to write about” is significant and even permeated the dance press ie you’d have thought the “dance clubs” were full of people ‘aving it to Underworld/Fatboy Slim/post-Firestarter Prodigy/Chemical Brothers (ie what was often called “student-techno” on dance sites). When in reality you could very rarely heard anything by any of these artists played in a “dance” club/rave situation.Most of the acts who were played were far too “anonymous” in the eyes of the music press.

PS Besides Oasis and Blur and maybe Pulp I don’t know if many of the other Brit Pop acts sold shedloads of records nb this was the era when it was easy to sell very few copies and make brief appearances in the top 10 of the singles and albums chart.

Re 44/45 I can’t anticipate what lord soülrat, as he appears to be this week (hi Mark), will say, but my tuppence worth that it isn’t necessarily to do with what the journalists themselves like musically. An endless wave of one-anthem wonders are hard for magazines to deal with, especially a monthly like MixMag, say. And good stories are good stories: whatever your taste in music, George Jones or Motley Crue or Elton John will often provide more to read about than this month’s cutting edge musician who has spent too much time in their bedroom.

I loved Eternity magazine altho it was surely the ‘hippiest’ dance mag out there ha ha. I’m not sure who AndyPandy has in mind re producers ignored in favour of the Chems tho – maybe some ‘anti-fame’ American or German proucers who were a bit harder to access?