THE COMMODORES – Easy (Like Sunday Morning)
What are the Commodores talking about in this record? Certainly in the mid-eighties when the track got hijacked (much like hijacking a hot-air balloon) by the Halifax Building Society the consensus was that Sunday mornings are chilled, everyone asleep, yuppies in loft flat, buying milk for cats sort of things. This was nonsense: in the mid-eighties you would be hard pushed to find a shop open on a Sunday morning selling milk. Anyone who has been to a Catholic service on a Sunday morning will tell you there is nothing easy about the hellfire and brimstone services often doled out for elevenses.
So what was the band with the original man with Orange for a surname in pop talking about? As far as I’m concerned I haven’t even seen a Sunday morning to note how easy it is. If they had said “Easy (Like An Eighteen Year Old Girl From Leeds Drinking Southern Comfort In Ritzy’s)” I would have known exactly what they meant. But instead the story of Easy is one of inter band rivalry. For when Lionel Ritchie croons that he is easy like Sunday morning, he does not mean the time between 4am and 12pm. He does not even mean the bit of time after midnight Saturday which most people consider as an extension of Saturday night but is strictly Sunday morning – and is oddly when a large number of people become easier due to excessive alcohol. But Ritchie is talking of none of these. He is not even talking about how easy the blind girl in Hello was – though she must have been to let Ritchie get away with following up that greeting with the thoroughly insensitive “Is it me you’re looking for”.
Nope, the Commodores are actually putting a sly dig in at everybodies favourite cause of art music wankery – The Velvet Underground. Whilst the Commodores had wrassled out hits like Three Times A Lady and other soft soaped mid seventies Motown slushfests, they felt they were not taken seriously. Unlike the VU who got most of their kudos from having known a bloke with Einstein hair and a German bird. Hence thid attack at the kiddy piano snoozeathon that is Sunday Morning. Which like Perfect Day, Last Great American Whale and everything else Lou Reed has had a hand in (except Heroin) is about taking heroin. Probably. The soul singers felt that they could have written a song like Sunday Morning with a mouth full of gravel and a selection of Fisher Price instruments. Which is pretty much what it sounds like. Wheras they write a soulful ballad about someone changing sex three times (or is it five times becaue she would have to change into a man twice) and people laughed at them. Funny that.
What The Commodores never understood was that their very name consigned them to their critical mauling. The name being a combination of:
a) The Comode : Victorian toilet in a wooden box
b) The Doors: Sixties toilet in a wooden box. (At least Jim Morrison is).