#1395: The Who – Too Much of Anything

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You remember how I wrote about another track by The Who maybe a couple weeks ago? ‘Time Is Passing’, that was the one. Well, copy and paste the first paragraph from that post and replace that song’s title with today’s, and the facts almost remain the same. ‘Too Much of Anything’ was another tune written by Pete Townshend, in his Lifehouse mode, 1970 to 1971. He went a bit barmy. Lifehouse was abandoned. Who’s Next was made out of its remains. Odds & Sods was released in 1974, prepared by bass guitarist John Entwistle while the other three members were preparing for work on the Tommy film. Unlike ‘Time Is Passing’, ‘Too Much…’ was available to hear on the original ’74 edition. The above video is the version from the ’98 reissue. It’s meant to be a remix too, but I don’t hear too much difference between it and what was released in the ’70s. Maybe you can.

By the time Pete Townshend was writing ‘Too Much…’, The Who’s newest album out for the public to consume was this little rock opera thing called Tommy. The band were shot into another stratosphere in its wake. Being the main songwriter and guitarist in one of the biggest rock bands in the world, I think it’s fair to say Pete Townshend could have anything handed to him on a plate without even asking. Really, anything. And clearly today’s subject was written during a time when it was all a bit overwhelming. There’s not much explanation that needs to be done when it comes to the lyrics, meaning what you read is all that’s being said. The words are very autobiographical, even if they were meant to be from the perspective of a character in the Lifehouse story. And the overall result is a somewhat upbeat-sounding track that ponders upon the effects of overexposure, with a great singalong chorus to string it all together too.

Apparently, the only reason ‘Too Much…’ wasn’t on Who’s Next or released as a standalone single was because Townshend found it hypocritical for a bunch of hedonists to be delivering a song, with the subject matter it has, to the masses. But I’ve only recently figured out how sort of similar, musically, it is to ‘Getting in Tune’, which did make it onto Who’s Next. Both songs have moments where they go into double time. Both end in a key higher than how they initially start. Perhaps someone in the band or the producer noticed this and a decision was made. To be honest, if it were up to me, ‘Too Much…’ would have taken the spot, for sure. But ‘Getting in Tune’ is all right. Also, maybe they didn’t like how the track turned out when they recorded it in 1971, ’cause it sounded like this at first, but a few years later there it was on Odds & Sods with a new/alternate Daltrey vocal and an edit that cut out a few extra measures near the end. Just throwing out theories here. But at the end of the day, it’s a song I like. All that counts.

#1394: Paul & Linda McCartney – Too Many People

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It was 2010. A year on from the Beatles: Rock Band game release, interest about that and how great The Beatles were in general was still at what felt like an all-time high. At least, that’s if you were a member on the Harmonix / Rock Band forums back in the day, which I was. There was a really cool community around that place. A thing that got people together and all creative-like was mash-ups, influenced by the LOVE album made by George and Giles Martin for the Cirque du Soleil show. I go into a lot more depth regarding these in this post I did many years back. For one specific mash-up “album”, I thought it would be a good idea to blend the ‘diss tracks’ of George Harrison’s ‘Wah-Wah’, John Lennon’s ‘How Do You Sleep?’ and the Paul & Linda McCartney’s ‘Too Many People’. The result… well, hear it for yourself. I don’t think it’s too bad, actually. A little abrupt in the changes, maybe. It belongs in the 2010s.

So I heard ‘Too Many People’ way before I got round to listening to Ram from front to back. I think it was a couple years that I did. It’s the first song on there, and what a way to start the album off. “Piss off, caa-haay-hay-hayy-hay-haayy-haaake” and then a bunch of cutesy vocalizations. Interesting. The ascending guitar lick adds a bit of mystery. And then after a few chord strums, the song properly gets underway. Over a groovy bassline, Paul McCartney provides some social commentary. He sees these activities people are doing, too many of these people, and he doesn’t get it. Among these activities are: losing weight, going underground, waiting for that lucky break. Etcetera, etcetera. A great vocal performance – “too many HUNGRY PEOPLE.. LOSING WEEEIGHT” – one of my favourite parts. A lot of grit mixed with a fantastic melody. Linda McCartney adds some gusto with those “Piece of cake / Lucky break” harmonies. It’s a bit of a list song, and at the end he more or less states he’s had enough of what he’s seeing. Thinks it’s all a bit silly. And everything’s capped off with a minute long instrumental for the outro to shake out the jams.

Got to address the elephant in the room, though. That being how the track was a shot at his old bandmate and songwriting partner, John Lennon. Particularly the “You took your lucky break and broke it in two” and “Too many people preaching practices” lines. Lennon took great umbrage to that, writing ‘How Do You Sleep?’ in response. A nasty track, that one. Not too much fun to listen to, which I think is its point. Me, I prefer ‘Too Many People’ ’cause it’s the exact opposite. And with all that beef aside, the song feels like a statement of intent for what’s to follow on Ram. You know, the preceding McCartney album is okay, but apart from ‘Every Night’ and ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’… maybe ‘Junk’ too, it felt more like a collection of ideas rather than full-fleshed songs. But Ram is the real deal. So many strong songs with variety, a lot of surprises, and McCartney exploring ranges and tones in his vocals that he’d rarely go to again in further releases. It all begins with ‘Too Many People’.

#1393: Supergrass – Tonight

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Writing about a song from Supergrass’ In It for the Money again. Only one more after this, but that’ll be sometime in the future. Can’t say enough times I how much I enjoy this album. I must have mentioned my liking for it in the other posts for all its other tracks on the blog. So I’ll leave my praise at that. ‘Tonight’ is the third song on there. I have a memory of listening to the album on my Playstation 2, it might have been the first-time listen, maybe not, it was a while back. When the guitar riff at the beginning started, I had a feeling I’d heard it before. Then the band started playing, and I thought “Okay, I’ve definitely heard this song before.” To this day, I still think I’d heard the song in an advert on the TV before getting the physical copy, on Cartoon Network or some children’s channel… just somewhere. But all those adverts from the early 2000s are lost in time, and I’ll never know for sure. Worth messaging one of the members nicely, I think. See if they’d know. They probably wouldn’t. Worth a shot, though.

‘Tonight’ hits another home run in what I consider the perfect opening moments of …Money. The track is a song about anticipation. Gaz Coombes takes on the voice of someone who’s going out for the night, and they’re gonna have a good time. They’re looking forward to the party, seeing the band “playing bish-bash-bosh” – a funny lyric that does the job – and embracing the lack of sleep they’re inevitably going to get. Coombes gets things underway with the aforementioned riff, the jumping between two notes within it kind of act as the melodic hook of the entire track, before Danny Goffey executes a rapid drum fill to bring everybody else in. Brass ensemble Hornography add a little pizzazz to the listening experience with their instruments, though they do seem to be buried in the centre of the mix. The initial monitor mix brings them further forward. You can hear the little subtleties in what they play. People are asking questions left and right, a girl asks “When?”, the narrator asks “Why?”, but it doesn’t matter when tonight’s about to go down. The whole thing’s a high-octane affair.

It’s known that a majority of the songs were written in-studio while the band were working on the album. With this in mind, I’ve always had the feeling that a lot of the lyrics were created to match the rhythm of the music, aiming for the feel rather than the substance. Take ‘Tonight’. I already made note of the “playing bish-bash-bosh” line. I don’t think any band could get away with that but Supergrass. And look at that amazing moment when the bridge comes in with that huge release of a key change. In that section Coombes sings: “Had his gun in his hand, and he’s looking at mine, and he’s two foot two.” and then “And he’s phoning his cab, and he’s seemingly fine, and he’s seen me too.” Doesn’t really have anything to do with what else goes on in the song. But the way Coombes sings them, sounds like they’re the most important lyrics in the song. Some could be confused. I’m all for it. When it comes to me, sure, music is meant to make you think, but it’s more important that it makes you feel. And I feel great every time I listen to this song. Just another highlight in an album full of them.

#1392: The Beatles – Tomorrow Never Knows

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I saw this song was next after writing the previous post, and it got me wondering. When and how did I listen to ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’? The thought got me looking back on that final third of 2009 when I really started listening to The Beatles, and surprisingly, it unlocked a memory that hadn’t been in the mental plane for a while. When I was on my Beatles discovery, trying to find out anything about any kind of song, I came across this person’s video. Made in the golden age of YouTube when everything was made on Windows Movie Maker, the video was a bunch of facts about ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ laid over the music, with some pictures here and there. My introduction to the Beatles was through songs like ‘Penny Lane’, ‘The Night Before’, ‘One After 909’… Songs that sound like a band made them. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was not like one of those. It was unlike any song I’d heard before. I was only 14 then, so that’s no exaggeration. And I don’t think it was too long after that that I found it was on Revolver and listened through the whole album.

The Beatles were meant to spend the first four months of 1966 making a film, which would have been their third in the four-film contract they had with some company. They said no and took a break instead. In January, John Lennon bought a book, took LSD and followed the instructions as exactly stated within the pages. The opening lyrics, “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream”, are taken almost verbatim from it. April came around, it was time for the band to start recording a new album again, and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was the first song they worked on. Lennon wanted to translate the hallucinogenic experience into song, and the Beatles threw everything they had into it. They all brought in tape loops, which they manually overdubbed in a session, McCartney spurring up the idea. George Harrison played a sitar and tambura on the track, bringing his firmly established Indian inspirations into the mix. Lennon wanted to be hung upside-down and spun around a microphone while recording his vocal. New engineer Geoff Emerick tampered with a Leslie-speaker cabinet to get something to that effect. And in addition the banging drum take, Ringo Starr provided the song’s title. Not intentionally, but it was his words.

The problem with Beatles posts is that I don’t want to turn them into a casual rewrite of a Wikipedia page, and there’s a Wikipedia article for every Beatles track, I think. So any technical stuff or further insight you might want, it’s probably best you went over there. My personal take is hopefully what people are here for, so I’mma give it to you. I can’t imagine how people in 1966 reacted when this arrived as the final song on Revolver. To me, it feels like an intentional mark on the band’s part, showing that they were just on another level compared to their contemporaries. A lot of the public must have thought they’d gone insane or too weird. Or had been taking too many drugs, which isn’t wrong a judgement. This is a song that was worked on 60 years ago next week, and there are songs and bands today that solely exist to sound like it but pale in comparison. That pretty much sums up The Beatles too, honestly. A lot of people don’t want you to believe it these days, but those guys, they made some really good music.

#1391: Gorillaz – Tomorrow Comes Today

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‘Clint Eastwood’ is the official first single by Gorillaz. I’m sure it goes down as that. When it was released in 2001, I was but a small child, but I have a vague memory of watching The Box or something and seeing Noodle kicking a gorilla in the face, having no idea what was going on. Seemed weird seeing a cartoon set to music. That’s seen as the song that introduced the world to Gorillaz. But a few months before, the first batch of Gorillaz material was released in the form of the Tomorrow Comes Today EP. A very pivotal time in Damon Albarn’s life. Only a month before the EP was out, he was appearing on TV shows with Blur, doing promotional work for the band’s Best Of: compilation. But that work was over, it was a new millennium, and it was time to unveil this new project. Gorillaz, hell yeah. ‘Tomorrow Comes Today’ was really the first Gorillaz song to be unveiled, along with a music video that, according to the Bananaz documentary, was done in two weeks.

I… did not like this song a very long time. I heard Gorillaz for the first time in 2010. I may have heard ‘Tomorrow…’ here and there before then, but here it was in the context of the album. With its placement after ‘Re-Hash’ and ‘5/4’, ‘Tomorrow…’ felt like such a downer. Albarn melodically mumbling syllables over downcast music. It wasn’t for me. I didn’t get it. But then, I remember, I was on a train, more specifically the Underground, back home one day. Couldn’t say what year. I was looking at people’s faces, most of them blank, expressionless, tired. The song came to my head, and that was it. I feel I finally understood what the tune was going for. Even though I don’t think anyone really knows what Albarn’s saying apart from the man himself, I get the feeling it’s about being anywhere else than a place you’re currently in – whether that be physically or mentally too. It might have to do with the rapid development of technology or something as well. Albarn’s vocal’s perfect for it. The best part is probably when Miho Hatori, as Noodle, harmonises with him on the last line. Icing on the cake.

The song goes back as early as 1999. We know this because, in its demo form, it was released as a bonus track on Japanese releases of Blur’s 13. Check out Damon Albarn just messing around on his Casio. Obviously, he saw enough potential in the song he had to develop it into the fleshed-out composition it would become. In its album form, it’s led by a really deep bass guitar, sparse piano tinkles and the melodica, an instrumental you’ll find in many a Gorillaz song. I never realized how sample-assisted the track is too. The drum beat is taken from Allen Toussaint’s ‘Get Out of My Life, Woman’. And if I hadn’t looked at Genius, I would have never known there was a recording of a Gregorian chant during the introduction. Thinking that’s down to the involvement of producer Dan the Automator, who was also working on Deltron 3030 almost at the same time. That’s a whole other bag we don’t have to put our hands into. But to sum things up, ‘Tomorrow Comes Today’ is a song I like a lot now having disregarded it for many years. I can find a lot of solace in its gloom.