I'm just now getting caught up on 3+ weeks of blog reading, and today I found this great post by Larry at Funky16Corners paying tribute to The Flamingos' "I Only Have Eyes for You", one of the most transcendent performances of a pop song, ever. Like a lot of people I'm sure, this song is deeply rooted in my subconscious, like an early, early memory that I don't have any words or images for. It's just there, along with mom and dad and my first dog and the smell of the big tree I used to climb in our front yard... And more importantly it's a song that stays good; I still go back and listen to it quite often.
Larry makes a few keen observations:
"There’s something special about the spare instrumentation - pretty much just piano, drums and guitar – contrasted with a rich, velvety blanket of human voices, all of it arranged to perfection (whoever came up with the “shoo-bop-sh-bops” ought to be awarded some variety of the Nobel Prize) that simply blows my mind."
Indeed. And it's not only that clever doo-wop hook, Nate Nelson's flawless lead vocal, or even that incessantly repetitive (in a good way!) 12/8 piano figure that keeps coming back again and again... it's that there are so many small things that fall into just the right places: that harmonically ambiguous beginning (with the bizarre placement of those "obsessive, almost dark" first two lines that rival only the opening of "God Only Knows" for most surprising lyrical intro to a love ballad); the eerie chorus effect on the guitar line doubled with the bass; a seamless background vocal arrangement over those harmonic left turns taking us into and out of the bridge; that soaring, wistful falsetto that becomes more and more prominent as we near the end, and don't get me started on the production (notice the subtle panning effect at the very end? rapture!).
Larry again:
"I’d go as far as to say that this is a signal record that verily transcends the construct (constriction) of genre, elevating itself to an entirely different level. It’s almost the musical equivalent of a meditative exercise, where you just close your eyes, allow yourself to be enveloped by the music (which you all probably do every now and then anyway) and just kind of feel it. Whether the Flamingos intended it or not, this record is possessed of a kind of otherworldly magic."
Quite right. And for a song that's been covered by the likes of Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra and many other legends, The Flamingos really did everything right here. My other favorite version has to be Lester Bowie's with Brass Fantasy from 1985 (out of print and hard to find, although it's available digitally on iTunes or here). Ten and a half minutes of lyrical doo wop brass bliss, played as buttery slick as only Lester can, and then midway through he rides a key change as things get slower and looser and slower and looser.
Anyway, here are The Flamingos to play you out... sounding like 1959, looking like 1979!
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2 comments:
Fuck yeah.
One thing that always cracked me up about about this tune is that, when it comes to the backing vox, it's actually only the first one that is "shoo-bop-sh-bop" -- all the others are "doo-bop-sh-bop."
I used to wonder how that happened. Was it an accident? Seems unlikely. But why would you only make the first iteration "shoo-bop-sh-bop"? What aesthetic purpose did it serve? Was there an argument between the two choices, and this was the compromise that resulted?
Of course it doesn't really matter, cuz it just works, regardless of how it got to be that way.
All of which is just preamble to my story about how, after I first played this tune for Thandie, we made a little game of sneaking up on each other and singing "doo-bop-sh-bop!" when the other person was least expecting it. Try it, it's fun!
I second that yeah... good stuff.
I wanted to add that this group, like all the early doo-wop groups, have their roots in African American gospel quartets (which paradoxically have five people in them...don't know where #5 went too in that video, but I am pretty sure that's 5 voices on the recording..I am not a Flamingos expert though). Anyway, no matter how many people, these acapella gospel groups were "do-bop-sh'bopping," ca. 1930s in harmony, tweaking the intonation so you would hear a rich wash of overtones, more evident in a church than a 1970s youtube vid. The vocables, and the use of the voice as a rhythm instrument has African roots for sure, but those gospel singers probably heard it in the sinful records of Louis Armstrong and some classic blues singers. They cleaned it up and added that emphasis on overtones and timbre, which also sometimes occurs when you get a bunch folks singing together in church anyway. Doo-wop takes it back out of the church, but keeps the conventions.
To me, those vocables and resultant play of timbre they create symbolizes passivity (what I am calling passivity anyway, not implying pathological weakness), an admonishen that there are forces in the world greater than your self. The effect, a result of acoustic physics, is in my mind a metaphor for the importance of living with others, of the necessity of others to our individual identity. Themes that are of course not uncommon in Christian churches, but no less important in the rest of the world. The interesting thing to me is that lots of spiritually inclined music draws on these kinds of acoustic phenomena.
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