Tag: Story Behind the Song

Sometimes I Get a Strange Pain Inside

One of the great songs of the early 1990s was Concrete Blonde‘s “Joey,” which appeared on the band’s album Bloodletting (1990). Like many great works of art, “Joey” came out of real anguish felt by its writer, Concrete Blonde lead singer Johnette Napolitano.

Although you may have sung along with lyrics like “Joey I’m not angry anymore,” if you delve deeper into the words of the catchy tune you find great pain. The song captures the feeling of loving someone fighting their own demons, helplessly watching while you cannot do anything as your loved one struggles with addiction: “I just stand by and let you / Fight your secret war.”

Napolitano wrote the song about her relationship with Marc Moreland of the band Wall Of Voodoo. Napolitano has explained in interviews and her book Rough Mix how painful it was for her to write and record the lyrics.

Because of that pain, Napolitano kept the band waiting for the song. She initially wrote the music for the song and the band loved it. But Napolitano kept them waiting on the lyrics because she knew that her song about Moreland was going to be heart-wrenching to write. Eventually, the words came all at once to Napolitano, and she wrote them down in a cab on the way to the studio. “Joey” was the last song recorded for the album.
Concrete Blonde Bloodletting

And though I used to wonder why,
I used to cry till I was dry;
Still sometimes I get a strange pain inside;
Oh Joey if you’re hurting so am I.

The song became Concrete Blonde’s biggest hit, eventually hitting #19 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. After a couple of more albums, the band broke up in 1993, although it would reunite at several points and is together today. The song’s subject, Marc Moreland would eventually die of liver failure in 2002.

And now you know the story behind the song.

Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    A Hard Rain, Lord Randall, and the Start of a Revolution

    Dylan Hard Rain In singer Dave Van Ronk’s memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, he tells about his experiences playing music in New York City in the 1960s and of those he encountered.  He also writes fondly of his memories of the young Bob Dylan.

    Writing about Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” Van Ronk notes that he does not love all the lyrics. He reveals that the phrase “clown who cried in the alley” reminds him of a velvet painting.

    But Van Ronk concludes that the overall effect of the song is “incredible.” He also explains that the tune comes from an old Anglo-Scottish Ballad.

    “Lord Randall”

    The English Ballad “Lord Randall” opens with similar a structure that Dylan would emulate in “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” with the singer asking questions and then responding with answers. The song begins, ““O where ha you been, Lord Randal, my son? / And where ha you been, my handsome young man?” Sound familiar?

    Like Dylan’s song, “Lord Randall” is melancholy in both sound and theme. The ballad recounts a tragic love story. Lord Randall sings of a broken heart, and by the end of the song we learn that he is dying because his lover has poisoned him. Here is a performance of “Lord Randall” by UK artists Vicki Swan and Jonny Dyer at The High Barn on February 2013.

    “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”

    In Keys to the Rain: The Definitive Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, Oliver Trager describes Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” as “”[a]s stark a piece of apocalyptic visionary prophesy as anything ever committed” to any media. It was unlike anything else Dylan had written up that time.

    Dylan’s song features a conversation between a father and a son, with alternating descriptions of life and death. Some believe that Dylan started writing the surrealistic poem during the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

    In the liner notes to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan though, Dylan explained that each line starts a whole new song.  He remembered: “[W]hen I wrote it, I thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all these songs so I put all I could into one.”

    Trager finds some “brightness” among the dark images of the song, including the final stanza when the narrator claims he will “tell it and speak it and breathe it/ And reflect from the mountains so all souls can see it.” It is an ending of defiance in the face of the darkness.

    Here is Bob Dylan’s singing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” from a 1963 performance at Town Hall.

    I have always loved the song and found it powerful, but I cannot even imagine what it must have been like to hear it in the early 1960s coming from Dylan standing on stage in a club. When Van Ronk first heard Dylan sing it at the Gaslight, he writes, “I could not even talk about it; I just had to leave the club and walk around for awhile. It was unlike anything that had come before it, and it was clearly the beginning of a revolution.”

    Do you agree that Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” is incredible? Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    How a Checkout Line Inspired Marty Brown’s “Love Comes Easy”

    Back in the early 1990s, country singer-songwriter Marty Brown stood in line at Wyndall’s Foodland on U.S. 60 East in Owensboro, Kentucky. In front of Brown, a guy stood watching the cashier scan his groceries. The man watched each price on the cash register until the cashier told him his total. The man responded, “Here, honey. It comes easy, but it goes away hard.”

    When Marty Brown heard the man’s comment, he not only recognized a good line but he also knew they would make good lyrics for a song. Brown later explained to the Owensboro Messenger Inquirer that he never knew who the man was, but he took the words as inspiration for his song, “Love Comes Easy,” which appeared on Here’s to the Honky Tonks (1996).

    Love comes easy,
    But it goes down hard;
    Just when you think you’ve got the right hand,
    You’re holding all the wrong cards.

    And that’s the Story Behind the Song.

    Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    Darius Rucker’s “Wagon Wheel”: How Broonzy, Crudup, Dylan, OCMS and a School Band Made a Hit Song

    Wagon Wheel

    Darius Rucker recently had a hit with “Wagon Wheel,” a song is so catchy that when you hear it you believe that you have heard it all your life. Although the song has not been around forever, it has been around for quite some time, going back through an unfinished Bob Dylan recording to an even earlier time.

    When Bob Dylan was recording music for the soundtrack to Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) (an underrated Western gem), he put together what he later called a “sketch” of a song that came to be known as “Rock Me Mama.” He never finished the draft of the song, but you may hear it below.

    Reportedly, Dylan credited the title phrase in the song to Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup (1905-1974), who in turn apparently developed it from Big Bill Broonzy‘s “Rock Me Baby.” Broonzy claimed he got the idea for the song from an older source, but Broonzy’s is the earliest version we know about.

    Crudup’s version of “Rock Me Mama” does not have much similarity to Dylan’s version beyond the title. Yet, Crudup’s song is important for not only influencing Dylan, but it also influenced Elvis Presley. When Presley showed up at Sun Studios, the young man impressed Sam Phillips by knowing Crudup’s “Rock Me Mama.”

    Although Dylan never released his version of “Rock Me Mama,” it was passed around as a bootleg, eventually catching the attention of Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show. Secor liked the music and some of the words that he could make out in Dylan’s mumbled version. So, he decided to finish the song.

    At the time he worked on the song, Secor was going to school in the Northeast, so he incorporated his homesickness for the South in a song about a someone hitchhiking from the North to the South to see his lover. The song, now entitled “Wagon Wheel,” then appeared on Old Crow Medicine Show’s 2001 EP Troubles Up and Down the Road and then on 2004’s O.C.M.S.

    “Wagon Wheel” became a bluegrass staple, and country artists and others took notice too. In 2012, Irish singer Nathan Carter recorded a version of “Wagon Wheel” for an album of the same name.

    Eventually, the song came to the attention of Darius Rucker in the midst of his post-Hootie & the Blowfish successful career in country music. Darius Rucker has reported that while he is a fan of Old Crow Medicine Show, he did not think much about “Wagon Wheel” until he heard a faculty band at his daughter’s school perform the song. Inspired by the performance, Darius Rucker decided to record the song himself in 2012.

    Rucker put “Wagon Wheel” on his 2013 album, True Believers. Then, his version became a big hit, and he won the Grammy Award for Best Country Solo Performance at the Annual Grammy Awards held in 2014 for his version of the song.

    So, forty years after Bob Dylan recorded some ideas from Arthur Crudup and Big Bill Broonzy, the recording evolved into a song heard by millions of listeners. Secor reports that while he has not had an extensive conversation with Dylan about the song, his sense is that Dylan is pleased with the results. So are a lot of people.

    And that’s the story behind the song.

    Photo via public domain. Which is your favorite version of “Wagon Wheel”? Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    The Real-Life Sadness in “Under the Boardwalk”

    The members of The Drifters were in mourning when they went into the studio to record “Under the Boardwalk.”

    Under the Boardwalk

    On the evening of May 21, 1964, The Drifters went into the studio for a scheduled recording session. But the session did not go as the group had originally planned, because the group’s members found out that day that singer Rudy Lewis had died a day earlier.

    That Thursday night at the studio, the members of the group were in tears but decided to go through with the recording session. During the session, the band recorded “Under the Boardwalk,” with singer Johnny Moore taking the lead on the track that was intended for Lewis.

    The song evokes the “happy sounds of the carousel” and lovers hanging out by the beach. But there is a bittersweet tone to the song, so if you listen close enough, you may feel you can hear a little of the sadness that the men were feeling when they recorded the song.

    Different websites report different causes of death for Lewis, saying there is some confusion about whether he died from either a drug overdose or from asphyxiation in his sleep from overeating. But one site says the cause of death was a heart attack. Lewis — whose voice is featured on such Drifters’ classics as “Some Kind of Wonderful,” “On Broadway,” and “Up on the Roof” — was only 27 years old.

    And that is the story behind the song “Under the Boardwalk,” written by Kenny Young and Arthur Resnick. Rolling Stone magazine lists the song as the eighteenth greatest summer song of all time.

    What is your favorite song by The Drifers? Leave your two cents in the comments.

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