The Broadcast/Paul McCartney and Wings

In The Words and Music of Paul McCartney: The Solo Years, Vincent Benitez writes:  "The Broadcast is the most experimental track in Wings' entire output."  David Bowie was reportedly so impressed by the track, which appears on the 1979 album Back to the Egg, that he thought it should be released as the first single.  Technically, the track isn't a song at all, but a spoken word piece heard over a fragment of melody--and the words aren't spoken by Paul McCartney or anybody else in the band.

The track was recorded at Lympne Castle in Kent, England, which dates from the 12th century.  The castle was owned by a gentleman named Harold Margary and his wife Deirdre.  Benitez quotes Wings guitarist Laurence Juber:

It's a bit hazy but the guy that owns the castle where we were recording, both he and his wife had these very plummy kind of voices
. . . . I think it was like, "Oh, wouldn't it be fun to have them read some classic English literature material and use the orchestral background to be just this kind of weird interlude."  And they were game for it.

McCartney selected books at random from the castle library and recorded the Margarys reading selections.  Harold Margary read from The Sport of Kings by Ian Hay and The Little Man by John Galsworthy, which is what you hear on the final track.  Deirdre Margary read lyrics from a song called "The Poodle and the Pug," from a 1946 light opera called Big Ben.  "Her reading didn't make the final version," reports Ian Peel in The Unknown Paul McCartney, "but a few lines ('...with tufts of hair stuck here and there which one would like to tug...') were spliced into Reception," another track on the album.

The Words and Music of Paul McCartney: The Solo Years (Kindle Edition)

The Little Man (Kindle Edition)

Bukowski/Modest Mouse

Prolific poet, novelist and short story writer Charles Bukowski would have turned 90 on Monday (August 16th).  Bukowski, who died in 1994, lived a hard life of drinking, gambling, dead end jobs, and rocky relationships with women.  A strong autobiographical thread runs through his writing, which is peopled with losers, lowlifes, and hustlers.  Much of Bukowski's work is set in the seamy underside of Los Angeles, his home town.

An alcoholic, Bukowski had a difficult personality--his behavior could be disruptive, boorish, and combative at his public readings and other social events.  The song Bukowski by Modest Mouse, from their 2004 album Good News for People Who Love Bad News, picks up on this trait.  The song can hardly be considered a tribute with lyrics such as these:

Woke this morning and it seemed to me
That every night turns out to be
A little bit more like Bukowski
And yeah, I know he's a pretty good read
But God, who'd want to be
God, who'd want to be such an asshole?

In his 2006 book Modest Mouse: A Pretty Good Read (yes, the title is taken from the lyrics of "Bukowski"), Alan Goldsher offers these thoughts on Modest Mouse lyricist Isaac Brock's attitude toward the late author:

Considering Isaac's love of both imbibing and literature, it was only a matter of time before he acknowledged eternally drunken poet/novelist Charles Bukowski in song.  But Brock's attitude toward drinking and drugging was slowly changing, so it would stand to reason that he might also take a different view of Bukowski.  While Brock sings about Bukowski being "a pretty good read," he was less than impressed with the author's worldview.  "He glamorized alchoholism and misogyny," Isaac says.  "I've seen friends get impressed by him and he seemed to impress himself by being a pain in the ass.  I just don't like alcoholism being put in a way that makes my friends wanna be alcoholics."  When Brock repeats the lyric "God, who'd wanna be such an asshole," you wonder if he's talking about Charles or himself.

Another musical reference to Bukowski can be found in U2's song Dirty Day, from their 1993 album Zooropa.  The song, which depicts a difficult encounter between an estranged father and son, is dedicated to Bukowski.  The phrase "these days, days, days run away like horses over the hill," repeated by Bono over the song's fadeout, alludes to Bukowski's 1969 poetry collection The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills.  Bukowski died a few months after the album was released.

Singer-songwriter Tom Russell's 2005 album Hotwalker: Charles Bukowski & A Ballad for Gone was inspired by his exchange of letters with Bukowski.  The album features original songs, narration, and actual recordings of Bukowski and his contemporaries (including Jack Kerouac and Lenny Bruce).  Russell has also collected his correspondence with Bukowski into a limited edition book called Tough Company, published in 2008.

Finally, the Boo Radleys state the obvious in their song Charles Bukowski Is Dead, from their 1995 album Wake Up!, released almost exactly one year after Bukowski died.

The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills (Kindle Edition)

Driving the Last Spike/Genesis

When composing a song, Phil Collins usually doesn't start with a particular theme in mind--he just lets the ideas and words flow freely as he's working out the melody.  "If you go right back to Face Value, I never sat down and wrote anything for that record," Collins says in the band's 2007 book Genesis: Chapter and Verse. "In The Air Tonight was totally improvised.  I sang what came out of my head and wrote it down afterwards.  And because it worked for that first record, that's what I've always done.  When I'm singing along the phrases come out."

For Driving The Last Spike, from the 1991 Genesis album We Can't Dance, Collins went the extra step of doing some research.  The song takes an epic look at the dangers and hardships that went into the construction of the British railway system during the 19th century, told from the point of view of a workman who took part in that process.  "To write 'Driving the Last Spike,' I ended up getting hold of a book about the navvies," Collins said.  ["Navvy" is a British term for an unskilled manual laborer, particularly someone who builds roads, canals, and railroads.]  He elaborated in an interview with Music Express Magazine [via genesis-path.net]:

The song's working title was "Irish," and that came from me making up words and phrases as I listened to the music...There's an Irish-sounding bit in the arrangement, so I thought about labourers and the working class.  And then as I browsed through a book called The Railway Navvies, I formulated this idea about the Irish workers who helped build the British railway system at the turn of the century.  I mean, when you're on a train and you're looking out of the window, you don't think about being 150 feet up in the air on a viaduct between two hills and how the track actually got there!

"I don't know why but I just thought there was a story to be told there," Collins says of the song in Genesis: Chapter and Verse.  "And that was one of only a few story lyrics I ever wrote."

Make Love Stay/Dan Fogelberg

In his 1980 novel Still Life with Woodpecker, Tom Robbins establishes a key theme early in the book in a neatly self-referential passage from Chapter 2:

     Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not.
     Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end.
     Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of the bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm.
     There is only one serious question.  And that is:
     Who knows how to make love stay?

The late Dan Fogelberg picked up on that theme in his song Make Love Stay, one of two new songs that appeared on his 1982 Greatest Hits album.  In the liner notes he dedicated the song to "Dr. Robbins and the Woodpecker" (Dr. Robbins refers to the author as well as to a character from Robbins' 1976 novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues), and later described the song as a "sinuous piece written around a chapter of Tom Robbins' Still Life with Woodpecker."  The song employs many images from the book, including moonlight, mystery, and fire.

Fogelberg, who died in 2007, was an admitted fan of literature.  "I love reading," he said during a live MSN chat in 2000.  "My favorite writer is Jim Harrison. I am currently reading Sterling Hayden's wonderful autobiography Wanderer. I'm also trying to get to Tom Robbins' new novel. I've also read all the Patrick O'Brien books and the Hornblower series.  Great stuff."

Submitted by Stacy Clopton Yates.

Still Life with Woodpecker (Kindle Edition)
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (Kindle Edition)

Personal Jesus/Depeche Mode

Depeche Mode's song Personal Jesus, from their 1990 album Violator, has been interpreted in a variety of ways--from an assault on organized religion to an endorsement of Christianity--and lyricist Martin Gore thinks that's just fine.  "He never explains the lyrics at all," says bandmate Andy Fletcher in Jonathan Miller's 2003 book Stripped: Depeche Mode.  "I've heard about ten different interpretations of 'Personal Jesus' and that's what Martin really likes. . . The lyrics are very ambiguous, so although it could have been controversial, in fact it turned out not to be at all.  Most people thought it was a pro-Christian anthem, which wasn't intended."

As its inclusion in these pages suggests, the inspiration for "Personal Jesus" came from a book, but it's not The New Testament, as one might think.  According to Gore--who opened up about the song in an interview with Spin Magazine--the unlikely inspiration was Priscilla Beaulieu Presley's book Elvis and Me, written with Sandra Harmon and published in 1985, which chronicles her relationship with her late ex-husband, Elvis Presley.  Gore told Spin:

It's a song about being a Jesus for somebody else, someone to give you hope and care. It's about how Elvis was her man and her mentor and how often that happens in love relationships; how everybody's heart is like a god in some way. We play these god-like parts for people but no one is perfect, and that's not a very balanced view of someone is it?

In the book, Priscilla Presley writes of Elvis:  "Over the years he became my father, husband, and very nearly God."

Stripped: Depeche Mode (Kindle Edition)

B.S. Johnson/The Pernice Brothers

 When novelist, poet, and filmmaker B(ryan) S(tanley) Johnson committed suicide at the age of 40 in 1973, his obituary in The Times of London began this way:

B. S. Johnson . . . was one of the most naturally gifted writers of his generation. He was also one of the very small number to commit himself whole-heartedly to the experimental presentation of fiction. His Albert Angelo (1964) included carefully holed pages in order that readers might choose for themselves the order in which they received the writer’s words; The Unfortunates (1969) carried the pursuit of disintegration further by being printed and boxed in interchangeable sections. Throughout his career he believed that to adhere to the disciplines of conventional form was to risk the distortion of truth.

The Pernice Brothers' 2006 album Live a Little includes a tribute to the late writer called B.S. Johnson.  Stereogum quotes Joe Pernice describing the song this way:

"B.S. Johnson" is simply an homage to the late great writer of the same name.  It's safe to say that he was not/is not widely read here in America, but he should be.  My brother is a pretty bright guy.   He's read a couple books, and upon seeing the title, thought I'd created a fictional character, a Walter Mitty type named Bullshit Johnson.  I told him I had, but that's for the next record.

Jonathan Coe (a master in his own right), upon hearing the song, emailed to let me know I'd managed to sum up BSJ's life in two minutes, twenty-two seconds, and that it took him 500 pages to do so in his spectacular bio of B.S. called Like A Fiery Elephant.

Incidentally, Joe Pernice is an author in his own right, having published a collection of poetry called Two Blind Pigeons in 2001; a consideration of a classic album, The Smiths' Meat Is Murder, in 2003; and a novel, It Feels So Good When I Stop, published last year.