2014-06-15 14.38.14 (2)

In Which I Ask Boy George The Meaning Of One Of His Songs

Down the street from my first full-time job at CBS Records was a bookstore. Two blocks down from that bookstore was another bookstore. Around the corner from my office was a Sam Goody music store. Often these stores hosted book/record/CD signings. During my lunch hour I’d wait on line to buy the new release from someone I admire and get them to autograph it at the same time. I met former Supreme Mary Wilson, David Johansen (as Buster Poindexter), and Liberace. I guess it wasn’t always someone I admire. While she was signing her latest CD for me, I told Sandra Bernhard that we had met once before. She responded, sarcastically, “Who could forget?”

When I got to the front of the line to meet Joan Rivers and was face to face with her, I said “Oh, it’s you. I thought I was here to meet Joan Collins.” She responded something to the effect of “Sorry. You got me.”

I met Tipper Gore at a signing of her then-new book Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society, or something like that. There was literally nobody there to meet her. Nobody except me. Perhaps it was obnoxious of me to say “Nice turnout, Tipper,” but this was back when she was campaigning to have warning labels put on records, an idea I found silly. She was a good sport, though. We ended up chatting for about ten minutes, each explaining his/her viewpoint. After our chat she asked “Are you going to buy my book now?” I told her no, and she said “Take it out from the library. It’s cheaper,” to which I replied “You’re a great salesperson, Tipper.” She laughed.

I don’t remember what I said to Prince when I met him, but I do recall him looking at me as if of the two of us, I was the weirder one.

I couldn’t speak when I met Tina Turner. Her skin was so smooth and flawless it left me dumbfounded.

Years later I met Kathy Griffin a a DVD signing that was immortalized on her reality show My Life on the D-List. The show did not exaggerate the situation – only eight or so people showed up.

I was excited to meet Boy George when he published his autobiography in 1995. I’ve been a fan of his since the first time I heard Culture Club’s first US single, “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me.” The group’s fourth album, From Luxury to Heartache, included a song called “Gusto Blusto.” A DJ played it on the radio and then said “I can’t tell you what Gusto Blusto means on the air.” Finally I had the opportunity to ask the song’s writer what that expression means. I asked George. He laughed and said “I don’t remember.” Thanks, George!

2014-06-15 14.38.14 (2)
Yesterday Boy George turned 53 years old. Here are ten tracks of his you should know.

It’s Friday The 13th And I Need To Dance!

In many Western countries, Friday the 13th is considered a day of bad luck by those who believe in such silliness.

In Spanish-speaking countries, Tuesday the 13th is unlucky.

In Italy, Friday the 17th is considered unlucky and 13 is a lucky number.

In Finland, many organizations promote National Accident Day, which always falls on Friday the 13th.

A study in the Netherlands found fewer car accidents occur on Friday the 13th as compared to other Fridays.

The Stress Management Center and Phobia Institute in Asheville, North Carolina estimates that somewhere between 17 and 21 million people in the United States are afraid of Friday the 13th.

At Tunes du Jour we dance every Friday, and we ain’t afraid of no 13th! Let’s kick off this week’s party with “Bad Luck,” by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes.

bad dates

You Should Know Robyn

My friend David hosts these wonderful parties where several of his performer pals entertain the guests. At last weekend’s bash David, himself a talented writer and performer, gave me the honor of regaling the assembled folks with tales about my love life, or as David put it, my “very personal, terribly tragic, and utterly hysterical tale of internet dating gone wrong.”

bad datesGWM not seeking married, seven-toed, gun-toting, Satan-worshipping, homicidal sociopath who isn’t out to his housekeeper

Robin Carlsson, the Swedish singer-songwriter who goes by the stage name Robyn, is no stranger to disappointment in her affairs of the heart. In “Dancing on My Own,” my #3 song of 2010, Robyn goes to a club and watches her ex-boyfriend dancing with his new girlfriend. She makes a lovable stalker, and while I never stalked an ex, I relate to how Robyn feels. There was that time I went with a date to a dance club. Sometime during our date he started dating someone else on the floor. And against a pole. And at the bar. I was dancing on my own, until I finally up and left.

I didn’t share that story at David’s party. I’m having second thoughts about sharing it here, but today is Robyn’s 35th birthday, which is a good excuse to overshare as a means of introduction to her music.

Tonys! Tonys! Tonys!

The Tony Awards, celebrating excellence on the Broadway stages, are being presented this evening. The Tony Awards are like the gay version of the Tony Awards. That’s how gay they are.

Last year I took second place in a speech contest where I spoke about the effect Broadway had on my life. Here is that speech, followed by a playlist consisting of cover versions of Broadway classics.

Prince memorabilia - I Wanna Be

Celebrating Prince

Prince is second to The Beatles on my list of all-time favorite music artists. From the first time I heard “1999” on the radio in my dorm room at Brandeis University, I became obsessed and started collecting his albums and singles. Here are ten items from my Prince collection:

Prince memorabilia - I Wanna Be“I Wanna Be Your Lover” was Prince’s first US Top 40 hit, reaching #11 in 1980.

Prince memorabilia - Still Waiting“Still Waiting” is a track that appears on Prince’s self-titled second album, the same record that spawned “I Wanna be Your Lover.” It’s not his best track, but how cool is it that I have a promotional 12-inch single from Prince’s pre-superstar days?

me wearing t-shirtPrince’s 1999 album was released in October 1982, one month prior to Michael Jackson’s Thriller. I remember taking the train to Harvard Square and buying both albums at the university bookstore. Shortly thereafter I bought a 1999 t-shirt, which I still have. Though I wear it regularly, its color hasn’t faded at all, there are no tears, and it fits me perfectly. Back then they made t-shirts of better quality. Kids today don’t know what good t-shirts are.

Prince memorabilia - Little Red CorvettePrince first US Top Ten single was 1983’s “Little Red Corvette.” The song is from his 1999 album, presently at #36 in my Top 100 Albums of All Time list. The song inspired Stevie Nicks to write “Stand Back,” on which Prince played keyboard.

Prince memorabilia - Delirious“Delirious,” also from 1999, was the follow-up to “Little Red Corvette” and also hit the top ten. The 45 came wrapped in a poster of Prince which had a calendar of the year 1999 on the other side.

Prince memorabilia - Purple Rain singles“When Doves Cry” was the first single released from the Purple Rain soundtrack, my #4 Album of All-Time. It became Prince’s first #1 single. It holds the distinction of being the only track without a bassline to go to #1 on the Dance Club chart. Like the album’s title track, the 45 was pressed on purple vinyl.

Me as PrinceMy Halloween costume in 1987 was Prince, inspired by his Parade: Music From The Motion Picture Under the Cherry Moon period. That album, #38 on my Top Albums list, includes Prince’s third #1 pop single, “Kiss.” He wrote the song for the band Mazarati, who were signed to his Paisley Park label. When he heard what the band did with the song, he took it back, replacing the group’s lead vocals with his and adding a guitar lick. Some more trivia – the week “Kiss” went to #1, the #2 song in the US was “Manic Monday” by Bangles. Per that record, the writer of that song was “Christopher.” In actuality, Christopher was a pseudonym for Prince, who also wrote under the names Jamie Starr (The Time’s “Jungle Love”) and Alexander Nevermind (Sheena Easton’s “Sugar Walls”).

Prince memorabilia - autographOne afternoon in 1988 Prince did an impromptu autograph signing at the Sam Goodys a block away from my office. I told my boss I’d be right back and I wormed my way to the front of the line. He was there to promote his Lovesexy album, which includes “Alphabet St.” I already had the album (on its first day of release, of course!), so he signed a piece of stationery I took from my office.

Prince memorabilia - Batman“Batdance” was Prince’s fourth #1 single. It appears on his Batman soundtrack though was not used in the film. The CD of the Batman soundtrack was released in a tin case.

Prince memorabilia - Most BeautifulDuring one of his fights with Warner Bros. Records, Prince self-released a single of “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World,” which was available by mail order in an oversized greeting card.

Today, the seventh day of Black Music Month, Prince turns 56. I don’t think he celebrates his birthday due to his religious beliefs, but that doesn’t mean we can’t. Here are twenty of his finest.

Winston + Village People

“Go West” a/k/a It’s Gay Pride Weekend And We Need To Dance!

Winston + Village People
In 1979, the Village People released “Go West,” a celebratory disco romp whose message to listeners in the know was “go west, young man, to San Francisco, a utopia for gays.” The lyrics included “Together we will love the beach / Together we will learn and teach.” And “I love you, I know you love me. I want you happy and carefree / So that’s why I have no protest when you say you want to go west.”

San Francisco was a popular gay destination and in 1977, home to the nation’s first openly gay elected official, Harvey Milk.

In 1993, Pet Shop Boys released their cover of “Go West.” They kept all the Village People’s lyrics and they kept the dance beat, yet their version has a tinge of melancholy.

The duo’s Chris Lowe explained “When the Village People sang about a gay utopia it seemed for real, but looking back in hindsight it wasn’t the utopia they all thought it would be.”

Tunes du Jour readers – join me as we go back in time and look at the evolution of a gay dance classic.

Disco music was born in the early seventies in black, Hispanic and gay clubs. As explained in The Queer Encyclopedia of Music, Dance and Musical Theater, “Perhaps no other popular art form is more closely identified with gay culture than disco and dance music. Gay men in particular adopted the intense, loud, thumping 4/4 beat of the dance music predominantly at the bars and discos that were among the few places where they could openly express their sexual identities in the 1970s and 1980s. As the musical backdrop for generations of gay men who came of age is such venues, dance music became inextricably connected with the gay experience.”

Disco really hit the mainstream in 1977 with the release of the film Saturday Night Fever, based on a magazine article. The film’s soundtrack album became the biggest-selling album of all time in the United States, a record it held until Michael Jackson’s Thriller surpassed it.

As disco became a major commercial force, many rockers, including The Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart and Kiss, turned to the genre to score some of the biggest hits of their careers.

In June of 1978, the Village People entered the pop top 40 with their first crossover hit, “Macho Man.” Hard as it may be to believe, most people at that time had no idea they were gay, despite the costumes and despite song titles such as “Hot Cop,” “San Francisco,” “Sodom and Gomorrah,” “Key West” and “Fire Island.” Everyone in the whole family enjoyed their second hit, “Y.M.C.A.,” where one can “hang out with all the boys.”

In March of 1979 the group scored their third hit single in under a year – “In the Navy.” The U.S. Navy considered using it as a recruitment theme. Said a Navy spokesperson, “The words are very positive. They talk about adventure and technology. My kids love it.”

During the Seventies San Francisco remained a popular destination for gays. A report by Alfred Kinsey in the early 1970s found: “San Francisco is generally considered the best city in the U.S. for homosexuals. It was partly due to the city’s ‘tradition of tolerance.’ Another factor was the city’s size and geography, as it is smaller and less residentially dispersed than New York or Los Angeles, which made it “more conductive to a tightly knit homosexual community.”

In March of 1978 the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed “the most stringent gay rights laws in the country.” Elsewhere in the U.S., the few existing gay rights laws were rapidly being repealed.

In June of 1978 San Francisco’s Gay Freedom Day Parade drew approximately 350,000 marchers.

On May 21, 1979, Dan White, the assassin who killed gay rights leader Harvey Milk as well as San Francisco’s mayor, was sentenced to only seven years and eight months in prison. The verdict led to massive riots in that city in which demonstrators burned a dozen police cars and more than 160 people, including 50 policemen, were injured. This happened just days after the Village People released their follow-up to “In the Navy,” “Go West.” Suddenly, San Francisco didn’t seem as peaceful and idyllic as it does in that song.

A few weeks later, a disc jockey from a Chicago rock radio station hosted an anti-disco demonstration at Comiskey Park between two baseball games in a double-header. Tens of thousands of people brought disco records to be set ablaze in center field while the crowd chanted “disco sucks.” I’d posit that this was in effect an anti-gay anti-black demonstration by white heterosexual rock fans.

Authors Andrew Edelstein and Kevin McDonough agree. In their book The Seventies they wrote “If you were a white, heterosexual teenage male who preferred to wear jeans and a t-shirt and sit passively at a stadium-size rock concert, then disco could be an especially threatening experience.”
After the Comiskey Park demonstration, disco quickly went back underground and was heard primarily in gay clubs. It soon came to be called house music and hi-nrg.

It should be noted that while rock fans tried to kill disco in the U.S., it stayed popular in the U.K., Europe, and elsewhere in the world.

The 1980s brought about the rise of the so-called Moral Majority in the United States. Not coincidentally, it also brought the scourge that came to be known as AIDS, which initially hit the gay population hardest. Homophobia contributed to a delayed response by the government.

Ten years into the AIDS epidemic there was still no sign of an effective treatment or cure.

In 1992 the British duo Pet Shop Boys were invited to perform at an AIDS fundraiser. Chris Lowe came up with the idea to do the Village People’s “Go West.” He played the record for his singing partner, Neil Tennant, who called it “ghastly” and “awful.” He got more into it when he thought about what he and his partner could bring to it, including the addition of “a big choir of butch men.”

A year later, the Boys released their studio recording of the song, complete with the big choir of butch men. In the context of the AIDS pandemic and the devastation it caused, particularly to the gay population, the song “Go West” takes on a different meaning than it did in 1979. As the website Shmoop puts it, “The sunny utopia the Village People had once sung of was literally full of sick and dying people; hospital beds in San Francisco were full of dying patients and there seemed to be no end in sight.”

The spread of AIDS led to a rise in gay activism, which is acknowledged in a verse the Pet Shop Boys added to their version: “There, where the air is free, we’ll be what we want to be / Now, if we take a stand, we’ll find our promised land.”

Of this record, Wayne Studer, in his book Rock on the Wild Side, a collection of songs by or about gay males, wrote “As the Boys do it, ‘Go West’ becomes an eerily uplifting disco dirge, both happy and sad at the same time. Extraordinary.”

Both the Village People’s and Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West” failed to cross over to the Top 40 of the U.S. pop charts; however, both were hits in the dance clubs, with the Pet Shop Boys version going to #1 on the U.S. Dance Club chart. The Pet Shop Boys version did make the top ten pop charts in the U.K., Germany, France, Austria, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Norway, Ireland, Italy, Japan and Australia.

It was around this time that Neil Tennant, the duo’s usual vocalist and lyricist, came out, to the surprise of nobody.

“Go West” was the second single released from the group’s fifth album, Very, an album that is included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. The opening line of the book’s write-up is “Though the Pet Shop Boys had always been really gay, Very was their first really, really gay album – and their first U.K. number 1.”

Very produced four top ten club hits in the U.S., including two #1’s – “Go West” and “Can You Forgive Her?”

In 2008 Australian web-site SameSame polled their listeners to find the “gayest songs of all-time.” Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West” came in at #6. The Village People’s “In the Navy” was #18, their “Macho Man” was #16, and their “Y.M.C.A.” was named the second gayest song of all-time, kept from the top spot by ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.”

Pet Shop Boys’ album Very made Out magazine’s list of the Gayest Albums of All-Time. It also made British music magazine Q’s list of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever. It has sold over five million copies worldwide.

Where has “gay music” come since the release of Very? Here are two interesting facts: the very first openly gay artist to have a #1 album in the U.S. was Adam Lambert, and that happened just two years ago. One year earlier, a song went to #1 on the U.S. pop charts and stayed there for six weeks – a song that explicitly called on gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders to love who they are, ‘cause baby we were born this way.

As for the key players in my story, Pet Shop Boys have sold over 50 million records worldwide, had twenty-two top ten hits in the U.K. thus far, and won Outstanding Contribution to Music at the 2009 BRIT Awards, England’s equivalent to the Grammys. Their most recent album, 2013’s Electric, hit #3 on the UK album chart. It included the single “Vocal,” a top three club hit stateside.

The Village People still tour with three of their original members. They have sold over 100 million records.

Despite the efforts of some folks, disco, while suffering some setbacks, didn’t die. As a matter of fact, one of last year’s most popular hits was Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky,” a disco-influenced record featuring guitar work by Nile Rodgers of the seventies disco band Chic.

Similarly, despite the efforts of some folks, the LGBT populations, while suffering some setbacks, continues to make great strides toward equality and respect.

Should you attend this Sunday’s Gay Pride Parade in West Hollywood, or any Gay Pride Parade this season, you will hear coming from many floats disco and house music, for that is the soundtrack of our movement.

I wish all my readers a very happy Pride. Dance!

Ringo + Curtis 004

Keeping The Music Of Curtis Mayfield Alive

Ringo + Curtis 004
In my role as the Vice President of Licensing at Warner Music Group I oversaw the licensing of “samples.” A sample is when a newer song uses a portion of an existing recording. A prominent example is Puff Daddy’s sample of The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” in his “I’ll Be Missing You.”

One of the most popular catalogues for sample licensing is that of Curtis Mayfield. Elements of his records have been used by many well-known and respected rap acts, including Kanye West and Beastie Boys. I’d run the requests by Curtis’ son Kirk, who was always a pleasure to work with.

Many complain of hip hop’s dependence on samples, and while often times samples are used in a lazy and uninspired way, there are many examples where the samples complement the new song perfectly. It can also be argued that samples keep the music of great acts of the past alive and introduce this music to younger generations. Where else might a teenager hear Curtis Mayfield or James Brown other than via a new Kanye jam?

Today, the third day of Black Music Month, we celebrate the birthday of the late, great Curtis Mayfield with some of the classics he had a hand in – as a solo artist, as a member of The Impressions, as a writer/producer, or via a sample. Click here for the playlist.

LGBT Pride And Black Music Month

June is LGBT Pride Month. June is Black Music Month. June is Audiobook Month. June is busting out all over.

For eleven months out of the year I stay in the closet and listen to Mantovani while reading actual books, but in June I am Marvin with a capital Gay.

Tunes du Jour will celebrate LGBT Pride and Black Music all month long (you’re on your own for Audiobooks). Here is a sampler to kick off the celebrations.

<iframe src=”https://embed.spotify.com/?uri=spotify:user:tunesdujour:playlist:7k4gfohaIt1IeiCz0SswPC” width=”300″ height=”380″ frameborder=”0″ allowtransparency=”true”></iframe>