Two Tunes: A Penny for Your Thoughts
My problems with ideational entanglement are yielding to patient wiggles of threads. I found one thread from the tangled lump of essay I told you about, the essay from hell, and it turned out to be about the history of the “silent reading test” black box—the Kansas Silent Reading Test, the IBM 805 machine, and the NAEP hijack. The frozen tundra in the evolution of the reading comprehension test was buried in the pileup draft “Scaling the Depths.” In it I trace the historical development of effective ways to measure earthquakes and use it to illuminate the stagnation of the multiple-choice test in American history.
So I thought I’d offer you a couple more of my cover songs in the meantime while I wiggle some more threads and rewrite “Scaling the Depths.” Here are two songs I wore out albums listening to as a young kid. It’s interesting that both of them went undervalued at the time of production, one by the critics, one by the writer. Another song in this category is “Monday, Monday.” The Mamas and the Papas almost didn’t record it. I can’t remember which one didn’t like it, but I think it was Michelle Phillips.
More later!
Heart of Saturday Night (Tom Waits)
“In a contemporary review for The Village Voice, Janet Maslin regarded the songs as tawdry affectations of ‘a boozy vertigo’ marred by Waits' vague lyrics and ill-advised puns on an album that is “too self-consciously limited in mood.’ It demands to be listened to after hours", Maslin wrote, "when that cloud of self-pitying gloom has descended and the vino is close at hand.”
In My Life (Lennon and McCartney)
“In a 1980 interview, Lennon referred to this song as his "first real major piece of work" because it was the first time he had written about his own life.[4] According to Lennon, the song's origins can be traced to English journalist Kenneth Allsop's remark that Lennon should write songs about his childhood.[5] Afterwards, Lennon wrote a song in the form of a long poem reminiscing on those years. The original lyrics were based on a bus route he used to take in Liverpool, naming various sites seen along the way, including Penny Lane and Strawberry Field.[6][7]
Lennon later thought the original lyrics were "ridiculous", calling it "the most boring sort of 'What I Did on My Holidays Bus Trip' song". He reworked the words and replaced the specific memories with a generalised meditation on his past.[7] Few lines of the original version remained in the finished song.[6]According to Lennon's friend and biographer Peter Shotton, the lines "Some [friends] are dead and some are living/In my life I've loved them all" referred to himself and Stuart Sutcliffe (who died in 1962)