12/11/2011

Paris Nights/New York Mornings


The juxtaposition of places has been a common literary device – A Tale of Two Cities, Down and Out in Paris and London, From Larkrise to Candleford. Sometimes it is for comparison, sometimes for contrast, sometimes to emphasise a distance . The same technique is seen in songs –seen already in a previous column  with  Kalamazoo to Timbuktu , from one unlikely sounding place to another. Actually it is perhaps more commonly seen by contrasting two different parts of the same town,  usually to inject a bit of social drama into a relationship  Hence,  Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl (‘looking for a downtown guy’)or Randy Edelman’s  Uptown Uptempo Woman, ('downtown, downbeat guy'). Or the Pet Shop Boys’ West End Girls (‘and East End boys’). It usually seems to be this way round in pop mythology – downtown guy/posh woman. That notion even turns up in musical dreams, as in Mungo Jerry’s Baby Jump –“I dreamt that you were Lady Chatterley and I was the gamekeeper”

However, on occasion the listener can gain a whole new perspective on a place when it is taken out of its usual context and juxtaposed with somewhere else. A good  example here is New York’s Greenwich Village. The district is steeped in artistic and musical history of a specific time period, to the extent that you can feel you are walking round a living museum . I am not sure that there is an equivalent area in London – the best comparison might be Liverpool, where you can still do tours round the Cavern and other high-spots from the early 60’s and hear anecdotes about what Tony Jackson said to Chris Curtis outside the Iron Door club in 1963. Likewise, you could take, as I did recently, a Rock Junket tour round Greenwich Village and find out where Rambling Jack Elliott stayed  (Room 312 in the Washington Square Hotel) or where John Sebastian and the Lovin’ Spoonful rehearsed and played (The Nite Owl Club, now  Bleecker Bob's record shop). Far be it  from me to sound like a  train-spotter -  but the photo below shows the same manhole cover that Fred Neil is standing by on the cover of his 1965 album, Bleecker  and MacDougal.


Many of the songs about Greenwich Village come from the same era as its musical heyday. Apart from Fred Neil’s album just mentioned – one of the first electric folk rock offerings – there is, of course, Simon and Garfunkel’s Bleecker Street off the Wednesday Morning 3am album, though written earlier by Paul Simon: in the Sound of Silence mood, it remains evocative of a particular time and place. The same street turned up years later and wrapped in mythology in the Waterboys’  Bleecker Street-   “Life is sexy, life is sweet, in Manhattan's ninety-six degree heat, Just pounding tar to my favourite beat, My down home one and only Bleecker Street “.  Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood did a rather belated (1969) sneer at the Village  scene in their Greenwich Village Folk Song Salesman song.

It is easy, then, to look at Greenwich Village solely in its own context and history and to walk round it as if you were in two time dimensions at once. The photo above is the same view near the corner of Jones Street and  West 4th Street  as on the cover of The Freewheeling Bob Dylan album,  except Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo aren’t  walking along. The song here, however – Paris Nights and New York Mornings by Corinne Bailey Rae from 2010 -  takes Greenwich Village out of its customary place and time and deposits it in contemporary Paris. This works on two levels. Lyrically, the song,  about 2 lovers meeting in two cities, switches between Bleecker Street and Paris to emphasise the similarities of the bohemian history, the  cafes and boutiques  and the same feel in walking the streets. At the end of the song video posted below, she gets into a New York cab on a Paris boulevard.

However, Corinne Bailey Rae’s own vocal style helps too. She is capable of creating the same kind of sunny, laid back, retro feel you can get from Sarah Cracknell and St Etienne, the sound of an open -  top sports car driving past a corn field on a summer afternoon. (She is showcased better, I feel, in a smaller setting rather than a large venue and the second link given below gives an alternate version of a style she excels at.) Musically, it is a sound – from a British singer from Leeds - that somehow provides a neat link between the two places.


Sometimes, you can get a feel of a place by looking at the past, for a place’s history can define it. Sometimes, however, you can see what is close at hand by turning in a different direction. When I first went to Greenwich Village it immediately struck me that it seemed more like Europe than New York in some ways - maybe Bloomsbury  in London but certainly Paris. So as you walk round there you can look backwards and see and hear the ghosts of the past – Phil Ochs playing at the Bitter End or Jimi Hendrix at the Electric Lady Studios.  Or you can look sideways and get a glimpse of Paris past or present. In fact, you don’t have to look very far – the start of the Rock Junket tour I went on commenced at Washington Square Arch, itself modelled after the Arc de Triomphe. The past is a foreign country in more ways than one, perhaps.

37 comments:

  1. Ooooh, what DID Tony Jackson say to Chris Curtis outside the Iron Door club in 1963????

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  2. Geoff, what is a trainspotter - from the context I think it means a music dork/geek, is that correct?? I don't think we have trainspotters in the U.S.

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  3. I love that you can still visit that manhole cover in the Village from that album cover!

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  4. I know that corner where you took that photo, Geoff - it's Jones St and West 4th:)

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  5. Check out our little version of Bleecker Street, man - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o27nm3r5YYY

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  6. Ha ha, Martha, in England trainspotters are usually 30 - 40 year old men who still live with their mothers. Gathering on station platforms in all weathers and wearing old anoraks and bobbly hats, they note the make, model and characteristics of each train that passes. Thus 'trainspotter' has come to mean any obsessed character who insists on talking about nothing but their chosen specialist subject. It is now used to apply to music knowledge too. A person who can sucessfully identify obscure music a radio is playing, for example, in the very early chords. A hardcore trainspotter can take it a step further and identify the source of obscure samples of music.
    Eg:
    Trainspotter: "Thats track B off of the first pressing of So and So record"
    Friend: "You're such a trainspotter."

    With all warmth and affection intended, Geoff is the very best kind of trainspotter, in the musical knowledge context.

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  7. i still reckon it was room 310. at the Earl Hotel on the corner of Washington Square. same building as now, different name. it's fancy now. it was a fairly crummy hotel back then. we gave the cockroaches their own names. anyway my room was on the third floor. i think it was 310 because Pete La Farge was in room 312, he's an old rodeo buddy of mine. i don’t really like New York though. it’s what made me want to be a cowboy in the first place, the wide-open spaces.

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  8. Oops, actually, you already told us it was Jones and W4th! i got excited when I recognized my neighborhood!

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  9. Here's the Dylan album cover Geoff mentioned, which depicts that corner of w4th.... http://gothamist.com/attachments/arts_jen/2006_04_arts_freewheelin.jpg

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  10. Love that moment at the end of the video when she gets into a NYC cab in Paris:) Brilliant!

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  11. And the past is present even in that cab moment - because the cab she jumps into is an old checker taxi that was used from 1907 onward. And you know what else? They came from France! A guy called Harry Allen imported 65 cars from France, ro replace the horsedrawn cabs in New York City. It was the first New York Taxicab Company. They were green so he painted them yellow. He had 700 by 1908. They looked like this:

    http://media.mlive.com/kzgazette/entertainment/photo/checker-cab-bd1cd3bf942102a1.jpg

    (which is the same as the one in the video).

    They used them through the 1960s and 1970s. But in the 1980s and 1990s, these kind of cabs were phased out and replaced by the Ford Crown Victoria, which look like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USACab.JPG

    So that end of the music video was set some time before the 1980s:)

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  12. She's one of the best singers in the world. Very soulful. Thanks Geoff!

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  13. Hey there, here's our song Bleecker Street (The Waterboys) in case you'd like to hear it! -
    http://soundcloud.com/mickpuck/bleecker-street/
    Otherwise it's kinda hard to find online!

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  14. I love Corinne Bailey Rae - she writes such romantic lyrics in a totally real non-cheesy way. Just awesomeness.

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  15. I hadn't heard this song before, but I loved it from the first note from the first time I heard it. It so fresh but it has almost a retro feel like it's from the early 70s. It feels like I've known this song all my life. It's so beautiful.

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  16. Geoff, if you haven't read it, you would like Anatole Broyard's Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir. It opens: "I think there's a great nostalgia for life in New York City, especially in Greenwich Village in the period just after World War II. The Village, like New York City itself, had an immense, beckoning sweetness. It was charming, shabby, intimate, accessible, almost like a street fair. We lived in the bars and on the benches of Washington Square. We shared the adventure of trying to be, starting to be, writers or painters."

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  17. I love Greenwich Village. And Washington Square Park’s famous arch, which is the most prominent work of art in the entire Village, was built to honor the 100th anniversary of the inauguration of George Washington, but was clearly inspired by the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing both in my life, and the one major difference is that Napoleon insisted that the names of all the places he conquered were carved into the sides of his arch, whereas Washington was both a more humble man and quite dead by the time his arch was built. Nevertheless, it’s an incredibly beautiful piece of architecture and it makes me really happy that New York has its own little slice of Paris right in the Village.....

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  18. Here's the Greenwich Village Folk Song Salesman - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW_00xvvM74

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  19. I dont know the answer to that, Desiree, but it was probably unprintable! (By all accounts, they didnt get on).
    That is fascinating, Marie-it adds another weird dimension to it, shifting in time as well as space.

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  20. Hey-is the JE above Ramblin Jack Elliott himself?! If so, many thanks for writing in and putting the room number straight!
    Thanks too to Mike Scott for the Waterboys link -I hadnt been able to find it online

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  21. Here's Mungo Jerry’s Baby Jump - amazing song.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR2EcetnorQ

    Check out the sideburns:)

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  22. Thank you for this fascinating blog, Geoff. I think the sense of nostalgia for the past is important again here - like the use of the checker cab from an earlier New York that Marie pointed out. Because the Bohemian purists have surely been chased away from Greenwich Village now, chased away from the very location they made nouveau-hip in the first place. As usual, when a certain neighbourhood becomes well-known and cool due to its eclectic quirks, this is exactly when it has passed its peak as a Bohemian enclave. Rented start rising to the point where artists can no longer afford residing there, gentrification became more pervasive forcing out the lower to middle-income families that once populated the community, and local businesses were increasing substituted by nationally known chains. In other words, the neighbourhood became the latest convert to the bland, sameness found in “Everywhere, America.” Needless to say, this is not the outcome that those living a Bohemian lifestyle were intending when they first moved into a down-trodden neighbourhood in New York City. But, as economic developers, urban planners, tourism bureaus, art councils, local government, and the chamber of commerce jumped on the creative class bandwagon, this conversion from Bohemian to trendy to gentrified definitely took place. Greenwich Village is Paris no more. Someone still needs to figure out: how can enclaves for artists and other members of the creative class be nurtured without killing the goose that laid the golden egg?

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  23. Laura, you are right - and in fact, Paris is not really Paris any longer, either! There has been gradual suffocation of working class people within the rigidly-defined boundaries of Paris proper. Higher property values have gradually forced many working people to a north/northeastern section of Paris and into the suburbs. Nowadays then, many neighborhoods in Paris are populated by an ethnically and socio-economically homogenous population, and these neighborhoods lose the character and vitality that once defined them. Certainly, this trend isn’t a uniquely Parisian phenomenon (as you point out, the yuppification of Greenwich Village sticks out as another example, or to a lesser extent, the rapidly unfolding gentrification of Colombia Heights and other neighborhoods in Washington D.C.), but the process in France’s capital is shaped and fueled by a geographical particularity - the périphérique, or circular highway, that surrounds Paris, which effectively provides a wall of separation between Paris and its suburbs. It is a physical barrier that enshrines a very real socioeconomic barrier - the standard of living, housing and education are all significantly lower outside it to the north and to the east. Jobs and transportation are more scarce. Nearly everyone is aware of this phenomenon, so much so that the Sarkozy government has had to acknowledge it in the form of its open-ended call for plans for a Grand Paris to transform the city beyond the périphérique in the next thirty years.

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  24. The Village tour sounds great, Geoff. Next time you're in Paris, there is a great one of Montmartre (up high, overlooking the city, a kind of separate little town). I did it once - and saw that a tour through Montmartre is necessarily a tour of the artists, actors, and entertainers who lived there. This is where the starving artists lived, because rent was cheap and light was plentiful -- no indoor heating, and little indoor plumbing, but large south-facing windows. Here, for example, one can visit Pablo Picasso's Parisian house, where he painted the famous Les Demoiselles D'Avignon, the first cubist painting. You can also visit a certain inn, le Lapin Agile, where many of these artists spent their evenings. The name of the inn derives its name from the shop sign depicting a rabbit, painted in 1893 by an artist named Gill: le lapin à Gill ("Gill's Rabbit") quickly morphed into le lapin agile ("The Agile Rabbit"), which I'm certainly was hilariously funny for the regular clientele, who all knew Gill. Montmartre abounds with this kind of story. There were so many actresses, dancers, and painters who had all left some kind of a legacy or a memory, sometimes with monuments, sometimes without a trace, that only a Parisian could tell you the full story.

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  25. It's strange how the video seems all Paris scenes though, the Corinne Bailey Rae video - it feels like New York is missing from the video somehow.....

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  26. I agree with Tiffanye! They should have stuck to the title of the song and recorded the night scenes in Paris and day scenes in New York!

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  27. I'm a huge Corinne Bailey Rae fan - she also has a huge ability to play cover songs and make them sound fresh and original....

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  28. If you don't know it Geoff, you might like her song “Your Love is Mine,” which completely throws a punch from the past. She recorded this song with the band The New Mastersounds. It has an indie pop feel; however her voice brings home a jazz feeling. Her singing is a complement to a wonderful acoustic guitar sound.

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  29. I love her - I had the opportunity to see her in a small venue before she became big in the States.

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  30. Thanks for helping me gain a new appreciation for Corinne - I used to shudder at the sound of her voice because her debut album was overplayed at the Starbucks where I spent an entire summer studying for an exam. Not her fault really, so thanks for helping me come around to her music :)

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  31. Her second album is really wonderful. Unlike the rather uncomplicated acoustic-pop-leaning sound of her debut, it has more lush production and bleaker lyrics. I'd recommend it to anyone.

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  32. Her music is so great. It has feel-good-clarity-kind-of-vibe, the clarity that is something worthy of all the recklessness and confusion. You know when you wake up and you realize how everything that had happened to you was perfectly meant to happen that way. And of course, nothing beats the moment when you can finally laugh at your own stupidity. That's what her music is like.

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  33. As a piece of trivia (hey, I'm a trainspotter too!), did you know that Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl" wasn't written about his then-wife Christie Brinkley, who famously played the titular character in that song's video...but by another '80s supermodel, Elle Macpherson? Apparently Billy was vacationing in the Caribbean when something happened to that only occurs during rock-star vacations: he ran into Elle, Christie, and a then-unknown model/singer named Whitney Houston, all of whom were staying at the same hotel. Billy actually first dated Elle, not Christie, after that encounter, and Elle was in fact the model who inspired Billy's doo-woppy hit (which was then titled "Uptown Girls," plural). Later, Billy moved on to Christie, switched the song title to be singular, cast Christie in the "Uptown Girl" video, and made her his wife for the next nine years.

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  34. I think Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline" might be another example of the downtown guy / uptown girl kind of song (and I agree this is way more common in music than the other way around) - the song was apparently about Caroline Kennedy!

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  35. The downtown guy / uptown girl thing is so strange though, especially today, when you think about male artists and remember that in the UK at least 60% of contemporary chart pop and rock acts feature former private school pupils. Which has apparently changed even since 1990, when nearly 80% of performers had been educated at state schools. The rise of privately educated performers such as Chris Martin spells the end of working-class music heroes......

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  36. Thanks for the mention of Your Love is Mine, Mick. I hadnt heard it and it is a gorgeous song, with a touch of Minnie Riperton about it..
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vlnuI-CCrg

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  37. Parts of it also reminded me of Betty Wright's 'live' Tonight is The Night

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