One day in the fall of 2010 I listened to online streams of dozens of bands about to play the CMJ music festival in New York, and I kept hearing the same drumbeat over and over: the one from “Be My Baby.”
Historical implications seemed to rise up from the task: When had it been so easy to find the common thread among piles of musicians all over the world in a single day? And as for the common thread, something interesting was happening here: Brooklyn, as we have come to collectively call all American musical culture that prefers not to know where it really comes from, had decided that it was born in a song written by two other people originally from Brooklyn. The song had been recorded nearly fifty years earlier, in 1963, after its writers, Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry, had graduated from college, married, and moved to Lefrak City, a brand-new, middle-class Queens tower-block complex. A long time previously, a different world, different circumstances. But the song has allure, does it not?
Listen to “Be My Baby” again, by the Ronettes, produced by Phil Spector. Hal Blaine, who played drums on the session, has explained that the original idea for the beat had been to hit the snare on the second and fourth beats, like a usual rock and roll song, but that during an early run-through he dropped his stick for the two and only recovered it in time for the four: and so was born bass/bass-bass/SNARE.
The action, then, is all bass drum until the four. Sounds like Latin music; sounds like a variant on the habanera rhythm. Anyway: the rhythm doesn’t articulate each beat in the bar; it leaves one empty, and strikes between two others. That’s what Latin music does. Here is the ghost of the basic Cuban rhythmic unit called the tresillo, which echoes through the Charleston, New Orleans jazz, R&B, early-’60s rock and roll, and reggaeton. It leaves something to the imagination. It’s gentle and then violent; it glides you and then shakes you, or rolls you and then rocks you. (The other thing that “Be My Baby” did was to put three loud eighth notes on the four to close out every four bars. Rat-tat-tat!) It has something, in a secondhand or known-in-the-bones way, to do with Cuba, which in the early ’60s was a very intriguing place, a shadow world—a fire-alarm signifier, a beamer of meaning for Americans and those in the rest of the new world.
It is also a beat that doesn’t tell you how you will get to where you’re going to go. It just knows that you will get there. It is supremely confident. It is making you write a check without looking at your balance.
Americans and their idolators co-opted and refashioned Afro-Cuban rhythms over and over. The tresillo rhythm is indirectly present in “Be My Baby.” It lies more clearly inside Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana” and Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long” and George McCrae’s “Rock Your Baby”; the Bo Diddley beat, cousin to it, is in the Miracles’ “Mickey’s Monkey” and the Clash’s “Hateful” and of course a hundred Bo Diddley songs; the “Be My Baby” rhythm itself animated the Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey” in 1985 and then, a quarter century later, Wavves’ “When Will You Come” and Bat for Lashes’s “What’s a Girl to Do?” and lots of others. (The one-man, small-scale singing-songwriting-recording operation DM Stith released a version of “Be My Baby” in 2009 without any drums—a great useless idea.)
* * *
The tresillo is general, but the “Be My Baby” beat, like the Bo Diddley beat, was specific. It had its day and then, for a while, that day was gone. Drummers and songwriters forswore it surely because it intimated a particular kind of pre–Tonkin Gulf Resolution dance, one with drama and desire and possibility: the opposite of disillusionment. Soon afterward, the act of playing anything like it would seem naïve and socially or philosophically backward.
But then what came after it—hippieness—became itself naïve, and what can you do with these mutually destructive cycles but finally go with whatever seems to contain musical viability, whatever is built to last, whatever really knows where it’s going?
The beat remains to hand. It never got lost. We love originality when we can have it, but we can’t have it very often. We also love—nearly as much—that which sounds out of style but stays with us because it sounds inevitable, or touching, or because it solved a problem at a certain point. “Be My Baby” remains an after-echo of something in the family of American music that is forever unsquare because it sees all and presumes to know nothing. The listener feels its kill rate, senses the presence of a rhythmic virus that burned through centuries and continents and ultimately became authoritative. You can’t condescend to a tresillo. It was there before you got here and will be there when you leave.
But there is also the atmosphere of “Be My Baby,” understood as philosophy and practice and habitat. There is a handclap strengthening that fourth beat—you can hardly hear it under the force of the snare drum, but it’s there, implying that this is a street song. There is the amount of reverb and the possible reasons the reverb was desirable. (This was during the middle of the golden age of the American middle class: reverb was a signal of all that democratic bounty.) There is its mixed metaphor of emotional overkill: the low reeds of big-band music, the strummed acoustic guitar and castanets of flamenco. There is the dry petulance and hard New Yorky accent (on phrases like “never let” and “turn their heads”) of Ronnie Spector, her voice opening up into a swinging-door vibrato at the end of lines. There is her line “I’ll make you so proud of me,” princessy hokum, a girl practicing a speech in her mirror. It’s self-conscious 1963, a calculation of what will gain traction at a certain place and a certain time.
* * *
Imagine picking up a telephone and hearing the distant past: the feeling of the time, the true tenor of things in the air, the striving or modesty or shame of it. You can’t do it by listening to “Be My Baby” per se: there you’re listening to a product, something complete within itself, well girded, made to be sold, conceived to be perfect.
But you can do it by hearing particular things in and around the distant past.
You can hear it in small imperfections within “Be My Baby” or things that couldn’t be rehearsed and faked: Ronnie Spector’s accent, the throbbing murk of strings and reeds and background vocals. You can hear it by trying to listen to the drums alone, or one voice alone, imagining yourself at a single fixed point in the studio or the recording space.
This has become easier to do in individuated studio tracks, available on websites here and there—of, say, John Bonham playing drums in the studio while listening to the rest of the track on his headphones (all you can hear is the fantastic whomp of his kit and the tinkle of the rest of the music leaking through his cans) or Michael Jackson singing “Beat It” or Kurt Cobain singing “Territorial Pissings” with the sounds of breathing and of sudden body motions that didn’t make it into the record.
You can hear it in the sonic atmosphere, generated through the recording process: here was a person, in such a place, at such a time, rendered by technology that soon may have become laughable. You are hearing the real thing from a real time. You have an idea of what the time was like, because of your own memory, or because you have read or seen historical documents. But this is something different. There is an element of spying going on here: overhearing rather than hearing. This is what we’re after when we play (on the drums, or “play” as listeners) the “Be My Baby” beat fifty years later. We want to overhear it. To overhear completely is to possess. We can’t possess “Be My Baby” all the way. So when we hear it we can’t condescend to it, and when we play it we can only imply it.
* * *
The Italian tenor Beniamino Gigli, one of the most popular opera singers of the first half of the twentieth century, became closely identified with the song “Mi Par d’Udir Ancora”—which was an Italianized version of “Je Crois Entendre Encore,” or “I Still Believe I Hear,” an aria from Bizet’s opera Les Pecheurs de Perles. He recorded it several times. The 1925 version is to me, for whatever reasons—the focus of sound and performance, and the suspended, uncracking, feminine dream state of his high tenor, even at his climax of “divin souvenir”—preferable. In the role of Nadir, a Ceylonese fisherman, he is singing of his love for a priestess he once saw in the city of Kandy. The Italian version adjusts the words a bit for sound value, but the original French libretto says:
I believe I hear again
hidden beneath the palm trees
her voice, tender and sonorous.
Nadir is carried away. “Mad intoxication,” he sings. “Sweet dream.”
This was, at the time, about as well recorded as recordings get. But there is a mystery and modesty about the performance: despite the best sonic fidelity possible at the time, something about the past is being hidden from us, just as something is being hidden from Nadir. He can’t possess the voice of the priestess; we can’t possess the song. That recording embodies more than we can imagine, and we can’t know it fully. The plainness of the high strings behind Gigli’s vocal melody. The amazing slow tempo of it, from a time when people knew slowness—the almost nontempo of it. You can’t hear it and say in any definitive way, oh yes, how 1925. It won’t let you.
* * *
The sound of the drums, from “Be My Baby” onward, is the strongest signifier of time and memory in pop. It explains the common practices for body motion at a certain point in time; it also often dictates how the rest of the music is to be laid out, at the time of creation, and how it is to be heard later on. Listen to the drums, played by Jimmy Carl Black, on the Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out! and particularly in “Any Way the Wind Blows.” They sound far, far away. What a sound. Like “Be My Baby” but more imposing and special, like a statue that must only be seen from a proper viewing distance. It sounds like open air; it sounds like summer. Eight-track recording with tube circuitry, 1966. A time when studios generally weren’t subdivided into smaller spaces, when reverb worked as a shortcut to suggest electronic vastness, and a time when many engineers presumably thought all drummers should sound something like classical percussionists in an orchestra—such that you can hear the drum set in full as an instrument meant to be struck loudly and enjoyed, not up close as an instrument meant to obliterate you.
Listen to the enormous drums on Duran Duran’s Rio, from 1982, especially “My Own Way.” You listen and think, well, yes, this is what this group sounded like all the time. But it hadn’t a year earlier. Here, every snare hit by Roger Taylor is supersized, a heavy stone splash that should logically displace other sound in its after-report but mysteriously doesn’t. This was the miracle of the technologies called triggering and gating. Every snare hit is the same. (On the chorus you hear synthetic drums, which can sound a bit wrong or wanting unless the drummer plays a fill and gets your attention.)
In the logic of this music, large gestures are rewarded. Eighties drum sounds: nothing like them. They were as violently consequential as the invention of reverb or the electric guitar. If you spent a lot of time around them, they stay in your memory. Likely, they changed your hearing. Producers were overcompensating; this was pop’s midlife crisis. The numbingness of the drum sound was its charm and its trick. In our great wisdom now we might see this as a liability: nothing wrong with the sound per se, but over and over, on every beat—we don’t do that anymore. We mix and alternate and mask; we don’t just candidly overdo it. We understand when we hear a record like “My Own Way” that pop had not assumed the size, in an almost physical sense, that its producers and musicians had felt was its destiny; the music, if we can anthropomorphize (and we can and do), was dying to grow bigger, to catch up in sound what it was achieving in dollars. There is such preening and posturing in it. When we hear it we may remember other preenings and posturings—in the way we moved and talked, in our clothes, in our attitudes. That drum sound is both a cause and effect of the way many people were expressing themselves at the time.
And it was trying to address a problem: How domineering can one aspect of the music grow without alienating the rest of it? This is often how music evolves—through innovations that can’t be sustained, overreaches that are inevitably revoked. Another of them was the direct-to-amplifier double-bass sound in jazz in the 1970s. Amplifying the bass directly through a pickup, rather than capturing its natural resonance with a microphone at close range, was for a while a bassist’s strategy for keeping up with the greater amplification of everything else. (The sound is primarily associated with Ron Carter, but can be heard even in recordings by more august, pre-1960s musicians: Ray Brown has it on Bill Evans’s Quintessence.) But listening to these records now, with their rubbery, metallic bass sound—the sensitized strings yield a kind of tap every time a note is sounded—is for some, myself anyway, almost impossible, an irritant of the greatest kind, unless as an exercise in temporal research: a desire to hear the way a certain kind of complex and patient American music was rendered in, say, 1975. The trebly tapping noise seems to vitiate the basic unifying authority of the double bass. It is narrow-souled, the sound of efficiency. Shortly after that period, the pendulum swung the other way, and the sound of the acoustic bass was rendered with almost exaggerated acoustic depth.
* * *
Many of us listen through our own memories—not a historical memory, attaching a piece of music to its own time, but a personal memory, attaching it to ours. Sometimes the maintenance of the memory becomes the important thing: we listen, or we don’t, according to what we think the memory wants. In the 1980s, my uncle offered to take my grandmother, then living in South London, to hear a performance of the Bach cello suites. She turned down the offer, explaining that she’d seen Pablo Casals perform them, and didn’t want another performance to replace the one by Casals in her head.
I suppose I understand this point of view, though I don’t quite believe in it. I don’t think we have a master tape in our consciousness—the way someone played something at a certain time and place—which becomes the memory’s one and only source for a given song. I also don’t think that it can be taped over by something else and irretrievably lost. Hers sounds like the refusal of someone whose listening life occurred between the 1940s and 1980s. (Before magnetic tape, you couldn’t undo a recording. Nor could you after it went away: the commercially produced CD can’t be erased and rewritten; the Internet promises to retain most things forever.) Or maybe she simply thought she couldn’t hear anyone play the suites better than Casals and figured she’d be bored—but of course the cello suites, as much as any other pieces of music and more than most, blossom in the mind through hearing successive interpretations. (She would have known that.)
So what would have been her reason for turning down the invitation that way? My best guess is this: she heard Casals; she inhabited the sound of his instrument, and no doubt she remembered where she sat in relation to the instrument; the sound created memory; she lived in the memory, as one lives in a house; she didn’t want a new house.
* * *
Really, there are two ways we listen through memory—we consult our experience of ourselves, if the music accompanied important personal events or seemed to describe and act upon us directly; or we consult our experience of the music, through our memory of putting ourselves, in one imagined way or another, into the picture of its recording. No matter how much secondhand context we may absorb about a piece of recorded music, we often attach ourselves to it by placing ourselves somehow within it. Sometimes a physical place in that picture seems impossible or superhuman; this can increase our happiness. Imagine where you’d be in the sound pictures of these records:
• Elgar’s “Enigma Variations,” played by the London Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Sir Adrian Boult in 1970 (you’d need dozens of ears, and to be positioned above various instrumental sections at once).
• Milton Nascimento’s Clube da Esquina, from 1972 (you’d need to be very close to a guitar in a dry-sounding space, and ten feet from Nascimento’s voice down an echoing passageway).
• Kanye West’s The College Dropout, from 2004 (impossible: this place does not exist).
In the most extreme cases the human has no place in the picture of a song. We are forced to hear as an imaginary anyone, a particle. We can’t possess it or create a spatial memory for it. We’re listening to a fabrication, a work of electronics and postproduction, made with some kind of attempt—conscious or not, but how could it be unconscious?—to cultivate a bunch of sounds toward the spirit of the time. Your relationship to the song is, perhaps, less with the sound than with that spirit of that time. But still you might remember how you inhabited the spirit of the time, as if it were a physical place.
What are the recordings in which it is easiest to imagine yourself in the picture? Probably bootlegs, field recordings, or one-microphone sessions, of which few enter the stream of mass consumption, like Alan Lomax’s recordings for Folkways or Chris Strachwitz’s for Arhoolie. As a kid I heard Big Joe Williams’s Tough Times; and though it was recorded twenty years before I heard it, I placed myself within it. The music flowed through one point in space and time. That point is 1960, Big Joe Williams’s living room in Los Gatos, California, and a microphone set at an equidistant point about two feet from his voice and his nine-string guitar. (Surely this example comes to mind because I have not forgotten the Arhoolie album-cover photo, which shows him seated, in recording position, with the microphone set up before him.)
It is a record with lots of imperfections and vulnerabilities. I hear Tough Times as a recording from 1960, and can possess it through my own memory even though I was not there—because it sounds like something hearable by a human being at that time, in that room. The slight out-of-tuneness of some of Williams’s strings makes it more so.
THE RONETTES, “Be My Baby,” 1963
BARRY MANILOW, “Copacabana,” 1978
LIONEL RICHIE, “All Night Long,” 1983
GEORGE MCCRAE, “Rock Your Baby,” 1974
THE MIRACLES, “Mickey’s Monkey,” 1963
THE CLASH, “Hateful,” 1979
THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN, “Just Like Honey,” 1985
WAVVES, “When Will You Come,” 2010
BAT FOR LASHES, “What’s a Girl to Do?,” 2006
DM STITH, “Be My Baby,” 2009
BENIAMINO GIGLI, “Mi Par d’Udir Ancora,” 1925
MOTHERS OF INVENTION, Freak Out!, 1966
DURAN DURAN, “My Own Way,” from Rio, 1982
BILL EVANS, Quintessence, 1976
EDWARD ELGAR, “Enigma Variations,” London Symphony Orchestra, Sir Adrian Boult, 1970
MILTON NASCIMENTO, Clube da Esquina, 1972
KANYE WEST, The College Dropout, 2004
BIG JOE WILLIAMS, Tough Times, 1960