We Interrupt This Broadcast

Dion, "In And Out Of The Shadows" - So yesterday, finding myself with an embarassment of trade credit after finally offloading all my laserdiscs, I'm lost in one of those glorious drifts through Amoeba's racks when I see it: Dion's Born To Be With You. Right upfront, I have to admit that my enthusiasm for this album is probably only outstripped by my enthusiasm for its pedigree; for those of you who don't know, Born To Be With You is the (in)famous 1975 collaboration between Dion and Phil Spector which in many ways stands today as the most interesting thing either man ever did. By 1975, Dion had been out of the limelight for a long while; having kicked the junk and made the transition from doo-wop crooner to sensitive folkie, he'd done about as well commercially as you'd probably expect, and was starving for something big to come along. Of course, "big" is Phil Spector's raison d'etre; the unmistakable grandeur of Spector's wall-of-sound production jobs was one of the crucial first steps in pop music's bid for critical acclaim. But by 1975, Spector wasn't exactly striding about like a colossus himself; as the sixties wore down, he'd been making more extravagant demands from an industry increasingly disinterested in anything he he had to push. Fortunately, the successes of the Spector-produced debut solo albums by John Lennon and George Harrison (the latter of which is really motherfucking great) encouraged Warner Brothers to offer him a contract allowing him (a) full creative control, and (b) his choice of producing any artist on the Warner label. Spector went with Dion, which in 2005 terms would be like Timbaland choosing to work with Bobby Brown, and the two set off to work on Born To Be With You.

It's fair, then, to say that hopes were pretty high for Born To Be With You to be something of a return to form for both Dion and Spector, a glorious Marvel-vs-DC of two titans whose towering peaks unfortunately got sall the confusion that came with Beatlemania. As you can probably guess, the album sold about four copies; apparently fans weren't ready for Dion giving up limp-wristed anti-war platitudes for legitimate introspective soul-searching songs about God and heroin addiction, while Spector's production was positively restrained in comparison to most of his other work (hell, "Do You Remember Rock 'N Roll Radio?" sounds closer to true wall-of-sound-ness than most of Born To Be With You). For a little over a quarter of a century, it was actually deleted from the catalogue; even now it's only available on an import two-fer in spite of the fact that this is seriously, seriously one of the better pop albums ever made.

Now, granted, it's tempting to make claims like that since (a) not a lot of people have heard it and therefore you've got a better chance of getting away with it and (b) the people who'd agree with you are people like Pete Townsend and Bobby Gillespie, and it's always satisfying to find yourself in distinguished company. But this morning I went on a walk around my neighborhood with Born To Be With You on my iPod and no, this is really the kind of album that deserves to be talked about like Pet Sounds (even if you only end up listening to it as often as you do Pet Sounds).

See, I always thought the most fundamentally interesting thing about pop music is that in theory, it's being made for everyone. Sure, more interesting music is almost always being made out on the fringes, but that's hardly surprising when you're making music for a limited slice of the population. Introducing something incredibly sophisticated to the masses, on the other hand - I mean, that's not just harder, that's almost noble by comparison. And Born To Be With You is an undeniably sophisticated album, probably in large part due to all the stuff that led to it being bashed so roundly; Dion's lyrics and performance frequently come close to Neil Young territory (in tone rather than in sound, fortunately), and he seems genuinely unafraid to dig deep or go weird (check out his interpretation of "(He's Got) The Whole World In His Hands"), while Spector's comparative restraint (which is a funny thing to say about an album with something like 10-15 session musicians per track) feels less like a failure on his part than a quiet step aside for the master. It's avant-garde in the way that an album like Nilsson Schmilsson was avant-garde, which is to say "not at all" - it was just a mainstream pop album coming from somewhere else entirely, and it's just too good to let all the weird shit on it get you all het up.

I chose "In And Out Of The Shadows" to represent this album, but really any of the other seven tracks would have been just as suitable. Born To Be With You peaks, I'd argue, with the opening one-two punch of the sprawling eight-minute title track and "Make The Woman Love Me", without question one of the greatest pop songs I've ever heard in my life, but really they're just more extreme versions of this mid-album masterpiece, and that's kind of missing the point. It's far more interesting that the whole album really is just as good as this would make you think, and that somehow nobody noticed. (Click here to buy the Born To Be With You/Streetheart two-for-one CD from Amazon.uk)

The Sharks, "How Could I Live" - By now, most everyone I know is ashamed of their secret ska pasts, mostly because they haven't done like I did and followed it back into reggae, roots, rocksteady, and all the rest of the sites of influence. I guess it's their loss, because sorting through all that stuff is one of the most satisfying musical projects I got goin' on today; it's like a permanently-dawning realization that all those hours I spent with the Slackers and the Toasters and the Selecter back in the day are still paying dividends if they've influenced me to a point where I'll know to blindly pick up something like the UNBELIEVABLE Soul Jazz Studio One Lovers compilation. Of course, it helps for the music to be as awesome as this; falling squarely into line with all the other Jamaican music that'd slip in effortlessly amongst other oldies-radio small-production slow-jam staples, it's hard to imagine people not being victimized by this song, recovering rudie or not. (Click here to buy the Studio One Lovers compilation from Amazon)