Sounds with Simon Tesler: Tribute (Part 1)

Hello, this is Simon Tesler with more great Sounds from the Rock and Soul Archive and a few of the stories behind the songs. Each week I select tracks with a specific theme, and this week the theme is TRIBUTE. Stay with me for 20 fabulous tracks honouring specific people both living and dead or even just great songs. Over the next two hours, we'll hear from Dexys Midnight Runners, Gorillaz, Lady Gaga, Stevie Wonder and many more. But first, Tenacious D and... Tribute. ** Tribute by Tenacious D Isn't that great! Tenacious D - which is of course the actor Jack Black of The School Of Rock and other movies and his longtime buddy Kyle Gass - together with a few of their famous friends, including Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters on drums and Warren Fitzgerald of The Vandals on guitar. And what *is* the best song in the world, according to Tenacious D? Well it's widely assumed to be Stairway To Heaven because of the sonic similarities between that track and Tribute, but actually that's not quite the case. Kyle Gass told the magazine Guitarings, "We had the idea late at night listening to Metallica in Jack's car. He said 'Dude, check this song out, it's the greatest song in the world.' Which is every Metallica song, because they're such an epic band. I said, 'I think *we* should write the best song in the world,' and Jack said 'You can't do that, you can't just write the greatest song in the world! .... But we could write a tribute to it....'" And so they spent months tinkering with the idea and a one-off gag turned into a whole musical project that spawned not just one album but four, as well as a TV series and even a movie, Tenacious D & The Pick Of Destiny, in which the duo go on a quest to find Satan's magical guitar pick that will allow them to become the best rock band in the world. Ahhhh.... OK, two more tributes now to a pair of soul legends. In 1972, for his album St Dominic's Preview, Van Morrison penned a lovely tribute to the inimitable soul singer Jackie Wilson, best know for joyous and uplifting classics like Reet Petite, I Get The Sweetest Feeling and Higher & Higher. Famously, despite it being an incredibly complex song, Morrison and his band recorded the whole thing in just one single take. Ten years later, Dexys Midnight Runners recorded their own version and it was released as the follow-up to their chart-busting Come On Eileen. But Kevin Rowland's Dexys had already released another tribute song of their own two years earlier with their second single, Geno. This honoured the 60s singer Geno Washington, originally an American airman stationed on a US military base in East Anglia who became the frontman for British blues group The RamJam Band. They're not very well known today but were famed in the 60s for their blistering live performances. Rowland told the Guardian, "I saw Geno Washington in 1968 at the Railway Hotel in Harrow. I was 15 years old and out with all the older kids – you had to be 18 to get in – short-haired, cool-looking mods-turning-into-skinhead types. Looking back, it's probably not the best gig I've ever been to, but I didn't have anything to compare it to. I didn't have any intention to be a singer at that point. I just thought you go to school, go to work and that's it. But when he came on swinging a towel, something clicked in me." Released in March 1980 it was Dexys' first No 1 single. But first, Van Morrison and Jackie Wilson Said. ** Jackie Wilson Said by Van Morrison, Geno by Dexys Midnight Runners Tribute songs aren't just for the people who influenced you musically. They can also be for the person who's the love of your life. There are of course many love songs written to romantic partners, and I played a few already a couple of weeks ago in my Names show. But I was keeping these two in the bag for today. Just a little over 50 years ago, on the 9th of March 1976, Patti Smith met the love of her life. She and bassplayer Lenny Kaye and the rest her band had just arrived in Detroit for some live shows. In her new memoir Bread Of Angels she wrote, "We landed in Detroit on a windy Tuesday afternoon and went straight to a welcome party hosted by the ­Detroit musician community at Lafayette Coney Island. I didn't particularly like parties, but I was lured by their legendary hot dogs. The people were very welcoming. We stayed awhile, had their deservedly lauded hot dogs, said goodbye to all, and headed toward the door." "That's when I first saw him. He stood by a white radiator in a blue overcoat. I noticed the threads where a button was missing. That fleeting moment was to redirect the whole of my life. Lenny introduced us simply: Fred Smith Patti Smith, Patti Smith Fred Smith. He had lank brown hair and eyes like water. He placed the button in my hand, and I wordlessly declared it a treasure. I felt a gravitational force; my being truly shaken, kindling my desire for the One, the better savage. Fate had touched us; I knew at that moment he was the one I would marry." This was the guitarist Fred Sonic Smith, formerly of the proto punk Detroit rock band MC5. Their relationship began soon after that, and in 1979, a year before they married, Patti wrote a song about him for her album Wave. It was to be her last album for eight years, because after they married she retired temporarily from the music biz to raise a family with her new husband. In a few minutes, another love song, this time by the rock band Toto, dedicated to the actress Rosanna Arquette. But there's a twist to that particular story, which I tell you about in a few minutes. But first, Patti Smith with Frederick. ** Frederick by Patti Smith Band, Rosanna by Toto Rosanna by LA's pop rock band Toto. Famously, Toto were named after Dorothy's little dog in the movie The Wizard Of Oz and Rosanna was a love song to the actress Rosanna Arquette, later to be the star of Desperately Seeking Susan and other movies. She was dating Toto's singer who sings so passionately about her. Everyone knows that. But actually neither of those stories are true. Rosanna Arquette was indeed dating one of the band, but it was keyboard player Steve Porcaro, not Toto's singer Bobby Kimball, and anyway the song was actually written by the band's leader David Paich. And in fact the song wasn't about Rosanna Arquette at all, even though both she and the rest of the band were happy to play along because it made a good story. David Paich told website Songfacts, "Rosanna was about a high school love, one of my first loves, but I just tagged another Rosanna's name on there because she was going at the time with Steve Porcaro, my best friend. He had just met her and was looking to title a song with her name, and it just fit perfectly for that song right there. So it's got her name on it, but it's really about another high school sweetheart, which is how songs happen sometimes." Oh and the name Toto? Well that story shifts like sand depending on who's telling it. When the band first got together they didn't have a name, but singer Bobby Kimball's real surname was the French-Canadian name Toteaux, ending "eaux". That's one possible explanation, but another comes from the fact that all the band members were already seasoned session musicians who could play any style of music required. So co-founder David Hungate picked the name after the Latin phrase In Toto, meaning "all-encompassing". So which is the true story? Who knows, maybe one, or maybe all of those different versions. Next up, another love song, from Lady Gaga this time. Though she's best known for her electro stompers, Gaga also occasionally pens truly heartfelt songs about people who are important to her, for example her aunt Joanne, after whom she named her fourth album, even though Joanne Germanotta died before Gaga was herself born. But two of her best and most personal songs are about lovers. She has never said who inspired the lovely Brown Eyes from her first album, but You & I from the Born This Way album was about her on-off boyfriend, bar manager and "cool Nebraska guy" Lüc Carl. In fact, the song's title and lyric sheet both have an umlaut accent over every letter u, just like Lüc Carl has over the ü in his first name. Here it is, Lady Gaga with You & I. ** You & I by Lady Gaga So in an interview with news channel MSNBC in 2010, Gaga said the song was about "the most important person that I ever met", and yet a year or so later, after the release of the song as a single, it seems that the relationship with Carl was over and Gaga was instead dating the actor and model Taylor Kinney who co-starred in the music video for it. Oh well. That's Love That It Is, as someone once sang... Two more tributes now but not for lovers but cultural heroes... of a sort. First up are Gorillaz with their debut single, Clint Eastwood, which is a loose homage to the film star of the same name as well as to director Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns in which Eastwood first became a star. Gorillaz founder Damon Albarn said the recurring theme he plays on the track on the melodica -- a sort of harmonica with a keyboard -- was inspired by Ennio Morricone's theme for the first Sergio Leone western A Fistful Of Dollars. "I'm a great fan of Clint Eastwood and of Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone," Albarn said later. "Also we were recording in Jamaica and listening to a lot of dancehall reggae and we imagined a cool moniker to have would be Clint Eastwood." After Gorillaz, we've got anarchic electronic duo The KLF channelling the Pet Shop Boys in an offbeat tribute to two perky young Australian actors who were just then beginning to establish pop careers in the UK in the wake of the massive popularity of Ozzy soap opera Neighbours, in which they had both starred. The song is Kylie Said To Jason and they are of course Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan. That track was the cornerstone of The KLF's album The White Room. "We spent £45,000 on the LP," KLF co-founder Bill Drummond told Sounds magazine. "Kylie Said To Jason was going to be a hit and then we'd have another hit, leaving us with a successful album. Then Kylie wasn't a hit and everything got confused. But we still had this burgeoning club credibility and Kylie Said To Jason not being a hit kept that intact." So all's well that ends well I suppose... but first Clint Eastwood. ** Clint Eastwood by Gorillaz, Kylie Said To Jason by The KLF Kylie Said To Jason from The KLF and before that Clint Eastwood from Gorillaz. We're just coming up to the break now. I'll be back with you again after the news for another hour of fabulous tracks, but first one of the most admired and also most poignant musical tribute songs ever recorded. In the early 1960s, Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Richard Wright were students at London Polytechnic college studying architecture. They started a band which went through several different names in a short space of time before finally becoming The Tea Set. Shortly afterwards, they were joined by an intense but brilliant young guitarist by the name of Syd Barrett. One night they turned up to perform at a gig only to discover that there was already another band called The Tea Set on the same bill. On the spur of the moment Barrett came up with a new name: the Pink Floyd Sound after two classic American blues singers, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. You probably know most of the rest of the story. Under the shorter name Pink Floyd, the band gradually became an important force in London's underground music scene, experimenting with quirky long instrumental pieces, and signing a lucrative contract with EMI Records. Barrett had become the main focal point of the band and also its de facto leader, but he was also indulging his interest in psychedelia rather too enthusiastically, by taking excessive quantities of LSD. This soon had a serious impact on his mental health as well as his ability to perform onstage. This was increasingly frustrating for his bandmates and eventually, one night en route to a gig in Southampton, Waters, Mason and Wright took the decision not to pick him up, effectively dropping him from the band. For years they were racked with a certain amount of guilt over this, especially when Barrett's mental health began to decline even more severely, and he effectively went missing. That guilt was compounded by the staggering commercial success five years later of The Dark Side Of The Moon. When they returned to the studio in 1975 to record the follow up album, they were still preoccupied with Syd Barrett's apparent disappearance and he was a recurring motif for several tracks of the album that became known as Wish You Were, not least the epic song that begins and ends the album, entitled Shine On You Crazy Diamond. The title even spells out his name. S for Shine, Y for You, D for Diamond. In the most bizarre of all coincidences, on the night the band sat down to record the vocals for Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Barrett himself turned up out of the blue. At first no one even recognised him because he was physically so different from the man they had once known, overweight, bald, and with his eyebrows shaved. He sat around in the studio but wouldn't really engage in conversation, and eventually Syd Barrett just slipped away into the night... ** Shine On You Crazy Diamond by Pink Floyd