I confess that I secretly love music, but I don't understand it, and therefore rarely attempt to write about it. I don't have the vocabulary. I just sit back in awe of great singers, many of whom are apparently forgotten. One night in Finland when I was all alone, and didn't have a friend, this song came on the radio, by an obscure artist named Garnet Mimms. I remembered hearing the song as a child. It's hard to understand why it wasn't more of a success. There is an athleticism in the range of the voice, and some kind of lovely precision in the notes that I don't think is common. Many rock videos depend on the slutty visuals or depend on the cleverness of the lyrics, but this is dependent on a kind of masochistic love interest of the singer for some mysterious other, for whom he will always wait, taking whatever crumbs he can get:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47OXAqbv4cU
Mimms recorded this one-hit wonder in 1963, but is still alive. Janis Joplin re-recorded the hit in 1970, but the song is only a shadow of Mimms' version. It's not as if she's a shabby singer. Her intensity is something else and it's generally conceded she was one of the greatest rock singers. It's still magnificent, but she doesn't have the architectural magnificence of Mimms. Also the backing music is I think more subtle in Mimms' band, an unknown band called The Enchanters, compared to the famous Full Tilt Boogie band. The little plucks of the guitar are poignant (remember that poigne, is French for knife) in the Mimms band, but I don't even know who played the guitar. With Mimms, I am never worried that he won't hit the notes. In Joplin's version, her voice is still good, but her vocal chords are blown from singing at the top of her lungs at gosh-darned hippy concerts probably while stoned out of her gourd. Mimms is more operatic, and in control of himself and the song. It is thus far more heart-wrenching to me.
The song itself has a strange S & M quality in it. There is glee that the other relationship is broken, but there is a sad assessment of the self that he (or she) can always be available. We're a long cry from the Garden of Eden here and the happiness of eternal companions of the soul. One can hear through the sobs the sense of lostness that the sixties brought in, and what the Sexual Revolution cost those who fought for it, as foot soldiers in the war that had nothing to do with anything that God would recognize as Love.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK74G7wDfk4
This is the kind of post that no one will respond to, but there it is.
8 comments:
Althouse linked to Garnet Mimms at her blog due to a post of mine on Mimms from yesterday! Hurray for Mimms! Back in the limelight!
The old James Brown sang in a fashion similar to Mimms. Here he is with Try Me in a song first cut in 1958. Note how slow the tempo is. Rock killed music with the fast tempo. Rap killed the tender lyrics with nasty Marxist viewpoints, which in turn has leveled whole cities.
What's left of Detroit and Motown after the riots of 1968?
It's a shame. Marxists destroy everything they touch by inciting all kinds of wild hatreds.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxgRkRSfzGA
Kirby, I noted the nod AA made to your reference to the Mimms' song in connection with the aftermath of the apparent Prosser victory in WI. Good job!
I don't really have a favourite yet in the mix for the Repubs' nomination. But Rs I like so far: Tim Pawlenty, Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Alan West, Michelle Bachmann, though I think only Pawlenty and Bachmann have shown some interest in the nomination. I like West's combination of informed commentary and Trumanesque, soldier-like candour. Just so the Rs pick a viable candidate who can weather the inevitable pro-O major media assaults and in 2012 deliver us into Nobama land.
JADL: Rubio wants the Veep nod. No responsibility but high profile works with his young family.
Kirby--don't know what version I like better yet, but I do love the sound of the Full Tilt Boogie Band (not as much as I like Big Brother, but there it is, right?).
Janis:
Because of the organ/intro.
The tempo of the earlier Mimms version is slower than any of the Joplin takes I've found.
It's fun to sample some of early Bo Diddley (1963) versus the 1970s Diddley, where his tempo speeds up. the earlier stuff has a volcanic quality to it, it's like an earthquake in slow motion. By the seventies I find it hard to deal with by comparison. There is no rest between the thrusts.
It might be just me.
T. Rex too speeds way up, and loses its crunching edge as a result.
The early hits like Jeepster and Hot Love just smoke in their slower versions. Part of that is the bass player, Steve Currie, who could rock the house with his intense deliberative playing.
He left the band in 1976 "to pursue other options" as they say, but the motor in the band was gone after that.
Someone like Bo Diddley is very weird because he plays the guitar as a percussion instrument but manages to grind blues qualities at the end of his strokes, and also gets odd melodies going simultaneously while managing to jump all over the stage.
The performers from that era said they could lose ten or twenty pounds on stage in a single event (depending on how much fat they had to lose). Even lithe Jagger said ten pounds was the average for him.
I don't think Mimms was losing weight during his concerts. He just didn't move like that.
Marco Rubio is smooth. I saw him debate Crist in the last election. He clocked him and barely broke a sweat. He's multicultural so the left couldn't scream yet there's no way he'd go commie since half his family was probably killed by the communists.
i like his hair
jh ;-)
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