Jul 1

Jul 1 Walking Down Madison

By David Steffen

I don’t mind admitting that in the mid-1960s I was a fan of Bob Dylan but not Joan Baez. These two legendary songwriters and performers were regularly linked up by the press, in part, due to their ages, political and social views, they were a boy and a girl (duh), and particularly through their songwriting. By the early ‘70s I was a part of the music business and met one of them.

While working for A&M Records in Chicago, part of my job was working with artists coming through town, helping promote their music, club and concert tours, schedule interviews and more. Somewhere in 1973 I found myself spending part of a day with Joan Baez who, a year earlier, had signed a record deal with A&M. She was in Chicago to promote her first A&M album, “Come From the Shadows”. In addition to visiting radio and press, I remember the casual parts of our conversation. Yet even those moments gave me some appreciation for just who Joan Baez was. It was a thoroughly enjoyable day talking about music, touring, and her first 15 years as a successful recording artist. I also got a first-hand lesson about California agriculture with, for example, a lesson on which lettuce to buy, which to avoid, and so on. As the saying goes, Joan walked the walk.

Remember the draft? If you don’t it may simply be a factor of age, or the likelihood that no-one in your immediate family was conscripted into the American military. Those of us who were high school age in the 1960s definitely knew about the draft. We knew that unless we went to college and received a deferment it was likely that—barring some paperwork miracle (or undiagnosed medical anomaly)—we would probably be wearing a uniform (voluntarily or through the draft) and quite possibly shipped to Vietnam. Some of the musicians who became part of the conscience of a generation wrote about the war: Dylan, Baez, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Phil Ochs, and others—wrote and performed songs that (to put it mildly) objected to war and the draft, and to be fair, other issues: poverty, social injustice, women’s rights and more. But that defiant songwriting was not purely American. Songwriters in other parts of the world also became known for writing songs that opposed war—Vietnam or almost any other war.

John Lennon famously wrote “Give Peace a Chance” (1969) which became a universal mantra for those protesting the Vietnam War. In November, 1969, Pete Seeger gave his voice to Lennon’s song, performing it before a crowd of 500,000 calling for a moratorium on the Vietnam War at the Washington Monument. And there was a player from the British Isles doing his own anti-war songwriting: James Henry Miller.

Miller was born in 1915 in England of Scottish parents. He adopted the stage name Ewan MacColl and wrote a number of songs that have become famous to music lovers around the world, including “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” (Roberta Flack achieved enormous fame and sales success with that song around the world.) He was also known for writing songs protesting nuclear arms, and songs of support for union laborers in the U.K. I learned about Ewan MacColl by following the career of his daughter Kirsty MacColl. As with much of the music I’ve learned to love, it was friends who connected me to MacColl. More on that in a minute.

Memories are crazy things, and beyond our true experiences, we often forget many events, and embrace those reimagined. That being said, 1989 was an interesting year in the music business. All of us at A&M Records wondered who would be left standing once Polygram completed the $500 million acquisition of A&M, the label that Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss started in Herb’s garage in 1962. One evening in ’89 I found myself leaving the Century Plaza Hotel after a meeting. While sitting in my car on the parking ramp trying to leave the hotel, a young woman dressed in something resembling camo saw me, and waved her hand to get my attention. As she walked closer to me I saw that it was my friend Barbara Bolan. She worked for IRS records and was promoting a new album by a group called Fine Young Cannibals. She handed me a cassette and as I drove home I found myself listening to “She Drives Me Crazy”. It was more than infectious. It was a spectacular record. Consumers and radio agreed, and the single went to #1 in Billboard. To this day, no one changes the dial or turns the volume down when that track comes on the radio, or YouTube, etc.

I don’t remember if it was Barbara or IRS Records president Jay Boberg who handed me a copy of 1993’s “Titanic Days” by Kirsty MacColl, but I fell in love with the music. And, I might add, the lyrics of the title track read like a hot romance novel (not that I care about such things). And there was another early-‘90s album by MacColl: “Electric Landlady’". I’m old enough to get the title’s pun (playing off of Jimi Hendrix’s album “Electric Ladyland”) and once again, I was happy to have another MacColl album in my collection. The lead track on that album was “Walking Down Madison.”

MacColl continued to grow as a vocalist and as a songwriter, and one couldn’t ignore the socially-relevant lyrics of “Walking Down Madison”. This young woman’s lyrics presented the diverse social eco-system of New York using Madison Avenue as a microcosm of the city: gun violence, opulence, hunger, homelessness, glitter, social ignorance (or ambivalence) and perhaps with a nod to West Side Story, the sharks and the rats. Having walked, driven, taken the bus or subway and taxied almost the entire length of Madison Avenue while working in New York, I was anxious to see the video. And that video—readily available on YouTube—richly follows her lyrical storyline:

From an uptown apartment

to a knife on the “A” train,

it’s not that far,

From the sharks in the penthouse

to the rats in the basement,

it’s not that far,

to the Bag Lady frozen asleep

on the church steps,

it’s not that far”.

In 4 1/2 minutes MacColl paints a picture of New York City’s economic contrasts, a picture that’s right in your face. And it’s helped along by rapper Aniff Cousins, who has a not-insignificant recurring part in the recording and the video.

The third MacColl track I want to mention is the “Christmas” record she made with the Pogues, the group led by Shane MacGowan. As holiday music, “A Fairytale of New York” is less Bing Crosby and more John Lennon. The track and video (which includes a cameo by actor Matt Dillon) were produced in 1987, and “Fairytale of New York” has been a perennial chart success in the UK ever since. I won’t describe the video (it should really be seen) except to say that MacGowan was quoted in UK music magazine Mojo, describing the lyrical interplay between himself and Kirsty MacColl: "Kirsty knew exactly the right measure of viciousness and femininity and romance to put into it and she had a very strong character and it came across in a big way... In operas, if you have a double aria, it's what the woman does that really matters. The man lies, the woman tells the truth.”

In 2000, Kirsty MacColl was killed while vacationing in Cozumel, Mexico. Enjoying a swim with her children, she was hit by a boat cruising through an area designated “No Boats”, (as in ‘for swimming only’.) Age 41. A tragedy, to be certain. A loss for recorded music is obvious. But twenty years later her voice remains compelling. The recordings I’ve mentioned today stay with me, just like recordings that you’ve loved over the years. Need some refreshing “new” music for your ears. Start with “Titanic Days”, then go to “Walking Down Madison”, and finish with the video of “Fairytale of New York”. Her recordings remind us of the tragedy of her death, how precious is the time we’re allotted on this planet, and how recorded music lets us enjoy, imagine, and celebrate while we’re here.

Photo by: Rita Carmo (www.ritacarmo.com)