Category: Girl Power Tuesday Page 1 of 2

We might already have stretched our motto “from the eighties to the noughties” by including a song or two that actually hailed from the seventies. So let’s one-up this and go all the way back to 1965.

Or even 1963. That’s the year Frank Sinatra starred in the comedy-western “4 for Texas” and uttered the line “They tell me them boots ain’t built for walking”. Barton Lee Hazelwood, who was tasked by Sinatra to boost his daughter Nancy’s singing career quite liked the line and it inspired him to write These Boots Are Made For Walking. Originally he had planned to sing it himself, but Sinatra was able to convince him that sung by a man it would be perceived as brutish, while coming from a girl it was rather cute. He also made sure Nancy would lose the nice lady image and start singing in lower keys.

The song immediately became an international hit and so an accompanying movie was produced, to be played on Scopitones, jukeboxes capable of playing 16mm films – Music videos in the sense as we know them were not yet invented in the 1960ies. These days the short movie is considered the definition of what the “Swinging Sixties” looked like.

Sinatra and Hazelwood would produce a string of other famous songs, among them “Something Stupid” (a duet with her father) and “Summer Wine“.

There are many things one can do on a Tuesday night. Some people choose to do sports, others might be in a book club, and some have to do the weekly maintenance. In the early 1990ies, a group of musicians around Kevin Gilbert used the night to meet in Pasadena, California and casually write and play songs together. When Gilbert started dating singer Sheryl Crow the club soon turned into a means to develop her “second first” album – the first one had been scrapped, as both her and her label found it lacking – which when eventually completed was named Tuesday Night Music Club after the group.

Unfortunately the relationship turned sour when Crow claimed all songwriting credits for herself in an interview and disputes about copyrights broke out. The album had a slow start, with three singles released without gaining much popularity (among them Leaving Las Vegas, which later would become quite a big hit as well), until All I Wanna Do was released as the fourth one. Ironically, that song which finally helped the album to it’s breakthrough in itself is based on a poem by Wyn Cooper, who earned quite a bit of royalties for it – but faced a lawsuit of his own over the first line: “All I want is to have a little fun before I die”, the inspiration for the poem, happened to originally have been a line uttered by his friend Bill Ripley while they were out drinking…

Broken glass notwithstanding the song – and eventually the album – went on to be hugely successful and Crow would go on to have a string of hits. As well as famous boyfriends, among them Eric Clapton, Owen Wilson and Lance Armstrong.

Everybody you know is into pop, right? That’s why it’s called “popular music” in the first place? Well, believe it or not, that’s not quite true. If you want to make music and money you have to appeal to more basic sentiments. In the German speaking world, you need to write Schlager or Volkstümliche Musik – like the Zillertaler Schürzenjäger, most of whom, I kid you not, are actually quite capable as jazz musicians. If you’re in the ‘mericas you need to perform Country.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t do a little cross-over. Which explains why it turns out the best-selling female country music artist of all times isn’t Dolly Parton after all! The title belongs to a Canadian – Shania Twain.

She released “That Don’t Impress Me Much” in two versions, but the so-called Country Version didn’t impress that audience too much. Contrary to the previous six singles she had released, this one totally failed to become #1 on the charts (well, it did make it to #8, which is more than most singers could wish for…). The International aka Dance Version, however, became a worldwide hit.

Her knack for choosing what would prove to be popular is also demonstrated by calling out Brad Pitt – there were so many famous actors at the time whose names you would most likely not recognize anymore these days…

In the mid-80ies the artist at that moment known as Prince had a very productive phase where he wrote a song just about every other day. Not all of them really fit him though, and so when he wrote “Nothing Compares To You” in just about an hour, he was more than happy to give it away to his side-project The Family. While it’s not public knowledge who the song is about, speculation goes that he wrote the song for his housekeeper, who had been making sure he felt right at home, providing for all his needs, but who abruptly left to be with her family after her father had died. In order to get strong feelings across, singer Paul Peterson kept thinking about a girl named Julie who broke his heart in High School. The song ended up being a filler on their first and only album with little success, but Peterson ended up marrying Julie so there’s always that.

Five years later the manager of Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor suggested to her to do a recording of the song, and when he brought the finished tape to the co-director of their label Chris Hill the latter was moved to tears. When he called O’Connor and told her about it, she asked, “Was it that bad?”.

The singer never got quite used to the fame the song brought her, and ended up being in many a controversy over the years (most famously ripping apart a picture of the pope while singing Bob Marley’s “War” on Saturday Night Live to criticize the covering-up of sexual child abuse by the catholic church, which shockingly somehow to this day for many religious people appears to be worse than the actual abuse), and repeatedly released strong statements only to backtrack on them soon after. It suited her fine, as she never considered herself to be a pop star: “I’m just a troubled soul who needs to scream into mikes now and then.”

Despite having lots of material shot in Paris, the video ended up being mostly close-ups which came as a surprise to many viewers who did not know the singer had shaved her head. The tears are real.

Songwriters Anne Preven and Scott Cutler of the LA based band “Ednaswap” wrote “Torn” in 1991 together with Phil Thornalley, with Preven taking inspiration for the devastation chronicled in the song from her work in a mental hospital in New York that dealt with suicidal juveniles as a teenager. It was first recorded two years later in Danish and had its English debut by Ednaswap, but none of this recordings took off.

That changed when Natalie Imbruglia, who was known to a broader audience from the immensely popular Australian soap opera “Neighbours” started a second career as a singer and released a version of the song as her debut single in 1997. Not immediately though, at least in the US, where the song was proposed to a number of record labels and turned down repeatedly – only to have the same people bending over backwards to seal the deal when the song exploded on the UK charts.

Alison Maclean, who shot the video was able to create a very intimate feeling by combining acting (recreating a scene from the 1972 erotic drama “Last Tango in Paris”) with footage from breaks, where the actors were not aware that the camera was still rolling.

In 1979 Robert Hazard recorded the demo for a little song he wrote about who lucky he was that there were so many girls who wanted to have some fun – with him… which wasn’t a big hit. But as the label, Columbia, owned the rights they asked producer Rick Chertoff to do something with the song. Which he did a few years later, by suggesting it to newly hired Cyndi Lauper, suggesting she’d edit the lyrics to a more feminist point-of-view. She was working on her album with his old bandmates of “The Hooters” at the time, and after experimenting with a number of different musical styles they together transposed “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” into what would become the anthem for female attitude in the 80ies.

The album, “She’s So Unusual” was a huge success and contained four top-five songs, the first debut by a female artist ever to do so. “True Colors” was another one of those and it evinced a strong theme in Lauper’s work even more: acceptance. While most videos at the time depicted staggeringly beautiful people rarely seen in real life, she insisted on having hers populated by normal gals and guys, leading regular lifes. And as “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” was to be an anthem for all women it was important to her that they all were represented in the video, irregular of race, body type or alleged flaws – what should go without saying these days took a long time in the making.

The video also features what at the time were mind-blowing never-before-seen computer generated images, produced by the brand new multi-million-dollar digital editing equipment bought for Saturday Night Live that they were allowed free access to.

The mother in the video really is Lauper’s mother, while the “father” is wrestler “Captain” Lou Albano, with whom she would collaborate on a number of occasions throughout her career.