It would be up to me to add some Michael Jackson to The Best You’ve Never Heard week, since Money Mike didn’t do it.
(Don’t worry, he probably would’ve, but I called first dibs. He’s still the biggest MJ fan on the planet.)
In 2001, Michael Jackson released Invincible, his first album in six years since the HIStory double album. After a few listens, there were some definite conclusions. Firstly, Jackson could still sing as shown on some of the ballads like Break Of Dawn, Heaven Can Wait, and Butterflies. Secondly, he was still capable of making terrible song choices. The Lost Children and Cry were terrible songs. But the thing that many people walked away thinking was that Whatever Happens, featuring Carlos Santana on guitar, was the best song (or Butterflies based on your taste) and was a surefire hit single. But what happened is that Sony didn’t support the album and pushed nothing except the initial single and no one outside of the die hard MJ fans got to hear Whatever Happens.
He gives another smile, tries to understand her side
To show that he cares, she can’t stay in the room
She’s consumed with everything that’s been goin’ on
She says …
Whatever happens, don’t let go of my hand
Viewers of American Idol will be familiar with the song because Mario Vasquez performed it in his audition that was shown before the season. He also sang back up vocals on the original track.
The song starts with an old fashioned instrumental that you’d hear in Westerns as if to say that MJ and Santana were about to draw on each other and a musical explosion was ready to occur. Just walk ten paces.
It’s Latin flavored, but not too much. Santana plucks the strings ever so delicately which forces MJ to sing with more emotion than you’d think possible.
Don’t you let go baby! Don’t you let go!
Lyrically, the song tells a story about a mysterious relationship between a man and a woman. The woman is scared about what they’re doing. The man is trying to make things right. Perfect even. He doesn’t understand that all she wants is just him and that’s all. The conclusion is that whatever happens, don’t let go of my hand. Forever, forever, forever.
Even though the finale of the song seems a bit corny with two of the greatest artists of our time thanking each other, especially Michael’s, “Thank you Carlos”, which seems like it took 20 takes, but it’s the perfect finish. They go out guns a blazin’. Well, sort of.
Whatever Happens is the song that would’ve should’ve could’ve, but didn’t. But thankfully for you, you can now find it because I know it’s the best you’ve never heard.
I love Coldplay. When I say I love them I genuinely mean I LOVE them. Now maybe I’m not crazed enough to know everyone in the band’s birthday and favorite food and color, but there’s something about this band that can make me happier on a happy day and mellow me out and make me stop for a second on a bad day. I met Chris Martin once and shook his hand–I kept my cool but was almost sure I was going to have a heart attack.
They have quite a catalog of songs now as they’ve released four studio albums, and sure many of their singles have a special place in my heart that remind me of people and places. There’s one song in particular that I always come back to and wish I could’ve convinced the folks at their record label that they should’ve worked a bit more aggressively here in the US (and well..in the UK too as it’s peak chart position across the pond was 35).
SHIVER is a logical next step right after the quick DON’T PANIC on the bands debut, PARACHUTES. DON’T PANIC gives you a little taste of what’s to come on this album, and is quick enough to set the tone then lead in to one of the gems in their catalog. It rocks, but not too hard. What bums me out the most is it’ll probably take a miracle for me to EVER hear this song performed live. While I (obviously) can’t confirm this, I’ve heard countless times the song was written for/about Natalie Imbruglia and well why would Gwenyth want to hear her husband perform a song about another woman? Speaking of Imbruglia, she released a song called SHIVER in 2005 from her album COUNTING DOWN THE DAYS (which wasn’t release here in the US, but was actually a good album–more about that some other time), and I immediately thought there could be a connection—nope, I was wrong…unless I’m really right?
For the longest time I wanted to believe that SHIVER was “my” song. Meaning people must pass it by and not think of it as a favorite or even being a “quality” track in the Coldplay song catalog. Sure it didn’t do a ton here in the US and I’d wager most people might not know what I was talking about if I struck up a conversation with someone who wasn’t a big fan. Fortunately for me, a few years back I got a feeling that the song might be bit more well known than I’d thought.
(INSERT DRAMATIC FLASHBACK MUSIC)
It was a cold, rainy, wet night. A buddy and I were out and about running around the city. We stopped to see a friend and asked him if he’d get a drink with us to catch up. After waiting around he declined, so we set out in search of a drink, but having no clue where we’d stop. We vowed to walk until we found a bar to have that one drink or if not, when we came across a subway station we’d go home. As we continued to walk it started to drizzle and we got wet, as did our brown paper bag we were carrying with some CD’s we’d picked up earlier from an industry friend.
Maybe about 30 minutes later we found ourselves up near Times Square (don’t ask me where we started…I have no clue) and the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Exhausted, I remember seeing a number of neon glowing BAR signs. Finally we ducked into a place–that felt a bit more upscale then your regular NYC dive bar where some young guys would grab a beer. Somewhat defeated we sat up at the bar, set our bag down and removed our damp coats and jackets. We both ordered a beer and shortly after the magic moment happened.
The previous song had faded out on the jukebox and what I heard next amazed me. I heard the opening notes of SHIVER and lit up. I was so excited and couldn’t believe I was hearing this song at a bar. It was that moment that I started to sing along with Chris Martin at a low volume level, not wanting to be that weirdo in the bar. But I heard more voices gradually and then in that “TV sitcom moment” it appeared that EVERYONE in the bar was singing along and singing loudly as Chris and the band backed us up. Everyone was singing–everyone except my buddy.
(FADE BACK TO PRESENT DAY)
Anytime I go to a bar now and see Coldplay on a jukebox it makes me immediately like the bar. Of course it’s usually their later albums, and that’s fine. It’s nice to get a little Coldplay action while I have a drink at the end of a bad day or to celebrate a triumph. While their might not be a “happy ending” who doesn’t enjoy a good tale of, “Hey…I like you, but I’m not sure you know I even exist…” I’d be too nervous to ever ask Chris Martin about the song if I ever did meet him, but I’ll admit I’d love to hear the TRUE story right from the source.
I was a teenage fanatic for the band Chicago in the late 80s, just as they were reaching the end of their second commercial heyday – a near-decade-long reign on the charts fueled by David Foster (and David Foster surrogate) produced power ballads – and were on the cusp of becoming crusty fixtures of summertime state fairs. The first three concerts I attended were all Chicago concerts (though, tellingly, the last of those concerts found them co-headlining with the Beach Boys – the reigning kings of the oldies circuit), and somewhere between the release of Chicago 18 in 1986 and Chicago 19 two years later, I’d acquired on either cassette or CD (or in some cases, both) every single Chicago album released since the band’s 1969 debut Chicago Transit Authority, on which they presented themselves as an idealistic jazzy-art-prog-rock band with horns and a social conscience that ran counter to the distasteful Nixon connections of Blood, Sweat & Tears, their chief competitors in the idealistic jazzy-art-prog-rock sweepstakes.
While my junior high and high school peers were busy carefully carving Metallica and Megadeth logos into their study hall desks, I would proudly sport my Chicago “Victorious Tour 1989” t-shirt; and where the unwashed masses on my school sang the praises of Jimi Hendrix, I defiantly extolled the virtues of Terry Kath whose distinctively rhythmic wah-wah-isms (best exemplified by the extended solo on the group’s iconic 1971 single “25 or 6 to 4”) were much admired by The Hendrix himself. It may not have been the most socially advantageous band to fall in love with – by that time, Chicago was an unabashedly corporate entity headed up by a cabal of wealthy, middle-aged ex-hippies. Nevertheless Chicago 19 proved to be arguably the best, and certainly the most successful album of their second act, earning multiple platinum certifications and yielding no fewer than five hit singles including “Look Away” which Billboard magazine eventually anointed the #1 single of 1989.
It’s a far cry from where the band had been ten years earlier when they released Chicago 13. This was a band adrift both artistically and commercially – a band still reeling from the sudden, tragic loss of their visionary singer and guitarist Terry Kath (who’d accidentally shot and killed himself at a party in 1978), and struggling with some newfound autonomy following the firing of their longtime manager-producer-svengali James William Guercio.
Heralded by the nine minute disco opus “Street Player”, the band’s last truly horn-driven single which, despite the band’s appearance on an SNL episode, didn’t really do much chart-wise, but gained notoriety in the 90s when it was liberally sampled by the Bucketheads for their club hit “The Bomb”, Chicago 13 – “The Highrise Album” – was the second in a trio of transitional, wildly unfocused, and mostly hitless late 70s albums which found the group experimenting with, among other things, actual album titles (the band’s 12th album was called Hot Streets), and ill-advised (and, indeed, sort of racially insensitive) studio gimmickry like P.C. Moblee, a manipulation of Peter Cetera’s otherwise clenched-cheeks, clenched-jaw white-boy whine made to sound like a wax-museum version of a vintage Chess Records bluesman.
Also unique to these “lost years” for the band was the voice of singer-guitarist Donnie Dacus who’d been recruited to replace Kath despite having virtually nothing in common with Kath stylistically. As a singer, Kath’s soulful howl was often compared to Ray Charles (best exemplified on Chicago’s neglected 1975 single “Brand New Love Affair”), his guitar playing was funkified and percussive with an innate sense for scale and detail. Donnie Dacus, on the other hand, was merely a serviceable, unsubtle country-rock guitarist (his resume included work with Stephen Stills), an adequate studio musician who, with his flowy, Frampton-esque blond locks and wistful tenor projected a youthful naivete completely antithetical to Kath’s lusty spirituals. As mismatched with the band as he was, he was actually central to a couple of the best moments on Chicago 13, including the record’s second single, a hard-driving, southern-rock flavored stomper called “Must Have Been Crazy” (which nicked the Billboard Hot 100 peaking at No. 83) and the upbeat album-closing pep-talk “Run Away” in which Dacus and Cetera tag-team the verses before rallying together in harmony on a triumphant chorus.
Dacus, who, in 1979 appeared as Woof in Milos Forman’s film adaptation of the musical Hair, was fired from the band after Chicago 13, and though he joined an 80s-era incarnation of the power-pop institution Badfinger, he has been virtually absent from music ever since. Time has been unkind to Dacus’s contributions to Chicago, and he is, to my mind, unfairly maligned by many of my other fellow Chicago fanatics. The major problem is that Dacus’s tenure fell squarely in between the band’s two heydays, and, only appearing on a couple of decidedly unsuccessful singles, his voice, unlike Kath’s or Cetera’s or, later, Bill Champlin’s (who sang lead on three of Chicago 19’s singles including “Look Away”) never had a chance to become one of the recognizable voices of the Chicago. Hearing Dacus singing “Must Have Been Crazy” – really one of the strongest singles Chicago released in the 70s, despite the fact that the band’s signature horn section had gone suddenly M.I.A. – you’d never mistake this Chicago for the band that recorded either early hits like “Saturday in the Park” and “If You Leave Me Now” or latter-day power-ballads like “Hard To Say I’m Sorry” and “Hard Habit To Break”.
Fortunately – or unfortunately – another of the band’s “lost years” experiments was their somewhat prescient (though, in hindsight, probably misguided) decision to film an extended promotional video for Chicago 13 which included clips for “Street Player”, “Must Have Been Crazy” and “Run Away”, featuring groaningly cheesy footage of the band hanging out and performing in a secluded mansion – watch as trombonist James Pankow hunts down a fugitive cat and drummer Danny Seraphine gets stranded in a tree, and oh yes, that’s a shirtless Peter Cetera sunning himself on a raft in the swimming pool… ewww – with saxophonist Walt Parazaider providing a Dan Ackroyd-noir voice-over narration. Tellingly, most of the band’s 80s videos would be bland performance clips, although they were much more successful with the comparatively high-budget, three-minute action-flick in song they put out for “Stay the Night” in 1984.
It would be up to me to add some Michael Jackson to The Best You’ve Never Heard week, since Money Mike didn’t do it.
