by Eric Boa
The first pop songs I remember are Mark Wynter singing Venus in Blue Jeans on Top of the Pops, a UK television show featuring the latest hits, and Frank Ifield singing I Remember You. It was 1962, the programme was in black and white and I was in short trousers. It wasn’t Mark’s quiff or gyrations that made me take notice, or Frank’s yodel, or even the melodies, strange though this must sound, but the chord changes. Those combinations of notes played together that mark out the melody. It was the beginning of my journey to play by ear.
Venus in Blue Jeans has, like Ira Gershwin’s British Museum*, lost its charm. The chord changes, once intriguing, now sound prosaic. I Remember You remains a classy song and it still fascinated me when I heard it in a jazz club last week. The tune is by Victor Schertzinger and lyrics by the great Johnny Mercer, a prolific contributor to the Great American Songbook (Moon River, Hooray for Hollywood). Mercer had a sharp wit. He famously decried a decline in quality of show tunes in the 1960s:“I could eat alphabet soup and shit better lyrics.”
I appreciate the craft of writing lyrics, but rarely am I enthralled. Chord changes and harmonies are my thing and what make my neurons all fire at the same time. Ever since those first pop sounds I’ve wanted to know the chords of a tune so I could play it on the piano and ‘sound like the record’. So I started to listen carefully and work out how tunes were constructed. I Remember You was particularly challenging because half way through, at the point that the lyric goes ‘… distant bells’, it changes key. Lots of tunes do this. The Beatles’ – or rather, Paul McCartney’s – Here, There and Everywhere changes key at “I want her everywhere”. Then, magically, both tunes return to the original key. How did this happen? I wanted to know.
I learnt early on how to read music, unlike many popular musicians. It has certainly helped in my chord quests, yet it’s how you listen that is critical to playing off the cuff, or by ear. My first step was to note when chord changes occurred and find a suitable chord. It helped that pop tunes use a limited range of chords and repeat the same sequences over and over again. It’s this familiarity that makes them popular. Repetition aids recognition and so I learnt common chord sequences. I could distinguish minor (sad) and major (happy) keys and chords, as in House of the Rising Sun (minor) and If I Had a Hammer (major). Try singing the latter in a minor key and the mood becomes darker, and even threatening.
If only I’d stuck with 12 bar blues or Country and Western songs. Predictable chords and chord changes and few of them. The thought of constantly “waking up each morning” or hearing countless protestations of love, thwarted or fulfilled, were unappealing. I wanted more chords and more complexity. Once you’re drawn into harmony, there’s no way out. Let’s move on a few years. It’s now 1968 and I’m in long trousers. I hear Lady Madonna, another McCartney tune, and I’m in its harmonic clutches. I want to play it on the piano and add some of my own flourishes. The thought arises that this might impress girls, though this turns out to be much harder than working out chord changes.
I make slow progress with Lady Madonna. After bar four I’m lost. Help is at hand. My mother buys me the sheet music and now I see not only the missing chords but how to play the piano part and almost ‘sound like the record’. I store the new chord changes in my ‘listening by ear’ memory. They will come in handy in the future. But why bother? Why not simply buy more sheet music? Unfortunately, few transcriptions of pop tunes turn out to be useful, or even interesting. The quality and detail are uneven. The transcribers miss out musical information when they transfer the melodies and harmonies on to paper.
Rick Wakeman (classically trained) contributes a rich piano introduction to Life on Mars?, yet I would almost certainly have been unable to find it written out in 1973, when David Bowie’s song was first performed. Bowie understood harmony, but wasn’t formally trained, unlike Wakeman. The only solution to playing the intro would have been to listen carefully to the record and work out the chord changes. Larry Knetchel did a similar job for Paul Simon on Bridge over Troubled Water; he wrote a piano intro based on Paul Simon’s melody chords. Fortunately someone did a great job on the transcription and I was, briefly, able to “sound like the record” on the piano – before all the other weighty musical paraphernalia was added by Simon and his producer.
I continued to progress in my knowledge of harmony and chords but I was getting frustrated. How much more was there to learn before I was 20? I borrowed a book of Gershwin piano transcriptions from Cambridge Central Library and my eyes and ears opened wide. Welcome to the world of diminished, half diminished and altered chords! It was harmonic overload as I played Nice Work If You Can Get It on the upright Bechstein at home. I was dazzled and also bewildered. So many new opportunities for improvising. There’s a lot going in as I try to absorb all the tricks and invention that Gershwin used.
Further afield I found compilations of other musical greats, such as Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern and Jimmy Van Heusen. It almost became overwhelming, especially when in my postgraduate years (still long trousers, but plus droopy moustache) I had another harmonic revelation when I discovered Brazilian harmonies. Leeds University had a sale of jazz LPs in the Students’ Union. From this I discovered The LA Four and their samba version of Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte and the wonder of Corcovado by Jobim.
It's a chord...but which one?
And yet, and yet. My journey into ever more complex chord changes meant that I began to lose sight of the melodies, and the performance of a tune. I was in danger of dismissing great tunes because they had few chord changes. Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell and Cecilia by Paul Simon only have three chords. They are still fabulous songs. The wealth of chords and sequences at my fingertips beguiled me and allowed me to noodle at the piano. It’s a sort of musical scribbling. Lots of nice phrases and snatches of melodies but never a full tune.. My father summed up years of listening to me noodle when he gently remarked that “now and then you threaten to play something I know”. Ouch.
Another downside to my obsession with chords and harmonies is that I’m forever analysing tunes. It’s particularly annoying when I experience what my father called ‘Music to go up and down lifts by”. I can’t avoid banal and tedious music played in restaurants, waiting rooms or even dentists’ surgeries. My dentist asked me recently what I was thinking about, as he completed yet another filling. His noble aim was to distract me from the job at hand. Was I looking forward to anything interesting at the weekend? Any trips planned?
Once the filling was over and I was back on dry land, I told him that I had been working out the chords of the dreary music throbbing in the background. The intended soothing was having the opposite effect as the same tedious chord sequences were repeated. Sometimes no music is best of all. That includes me noodling.
* from A Foggy Day (in London Town):
“I viewed the morning with alarm
The British Museum had lost its charm"
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