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You're listening ad free on Amazon Music. Hey there Hit Parade listeners. What you're about to hear is Part one of this episode. Part two will arrive in your podcast feed at the end of the month. Would you like to hear this episode all at once the day it drops? Sign up for Slate Plus. It supports not only this show, but all of Slate's acclaimed journalism and podcasts. Just go to slate.com hitparadeplus you'll get to hear every Hit Parade episode in full the day it arrives. Plus Hit Parade the Bridge, our bonus episodes with guest interviews, deeper dives on our episode topics, and pop chart trivia. Once again to join, that's slate.com hitparadeplus thanks and now please enjoy part one of this hit Parade episode. A quick note this episode contains a song lyric with racially offensive language. Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate Magazine about the hits from coast to coast. Chris I'm Chris Melanthy, chart analyst, pop critic and writer of Slate's why is this song number one series on today's show? 44 years ago, in November 1978, this single was issued by a bespectacled Brit who had the nerve to name himself after the King of Rock and Roll. It was a peacenik anthem with a punk rock title, what's so Funny Bout Peace, Love and Understanding.
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What's so Fun about Peace, Love and Understanding?
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The song by Elvis Costello and his band the Attractions was written and produced by the man who first recorded it, another Brit named Nick Lowe. And like his friend Costello, Lowe was hard to define. These men had been called everything from pub rock to power pop to post punk. By the late stage 70s, all of these scrappy scenes were fusing under the catchall term new Wave, which caught on with the public and began to generate hits on both sides of the Atlantic. Hits from artists like Joe Jackson, another spitfire who carried himself like a bruiser but wrote like a balladeer, together with Elvis Costello and another British rocker named Graham Parker, who was winning acclaim from scores of critics and tastemakers.
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Just can't get, Just can't get no protection Just can't get Just can't get no protection.
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These acerbic blokes became known as the Angry Young Men, an ironic title considering they were tender and soulful as much as they were angry. But the name stuck. Costello, Jackson and Parker were the locus of what New Wave became, growing out of England's pub rock and punk rock scenes and the transatlantic sound of power pop. Sure, these guys knew how to knock out a fresh fearsome rave up. And often their lyrics were spiteful and full of contempt. But by the 80s, their not so secret sophistication was peeking through as their music ranged far beyond the confines of post punk.
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Jim Jack Jump It's Jumping Jam makes you like your eggs on the Jersey side the Jim Jam Jumping Jive makes.
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You and while other more accessible British acts took the new wave sound to the bank in America.
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Stand so close to me don't stand, don't stand.
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The Angry Young Men had to diversify their sound to crack our top 40. They got poppier, jazzier, leaned toward ballads and R B in their quest to become pop hit makers.
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Do you know what you want?
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And the advent of alternative rock in the late 80s and 90s treated them like Beatlesque forefathers. One of these post punk forefathers even has this pop superstar to thank. She's the reason why after 1992 he didn't need to work another day in his life. I will explain. Today on Hit Parade we will trace the rise of these so called angry young men and their transition into less angry, older and more pop friendly men. They were never destined to be big hit makers, which makes the moments when their genre busting experiments crossed paths with our Hit Parade so fascinating. Rather than scrappy punks they turned out to be, as shown by the biggest hit any of them ever scored urbane sophisticates. And that's where your Hit Parade marches today, the week ending November 20, 1982. Forty years ago this week when Steppin out by Joe Jackson broke into the top 10 on Billboard's Hot 100 on its way to a number six peak at a time when new wave mostly meant synth pop and mtv, Joe Jackson, Elvis Costello, Graham Parker and their peer Nick Lowe were charting a different wave, one that couldn't be confined to rock, pop, jazz or soul. Join us as we pump it up, write the book and go steppin out into the night.
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Has the dawn ever seen your eyes?
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This is the British trio Emerson, Lake and Palmer with the title track from their 1971 LP Tarkus. A number one UK album and top ten US album ELP were famed for their intricate progressive rock, including compositions like Tarkus that stretched past 20 minutes, were divided into movements like classical music and filled whole sides of vinyl. These ELP albums, Tarkus Trilogy, Brain Salad Surgery routinely went gold and dominated album rock radio in the early seventies. This music is not the focus of this Hit Parade episode. Indeed, we just played you, Emerson, Lake and Palmer because all the music I'll be covering in this show will be in essence the opposite of this. Sub genres like the ones I mentioned at the top of our show, Pub rock, power pop are frankly hard to define, let alone such catch all classifications as post punk and new wave. It's almost easier to define these categories by what they are not. Lugubrious, intricate, weighty, the very things that progressive rock fans prized in the music of elp, yes, Pink Floyd and early Genesis. These were what the musicians I'm going to focus on today were trying to counteract. Some of these guys were punks before punk was a genre. But frankly, these movements defy the very idea of genre. Often the bands of these early 70s scenes and styles sounded more like R and B, Or even a kind of punk version of country. Mind you, the so called angry young men we'll be focusing on in this episode were not punks the way say the Sex Pistols would be. But they did emerge at a time when playing loud features fast and aggro, as Joe Jackson does here, was rewarded by the marketplace. Here's the other thing that's ironic about our so called Angry Young Men. Years later, several of them would wind up writing their own classical pieces, working with jazz musicians and build building elaborate orchestral arrangements. In other words, after coming out of a movement that disdained elaborate song structures and high culture pretensions, they went high culture themselves. But maybe they had to burn it all down before they could build it back up. What made the mid-70s such a fruitful time for these artists to earn their stripes was that rock itself was going back to basics.
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What I did but stop and go speak and I'm sure that's how you.
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Which didn't always translate on the charts. Few of the acts we'll be discussing on this show scored hit singles, especially in the United states. The Hot 100 peak positions will be few and far between. But you can trace much of what happened in transatlantic roots rock in the first half of the 70s back to this song, which was an actual American top 40 hit. Top five, in fact. Welshman Dave Edmonds kicked off his career with a big hit, this 1970 cover of Blues man Smiley Lewis's I hear you knocking. It reached number one in the UK and number four in America. It was retro for the time, closer to the spirit of 50s rock and roll than 60s hippie rock. And yet it was also current, providing a blueprint for where back to basics rock could go in the 70s.
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You better get back to y' all used to be cause y' all your name good for me.
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Dave Edmonds soon became the avatar of this rootsy approach. His debut album, 1972's Rock Pile was filled with new takes on retro rock and rol. And Edmonds soon found himself at the crux of the so called pub rock scene. A tight network of British bands dressed in denim and other glam free outfits playing homespun rock and roll in small London area clubs. These bands rejected languid album oriented rock, preferred songs of two to three minutes in length and played with proto punk economy. Edmonds would go on to produce albums by several bands from this scene, including Ducks Deluxe. And the the American band Eggs Over Easy, who made their name in British pubs. At the same time this scene was flowering in England, another sympathetic subgenre was bubbling up in the States and spreading on the radio. Power pop. Another back to basics rock movement that took catchy 60s pop by the likes of the who or the Beach Boys and turbocharged it. While British bands like the Beatles and their descendants Badfinger gave a spark to power pop. The first wave of power pop bands were mostly American, such as the Eric Carmen fronted the Raspberries, The alex chilton led big star. And the solo studio wizard Todd Rundgriff.
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Inside.
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Back in England, one band on the pub rock scene was setting itself apart from the pack. Named after their guitarist Brinsley Schwartz. This band had a sound so rootsy that at first it bordered on American country music. Brinsley Schwartz. The band were ambitious. They played clubs and colleges all over England and even opened for Paul McCartney. They also had a secret weapon, a songwriter in his early 20s from Walton on Thames in Surrey who had a gift for melody. His name was Nick Lowe. On albums like 1972's Nervous on the Road, Lowe wrote almost every song that wasn't a cover. Gradually his homespun sound became more polished, veering toward power pop. When Brinsley Schwartz worked with producer Dave Edmonds on what would wind up being their final album, 1974's the New Favorites of Brinsley Schwartz, Nick Lowe had a songwriting breakthrough. The original version of what's so Funny Bout Peace, Love and Understanding. It was a remarkably meta song. The pub rock genre was intended as a rejection of 60s hippie rock. And yet here was Nick Lowe, embracing the hippie ideal of peace and love and writing a cynically phrased but earnestly delivered plea for that ideal over a sparkling power pop melody. Nothing by Brinsley Schwartz charted in England or America. After the band split, Nick Lowe teamed up with Dave Edmonds he wrote songs for Edmonds, including his retro rock single I Knew the Bride When She Used To Rock and roll a number 26 UK. And Low. And Edmonds formed an on again off again band called Rockpile, named for Edmonds 1972 L.P. rockpile would play gigs more than they recorded, but they helped infuse retro rock into what would eventually become new wave. As for his solo career, Nick Lowe signed to the new label Stiff Records, which would be vital to the breakthrough of British punk. In 1976, Stiff put out Lowe's debut single so It Goes, with guitar backing from his mate Dave Edmonds. So It Goes was straight up power pop. Equally important as Nick Lowe's singing and songwriting careers were his other role as a producer and incubator of new talent. What Dave Edmonds had done for the pub rock scene in the early 70s, Low would do in the mid-70s for a new wave pun intended of emerging British acts and the first of these launched the same year as Lowe's own solo career. Graham Thomas Parker, born in Hackney, east London in 1950, spent the early 70s working odd jobs, factory worker, dock worker, gas station attendant and gigging around London in obscure pub rock bands. Parker's sound drew inspiration from the likes of van Morrison and 60s R B. It was basically white soul crossed with pub rock, as heard on his 1976 debut single the Horn inflected Silly Thing, But Parker's voice and vibe had the edge of punk, an unusual collision of styles. Around 1975, Parker signed with the same manager as the soon to be defunct Brinsley Schwartz. Soon several former members of that band became The Rumor, Graham Parker's backing band and the 1976 debut album by Graham Parker and the Rumor. Howlin Wind was produced by former Brinsley leader Nick Lowe. Parker's songs were soulful, but Low presented them with ragged frugality. Not since Bruce Wayne Springsteen had a new rock performer been greeted with such critical acclaim. Rolling Stone applauded the Rumors quote raw efficiency and they reserved special praise for Parker's songwriting. Though Howlin Wind did not chart in either the UK or the us Graham Parker took advantage of the strong reviews to record a follow up album right away. Parker and the Rumors Heat Treatment came out just six months after the debut. Heat Treatment got Parker onto the charts for the first time, number 52 on the UK album chart and in America, number 169 on Billboard's top LPs. But Parker's more impressive chart performance was on Paz and Jop. The Village Voices widely followed poll of dozens of rock critics launched in 1971. By the way, the poll's name is a spoonerism of the magazine jazz and pop. At the end of 1976, the Paz and Jopp Critics Poll ranked both of Parker's albums in the top five at numbers two and four. Only Stevie Wonder's songs in the Key of Life prevented Parker from topping the poll. Jackson Browne's the Pretender came in third. Parker's classic rock and soul touchstones crossed with punk energy were catnip for critics. This would not be the last time Parker would do well in Pazen Job, the one chart he ever dominated. Parker did manage to crack Billboard's Hot 100 with the heat Treatment single Hold Back the Night, which peaked at number 58 in 1977. Most of the album was overseen by future hard rock, pop and country producer Robert John Mutt Lang, an odd pairing that Parker would later seek to undo. But Parker's friend Nick Lowe did produce the LP's cheeky track backdoor Love.
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It's Just a backdoor Love.
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While he was keeping one eye on Graham Parker's career in 1977, Lowe would go on to mentor another newly emerging singer songwriter who'd made his bones on the pub rock scene. And this creative partnership would prove a much greater success. No one would even think to call Graham Parker an angry young man before this other acerbic rock nerd built that archetype. First, Less Than Zero was the debut single by the 22 year old born Declan Patrick McManus, known to the world by the moniker Elvis Costello. Released on Stiff Records and produced by Nick Lowe, Less Than Zero defined Costello out of the gate. Melodic but bashing, acerbic but catchy.
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Turn out the TV to winless men will suspect even your another one detected so your bottle won't know.
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Costello was new neither to the music business nor the recording studio. He'd grown up in a showbiz family, the son of British Irish band leader and vocalist Ross McManus. In Elvis's telling father Ross would try anything to get over on the hit parade. Here he is in a delightfully cheesy televised ring a ding ding performance in 1963 of the Pete Seeger folk standard if I Had a Hammer.
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In the Morning and Hammer in the evening.
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And Ross McManus even recorded jingles for TV adverts. In 1973, Elvis sang backup for his father on this ad for R. White's lemonade.
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I'm a secret lemonade drinker R. Whites always I'm gonna try to keep it up it's one of those nights Always, always, always reminis I'm a secret lemonade.
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Dream on his own, Elvis Costello made his way through the Greater London pub rock scene. The same scene that incubated Nick Lowe. Costello briefly recorded with the short lived pub rock band Flip City. You can hear Elvis's distinctive vocals on this 1975 flip city single, Sweet Revival. Elvis Costello was five years junior to Nick Lowe and had a more pronounced rebellious streak. Less Than Zero was a diatribe against former British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, whom Costello caught on TV trying to distance himself from his racist past. Costello wouldn't give him a pass calling Mr. Oswald with the swastika tattoo. In other words, what was most punk about Elvis Costello were his words more than his music. This was even more apparent on his second single, the Slow Dance Anti Love love song. Alison. Oh, it's so fun. It's with lyrics like I understand that you are not impressed or I wish that I could stop you from talking when I hear the silly things you say and I know this world is killing you. Costello's oft covered ballad is one of the most bile filled beautiful songs ever. For his part, Costello was a different kind of male rock star. With Buddy Holly glasses, narrow suits and jittery akimbo limbed singing stances. He came off as too fitful and embittered to be romantic, yet the song came out romantic anyway.
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I know this world is killing you. Oh, and.
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A lyric in Allison provided the title of My Aim is true, Costello's 1977 Nick Lowe produced debut album. Like Graham Parker, Costello was still holding down a mundane day job when not playing music, and Elvis had to commute between the recording sessions and the offices of Elizabeth Arden where he worked as a data entry clerk. Costello had not yet formed a backing band, so for that one lp, this is a fun piece of trivia. He was backed by members of the California band Clover, who would regroup in the 80s as the chart topping band Huey Lewis and the News. No kidding. But I digress. Though Costello was being marketed by Stiff Records as punk adjacent, the album ranged widely and on one track Elvis rather ironically claimed he was not angry. But that word would take on new meaning after Costello's American label, Columbia Records, got him a late 1977 showcase appearance on NBC TV's Saturday Night Live. What Costello pulled live on the air that night became the stuff of legend. Elvis Costello and the attractions only got the SNL gig because original guests, the Sex Pistols, who were hamstrung by visa issues could not make it so Costello dreamed up his own punk rock style gesture. Before the show, Columbia Records had insisted that Costello should perform his single Less Than Zero, a song Costello didn't want to play because he was sure Americans wouldn't know anything about its subject, the British fascist Oswald Mosley. So after just seven seconds of Less Than Zero live on the air, Costello did this.
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I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, there's no.
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Reason to do this song here. You've possibly seen this footage SNL has replaced, played it on their anniversary shows numerous times, and even recreated it in parody. And you may have wondered why Costello specifically says there was, quote, no reason to do this song here. By here, Costello meant no reason to do it in America, not on Saturday Night Live. And he was rebelling against his record label, not NBC. Despite the urban legend that the broadcaster was angered by the song, he switched to radio Radio, a biting diatribe against big media conglomerates like NBC.
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They're saying things that I can hardly believe. They really think we're getting out of control.
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The then unreleased song wouldn't appear on a Costello album until 1978's this Year's Model. Yes, NBC brass and especially SNL producer Lorne Michaels were enraged by the bait and switch. Michaels staff hounded the band out, out of the studio, and Costello was banned from SNL for a dozen years. But Columbia Records couldn't have asked for better publicity. This gesture established Costello as a punk fellow traveler, an actual angry young man. Prior to the SNL appearance, Costello's My Aim Is True album hadn't gotten higher on the Billboard album chart than number 86. Two months after the show, the LP soared into the top 40 on its way to a number 32 peak. Costello's then current single, Watching the Detectives, even bubbled under the Hot 100 at number 108.
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Ooh, it's so cute. She's watching the detectives.
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Watching the Detectives was also on trend in another way. It's reggae beat. As far back as 1975, when Punk Priestess Patti Smith threw a bit of reggae onto her landmark album Horses, Them.
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Are the ocean USA Dismal women all standing with shack on their faces. Sad description.
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Punk rockers had flirted with reggae rhythms. Costello made this connection even more OOVERT. As noted two decades later on the PBS documentary series Rock and Roll, it seemed as if every punk rocker started to walk with a skank. The new openness to reggae rhythms would prove infectious and often more commercially acceptable for a mass audience than hardcore punk. Once reggae was normalized in white rock by Costello on a song that helped break him in America and was also a number 15 hit in his UK homeland. Other bands were able to take the approach and run up the charts with it, most notably this band, The Police. The trio of Sting, Andy Summers and Stuart Copeland leaned heavily on on reggae for their first wave of singles. They even scored their first top 40 hit, Roxanne, emulating the reggae approach Elvis Costello had popularized. The Police may have scored the biggest pop hit of the reggae punk wave of the late 70s, but one other new rocker was trying his own hand at the reggae rhythm and a range of other styles in his quest for punk era legitimacy. Ian Jackson, born in Burton upon Trent in 1954, would not change his name to Joe Jackson until the mid-70s after his resemblance to the title character on a British TV puppet show called Joe 90. Joe Jackson was, in a way, the least likely punk of all, a lover of jazz and classical music who'd earned a scholarship to London's Royal Academy of Music and had come up not as a pub rocker but a multi instrumentalist on the cabaret circuit. One of his bands, Arms and Legs, released a single in 1976, she'll surprise you, that sounded miles removed from punk. However, by 1978, when Joe Jackson was shopping demo tapes, punk had morphed into new wave and was taking over the charts. Nick Lowe scored his biggest ever British single with the sleek I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass, a number seven UK hit. Dave Edmonds, too, had shifted in a new wavy direction with Girls Talk, a song Elvis Costello wrote for him in 1978 that eventually reached number four UK. And on Costello's second album, this year's Model, the top Paz and jop album of 1978. By the way, he'd moved deeper into new waves with such British hits as the number 16, I don't want to Go to Chelsea. And the power pop party rocker Pump it up, a number 24 UK hit.
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Pump it up when you don't really need it Pump it up until you get good feeling.
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Joe Jackson took note of all of this. As AllMusic's William Rolman would later write, quote, despite his classical education and background playing many types of music in clubs, Jackson admired the punk and new wave movements, especially the energy and simplicity of the music and the outspoken tone of the lyrics. Jackson had no trouble incorporating these elements into his own music, and if he was using the new wave label as a flag of convenience, the style nevertheless was a good fit for him. Unquote.
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If you want to know about the stains on the mattress. You can read it in the Sunday papers.
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In the summer of 1978, the American producer David Kirschenbaum got Joe Jackson signed to A M Records and began producing his debut album, Look Sharp. The LP positioned Jackson as a sardonic rocker in the Elvis Costello mold, with cutting lyrics and new wave pop hooks. Jackson's band, including guitarist Gary Sanford, drummer Dave Houghton and the celebrated bassist Graham Mabee, added bashing energy to even Jackson's most melodic compositions. On Got the Time, which would later be covered by speed metal band Anthrax, the Joe Jackson Band veered all the way toward pure punk. When Look Sharp arrived in early 1979, Jackson was immediately compared to Costello, as magazines tagged both snide but melodic rockers as angry young men, a term, by the way, first coined in the 1950s for a group of British playwrights and novelists like John Osborne and Kingsley amos. Costello and Jackson 2 were thought to possess a gimlet eyed, distinctly British take on rock, and soon enough Graham Parker would be tagged with the moniker as well. The difference among the angry young men, however, was that Joe Jackson scored the first major pop hit by any of them.
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Is she really going out with him? Is she really gonna take him home?
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Like Costello's Allison, Jackson's Is she really Going Out With Him? Was a bitter lament by a solitary man ruing a woman he doesn't stand a chance with. And like Allison, beneath its caustic facade, it was melodically graceful and romantic. Even as a heartsick Joe growsed about pretty women walking with gorillas while he kids himself he looks real smooth. It's an incel anthem that plays like a love song.
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They say the looks don't count for much so there goes your proof.
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First released in late 1978, is she really Going out with Him? Took months to catch on, finally cracking the Hot 100 in June 1979. By mid July it had cracked the top 40 on its way to a number 21 peak. It made sense that Jackson's single would break in the summer of 79. In America, that was the breakthrough summer of new waves, as power pop bands like Cheap Trick, The knack. And the Cars. All scored their biggest hits to date. Even pop crooner Linda Ronstadt was drawing from the new wave well by covering Elvis Costello. Ronstadt's version of Allison reached number three thirty on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart in May of 79. But perhaps the most surprising new wave hit maker in the United States in the summer of 79 was Costello's friend Nick Low. Cruel To Be Kind was a song Low wrote back in his Brinsley Schwartz days with his bandmate Ian Gomp. Lowe modeled it after the early disco hit the Love I Lost by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, which Lowe loved and wanted to adapt into a power pop song. The Brinsley's version never saw release and Low sat on the demo for half a decade until his Columbia Records A and R man convinced him to re record it with his Rockpile mate Dave Edmonds. An odd fit for the pub rock era, Cruel To Be Kind turned out to be ideal for the new wave era. Like prior singles by Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson, Cruel found Low cursing his heartache to a toe tapping melody. Released in the summer of 79, Cruel to Be Kind reached number 12 in both the US and the UK. In America, by the way, it's Low's only top 40 hit. He is definitionally a one hit wonder here, but what a hit. In interviews, Lowe says he still loves it and still plays it live to this day. Around the same time he fashioned his future hit, Lowe recorded another single called American Squirm. For this track, Low was backed by Elvis Costello and the Attractions. American Squirm is today best remembered as the A side of a single whose B side is now far better known. Low gave the single's B side to Costello and they finally recorded the classic song Nick Lowe wrote for Brinsley Schwartz five years earlier. Yep, what's so funny bout Peace, Love and Understanding? Though it was never issued as an Elvis Costello A side and hence never charted, the Attractions take on Lowe's peacenik anthem became the definitive version. It was played extensively on album rock radio and later included on the American version of Costello's 1979 album Armed Forces. This exposure made Armed Forces Costello's biggest US album, issued in the winter of 1979. By March, Armed Forces reached number 10 on the Billboard album chart, fueled by Peace, Love and Understanding, as well as the single Accidents Will Happen, which just missed the Hot One 100 at number 101. The same month Armed Forces was peaking on the album chart, Graham Parker came back with his own acclaimed album, but he'd had a much rougher go in the late 70s then cost Stello had. For all his early critical acclaim, Parker's US label, Mercury Records was befuddled at how to promote him. Singles like Sweet on you missed the Hot 100 and his LPs wallowed at the bottom rungs of the album chart. Parker came to believe Mercury was botching his career, and so in 1978 he and his band the Rumor recorded a quickie live album, the Parkarilla, to fulfill his contract with the label. Parker was so contemptuous of the project he remade an old track, Don't Ask Me Questions, as a disco song just to fill side four of the double lp. It was not great. As a final kiss off to the label, Parker recorded the single Mercury Poisoning, a thinly veiled screed that was like his version of the Sex Pistol's EMI critics called Mercury Poisoning one of Parker's best songs, and it only stoked his reputation as one of rock's most acerbic scribes. The Mercury Diss track was issued as a one off off by Stiff Records in the UK and in the U S by Parker's new label, Arista Records. Label chief Clive Davis gave Parker a big advance and an ample recording budget for what would turn out to be Parker's most celebrated album, 1979's Squeezing Out Sparks in Japan.
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Discovering Japan.
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Davis got what he paid for Squeezing Out Sparks was Parker's most polished lp, fully aligned with the sound of rock post punk, a bracingly original take on the angry young man template. AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine would later call it a masterful fusion of pub rock classicism, new wave pop and pure vitriol that makes even his most conventional singer songwriter numbers bristle with energy. Released in March 79, squeezing out Sparks finally got Parker into the top 40 on the album chart, peaking at number 40 and spending half a year on the chart with the critics. Sparks did even better than Howlin Wind or Heat Treatment had. Paz and Jopp ranked it for first in its year end 1979 poll. In a celebratory mood, Parker and the Rumor issued a live cover of the Jackson 5's I Want yout Back as a single, and it briefly touched the pop chart. Meanwhile, Joe Jackson moved quickly to follow up his debut, which had cracked the top 30 and gone gold before 1979 was out. He dropped I'm the Man, whose cheeky title track found Jackson still playing. The witty cynic. I'm the man returned Jackson to the US album charts top 30, where it peaked at number 22 in his homeland. It generated a big hit single, an insightful, empathetic song called it's different for Girls. Introducing it on stage, Jackson would mask the song's open heartedness with a veneer of punk attitude.
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This is a song for all you sophisticates, especially for the guys. You may have noticed that women are really a drag sometimes, you know what I mean? Like sweet, shy, mysterious creatures that us men are, you know, and all they.
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Want us for is our bodies in reality. It's different for Girls was a conversation between a man and a woman, with the woman playing the hardened cynic. Jackson played no instruments on the track, including his signature piano, preferring to let the melody ring out on guitar. It's Different For Girls reached number five in the UK Joe Jackson's biggest ever British hit with two hit LPs Joe Jackson had a stellar 1979, but Elvis Costello was having a more tumultuous. In the spring, Costello scored his biggest ever UK single, the number two hit Oliver's Army. But the song also drew attention for a rather unfortunate use of the N word.
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One more with a one less white.
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Though it passed right by cultural gatekeepers at the time, the lyric came to seem even more unfortunate after word got around that spring of an incident at a hotel bar in Columbus, Ohio, between Costello and members of Steven Still's band. In a drunken exchange, Costello insulted several African American musical artists with racial slurs, including James Brown and Ray Charles. When details of the exchange were leaked to the press, Costello quickly apologized, but his American reputation was tarnished. Radio stations pulled the Armed Forces LP from rotation, and later dates on his US tour sold poorly. Costello, who had been part of England's Rock Against Racism movement in the mid-70s, felt foolish and expressed deep regret for the incident. In later interviews in 1982, he would tell Rolling Stone, quote, what could I do? Hold up a sign that read I really like black people. What he did do in 1980 was record an album devoted to classic American soul. He called the LP Get Happy, produced by his mentor Nick Lowe. For its lead single, Costello covered a previously obscure b side by 60s r b duo Sam and Dave called I Can't Stand up for Falling Down. Elvis and the Attractions reinvented Stand up as an ebullient rave up. And turned it into a number four UK hit, generating royalties for its black songwriters, Homer Banks and Alan Jones. Elsewhere on the Get Happy album, Costello wrote soulful originals like High Fidelity. But the album's final single, the Waltz Time number New Amsterdam, a number 36 UK hit, signaled the more baroque approach Costello would pursue as he entered the 80s. Indeed, and the 80s would be the decade. All the angry young men would reinvent the New wave template and reach new pop heights. They would not be confined to punk, post punk or even power pop. They would follow their own muse and score bigger hits.
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Don't you feel like trying something new.
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When we come back, Elvis goes new romantic, Graham turns wistful, and Joe becomes the Jazzbo's favorite rocker. Non Slate plus listeners will hear the rest of this episode in two weeks. For now, I hope you've been enjoying this episode of Hit Parade. Our show was written, edited and narrated by Chris Melanfi. That's me. My producer is Kevin Bendis, Derek John is executive Producer of Narrative Podcasts, and Alicia Montgomery is VP of Audio for Slate Podcasts. Check out their roster of shows@slate.com podcasts. You can subscribe to Hit Parade wherever you get your podcasts, in addition to finding it in the Slate Culture feed. If you're subscribing on Apple Podcasts, please rate and review us while you're there. It helps other listeners find the show. Thanks for listening and I look forward to leading the Hit Parade back your way. We'll see you for part two in a couple of weeks. Until then, keep on marching on the one. I'm Chris Melanfi.
- [65:26]
B
I said that won't be too much fun for us though. It's oh so nice to get.