Читать книгу “We Didn’t Start the Fire” - Группа авторов - Страница 18

Joel’s approach to vocal tracks reveals additional links between Sgt. Pepper and The Nylon Curtain in terms of lead vocals, lyrical references, nonlexical vocalizations, background vocals, and the application of recording technology to vocal tracks. On several tracks, including “Laura,” “A Room of Our Own,” and “Scandinavian Skies,” Joel admits he was trying to sing like Lennon while recording his lead vocals, including, at times, the nasal timbre of Lennon’s singing during the Sgt. Pepper era. He had been, in his words, “traumatized” by Lennon’s murder two years earlier. “It was a realization that there could never be a Beatles again because there’s no more John Lennon,” Joel says. “And in a way, I suppose I was trying to re-create what I loved about the Beatles with the vocal approach. I hear myself singing like John Lennon.”¹⁹

Then there are the words comprising the lyrics, which Joel remembers noticing about Sgt. Pepper. The Beatles album was full of references to British life and culture that may have been lost on American teenagers yet remained significant: “We didn’t really know what they were talking about,” Joel said. “But the sonic effect of the words themselves was very effective.”²⁰ Where Lennon and McCartney wrote about “four thousand holes in Blackburn Lancashire,” Joel sang, in “Goodnight Saigon,” about Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, a reference with which his audience, especially his generation, was surely more familiar, as it was an important military installation during the Vietnam War. Additionally, it also offers Joel the opportunity to achieve the sort of “sonic effect” that intrigued him about the Beatles’ lyrics by employing elision. He sings of the lengthy nights in Vietnam as lasting “six weeks,” but then uses the same lyrics—without repeating them—to refer to the duration of the American military’s basic training at Parris Island. Joel’s elision is semantic, melodic, and formal: the lyrics end one thought and begin another; the descending stepwise motion of “six weeks” (B–A, scale degrees seven and six, sounding dissonantly over a IV chord) both ends the melodic idea pertaining to one phrase while simultaneously beginning the melodic idea of the next; and the moment of elision stretches over two distinct formal sections of the song, the bridge and the succeeding verse.

Both the Beatles and Joel also use vocal sounds in ways that do not sound like singing. Joel liked the idea of hearing voices, but not hearing them sing. He points out that he was inspired by the Beatles’ “Girl,” from Rubber Soul (1965), because of the way the singers audibly inhale, while Sgt. Pepper’s “A Day in the Life” includes panting during McCartney’s bridge. On The Nylon Curtain’s “Allentown,” for example, Joel has voices chanting alongside the sounds of factory machinery and pile drivers: “ooo—shhh—ooo—ha!” This kind of “experimental” approach, moving beyond the conventional use of the voice, is what Joel sees as the most salient link between the Beatles’ recordings and his own. On previous albums, once he felt that a song’s tracks were in good enough shape, he would hand control over to his producer to finish mixing. But on The Nylon Curtain, he was present for the entire process, alongside producer Phil Ramone. “I had to be there. It’s not something I could just leave. . . . It was an experiment in sonic composition as well as music composition.”²¹

Additional connections can be heard in the use of background voices as voices, especially on The Nylon Curtain’s second track, “Laura.” The song takes the emotional frustration introduced in “Allentown” and refocuses it on a more personal level, expressing a man’s simultaneous desire for and frustration with a woman. On earlier songs, the background vocals would sound with or behind the lead vocal, supporting it but not distracting the listener from the main melody. However, those on “Laura” are considerably more active, singing discernible words, echoing lyrics, or responding and commenting on the principal melody. Within the Beatles’ catalog, it is similar to the difference between background vocals on Revolver’s “I’m Only Sleeping” (1966) and Sgt. Pepper’s “Getting Better.” About half a minute into “Getting Better,” as McCartney cheerily proclaims, “it’s getting better all the time,” Lennon and Harrison remark smartly, “can’t get no worse!” In the final verse of “Laura,” Joel sings angrily, “Laura loves me even if I don’t care.” The background voices, also sung by Joel, echo the title lyric, parrot back “loves me,” and then, at the end of the phrase, taunt, “if I don’t care ah-ah,” holding out the open vowels with a Beatle-esque inflection and a sighing gesture (the descending portamento, “ah-ah”) that would be at home on a Beatles record.

Moreover, Joel does not simply embrace the Beatles’ music, he builds on it. An examination of the use of double-tracking—the layering of two instances of recorded material (such as a vocal line) such that, on playback, they sound simultaneously—shows how. For example, on “Laura,” Joel’s voice is double-tracked for the entire song, similar to the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (1963), “Across the Universe” (1970), and much of Sgt. Pepper. Olivier Julien argues that double-tracking was not only a technological development but also an aesthetic one. While the Beatles were surely not the only ones to embrace double-tracking (Phil Spector and Brian Wilson did too), they were pretty keen on it. They used it on nine of the thirty-three songs they recorded on two track machines, and then when they began using four-track recording equipment on A Hard Day’s Night (1964), it appears on twelve out of the album’s thirteen songs.²² Martin certainly recognized the way double-tracking created a new and distinctive sound for the vocal track, especially as experimentation and psychedelia became motivational forces for the Beatles and many artists that followed.²³ On The Nylon Curtain, “Scandinavian Skies” strikes a psychedelic tone, in part due to its use of double-tracking.

Joel’s use of double-tracking on The Nylon Curtain is not new, as it also appears earlier in his catalog, such as on “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me,” from Glass Houses. However, the way he uses the technique is different. Rather than an end in and of itself, double-tracking serves additional purposes, one of which is to carry particular connotations. Across the album, double-tracked vocals feature prominently on songs that express frustration, anger, and anxiety, including “Allentown,” “Laura,” parts of “Surprises,” and “Scandinavian Skies.” In constrast, single-tracked vocals usually appear on songs expressing resignation—such as “Goodnight Saigon,” other parts of “Surprises,” and “Where’s the Orchestra?”—as well as those pertaining generally to more positive situations, such as “She’s Right on Time” and “A Room of Our Own.”²⁴ Thus, one could argue that what Julien calls the “diversion” of musical technologies that led to double-tracking, which the Beatles embraced and helped popularize, extends from the early 1960s through to Joel’s work in the early 1980s. Considering Joel’s insistence on situating The Nylon Curtain as a follow-up to Sgt. Pepper, whose techniques would make his own work “richer and more textured,” it therefore seems likely that Joel’s use of double-tracking was not just a general adoption of the reigning recording aesthetic but a much more direct emulation.²⁵

Yet it is not merely emulation. Joel uses the double-tracking technique in ways that are certainly inspired by the Beatles but nonetheless distinct. On “Laura,” the entire lead vocal is double-tracked, but certain lyrics feature a more severe application of the effect (indicated here with italics). For example, in the second stanza, Joel sings, “then these careless fingers, they get caught in her vise,” and later sings, “then she tells me she suddenly believes she’s seen a very good sign.” While in the case of “careless” one might argue that the application of the effect emphasizes Laura’s carelessness, it is more difficult to make the case that a more severe timbre on “suddenly believes” does the same. As it turns out, the motivation is musical rather than lyrical. Both instances appear in analogous places in the melodic line, at the end of a lengthy series of alternations between the fifth- and sixth-scale degrees (in B-flat major), just before the melody rises into a higher octave. The severity of the double-tracked vocal can therefore be read as a reflection of frustration manifest in the melody before a modicum of resolution is achieved through its ascent. Following the song’s bridge, the same effect is applied twice in the lines, “I should be so immunized to all of her tricks” and, during the final verse in the melodically analogous spot, “If she had to she would put herself in my chair.” Importantly, in “Laura,” the distinction has changed: no longer is it between vocals that are single-tracked and those that are double-tracked. Instead, the difference lies between vocals that are double-tracked and vocals that are more severely double-tracked.

In effect, Joel has shifted the calculus from a difference in kind to a subtle-but-still-noticeable difference of degree. “Surprises,” an eerie and enigmatic track during which, as Holden writes, “the singer views his own life and creativity as a series of deterministic changes,” similarly emphasizes that difference of degree.²⁶ The song mixes synthesizer patches of strings and keyboards over a lament-like, stepwise descending bass line and highly chromatic harmony. The opening vocal phrase begins with a single-tracked voice as Joel implores the listener to stay calm: “don’t get excited, don’t say a word.” The double-tracking slowly becomes apparent as the lyrics reveal the reason behind the narrator’s desire: some kind of mistake was made and “handled so neatly.” The second layer of the lead vocal is completely mixed in by the end of the phrase, when Joel’s voice reveals in the song’s refrain that such a mistake should have been expected: “it shouldn’t surprise you at all, you know.” The following vocal phrase then reverts to a single-tracked line and once again mixes in the second vocal layer slowly, culminating in a completely double-tracked texture in time for the next refrain. One hears a similar effect on “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” as Lennon sings “the girl with kaleidoscope eyes.” Both songs introduce the double-track effect in the middle of a vocal line. In the Beatles’ song, however, it is not a gradual effect, but a quick switch from dry to doubled. In Joel’s song, the double is blended in slowly.