Showing posts with label David Lee Roth. Show all posts

Friday, September 26, 2014

50 years ago: Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” topped the chart

Oh Pretty Woman

Roy Orbison

Writer(s): Roy Orbison/Bill Dees (see lyrics here)

First Charted: August 29, 1964

Peak: 1³ US, 1³ CB, 1¹ HR, 48 AC, 89 CW, 1 CL, 1² UK, 1¹ CN, 1² AU, 1 DF (Click for codes to singles charts.)

Sales (in millions): 1.0 US, 0.76 UK, 7.0 world (includes US + UK)

Airplay/Streaming (in millions): 6.0 radio, 103.05 video, 293.43 streaming

Awards:

Click on award for more details.

About the Song:

Orbison’s “most enduring recording” ^NRR grew out of a crack Bill Dees made to Roy’s wife, Claudette. She interrupted the pair while they were writing to ask her husband for some money to go to the store. Dees shot back that a “pretty woman never needs any money.” ^RS500 From that, Roy came up with the idea of a man watching a pretty woman walk by and wondering if she might be lonely like him.

The path from inception to release was, as Dees says, “the fastest thing I ever saw.” ^KL He says they wrote the song on a Friday, recorded it the next Friday, and by the following Friday it was released. ^KL The song was marked by “Orbison’s tiger-like growl and the repetitive guitar riff.” ^JA His singing is “uncharacteristically exuberant” ^TC on this “perfect country rock boogie sound.” ^TC Chet Atkins called it the “best commercial record I ever heard.” ^HL

The flirtatious nature of this “anthem for voyeurs” ^TC was amusingly ironic, depicting Orbison (or at least the song’s protagonist) “as a trolling stud.” ^MA The image was far better suited to singer David Lee Roth’s machismo when his hard-rock band, Van Halen, took their 1982 cover of the song to #1 on the album rock chart and #12 on the pop charts. Six years later, Orbison died of a heart attack, but as a testament to the song’s timeliness, a version recorded live in September 1987 hit the adult contemporary and country charts in 1989 – twenty five years after the original.

Rap group 2 Live Crew recorded a parody under the title “Pretty Woman” and sampled the bassline from the original. ^WK Orbison’s publisher sued under the claim that the fair use doctrine did not allow for copyrighted material to be reused for profit. ^WK In 1994, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in what is now considered a seminal fair use decision, ^WK that parody qualified as fair use.

Resources:

DMDB Encyclopedia entry for Roy Orbison
^TC Toby Creswell (2005). 1001 Songs: The Great Songs of All Time. Thunder’s Mouth Press: New York, NY. Page 694.
^HL Michael Heatley and Spencer Leigh (1998). Behind the Song: The Stories of 100 Great Pop & Rock Classics. London, England: Blandford Books. Page 16.
^JA David A. Jasen (2002). A Century of American Popular Music: 2000 Best-Loved and Remembered Songs (1899-1999). Routledge: Taylor & Francis, Inc. Page 150.
^KL Jon Kutner and Spencer Leigh (2005). 1000 UK Number One Hits: The Stories Behind Every Number One Single Since 1952. London, Great Britain: Omnibus Press. Page 103.
^MA Dave Marsh (1989). The Heart of Rock and Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made. New York, NY; New American Library. Page 32.
^NRR National Recording Preservation Board of the Library of Congress The Full National Recording Registry
^RS500 Rolling Stone (2011). “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time”
^WK Wikipedia.org

First posted 8/29/2011; updated 11/12/2022.

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Van Halen and David Lee Roth reunite for their first album in 28 years: February 7, 2012

Amazon.com Widgets

28 years ago, Van Halen were arguably the biggest rock band in the world, riding high with 1984 and its lead-off single “Jump”, a #1 hit in the U.S. Fast forward a couple years and frontman David Lee Roth was out, replaced by Sammy Hagar. The Red Rocker kept the band on top, helping them top the Billboard album charts with four studio albums over the next decade. When Hagar left, VH figured they could strike magic once again, but struck out with the Gary Cherone-led Van Halen III album in 1998. While the group still came out with a couple greatest-hits collections and did a couple tours, it looked like III, the band’s poorest received album in both sales and critical acclaim, might be the band’s tepid hurrah.

However, as evidence that all fences can be mended, Roth returned to the fold for a tour in 2007 (although original bassist Michael Anthony had been replaced by Eddie’s son Wolfgang) and now this, the band’s long overdue 12th album. Comeback projects rarely prove to be necessities, but Truth is, according to AntiQuiet, “a true return of the ‘80s cock-rock overlords.” ^WK SleazeRoxx said, “regardless of how much bad blood has been spilled over the years, of how insane Roth and the Van Halen brothers can act, one thing is certain – when they get together magic happens.” ^WK

As evidence of the pent-up demand for new VH with Roth as the frontman, lead single Tattoo was the #1 selling rock song in the U.S. Canada, Finland, and the Netherlands a day after it was released to iTunes. In its first week of release, the video got two million hits on YouTube. ^WK

“Obsessive fans instantly noted the similarity between [that song] and ‘Down in Flames,’ a 1977 song played live, but never released on an album.” ^HF It isn’t the only case of one of the album songs reaching back into the group’s past. Big River is “based on the oft-discussed ‘Big Trouble’ demo which has circulated amongst fans for years, and was actually originally intended for Diver Down and then 1984.” ^CS She’s the Woman dates back to a 1976 demo that signed the band to Warner Bros.” ^MR and Beats Workin’ “culls its energy from past demo ‘Put Out the Lights’, another lost gem off that Warner Bros. tape.” ^CS Blood and Fire “has ties to the band’s score for the 1984 film The Wild Life;” ^CS Bullethead dates back to 1977; and Outta Space began as “Let’s Get Rockin’” in 1976. ^CS

Hagar accused the band of just recording old songs because they couldn’t write new stuff. ^MR However, as Roth told the Los Angeles Times, the band deliberately made an attempt to link to its past “by taking the most promising chunks of coal from four decades ago and polishing them into diamonds.” ^HF It “turns out to be a savvy move, as they not only saved promising songs, but re-oriented the band, pushing them toward their essence” ^AMG as they use “their history to revive their present.” ^AMG

In the end, “it’s pretty clear that these dudes put in the hours.” ^MR “Fans will revel in Eddie’s killer licks;” ^CS even “if he’s no longer in tip-top form, he’s still close enough that there are mnay moments throughout the album to dazzle Eddie wanna-bes.” ^HF “Alex Van Halen remains the meatiest drummer in hard rock.” ^VS and while Roth’s “voice is not the soaring, singular rock wonder that it used to be, …he’s still got plenty of horsepower under the hood” ^HF and that he “has been waiting for years to really let loose, and A Different Kind of Truth offers him plenty of opportunities.” ^CS

This “could have been a train wreck of epic proportions and it’s far from it.” ^HF It has just “enough flashes of past brilliance” ^HF and is “a frequently thrilling return.” ^GN “Against the odds, the party metal kings are back and blazing.” ^GN

Resources and Related Links:

the DMDB page for A Different Kind of Truth
the DMDB Music Maker Encyclopedia entry for Van Halen
^AMG Stephen Thomas Erlewine All Music Guide
^CS Michael Roffman Consequence of Sound (2/6/12)
^GN Dom Lawson The Guardian (2/2/2012)
^HF Melinda Newman HitFix.com (2/6/12)
^MR Joe Bosso, MusicRadar.com
^VS Mark LePage Vancouver Sun (2/6/12)
^WK Wikipedia

Saturday, February 25, 1984

Van Halen hit #1 with “Jump”