12/8/2023 0 Comments Bee gees massachusetts lyricsThe day was all about number one and indeed Tony’s initial greeting opening the new station had been preceded by George Martin’s brilliant Theme Number One, which was also faithfully repeated on Saturday. In all fairness, Engelbert should have been first up. #27 – The simple reason Bannockburn played “The Last Waltz” was that it was number one that day. Trouble is that the song is blah compared to anything they’d introduced on the amazing Bee Gees’ 1st, and doesn’t get near the desperate teenage aching soul hysteria of “To Love Somebody” and “I Can’t See Nobody.” Of course it was their biggest hit to date, so my vaunted inability prior to Crayon Pop to be in touch with the popular pulse anywhere had an early beginning.īut Tom’s appreciation of this song makes me appreciate it a bit more. Like Tom, I think the song is basically unplaced and right to be unplaced, so the state’s nonassociations with much of anything in the almost 200 years since the shot heard round the world are an advantage. I still wonder if this might not have been the reason. As “Mining Disaster” only got to number 14 nationally, I wondered, when the Bee Gees released “Massachusetts” several singles later, if the title was meant to give them further attention in Boston, where they already knew they had an in. When “New York Mining Disaster” by the then-unknown-in-America Bee Gees came out, The DJs at WBZ in Boston were taken by it, talked it up, played it incessantly, said “Sounds so much like the Beatles, but isn’t,” and the song jumped to number one on their chart in a single week (which was something pretty much only the Beatles managed in the pre-Soundscan Sixties in America). Well, “New York Mining Disaster” had zero to do with anyone’s image of New York, either city or state, and works for me way better than this just for being a riveting, dramatic song that matches the Beatles’ harmonies for weird tingliness while also having an ear to soul music. Oh and just to tie three consecutive song reviews into one: “The Last Waltz” is total crap □ Anyway, I just find this phenomenon interesting as a geographer. You could successfully write a song about Boston, Cape Cod, or the Berkshires maybe but not the state as a whole. In the case of Mass, I think its position as New England’s most populous, diverse, and overall dominant state somewhat precludes it as being a “region” in the same way. Up above someone noted the choice of using a state in a song rather than a city, but there’s been plenty of successful songs about California, Texas, etc. I think the problem is that some geographic locations/regions have a coherent identity that can be used in an artistic statement while others can’t. Of course, this makes me wonder what a song about Massachusetts is supposed to sound like anyway? To compare, I just listened to Arlo Guthrie’s song about the same state and it didn’t quite work for me either. “Mass” isn’t a bad song per se, but the geographic title doesn’t fit. Perhaps it’s because I’ve heard it in conjunction with photo montages of SF or perhaps it’s because it’s further from home for my East Coast self and therefore seems more “exotic”, but “SF” conjures up images of the location (at least how I envision it being in 1967) that “Mass” does not. “San Francisco” is unsurprisingly the one that works. And what does a power outage have to do with the separated lovers in this song anyway?īut hey–the song’s (kind of) pretty, isn’t it?Īs someone who’s been to both San Francisco and Massachusetts numerous times, it’s notable that one song works for me while the other does not. How else do we account for operas with titles like I Puritani or Emilia di Liverpool?īut what always perplexed me was the fact that the lights DIDN’T go out in Massachusetts–they went out in NEW YORK. Oh well, the English have traditionally exoticized the Italians, and vice-versa. Was it the name that sounded intriguing to these Anglo-Aussies? But then Americans probably could wax romantically on English (or Australian) place names (Salford? A town called Alice?) because they were not there. I really couldn’t figure out why anyone was romanticizing Massachusetts–I still can’t, other than to say that it must have been “one place have been/seen” only in passing. Hearing “Massachusetts” made me realize that what one finds “exotic” is a matter of where one is, both geographically and psychologically. This recording gave me a strange epiphany of sorts at an early age, even if I didn’t know what to do with it.
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