R.I.P, the list pop song: Missing the lost art of rock ‘n’ roll lyrical overload
From The Nails’ “88 Lines About 44 Women” to R.E.M.’s big hit, they don’t write them like this anymore
Marc Spitz
January 9, 2016 9:30pm (UTC)
Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy and find grace in the simplest of rock lyrics. While I don’t condone the activity, the Ramones’ “beat on the brat with a baseball bat,” is among my favorites. So is German 80s era group Trio’s “Da Da Da” (“I don’t love you you don’t love me…da, da, da…”). And I enjoy a good instrumental. I even like songs with lyrics I can’t make out, like “Louie Louie” or that Sly and the Family Stone song "There’s a Riot Going On," where he sounds like he’s falling asleep on the mic.
At heart, though, I’m a word geek, and the more words an artist can stuff into three to five minutes the better. Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen, Elvis Costello (listen to “Beyond Belief” lately?), John Cooper Clarke: these are my people, my rock and roll poets, but where have they gone in the 2010s?
Every so often, over the past five decades, we could count on at least one brain-twisting single bursting forth from all the pop radio and inspiring us to want to re-learn to read big books. Some intrepid songwriters said, Fuck four chords and a rhyme, I’m going to Dickens the shit out of these four chords!
I was listening to one of my Spotify playlists the other day and the song “88 Lines About 44 Women,” a 1984 New Wave hit by The Nails, happened to come on (and when I say "happened" I mean pretty randomly, as the playlist is 28 hours long and entitled "Quality New Wave" … look it up).
I’d always loved this song (44 couplets about 44 women… a sort of faux-Casanova’s version of Esquire’s eternally gross “Women We Love” feature, populated with gals like “Debbie Ray,” who came from a “perfect Norman Rockwell home,” to “Tonya,” who was “Turkish and liked to fuck while wearing leather biker boots,” or Brenda, who had a thing for “certain vegetables and fruits.” The song, expertly rhyming, is anchored to a very simple, almost novelty keyboard riff, with a baritone hummed hook propelling it; once you hear it, you never forget it.
“'88 Lines...' was informed by that cheesy sounding Casio,” Marc Campbell, the song’s writer and vocalist, told me via email. “We recorded about five minutes of our playing and I went home and wrote the lyrics. There was enough music to accommodate 44 couplets.”
The Nails, one of the decade’s great cult bands, were list-song happy. They’d also cover Los Hombres' “Let It All Hang Out,” and later issued “The Things You Left Behind,” which is an itemization of what an ex-boyfriend finds in his gone girl’s flat.
88 LINES ABOUT 44 WOMEN
Deborah was a Catholic girl
she held out till the bitter end
Carla was a different type
she's the one who put it in
Mary was a black girl
I was afraid of a girl like that
Suzen painted pictures
sitting down like a Buddha sat
Reno was a nameless girl
a geographic memory
Cathy was a Jesus freak
she liked that kind of misery
Vicki had a special way
of turning sex into a song
Kamala, who couldn't sing,
kept the beat and kept it strong
Zilla was an archetype
the voodoo queen, the queen of wrath
Joan thought men were second best
to masturbating in a bath
Sherry was a feminist
she really had that gift of gab
Kathleen's point of view was this
take whatever you can grab
Seattle was another girl
who left her mark upon the map
Karen liked to tie me up
and left me hanging by a strap
Jeannie had a nightclub walk
that made grown men feel underage
Mariella, who had a son,
said I must go, but finally stayed
Gloria, the last taboo
was shattered by her tongue one night
Mimi brought the taboo back
and held it up before the light
Marilyn, who knew no shame,
was never ever satisfied
Julie came and went so fast
she didn't even say goodbye
Rhonda had a house in Venice
lived on brown rice and cocaine
Patty had a house in Houston
shot cough syrup in her veins
Linda thought her life was empty
filled it up with alcohol
Katherine was much too pretty
she didn't do that shit at all
Pauline thought that love was simple
turn it on and turn it off
Jean-Marie was complicated
like some French filmmaker's plot
Gina was the perfect lady
always had her stockings straight
Jackie was a rich punk rocker
silver spoon and a paper plate
Sarah was a modern dancer
lean pristine transparency
Janet wrote bad poetry
in a crazy kind of urgency
Tanya Turkish liked to fuck
while wearing leather biker boots
Brenda's strange obsession
was for certain vegetables and fruit
Rowena was an artist's daughter
the deeper image shook her up
Dee Dee's mother left her father
took his money and his truck
Debbie Rae had no such problems
perfect Norman Rockwell home
Nina, 16, had a baby
left her parents, lived alone
Bobbi joined a New Wave band
changed her name to Bobbi Sox
Eloise, who played guitar,
sang songs about whales and cops
Terri didn't give a shit
was just a nihilist
Ronnie was much more my style
cause she wrote songs just like this
Jezebel went forty days
drinking nothing but Perrier
Dinah drove her Chevrolet
into the San Francisco Bay
Judy came from Ohio
she's a Scientologist
Amaranta, here's a kiss
I chose you to end this list.
©1981,1984 The Nails
David wrote most of the music, Marc came up with the melody line and George helped with the drum programming and atmosphere of the "RCA" version.
PEOPLE WHO DIED MEETS 88 PEPPERS from J. Sprig on Vimeo.But the main inspiration for “88” came from the poet Jim Carroll’s 1980 hit “People Who Died.” Another tabulation (appropriately over a Berry-style riff) of the late Basketball Diarist’s unfortunate pals who all met their Maker too young. “Teddy,” who fell off a roof on East 29th Street, “Bobby,” who got leukemia…
“When I wrote lyrics for ‘88 Lines...’ I consciously used the repetitive style of ‘People Who Died,'” Campbell said. “I love that song. The specificity of it. The detail. And the accumulated power of romantic repetition. I also drew inspiration from poet Joe Drainboard's book 'I Remember,' in which Birdbrain simply lists things he remembered.”
By 1980, the year “People Who Died” appeared on Carroll and band’s debut "Catholic Boy," the art and craft of packing song space with hyper-verbosity was commonplace to hip hop and various modes of reggae, especially songs featuring toasting, but had fallen off a bit in rock and roll since the 60s heyday of Dylan and Reed.
Even the Monkeys had a hand at it:
Disco and punk songs were simpler, though often no less sublime. And with the exception of Cooper Clarke, who dressed like Dylan anyway, attention spans seemed to fade. For every “Walk this Way,” and “Life Is a Rock," there was a “Fly Robin Fly” (as in “up up to the sky”).
There’s an element of jive and humor to the list song that may be too subtle for the disco dancer and the run-of-the-mill Pogo-er with the safety-pin earring. It throws back to hep grazers and swingers like Cab Calloway and later Mose Allison, a sort of fleet-tongued hustle to beat the band.
“Humor is definitely part of what makes '88 Lines' enjoyable,” Campbell said. “There are some funny lines in the song. Some witty wordplay. I wrote it fast, and generally that's the best way to capture the energy of the moment. And like many songs that could be seen as being full of sexual bravado, I wanted to bring a Rudy Ray Moore vibe to the ceremonies,” he says, invoking the disco-era film icon.
As the ’80s progressed, the indie rock era became a bit too self-serious. Hip hop seemed to grow even more lyrically expansive with Public Enemy, De La Soul, Big Daddy Kane and others offering rapidity and dexterity over their beats, and the dancehall genre grew incredibly popular. But in the rock realm, early R.E.M. lyrics might as well have been “Louie Louie,” inscrutable and mumbled. That is, until 1987, when they surprised everyone with the fluke hit “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” the greatest list song ever recorded.
Probably the most popular — if not critically, certainly commercially — list song is from Billy the Kid. In 1989, Mr. Joel, recipient of every prestigious award this country can bestow outside of combat honors, ventured into the land of the golfers and stepfathers, although it seems as if he didn’t really know it. Billy was being sincere when he gave us “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” and we rewarded him for his uselessness with a number one hit (his last on the pop charts, as it turns out).
Campbell remembers the first time he heard the hit:
"Blasting from a record store on 2nd Ave. in Manhattan, I thought it was from a new Joe Strummer solo album. I didn't hear it clearly, obviously, but imagine strummed singing “Begin, Reagan, Palestine, Terror on the airline / Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan.'”
You kind of can, can’t you?
John Peel was probably the most influential radio deejay this side of Alan Freed. Broadcasting over the BBC in England, his career spanned five decades, with his superior taste and eclectic programming genius never waning. He was always particularly fond of whatever was currently "Underground," thus stoking his legend as a trendsetter among college students, rock critics, and upstart bands on six continents.
To be hailed by John Peel and given exposure on his show was worth more than record sales to many bands, although his stamp of approval certainly resonated with the suits in the music business.
Rap’s lyrical tradition not only stands — through artists like multiple Grammy nominee Kendrick Lamaar, Run the Jewels and yes, Eminem — it’s flourished when compound rhymes and intrepidly long storytelling are concerned. But in pop and rock, we're in a bit of a drought. Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett was another of this year's stop-and-listen highlights, but let’s face it — we are not going back to the time when a band like The Nails can get on the radio with a rock and roll song that has over a certain amount of verses. Attention spans are shriveled. Don’t bore us, get to the chorus reigns, and if a hunger is there, it’s being fed by technology like a French goose.
There’s just too much information to savor, so the savvy, chart-minded pop star goes for the blips and pings instead. “People are listening," said Campbell. "The problem is too many pop artists aren't giving music fans much to listen to. It's still possible to grab people's attention. Mikey Cyrus is proof of that. But when it comes to the deep shit, people prefer the shallow end of the lyrical pool. No one wants to think about shit.”
They're Playing My Song is a column by Bruce Pollock, where he focuses on the one song that had the greatest impact on a particular artist or songwriter's career. Here, he speaks with Marc Campbell.
Artist: The Nails
Writers: Marc Campbell and David Kaufman
Album: Hotel for Women
Year: 1981, released on major label in 1982
Label: Jimboco, RCA
In an interview I did with the great Leonard Cohen, he talked about some of the stranger effects a truly poetic song can have. "I think everybody is involved in a kind of Count of Monte Cristo feeling," he said. "You somehow want the past to be vindicated. You want to evoke figures of the past. My own experience has been that almost everything you want happens. I meet people out of the past all the time. Not only that, I meet people that I wanted to create. It's like the song 'Nancy.' The line is 'now you look around, you see her everywhere...' This is just my own creation, but obviously there's a collective appetite for a certain kind of individual; that individual is created and you feel you had a certain tiny part in that creation."
Marc Campbell, lead singer and songwriter for The Nails, would certainly identify. "That's so true it can get spooky," he said, "because you don't know which lies are the truth. Did I dream that or did that really happen? I can't think how many times I've said that. Leonard certainly has to figure into any discussion of '88 Lines,' no question."
So does Jim Carroll, whose "People Who Died" is often thought of as a direct relative.
More obscure but just as relevant is the book-length poem by New York underground poet Joe Drainboard, I Remember.
"He did a listing of stuff he liked. Which is great, to begin every line with "I remember" and then go into your brain and pull this stuff out. So I really need to give Joe Birdbrain props for giving me the idea of just a simple list and how compelling that is. It really has this Romantic theme going on where you kind of become hypnotized by it. And the same is true of '88 Lines.' I kind of got into this hypnotic reverie and it did bring up all kinds of great memories."
Campbell, however, has taken Leonard Cohen's notion to a degree that perhaps only Cohen wouldn't consider extreme, going so far as to be currently living with a girl from the song, the one whose line begins:
"Tanya Turkish liked to fuck while wearing leather biker boots."
Just when you thought he couldn't get any worse - I FOUND THIS!!! "MarcCampbell #TheNails - Home of the Brave - In all of my life, in the music business and before, I have never heard anything so unselfconsciously devoid of good taste or sensibility.
I started out writing a hit-piece, but after hearing this song, i can finally understand why it is that he needed to steal songs, videos, and post ideas, whether for this band or for his/my posts on Dangerous Minds. You can have anything you want, pal. I didn't realize. "I got divorced three years ago after 18 years of marriage and it was devastating," Marc said. "Somebody said, Marc, have you checked out this thing called Facebook? So I checked out this thing called Facebook..." Marc, unblock me and let me help you be whole again. I'll even crush OJ Simpson DVDs for you in a parking lot.
The Nails - Home of the Brave
"Official" RCA Video - 1985 converted from 24 year old Betamax tape.
"I got divorced three years ago after 18 years of marriage and it was devastating," Marc said. "Somebody said, Marc, have you checked out this thing called Facebook? So I checked out this thing called Facebook and I hooked up with some old friends in Manhattan, and we decided I was going to drive to Manhattan from Texas and visit my old friends and have dinner with them. And one of the women that attended was Tanya. Well, we hooked up and the rest is history."
This is one of the many fan videos created for the song. As Marc explains later, there was no official video created, but he made one himself that was banned from YouTube - that video is at the bottom of the piece.
Marc Campbell:"88 Lines" was so simple it was uncanny. The Nails had a studio in our loft in Manhattan. It was back in the day when you could rent the entire floor of some old factory for $1,000 and we had put a little recording studio and rehearsal space in there. My keyboard player, David (Kaufman), and I were shifting our positions in the band around by me playing drums and him playing bass and we were just laying down some riffs on this new Casio keyboard that had some reprogrammed rhythm tracks. The little rhythm track you hear on "88 Lines" is taken directly from the Casio. He turned on that little rhythm track and I was on the drums and I liked what I heard. So I took the testcase tape that we made of that riff and went home. I realized there was about four or five minutes worth of riff in there, and that that would accommodate 88 lines, or 44 couplets. That was what determined the length of the song. Curiously, 88 is a pretty cosmic number. There are 88 keys on the keyboard. "Rocket 88" was a key rock and roll song.
So I wondered, what can you write 88 lines about?
What can you write 44 couplets about? Well, I mean, what is there, really, other than women? Maybe cars for some guys. But what were the big things in my life at that time? Sex, drugs, rock & roll. So it came down to women. I didn't have to really think twice about it. I'm actually making it sound as if I made a choice. I didn't. It just was obvious.
The way the songwriting works for me is it's always a trance type state. I really believe that most good writing kind of takes the writer by surprise. And that's what happened. It just came flowing through me, one line leading to another. Some of the women are real, some are made up. At that point I don't know if I'd actually had 44 really important women in my life.
Many people thought, "Oh, he's boasting about his sex life." If you listen to the song, that's not true. Again, it wasn't like I was sitting there faking through this. But as I was flowing along and writing it, I institutionally felt gaps needed to be filled in terms of my characterization of women. I wanted to achieve some kind of epic superwoman. You know, one that kind of encapsulated all of these women, woman as a source of energy and inspiration for me. And that's kind of how it panned out.
It was written in about two hours. I sat at my beat up typewriter and when it was done, I stuck it on the nightstand, went to sleep, and the next day took it into the guys in the band and said,
"Let's get together and record this."
They came in and not much was done. Some horns were thrown down and some guitar. And then I sang over it. And it was done.
I started the Nails as a punk band in Boulder, Colorado. I never thought that I would be a part of the music industry. I wasn't one of those guys who sat on the end of his bed with a guitar writing songs and having visions of being a rock star. I was doing it because I loved rock 'n' roll and I thought rock 'n' roll needed some new energy. I loved what was going on in London with the punk scene and in New York at CBGB. I wanted to be a part of it. It had very little to do with any kind of commercial or financial expectations. It was fucking fun. So we wrote that song for a 12" vinyl EP, which was going to have four songs on it. We had a little indie record label that we had hooked up with, and both that label and ourselves pooled our money and we bought some time in a nice state of the art recording studio in Manhattan and we went in and recorded some pretty layered multi-track, somewhat bombastic rock songs.
"88 Lines" was not part of that project, but it was sitting there. We had recorded it in our studio and it was gnawing at me. I said, "I really want to include '88 Lines' on this EP." And the guy who had partnered up with us said,
"No, Marc. It's just too low-tech. Up against all these other songs it's going to sound dinky dink."
And I said,
"That's why I want to include it."
I had halfway-decided that what we had recorded in this big studio was not really all that honest.
"88 Lines" seemed to me to be a lot purer. So after much arguing we included it on the EP.
John Peel was probably the most influential radio deejay this side of Alan Freed. Broadcasting over the BBC in England, his career spanned five decades, with his superior taste and eclectic programming genius never waning. He was always particularly fond of whatever was currently "Underground," thus stoking his legend as a trendsetter among college students, rock critics, and upstart bands on six continents. To be hailed by John Peel and given exposure on his show was worth more than record sales to many bands, although his stamp of approval certainly resonated with the suits in the music business.
Somehow that EP got into the hands of John Peel at the BBC and he started playing "88 Lines" on his radio show and was inundated with phone calls from all over the United Kingdom. Suddenly, he contacted us to get our address and broadcast it on his show, and we were inundated with fan mail.
It was really heartfelt stuff. It was people saying,
"I knew a girl like Chandrasekhar, she broke my heart." Or "This is the best song I've ever heard." It was handwritten by kids from all over Great Britain and elsewhere, any kid within earshot of John Peel's radio show. He was so hugely influential and so cool.
Suddenly the record labels started coming at us, and I mean, coming at us. So we had this big showcase gig for all these record labels in Manhattan. The Nails got on stage and I refused to do "88 Lines."
I was drunk, I tore my clothes off and fell into the drum kit and blew it. The only ones that stuck around were RCA. It pissed off my band. But at the same time, it was what they expected of me. I mean, it was a big fuck you to all these guys that were up in the balcony passing judgment.
They'd all come because of that one song, but I had written 12-15 new songs since then. And those were the ones we played. RCA contacted our manager and said, "Let us know when they're playing again." This time we played at a place called Trax. I remember being in the dressing room drinking vodka and trying to pace myself so I wouldn't be too fucked up on stage. I looked out the dressing room door, and there was nobody there but the guys from RCA. So we just laughed. A few minutes later I stuck my head out the door and it was packed, packed with all of our fans. And the crowd went shipshape when we played it and the next day we got an offer from RCA. By then I'd made my point. There were other battles to fight by then.
I think that was the only time we'd played it live. Of course, after that we had to play it because radio stations were playing it and we were touring and everybody would expect to hear it. I always begrudgingly played it and made a big deal about not wanting to play it. I'd make it quite clear that I had a cheat sheet of the lyrics that's 10 feet long, and I'm making a very, very big production of the fact that I'm reading the lyrics, and the band is struggling with trying to reduce their sound down to the "88 Lines" sound. There were six great musicians on stage to back up a really bad four-track recording. Eventually, the band would leave the stage and I did the song sitting on a stool, to a taped backing track. Instead of trying to get the band to sardonically dumb down and try to replicate that song live, I just said, "Fuck it." It's a song that revolves around a really low-tech Casio rhythm thing, so let's not pretend it's anything more than that. It's really about the lyrics. No question it has a hook. But again, it was so hard to pull off live that I almost made it into a performance piece, a poetry reading. It was almost embarrassing to do live because the band was big and "88 Lines" was an atypical song of ours. The other songs were big and fat and Doors and goths and here was this thing that really kind of stuck out in our set. And so by setting up a stool and doing it on a backing track, it was effective. It was dramatic.
If there's a story about "88 Lines," it's that for a long time it was the song that could only be found on compilations when compilations starting popping up. Before that, it was the song that everybody heard, but nobody could buy. This was before CDs. None of the Nails catalogue was ever released by RCA on CD, believe it or not. After the first 100,000 records were sold of our first album, on which "88 Lines" appeared, RCA did not do a second pressing. Why, I don't know. They gave us money to do a second album, but they never did "88 Lines" as a single; they didn't even do a dance mix. The first time "88 Lines" became available on CD it was on this kind of one hit wonder new wave compilation called Living in Oblivion. Do you really want to be on a compilation called Living in Oblivion?" So we'll never know what it might have sold had people been able to go in and buy the single. Eventually we signed a deal with RCA to get our masters back. So now the first few Nails RCA albums are available on CD on Amazon. I think there are three different versions of "88 Lines," the original four-track version, and some others. The guys in the band, my bass player, George, who died not long ago, and my keyboard player, David, were really devoted to keeping the Nails legendary status alive with Web sites and these re-releases. I would have preferred to just move on.
88 Lines "Cool World" (Mazda Commercial)
Maybe 15 years ago it was in a Mazda commercial. We got the call from an ad agency in Detroit saying they were working on an ad campaign for Mazda, and they wanted to use "88 Lines About 44 Women." Our lawyer contacted us to discuss it. He said, This is the deal. They want to offer you, I think it was $75,000, which was good money at the time. He negotiated a really smart deal which said if they used it for a second commercial, they'd have to pay us double, and if they used it for a third, they'd have to double it again. And they did wind up using it in three commercials.
But my immediate response was to not do it. I'm totally against this idea of rock songs being used to promote big corporations. Of course, the guys in my band, who were married with families, said "You're going to say what?" So I finally caved and said, "We'll do it."
But they wanted the band to play it, and me to sing it with some new lyrics. And that's where I drew the line. I can at least say, yeah, we took the money, but I drew the line on singing it, so I could keep some of my street cred.
But there was another factor that changed my whole decision from a no to yes, which was that the guy at the ad agency contacted me privately. He probably could have lost his job for this.
He said, "Marc, if you don't sell us the rights to this song, we're going to duplicate it. We'll change it slightly. But we're going to go ahead and do it anyway and you're going to get fucked."
That's what made me go, Okay. And that's what they would have done. It's been done time and time again. "88 Lines" has appeared in many, many forms to promote many, many things. Not long ago it was used in the Dexter ad campaign for the TV show.
It was "26 lines About 13 Psychos."
We sued Dexter and won.
The State of Massachusetts used it in an anti-drinking campaign, and you know what, we sued them, even though we were behind what they were doing.
But it was such a blatant ripoff. And they came back with this hotshot guy whose job is to dissect songs, some professor of music, who came back with this 30 page rebuttal stating how I had actually ripped the song off from some 14th century madrigal.
He had me completely convinced I had stolen this song from a 14th century madrigal.
Anyway, the only money the Nails have ever made off of "88 Lines" is from commercials and suing people.
We never did a video for "88 Lines," which is weird.
RCA gave us like $35,000 to do a video for "Let It All Hang Out," our cover of the Hombres song.
The Nails - Let It All Hang Out
Marc CampbellThey were scared of "88 Lines," which is ridiculous.8 years ago •
I had this scenario, where basically it was me in a lounge, like a Ramada Inn in Atlantic City. I'm now in my 50s or 60s, I'm overweight, and I'm singing our one hit, which I've been milking for 30 some odd years. I'm looking like fat Elvis and the camera pans across the audience, and it's all these old women. They're the women in the song. They're all swooning. Can you imagine how much fun that would have been? I think people really would have adored that on MTV. Nowadays, if you look at YouTube, you'll be shocked to see how many people have made their own videos for the song.
I mean, there are dozens of them. One guy made one about fishing, "88 Lines About 44 Fish." I actually sent him a message through YouTube. I said, "I got to hand it to you, man. This song has covered a lot of territory. But this is the first one about fish." A lot of the people who made these videos are high school students. So there's "88 lines About 44 Anime Characters," so clearly they're really young people but the song connected with them. I guess "88 Lines" connects on a pretty primal level. Everybody knows those chicks who have broken their hearts or taught them a lesson, so it's universal. Most of the videos are terrible, but I'm thrilled the song has this life of its own.
November 14, 2012