round 1

(5) cowboy junkies, “sweet jane”
BOUNCED
(12) bronski beat, “ain’t necessarily so”
308-81
AND WILL PLAY ON IN THE SECOND ROUND

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/2/22.

“Anyone Who Ever Had a Heart: lorraine berry on cowboy junkies’ “Sweet Jane”

1.

“Sweet Lorraine,” recorded in 1940 by Nat King Cole, was the song that inspired my dad to name me. My mother had wanted to call me “Colette.” But in her northern English home, the sophistication of such a name left folks scratching their head. And while I love my name, its long “a” sound makes it feel much less delicate than all of those girls’ names that feature the breathy soft “a” of names like Angela or Ashley.
Sweet Jane is a girl whose name features that same harder a.

2.

When I heard Velvet Underground or later, Lou Reed, sing Sweet Jane as a kid, even though I didn’t understand the lyrics, the song sounded gritty, maybe even dangerous. When I heard it as a teen, still not listening closely to the lyrics, I assumed Lou Reed was singing about drugs.
The scenes of street life in NYC were what made the song cool for me eventually, but even then, I never really heard it as a romantic love song. It wasn’t until Margo Timmins emerged from the shadows of the video playing on MTV that Sweet Jane suddenly became a sensory caress that felt like it was ushering me into the slow-motion erotic catastrophes that was love in the 1980s.

3.

As a child in the 1970s, I would listen to my radio for hours in my room. The goal was to capture the new song I loved so much on my cassette recorder. Each song that wasn’t “it” was great, but in that space between songs when the DJ would be stepping on the intro of the song I wanted, I’d hit the record button. The blackout bingo were those sweet moments when two songs were played back-to-back without interruption, and the second song was the object of your quest. No voice breaking up those first few notes that you knew by heart.  
Watching MTV in the 1980s was the visual component of Radio-Cassette Bingo. Certain images could get you to love a video even if you didn’t like the song or the pretty boys who performed it.  Duran Duran taught me that.
The first time I heard “Sweet Jane,” by The Cowboy Junkies, the shadows pulled me in. That, and Margo Timmins’ ethereal Rapunzel waves of hair, something my own curly head would never accomplish.
It’s only now as I rewatch it that I see the things I missed. The moments when Timmins appears in color. The thorns. The chains. The things you don’t see about love when you’re in your mid-20s.

5.

I asked my husband a few weeks ago to watch Lou Reed perform “Sweet Jane” and then the Cowboy Junkies version. As someone whose music transmits itself in words, I wanted to hear what the guitar player heard.
The next day he unpacked his ivory-colored Taylor electric and sat down with me. “So,” he said, making sure he was tuned, “Lou’s live [“Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal”] version is in E,” and he plays the progression. “That’s where that chesty growl comes from. The studio version—like Mott the Hoople’s, like Cowboy Junkies—is in D, and more bouncy.
“Mott the Hoople added some pop to it with that ascending riff in the chorus....”

6.

In the 17th century, Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit and polymath, formed the connection that intervals in music convey colors. Others built upon his theory. In 1742, Louis Bertrand Castel developed a direct correspondence between specific notes and colors, and suggested the creation of a “le clavecin oculaire“ an instrument that would throw colored light out as it was played. Following his theory, DAG becomes green-violet-red. DABmG, however has the addition of agate, a gemstone that is known for the differently colored variants it produces.
My own synesthesia is not consistent, and disappeared for a long time after childhood. But in the past few years, it’s been back. Textures and tastes align with color. On a recent flight across the Rockies as I journeyed home to my beloved Cascades, toasted marshmallow flooded my mouth as I beheld the endless pillows and pillars below me.
With music, however, I don’t see color. I feel it in my body. Not the ways that a piece of music can cause you to resonate and set off the tinkling of bells in your spinal column. Or the way certain pieces of music make you weep.
I have somatic reactions to music, as if the emotions it sparks create their own physical manifestations. Suffusions that sometimes feel as if a rush of adrenaline has numbed my legs or set off the physiological responses that lead directly to migraine. Some songs inspire anxiety that becomes the sensation of panic attack.
But some songs I feel like an ache.
The Cowboy Junkies’ cover of “Sweet Jane” is one of these.

7.

Lou’s live version does not, however.
Instead, coming in as it does after what might be one of the best intros in live rock history, that one floods me with the razor blade blood pumping out of my heart.

8.

CJ was not the first band to cover the song, and there have been many more versions that have followed. “Sweet Jane” or “Sweet Jane covers” as a search term on YouTube yields dozens.
Diana Gameros and Los Refugios Tiernos, Mott the Hoople, Phish, Hollis Brown, Two Nice Girls, Brownsville Station, and Lone Justice are just some of the many artists who have interpreted the song. (There’s also a lullaby version I wish I had never heard.)
The song always seems to capture an emotion, or a moment in time that the artist was experiencing. It is pliable, labile that way. The most recent version I’ve heard is the one by Miley Cyrus and it scorches like a torch in a nightclub.

9.

Margo Timmins’ soft voice and the sweep and tap of the brushes were not the band’s original mode of play. But after receiving noise complaints about their rehearsal space-garage, they softened the playing and found their sound. In a 2001 article for No Depression, “We realized we had to tone down,” Michael Timmins explained. “One thing fed into the other: Margo began to realize that her singing voice was more effective quiet. We began to realize, if we can get down underneath Margo, the sound will be more effective. Pete picked up brushes – he was just learning to play drums at that point. Everything sort of came down. We learned to play with less volume."

10.

I met Yves in 2006. I’ve told the story elsewhere, but after a week of intense communication, I traveled to Montreal to spend Veteran’s Day Weekend with him. Our first several hours had us both convinced that we had discovered a serious love, but my last hours with him were spent tending to him while he suffered a fatal brain aneurysm.
The night before I met Yves, we talked on the phone. He told me that he was listening to a lot of 80’s music—that that was his mood. He would tell me later that he had been so nervous about meeting me that he had just wanted to get lost in old, familiar tunes. On the phone, I could hear something playing, but it was too faint to be anything other than background noise.
Later, after the events had transpired, I would find the playlist of what he had listened to that night. He was the Web master for his housing cooperative; he maintained a site that contained news about the co-op and playlists of music that the group’s members could stream. Those playlists would remain on the page until he posted whatever new songs had appealed to him. He always entitled his playlists “Playing while we hack.” If you happened to check the page while he wasn’t online, you’d find the most recently archived list, but where a new list should be, it would simply say, “Nothing… Our desktop’s speakers are silent.”
Nick Cave. Tom Waits. Gang of Four. X. Porno for Pyros. The stuff of a “working” song list that you might expect to hear from a man born just a few months before me in 1963.
He was a sound engineer, and I would meet many of the bands he had recorded at his memorial service.

11.

One of those songs on that list was the live version of “Sweet Jane,” recorded in 1973 and included on 1974’s Rock and Roll Animal.
I can’t listen to that version without instantly feeling an ache underneath my breastbone, the faint echoes of a trauma that made 2007 a rough year.

12.

CJ’s complete rearranging of “Sweet Jane” breaks my heart but in much different ways. It reminds me of the way love feels in your twenties, and the casually cruel boys who batter your faith in yourself.
The visual artist who invited me, who had been his lover, down to Berkeley to stay with him for a week. Then he made me sleep on the couch after he changed his mind about his intentions in asking me to fly down to him. Or the photographer who was more angry about the fact that a close friend and I had figured out that he was sleeping with both of us. “You two had no right to talk about our sex life.” As if the spilling of secrets far outweighed the breath-taking act of infidelity that neither of us had expected.  Or the musician who would let himself feel vulnerable with me for a week, and then disappear for weeks at a time in order to emotionally disengage, only to show up again and again at my place of work.
When I finally found a man who wanted to make an emotional commitment, he was a man of science, of facts to quantify, but a man whose connection to the muse came in kitchen chemistry—literally—but in no other way. I married him. And divorced him twelve years later.

13.

Margo Timmins once explained that CJ had originally intended to include “Sweet Jane” on their first album, Whites Off Earth Now! Problem was Timmins’ brother Pete the drummer had only been playing for a short time. When trying to hit the “stop” just before “heavenly wine and roses,” the two of them could not get the timing right.  
The best part of recording the song, she recounts in the video, was getting to meet Lou Reed. She looks starstruck as she recounts it. “Meeting Lou Reed was probably the highlight of my career.” She hesitates at the cliché, and then decides to go ahead. “Lou Reed gave me the soundtrack to my life.”

14.

When Lone Justice fronted by Maria McKee sang “Sweet Jane,” they turned it back into the hard-edged banger that more closely resembles Mott the Hoople’s version turned up to 11. As if Maria is kicking her boots at the CJs, telling them that they may have captured the sweet longing beneath the words with their version, but Sweet Jane was a salty woman, not the dreamy girl Margo channeled. When the song continues into “Walk on the Wild Side,” it’s clear that it’s Lou to whom Maria’s swearing her allegiance.

15.

In CJ’s video of the song, the thorns and chains appear as they are dragged across a bed. It summoned the eroticism of the famous photograph by Imogen Cunningham. I first saw the photograph The Unmade Bed when the artist who would later turn Berkeley into a sad space for me asked me to go to an exhibition with him. I remember being struck silent by the image, the hairpins, the shadows, the feeling that the lovers have just arisen and left love behind.
In the video, thorns, a heavy chain, a necklace, a rose crushed. And the woman’s hand clutching the side of the mattress, that sweet moment when one is the only object of your lover’s attention.
Sometimes, when Margo sings, sweet Jane sounds like sweet chain.
The CJ version whisks us away from the crowded New York City street and plops us right into the emotional territory.

And anyone who ever had a heart
They wouldn’t turn around and break it
And anyone who ever played a part
Oh wouldn’t turn around and hate it.

The CJ song starts with a verse much later in the original song, as if you’ve caught it being played for the thousandth time somewhere. But Margo Timmins’ voice catches your attention, and you hear the song anew.
It sounds like a plea from someone who is chiding a lover for not saying “I love you” more often. I’m not minimizing that sentiment. Unrequited love is debilitating, especially in those years when every emotion feels like the most important emotion you will ever, ever have.

16.

When Lou sings that verse, it’s right after a list of things that “evil mother(fuckers)” will tell you. And he grows angrier as he recounts the list. He blasts those who tell him that “And life is just to die!”
The song is narrated by Jack, who is driving his car, and Jane is in her vest. He’s talking to Jim, standing on the corner, who is really in a rock and roll band. Jack is recalling the past times; he’s a banker, after all, and Jane is a clerk. He has advice for the protesters: ignore the haters who tell them that they’ll never change anything.
Those folks who say that shit never had a heart anyway.

And there’s even some evil mothers
Well they’re gonna tell you that everything is just dirt
Y’know that women never really faint
And that villains always blink their eyes, woo.
And that, y’know, children are the only ones who blush!
And that life is just to die!

17.

It would take four years from age 38 to age 42 before I met Yves. In that time, I had discovered that the same types of men who had been unable to handle their emotions in their twenties were no closer to getting it right in their 40s. Only now, they wanted to “blame me for the rocks and baby bones and broken lock on the garden.”
I hear the heart weariness that Margo Timmins carries as she sings the song. She was 27. It sends its strum straight down to my lower belly, wondering if this time, erotic attraction is going to be enough to keep this goddamned relationship together. Because anyone who ever had a heart wouldn’t turn around and shit on the person with whom they had just made love.

18.

Everyone knows the story of how the Velvet Underground’s version of “Sweet Jane,” recorded on its fourth album, was not the song Reed had meant. The usual issues among band members meant that he wasn’t even in the studio when the song was recorded. But in 1973, he performed the song in all of its glory.
In the video of the performance, his band plays an intro that goes on for nearly four minutes, a demonstration of the players’ virtuosity that lifts the mood. Then Lou starts to sing.
Turns out that the VU didn’t get the intro right.  
Lou Reed once explained to  Elvis Costello that people often get the chord riff central to “Sweet Jane” wrong. And then he pulled out his guitar and showed the chord progression with the “secret” Bm chord. And despite the fact that it’s been repeatedly claimed that Cowboy Junkies version was his favorite cover, it lacks the hidden Bm chord.
It doesn’t make the song any less powerful. It just hits different.
A sweet ache. Not pain.

Infinity.
The guitar player and I met in 2008. We’re still together, finally deciding in 2019 that we should get married. He is a writer, too, and I finally found a man who combined being creative and being stable that had eluded me all those years.
I watch Cowboy Junkies now and I remember those years of the careless boys who broke my heart. Then watch Lou Reed rail against those who would strip us of our hopes and dreams.

You know, those were different times
Oh, all the poets, they studied rules of verse
And those ladies, they rolled their eyes

I like our cover best.

After 23 years of living on the other side of the continent, Lorraine Berry finally made it back to the Pacific Northwest, the place where she grew up. On her Twitter account (@BerryFLW), she frequently posts photos of trees and mountains and has recovered her sense of being right-sized. When not writing about books at various outlets, she is at work on a novel manuscript set in Seattle in the early 1980s. She lives in western Oregon with her husband, two dogs, and three cats. Her current goal is to learn to identify the 1980+ lichens of the PNW. 

Elliott Vanskike on Bronski Beat’s “Ain’t Necessarily So”

I didn’t intend this piece to be an elegy. I wanted it to be about transcendence, and I think we’ll still get there. But we need to start with elegy. Steve Bronski, the man who gave his name to Bronski Beat and played keyboards and drums in the band, died in December 2021. Another member, Larry Steinbachek, had died of cancer in 2016, leaving only vocalist Jimmy Somerville still alive from the original synthpop trio that formed in London in 1983. That lineup released a lone album, Age of Consent, in 1984, before Somerville left to form The Communards. All three members were openly gay, and they wrote songs about the struggles of being gay men in the repressive environment of Thatcher’s England (or Reagan’s U.S.).

Age of Consent is often described as a political album. But “No More War” is the only overtly political song on the record. Most of the other tracks cover time-tested pop music themes: teen rebellion, love, and lust. What renders the songs political is that they are explicitly about homosexual love and were released at a time when homophobia was the societal norm and had the tacit backing of the state. Gay sex was only made “legal” in Somerville’s native country of Scotland in 1981, and the age of consent for homosexual acts remained 21 in the U.K. until 1994. (Hence the name of the album. The inner sleeve printed the age of consent in the U.K. and other countries around the world, driving home the point that the U.K. was out of step with its neighbors.) Violence against gay men was commonplace in the 1980s. When Age of Consent singles “Why?” and “Smalltown Boy” mention bloody fists or fighting for love or being pushed and kicked, these aren’t metaphors. If you were gay, your mere existence was a provocation for attack.
The other violence that’s a necessary backdrop for “Ain’t Necessarily So” was less overt but more insidious. The first person to die of AIDS in Britain died in 1981. But it wasn’t until 1984 that scientists understood the disease was caused by a virus and another two years before HIV was isolated and identified. In the intervening years, all we knew was that gay men were dying protracted, excruciating deaths because they had sex. By the mid-1980s in Britain two people a day were dying of AIDS. Amid this pandemic that affected only a stigmatized minority, Thatcher—much like Reagan—resisted efforts to educate the public and clung to a calculated morality. Most people were as squicked out by sex as she was, her thinking went, so if she could just pretend AIDS wasn’t a problem, the British public wouldn’t associate her with either the deaths or discussions of unprotected sex. Public health experts in Britain were ultimately more successful than their U.S. counterparts in getting out messages about HIV prevention, but there can be little doubt that hundreds of gay men died because Margaret Thatcher didn’t want the word “condom” printed in government leaflets.

Given this context of violence, suspicion, and death, it’s hard to imagine three gay men in London in the 1983–1984 making anything other than a political album. And the first song on side 1 does start with Somerville’s searing a capella cry of protest, “Tell me why” followed by “Contempt in your eyes/When I go to kiss his lips.” “Ain’t Necessarily So” is the second song on the album and might initially seem to break from the personal-is-political tone established by “Why?” This is a cheeky song from Porgy and Bess, a musical written by George and Ira Gershwin 50 years before Age of Consent was recorded. In the musical, “Ain’t Necessarily So” is sung by Sportin’ Life, a gambler and coke dealer, in the middle of a church picnic. Sportin’ Life uses the song the same way Bronski Beat do: to skewer the uptight morality of the surrounding community. His target is the hypocrisy of people who sit in judgment of his dice game and his drinking but are gullible enough to believe that Jonah survived for days in the belly of a giant fish. For Bronski Beat, the stakes are much higher. Sportin’ Life is mocking self-righteous church folk to carve out some space for his illicit business. Bronski Beat are fighting for their lives.
For Bronski Beat, “Ain’t Necessarily So” is an extended piss-take on those who think gay people are hell-bound because of some hoary stories about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Old Testament. Each verse of the song mocks the credibility of the Good Book by pointing out how ridiculous its foundational stories are. Do you really believe that Moses, the man who led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, was placed in a basket of woven reeds after his birth and set adrift on the Nile, only to be found by Pharoah’s daughter who raised him as an Egyptian prince until Moses discovered his true heritage and then led his downtrodden people to freedom? Doesn’t that sound a little bit like a terrible soap opera plot device? Are we foolish enough to take the Bible’s word for it that a scrawny Jewish teen killed a well-armored giant with a slingshot? Most incredible of all, we’re just supposed to swallow that as a punishment for disobeying God, Jonah was thrown overboard, gobbled up by a great fish, lived inside the fish for three days, and then got vomited back up onto land, no harm, no foul?
By forcing ridiculous rhymes, Ira Gershwin’s lyrics underscore the outlandishness of the stories. David “shot Goliath who lay down and dieth”; Jonah “made his home in a fish’s ab-DOE-men.” George Gershwin’s music adds to the lampoon, because it takes the shape of a gospel hymn, including a backing choir. The song recounts well-loved Bible stories but does so in such a way that it’s hard to gainsay the chorus’s conclusion: “Things that you’re liable to read in the Bible ain’t necessarily so.”
In a lot of ways, “Ain’t Necessarily So” is a departure from the songs Bronski Beat were known for. It’s not a dancefloor banger. The first sound you hear after a descending bass line is the bottom register of a sinuous clarinet. What follows is jazzy—an extended clarinet intro backed by downtempo keyboards, almost like a post-club chillout track merged with “Rhapsody in Blue.” The song remains cool almost until the very end. The massed voices that have backed Somerville after the first chorus begin to sound slightly frenzied as they repeat “ain’t necessarily so.” But it’s not until the final time he sings “ain’t necessarily so” that Somerville unleashes the piercing falsetto that was the band’s signature element from the very beginning.
Steve Bronski is said to have known the band would be a hit the minute he heard Somerville sing. Listen to Somerville’s backing vocals on the final chorus of Fine Young Cannibals’ “Suspicious Minds” and you can see why Bronski was confident of success. Most male rock, R&B, and pop singers have a falsetto range they can use. Some slip into it gracefully and with confidence. Think of Prince in “Kiss” or G.C. Cameron on The Spinners’ “It’s a Shame” or Paul Heaton on The Housemartins’ “The World’s on Fire.” Some howl and swipe in their upper register like Journey’s Steve Perry or The Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser. The former type hits the notes cleanly, but usually with little force; the latter type blasts away, but with little finesse. Jimmy Somerville doesn’t reach for his falsetto notes—he lives there. His entire range is falsetto, and he puts incredible force behind his delivery. Just listen to the thrilling vocal crescendo that leads into the key change in The Communards cover of “Don’t Leave Me This Way” or Somerville’s singing on the last minute of “You Are My World” when he seems to tear a hole through sound itself.
With Somerville’s voice, at last, we’re getting to transcendence. Transcendence is art’s job. In its striving for what’s beyond, what we can imagine but not yet touch, art moves us. Along with architecture, singing might be the art form that is best at evoking transcendence, at moving us outside of ourselves. This is why religious worship—which asks us to shift our focus away from ourselves and onto ineffable things like the soul, the meaning of life, eternity—leans so heavily on singing. Transcendence is the point of worship and singing is its killer app. The subjects Somerville was singing about amid the carnage of the AIDS epidemic cried out for transcendence—some way to elevate gay men’s struggle for acceptance and survival, to show that something better was possible. Somerville worked with ACT UP during the 1980s and continues to speak out about the denial of basic human rights LGBTQ people face (especially in the developing world) and about the need for funding for HIV prevention and for the care of people who have AIDS. Ongoing activism from members of the gay community has saved countless lives from the early years of the AIDS epidemic up through the current day. But in addition to the work, you need a work song, something that lifts your spirit above the humdrum toil and imagines a brighter day.
In “Ain’t Necessarily So” Somerville’s crystalline countertenor provides that spiritual uplift. Across the course of the song, his voice tracks upward from the baritone that’s the bottom of his range until he hits the final iteration of the title with the full force of his startling upper register, knifing through the foolishness of these ancient myths from a book that says he’s irredeemable.
I’ve loved this song since I first heard it in college. That was almost four decades ago, but I’m pretty sure my initial enjoyment had as much to do with my mother as it did with Bronski Beat. Two things about my mother are relevant here: she hilariously (and not on purpose) butchered the lyrics of songs, and she was a full-on born again evangelical Christian. This meant both that she sang John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane” as “Leaving on a Jet Train” and that, along with the full suite of religious intolerances and hatreds, she loathed gay people. Or, in that nifty evangelical dodge, she “hated the sin, but loved the sinner.” One of the songs she loved to sing around the house was “Ain’t Necessarily So,” but she would sing only those three words over and over. I don’t think she even knew the rest of the song. When I returned home from college one summer and asked her if she knew the phrase that preceded “ain’t necessarily so” in the song, she was upset to learn that it was “things that you’re liable to read in the Bible” and dismayed at the delight I took in telling her that the song she’d been singing for years was actually blasphemous.
I loved my mother then and I never stopped loving her, even when it became clear to me that her religious devotion led her to hateful and abhorrent views. If she’d ever seen the picture on the sleeve of Bronski Beat’s “Ain’t Necessarily So” import single it would’ve made perfect sense to her that a wholesome picture from “The Wizard of Oz” was disfigured with a devil’s head. Homosexuals were evil, so why wouldn’t they do something so perverted? It’s hard to justify or explain how I could go on loving a person who thought some of my best friends deserved to spend eternity in hell. I don’t hesitate for a second to condemn politicians and religious leaders for holding the same views my mother held till she died. But love endures conflict and
complexity; we make allowances, we rationalize.

Songs, of course, are also memory’s killer app. “Ain’t Necessarily So” invariably takes me back to a time when my gay friends were terrified and angry (my best friend’s boyfriend would later die of AIDS), but also to a time when it became apparent that the rift between my mother and me was unhealable. The death of a vital part of that relationship only merits a lesser elegy, but there’s a profound sadness wrapped up for me in Bronski Beat’s version of “Ain’t Necessarily So.” Until the last chorus, when Somerville launches his pure, exquisite cri de coeur, the song is subdued, nearly mournful. Transcendence at the end, but transcendence dragging the dead weight of elegy.

Elliott Vanskike is a writer and editor living in Takoma Park, MD. His book and music reviews have appeared in Raygun, CMJ, and the Washington Post. His poetry has appeared in Electric Literature. His dissertation only appears in the library of the University of Iowa. Find Elliott at @twonnet.