MELANIE Beautiful
People: The Greatest Hits of Melanie On August
15, 1969, 22-year old Melanie Safka stepped onstage at the Woodstock Music
& Art Fair outside Bethel, N Y. in front of a soggy but enraptured crowd.
Sandwiched between Ravi Shankar and Arlo Guthrie she played the songs,
"Beautiful People" and "Birthday of the Sun" and emerged
overnight as a star— and as folk music's most endearing flower child. "After
Woodstock I became the festival queen," Melanie recalls 30 years later. "I was really lucky that I got to be
there, because I wouldn't know what Woodstock was if I hadn't been there. A
lot of people have the wrong idea about what it was, even people who were
there, because of the cynicism that came from it just because the ideals
didn't come to fruition. Drugs and sex? Yeah, but there was something else:
there was some kind of spiritual awakening. To me?
There was almost a renaissance on Earth. Music was drawing from all these
sources and everything was opening up. The music industry didn't know what
was happening. Things that were impossible to make hit records became hit
records, things that they predicted to be hits weren't. The motivation of so
many of those artists was truly just to get out their music, not to be famous for it, not to make millions from
it, but just to get it out there in as honest a form as possible. I think
that's why so much of that music lives. The motivation was right." But even
as she basked in the spotlight, Melanie was starting to bristle at her
innocuous image. "I was who I am—I smiled a lot at the camera. I was
cherubic, not angular, so it just all seemed to fit," she says.
"But I started to feel like I was an unwilling victim, that this was
something that was happening to me, but not because of me. Those were the
years that the image became so strong: I was this bliss ninny, the
penultimate flower child. But my whole reason for being was to be painfully real,
and 'flower child' wasn't quite getting that." Despite
her reputation as the Princess of Peace, Love and Understanding. Melanie was
also one of pop music's fiercest advocates for artistic integrity. While many
of her acoustic guitar-wielding peers were protesting and preaching, she
crafted meaningful, moving music that championed change from within. As a
singer she valued expression over technique: Her raspy, riveting voice was a
gloriously untamed instrument, soaring from a seductive coo to an overpowering
wail with all the finesse of a force of nature. In such disarmingly In 1971,
she grew tired of fighting with her record company for creative control and
at the height of her stardom; she and husband-producer Peter Schekeryk formed
their own independent label, Neighborhood Records. And she's the first to
concede the brutal irony that after winning her creative freedom, bouncy
numbers as "What Have They Done to My Song, Ma?" and "The
Nickel Song," she railed against the bottom-line mentality driving the music
industry she scored the biggest hit of her career with the tongue-in-cheek "Brand New Key" (which spent
three weeks at No. 1 in November 1971) but wound up solidifying, rather than
deflecting, her cute image. Today, Melanie might be championed as an
underground heroine along with Ani DiFranco for rebelling against the system,
or even with the likes of Madonna for rebelling within it. But in her late-
'60s early-'70s heyday, she was still struggling to establish her identity—
with her fans and for herself. Born Feb.
3, 1947 in Queens, N.Y. to a Ukrainian father and an Italian mother who Sang
in jazz clubs, Melanie was a self-professed loner who divided her college
years between a drama career and playing Greenwich Village coffeehouses. At
age 20, she met music publisher-producer Schekeryk, who got her a deal with
Columbia Records that lasted for two singles. In 1968, she was signed by
then-fledgling Buddah (as it was spelled back then) Records helmed by future
record mogul Neil Bogart. The man who would later start up Casablanca Records
and make stars out of Kiss, Donna Summer and the Village People made Melanie
his first grand marketing experiment. "He [Bogart] was born February 3,
same as me, and he had big doe eyes like me," Melanie remembers.
"He thought he and I were somehow connected. I was his pet project. He
was probably one of the first marketing people in the music business. He was
brilliant. You heard the name Melanie before anyone even heard the music. He
had all these rumors spreading: He had some people believing I was an
international star, to others, I was a Jewish girl from Brooklyn. There was
as a lot of mystery about me."
Melanie's engaging 1968 debut, Born to Be, showcased a remarkable complex
perspective. Her tribute to Winnie the Pooh creator A. A. Milne,
"Christopher Robin," emphasized her childlike charm, while
"Animal Crackers" demonstrated her penchant for the absurd,
complete with a loopy nod to "Alice's Restaurant." But the most striking tune was her first
Buddah single, "Bobo's Party," a brooding ballad about the
dichotomy between adoring crowds and lonely hotel rooms, boardroom
recognition and personal fulfillment. "I was superimposing one kind of
relationship onto another," Melanie explains with a laugh. "I
wanted love from a record company. That was my trouble from the
beginning." In October 1969, fresh from Woodstock, she released her
second album Melanie, which sported the uplifting festival favorite,
"Beautiful People." But the spiritually nurturing aftershocks of
Woodstock were most passionately celebrated in 1970 on "Lay Down
(Candles in the Rain)," a collaboration with the Edwin Hawkins Singers
that soared to No. 6 on the Billboard pop singles chart and paved the
platinum path for her third album, Candies in the Rain. "I wrote it
immediately after Woodstock," she says. "I started thinking about
people demonstrating for a better world and peace. It came to me so wholly that I always felt instantly connected
to that song. But I knew I needed the choir." The Hawkins Singers had
scored a Top 5 hit the year before with "Oh Happy Day" and were
also signed to Buddah, so Melanie already had a link. Armed with her guitar,
she flew out to their rehearsal at a high school gymnasium in Oakland,
California to pitch "Lay Down" in front of the whole choir.
"Edwin said, 'Does it name Jesus? ' l said, 'No, but he's there. He
was against the idea because it didn't talk about Jesus or the Lord. But l
had such conviction that this was meant to be, I was so into it that everyone
else was excited. So even if Edwin Hawkins himself didn't want to do it, the
singers were sold so I don't think he could have refused. We went into the
studio and it was absolutely spectacular. We did it in one take with everyone
singing live and it lasted eight minutes or so. It was so spontaneous, it had
so much joy in it. I knew it was going to hit people." The single
version was edited to 3:45 but the full 7:39 version makes its first CD
appearance on this package. Candles in the Rain also featured such concert staples
as the heart-wrenching "Leftover Wine," her compelling cover of the
Rolling Stones' "Ruby Tuesday" and "What Have They Done to My
Song, Ma?" The latter—whose actual title, "Look What They Done to
My Song, Ma," was changed by Buddah to make it grammatically correct—has
been covered as a jaunt) sing along by everyone from the New Seekers to Ray
Charles. But the song actually is a commentary on how art gets corrupted by
commercial interests . "I wrote that in the studio and I
didn't even know they were recording me," Melanie remembers. "I was
in the vocal booth and I thought my mike was off. It was inspired by what was
going on in the studio. The songs never came out the way I wanted them to. I
always heard things like bagpipes or didgeridoos or penny whistles, but
they'd always come out kind of like a hit record." Oddly, "Lay
Down" was followed up with a non-LP single called "According to
Plan," which Buddah changed to "Peace Will Come (According to
Plan)." it was my personal peace song," she says, about my
connection with the Earth, 'with a velvet hill in the small of my back and my
hands are playing in the sand'—it was a stream of consciousness poem. I
didn't expect people were going to sing it at peace demonstrations." The
tune was later tacked onto her 1970 Carnegie Hall live album, Leftover Wine,
which Captured \Melanie's fervent bond with her fans on such acoustic numbers
as the hilarious "Psychotherapy," sung to the melody of Battle Hymn
of the Republic." By 1970 Melanie was feeling suffocated by her
manufactured image. "I knew l was in some sort of machinery that I
didn't have a lot of control over," she says. "I knew that it was
about me, but it really had nothing to do with me." She recalls blowing
her top one night during a United Nations tour of Yugoslavia when she, well,
removed her top. "I became more reactionary to my image. I wanted people
to know that I was a real person, and you do silly things to dispel other
notions," she says, and felt to me like I was a
clown. I needed to just not be that. 'In February 1971, she released her
fifth and final official Buddah album, The Good Book, and the signs were
evident that the "flower child" was growing up. The skeptical title
track ("You've got to tell us you love us so we don't feel alone")
was inspired by her 1970 appearance at the last Isle of Wight festival in
England. "That's when I first got wind that there was trouble in
paradise," she says. "It seemed like some people were posing as
people who wanted to change the world for the better, but they weren't really
doing it for the right reasons". The Nickel Song," despite its
giddy Dixieland arrangement, was an outcry against losing control of your art
and your destiny. "I didn't get to pick the photos, the album title—all
of that was Buddah," she says. "We wanted artistic control. I
thought if I could get off this label, I'd just do things differently."
When her Buddah contract expired, Melanie and Peter started their own Indie
label, Neighborhood, and set up shop in the Gulf & Western building in
New York City. The roster included rock band Five Dollar Shoes, a
folk-country duo named Janey and Dennis and Mike Heron of the Incredible String
Band. In 1971, Melanie's first Neighborhood album, Gather Me, was released.
Her declaration of independence was the gospel-fueled "Ring the Living
Bell," which was "me trying to explain myself," she says.
"I always felt I was misunderstood and people didn't get me right at
all. 'I've been celebrating way too long/and I've been drinkin' I'm ashamed
to tell,' 'I'm not a magic lady.'I felt some people wanted to make me the
high priestess of something or other and I just kept saying, `No, that's not
who I am'." The
album's surprise hit was "Brand New Key," a throwaway ditty that
seemed out of place compared to the urgency driving the rest of the album.
Originally written with a Cajun feel and later recast as a convincing blues,
the song cleverly cloaks a feminist statement ("For somebody who don't
drive, I've been all around the world/some people say I've done alright for a
girl") underneath its playful double entendre about skating and sex. No
wonder it's been covered three times in the last four years, by artists
ranging from country singer Deana Carter to Minnesota alternative pop trio Zuzu's Petals and gloomy, cello driven
New York quartet Rasputina.Gather Me reached No. 15, but Neighborhood's
short-lived windfall was siphoned off by the jilted Buddah, which countered
their releases with competing singles and shameless compilation albums like
The Four Sides of Melanie and Garden in the City. "They (the old Buddah
regime) were really mad at me and were just putting out anything they had
hanging around," Melanie says, noting that The Four Sides of Melanie was
decorated with images of Peter with devil ears. "They were just getting
even. Every time I released one record, they'd come out with something that
was in the can. We had distributors who were buying Melanie records from one
source and now we were fighting it, basically. We were going against the
favorite son of the record industry, Neil Bogart, so we made a lot of instant
enemies. Neighborhood
shut down in 1975? But Melanie's work during this period represents some of
her most nuanced singing and most mature songwriting. The
haunting"Together Alone," from 1972's Stoneground Words, was an
enticing slice of blue-eyed soul worthy of Laura Nyro. 1974's Madrugada
boasted the Caribbean- inspired "Love to Lose Again" and a touching
cover of Jim Croce's "Lover's Cross' that showed off her
still-formidable interpretive skills. As part of its 1999 rebirth, the newly
re-activated Buddha Records has gathered Melanie's most memorable Buddah and
Neighborhood recordings and book ended them with two of her favorite recent
compositions: the defiant "I Will Get Over," a choir -
fueled counterpart to Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive"; and
"Summer of Love II" (the title is a reference to Woodstock being
the unofficial sequel to 1967's Summer of Love), a heartfelt tribute to the fans who make annual pilgrimages to
Bethel which she wrote on the eve of performing at the 25th anniversary of
Woodstock in 1994. While the instrumentation and feel of the new tracks are
more contemporary, the lyrics are informed by the inspiring
blend of compassion, strength and grace that have marked Melanie's music
since she was a struggling Greenwich Village folkie trying to escape the
shadow of such artists as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. "I just wanted to communicate my feelings," she says.
"My big motivation was to be some kind of service to mankind. I really wanted
to be in the Peace Corps. I felt like my purpose was to somehow save the
planet. But I didn't know how to be an engineer—they really needed those in
the Peace Corps, they didn't need folksingers. So I thought, 'I'll do it some
other way.' I was just writing whatever was coming out my heart. I never
wanted to be preachy. I was never trying to sell something. I was just
singing and writing. In fact, I never even thought of myself as a writer. At
that time, I didn't get a lot of credit for writing songs. People just
thought I sang those songs. I guess 'writer' was much too serious for
somebody named Melanie." David
Okamoto, May 1999 David Okamoto is the music editor of the Dallas Morning
News and a contributing editor to ICE Magazine. SUMMER OF LOVE Step inside the shoes I
walk in Walk them down onto a
pasture Where the green may have
been yellow But the music will
remember In the summer of love Where we raged and reached
for freedom When we kissed and loved a
stranger And we asked our silly
questions And would not settle for
the reasons Did we rise up to the
cause Did we cause the thing to
happen? When humanity awakened But the music will
remember In the summer of love There's a power on a
hillside There was magic in the
moment It's a farmland that lies
fallow But the dream grows on
forever Cynics laugh and make it
less then The extraordinary wonder When humanity awakened Ah but the music will
remember In the summer of love Lay down, lay down In the summer of love When humanity awakens Then the music will
remember Woodstock Is Why did I write Summer of Love II? As the
Indians believe that there are certain places that are sacred, there is
something magical and mystical on the site of the original Woodstock. What
makes the site significant? It has to do with the "pull" a place
has, because a great event has occurred there. Woodstock had that
"thing" that spiritually bands together. It is like a rare moment
one may have experienced, say on Christmas Eve, or during a crisis--where
people become that same big common denominator. It goes
beyond mere survival and it strikes a chord in all of us. Now this truth is
still lingering on that site, accessible, tangible and ready to be received.
When people make a pilgrimage there, it is a walk toward humanity. Regardless
of what title or names are given to the power and the feelings of this
festival and the way it connects us, it is important to recognize it and
acknowledge its existence. It was real, and is real, and that knowledge is an
affirmation that we are spiritual beings. Melanie,
May 1999 ©1999
Melanie Safka |
1. Summer
Of Love II (J) 2. Lay
Down (Candles
In The Rain) Melanie with The Edwin
Hawkins Singers (original full length version) (C) Buddah
single #167 Pop #6 /
chart debut: 4/25/70 3. Ring
The Living Bell (F) Neighborhood
single #4202 Pop #31 /
chart debut: 1/29/72 AC #18 /
chart debut: 2/5/72 4. What
Have They Done To My Song, Ma? (C)
Buddah
single #268 (b-side) 5. Brand
New Key (F) Neighborhood
single #4201 Pop #1 /
chart debut: 10/30/71 AC #5 /
chart debut: 11/20/71 6. Love
To Lose Again (I) Neighborhood
single #4214 7. Lovers
Cross (I) Neighborhood
single #4215 Pop #109
/ chart debut 8/17/74 8. Ruby
Tuesday (C) Buddah
single #202 Pop #52 /
chart debut: 12/5/70 |
9. The
Nickel Song (E) Buddah
single #268 Pop #35 /
chart debut: 1/22/72 AC #30 /
chart debut: 2/5/72 10.
Bobo's Party (A) Buddah
single #113 11. The
Good Book (E)
Buddah
single #224 12.
Christopher Robin (A) 13.
Animal Crackers (A) Buddah
single #167 (b-side) 14.
Psychotherapy (live) (D) 15.
Beautiful People (B) Buddah
single #135 16.
Together Alone (G) Neighborhood
single #4207 Pop #86 /
chart debut 10/21/72 17.
Leftover Wine (C) 18. Peace
Will Come (According To Plan) (D) Buddah
single #186 Pop #32
chart debut: 8/22/70 19. I
Will Get Over (I) All
Tracks Produced by Peter Schekeryk All Songs
Written by Melanie Safka Except
"Lover's Cross" (Jim Croce) and "Ruby Tuesday" (Mick
Jagger/Keith Richards) |
A. From
the LP Born To Be - Buddah #5024 B. From
the LP Melanie - Buddah #5041 Album #196 chart debut: 11/15/69 C. From
the LP Candles In The Rain - Buddah #5060 Album #17 / chart debut 5/9/70 D. From
the LP Leftover Wine Buddah #5066 Album #33 chart debut 9/26/70 E. From
the LP The Good Book Buddah #95000 Album #80 / chart debut: 2/27/71 F. From
the LP Gather Me Neighborhood #47001 Album #15 / chart debut 11/13/71 G. From
the LP Stoneground Words Neighborhood #47005 Album #70 / chart debut:
11/11/72 Courtesy of MCA Records, Inc., under license from Universal Music
Special Markets, Inc. H. From
the LP Madrugada - Neighborhood #48001 Album #192 / chart debut 5/11/74
Courtesy of MCA Records, Inc., under license from Universal Music Special
Markets, Inc. I.
(P) 1999
Peter Schekeryk Courtesy of Peter Schekeryk and Melanie Safka II.
J. Radio
Single Only (P) 1999 Peter Schekeryk Courtesy of Peter Schekeryk and Melanie
Safka |
Compilation
Produced by Mike Ragogna & Peter Schekeryk Mastered
by Robert Fripp & David Singleton Product
manager: Mandana Eidgah Production
Coordinator: Jeremy Holiday Master
Tape Transfers: Bill Inglot & Dennis Ferrante Package
Design: David K. Kessler/NYC Compilation
& Sequence: Mike Ragogna Liner
Notes: David Okamoto Research
Assistance: Gary E. Mansfield and Tommy West Photos
Courtesy of Melanie Safka and Peter Schekeryk, BMG Photo Archives Print Ads
Courtesy of Howard Fields Archives:
Joanne Feltman, Glenn Korman, Tom Tierney and Claudia Depkin Project
Coordination: Arlessa Barncs, Lisa Butler, Christina DeSimone, Robin Diamond,
Felicia Gearhart, Laura Gregory, Donna Malyszko, Robin Manning, Ed Osborne,
Larry Parra, Bruce Pollock, Dana Renert, Catherine Seligman, and Steve
Strauss Thanks to
Alex Miller, Eric Hodge and Frank Ursoleo Special
thanks to Gary Newman and Mike Jason For their
support, Buddha Records thanks BMG Entertainment: Strauss Zelnick, Kevin
Conroy, Dennis Petroskey, Bill Wilson, Patricia Feighery, Scott Richman; BMG
Distribution: Pete Jones, Rick Bleiweiss, Rick Cohen Come
visit Buddha at www.BuddhaRecords.com
Booking
into: Producers Inc. (813) 988-8333 |
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