Winamp Wednesday: I Can Play This Here Guitar
And I Won't Quit Til I'm a Star...
Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting all the MP3s I downloaded in the wild-west days of the early internet. B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today's track...
George Benson, “On Broadway”
It’s SHOWTIME!
This recording is a rare beast, a cover version I like more than the progenitor. With all respect to The Drifters, their version feels like something intensely of their moment, the story of the street-corner as that corner changes and rips opportunities away. There is no number that is more March 1963 than this one in hindsight. In a scant few months The Beatles would take over every radio, and a nation transformed by grief would find its ultimate distraction. This version of the song sounds like Kennedy’s America, like Roger Maris and Steve McQueen, like the blessed naivete that blanketed pop culture through the start of the 60s.
I honestly adore both of these recordings, and the fact that they can tell such different stories boils down to the songwriters. This tune was co-written by Cynthia Weil, who died just two weeks ago, her life filled with incredible achievements. Her work with Barry Mann not only survived The British Invasion but worked to define the sound on both sides of the Atlantic. What is British rock without “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”? Do The Drifters really cement their legacy without “Saturday Night at the Movies” (coming next week to Winamp Wednesday)? How many ways do we think of “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling”, and how many of them are just Top Gun? No wonder the revue of their partnership was entitled They Wrote That?. You don’t become obsolete and you’re never written out of the story if you’re out there writing the story ahead of time.
Which makes Benson’s reinvention of the tune so wonderful and radical. Fifteen years later, just long enough to be nostalgic but early enough that it hadn’t grown stale, he steps out with this absolute stomp that runs ten minutes on the LP. Leave it to George Benson to record one of the better odes to New York’s major thoroughfare on a record called Weekend in LA. This is an artist who is both sharing something he loves and looking to prove something. You can feel the force on this track, what it must have been like to be in the room as it was recorded. My parents often talk about seeing Benson on Broadway in 1978, not long after the release of this single, and how electric it was inside the Belasco. “On Broadway” was not a one-off performance for him.
I’m sure it was partially their enthusiasm for his music that drove my own, but George Benson had always been the sound of the night in New York City. We’ll get to “Give Me the Night”, which was all orange incandescents and stop-lights along the Drive, but “On Broadway” was neon and nights out. If the Minolta sign and the news ticker at 42nd Street needed a theme song, this one would assuredly be it. One couldn’t help but feel a little bit like the grand center of attention whenever this song played.
I remember what it was like to ride a little delusion of grandeur around Manhattan to this song. Twenty-odd years after the release of Weekend in LA and across a very different Times Square I would look up at the glitz and glamour and imagine all those someday-soons that would come to me if I tried even a little bit. After all, aren’t we usually the star of our own fantasies? All the things we believe about how we wouldn’t quit til we were stars. Of course it’s all a little bit of hooey. I hadn’t even seen All That Jazz yet, where “On Broadway” is used for the frenzied loss of dreams that starts one of cinema’s most depressing self-reflections. To me it was just a tremendous jazz riff and the assurance that they’re dead wrong, I know they are. I had my hand in so many pies, and I was unique just like every other entertainer-dreamer in this city.
Life had other plans for most of us. But these days I’d much rather be out ahead and writing what it’s all going to be. When faced with the dilemma of whether to be The Drifters or be George Benson, we should strive to be Mann and Weill.